A BIT ABOUT ME

I was born on a Marine base in Quantico, VA, where my father served as a physician with the US Navy. My parents moved to North Carolina shortly thereafter, where I spent a pleasant childhood growing up in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. After two years at the local high school, a neighbor sent me to boarding school to keep her son company. Subsequently, I attended Emory, Harvard, and Georgetown. I hold degrees from Harvard and Georgetown. At Emory, in Atlanta, GA, I studied medical sciences and English Literature. At Harvard, I studied 17th Century Romantic Poetry, researched and wrote a doctoral thesis and numerous papers on economics with Dr. Tor Brunzell, currently a professor of economics at Stockholm University in Sweden. At Georgetown, I completed my study of law with a Juris Doctorate in 2002.

A lifelong student of fitness, while in Cambridge, I was supervisor of the central gymnasium at Harvard University (Malkin Athletic Center) for more than a decade, at times, actually living in the gym. I have hiked across Europe: from the Arctic across Jotunheimen National Park in Norway, across the Picos de Europa of Spain; across the Pyrenees of Spain and France; across the Jura Mountains of Germany and Switzerland, across the Alps of Switzerland and France down to the Mediterranean, approximately 4000 miles in all. It was during these long, contemplative hikes that I first formulated my ideas on human fitness. Then, returning to my life in Cambridge, MA, I would put my own body through repeated diet and exercise experiments in order to understand better how to maximize my own enjoyment of life. OPTIMUM WEIGHT is the results of this decades-long research.