POULET BASQUAISE - French Basque Country - Slow-cooked chicken with tomatoes, peppers, onions and piment d'Espelette, served with crispy rosemary potatoes.

In my ongoing quest for better health lately, I have come to the conclusion that food has an important place. Or rather, that food plays a much bigger role than I wanted to accept. First of all, it feels like a stupid statement coming from a doctor, because it is something so obvious that any ten-year-old should know it, and yet we adults choose to ignore these simple lessons until we are forced to learn them all over again. For the last two weeks, I haven't been to Penny, Li

How many of you have seen The Hunger Games? How many of you have ever wondered what it would feel like to experience a hunger that never ends? Over the past week, I have gone through quite a few metabolic changes, mainly as a result of the physical activity I have been doing. Regular exercise seems to have an incredible ability to correct some of the bad habits our bodies have developed — even when that body happens to belong to a whale. One of the biggest changes I have noti

How is it we all know better what health means or what taking care of ourselves means, but in reality we fail? Do you remember a few weeks ago when I started moving and exercising? Somehow under the strain of the physical effort combined with the calorie deficit, I almost ended up in the hospital. My blood sugar played a trick on me and reminded me why you have to take care of yourself. As it seems, there is nothing serious, nothing that cannot be fixed, but the idea of “I’m

At the beginning of 2019, I started becoming interested in macroeconomics and business. I liked the thought of starting my own business, so I began looking for sources of information. Where do all of us look for information most easily? Exactly—YouTube. Today, it is the most accessible source we have. Somehow, that is where I came across a few entrepreneurs—or at least self-proclaimed entrepreneurs—who explained that you cannot build a business because you do not have all the

We all know the theory behind saving money, but most of us simply fail to do it. Some people are unable to save because they are just broke — the money simply isn't enough to get them from one month to the next. Others, however, earn enough that they could actually save something. And when I say "save something," I don't necessarily mean saving thousands of euros every month. In my mind, even managing to put one euro aside counts as saving. It may not seem like much, but the

One of the biggest realisations I have had in recent years is that financial education begins at home, not at school. You would be surprised by how many people earn enormous amounts of money and still end up broke because they never developed a vision for their future—or simply never learned how to manage their money. Why does society have such a complicated relationship with wealthy people? I am not talking about doctors, who may earn more than the average person but have no

Medicine has evolved significantly over the past few decades. Technological progress has greatly improved physicians’ ability to establish diagnoses and provide increasingly less invasive treatments. Consider, for example, the advances made in cardiology and cardiac surgery over the last 20 years—and how many patients today benefit from procedures such as transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI). Only a few years ago, some of these patients would have been considered in

Today I woke up and took two showers. I tried to wash the fat off, but it didn’t work. After that, I went for a run. Okay… I went for a walk. Okay! I went for a crawl. Considering that the streets of Salou, Spain, are on an incline, it probably would have been more efficient just to roll downhill. After fifteen minutes, I asked AI how many calories I had burned. It responded with approximately 80 calories, about 30 of which I would have burned anyway just by continuing to bre

In the last post I talked about inflation and how it represents a generalized rise in prices and a permanent decrease in purchasing power. I know I mostly focused back then on inflation caused by the growth of the money supply, but inflation actually has a lot of possible mechanisms. In this post I’m trying to go through all of them and explain them. As a basic rule, inflation caused by printing money is not the main cause of inflation. Naturally, inflation appears when there

In one of the past posts I said we’d address the problem of inflation. Somehow, every time we looked for solutions to different problems, we kept running into the problem of money. We said we can’t grow incomes fast enough, because productivity can’t be grown fast enough either. So how do we address the money problem? Well, another way to visualize the situation is to imagine a big bucket of water, and inflation is a small hole in that bucket. Normally the hole is just big en

What do you say we do an exercise in imagination today? What if we reinvented society and human civilization? Obviously, this can only be a theoretical exercise, because in reality things are much more difficult to change, and neither you nor I have any real power to do something like this. In my imagination everything can be changed very easily.. I don’t necessarily think being a dreamer is a bad thing. I have been like this my entire life. When I was in kindergarten, I used

Welcome back! Today I want to talk to you about COVID. Do you still remember COVID? Probably some of the people who will read this post in the future will not even understand what exactly I am talking about. COVID emerged as a pandemic at the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020. Anyone curious enough to look up the general facts is free to do so. I have no intention of giving you theoretical lectures. Nor do I intend to count myself among those of you who never believed in

Hi everyone. Today, I decided to start a miniseries called Fatboy. In this series, I’m going to explore different topics related to obesity. For me, this is meant to be a hands-on, pragmatic project that can actually offer a way to lose weight. After many years of failed attempts at losing weight and trying different diets, I’ve realized that I need to take a different approach. It’s not enough to simply follow a diet or exercise for a certain period of time. What is needed i

I kept thinking today about the purpose of this blog and why I feel this need to write something. A part of me has become almost addicted to it and would like to write to you every single day. But I wonder whether daily posts would eventually lose some of their substance, some of their purpose. Today, I decided to go back in time and tell you stories from my life and my childhood. Maybe that’s a good way to get to know someone. I know I would enjoy reading stories from other

Do you think that's an exaggeration? Do you think something especially interesting happened, worth telling the rest of you readers about? No, it's not an exaggeration, and no, I don't think anything particularly interesting happened. Objectively, it was probably just another day of my life. But to me, it was something beautifully special. Here's the story, and I'll let each of you decide for yourselves whether it really was a beautiful day. The day started fairly early with a

Good morning, my dears. Today is another heatwave day here in Colmar. Europe has seen a lot of fires these past months, and it feels like one giant fire stretching from Bordeaux all the way to Spain. Yesterday it was 36 degrees, but somehow it felt even hotter than that. Last night I sat down and looked through the global markets and the turn the economy has taken. I was trying to figure out what the lessons for you should be, and how I could guide you better. The truth is, e

Hi, my dears. How was your day? What adventures did you get up to today? I'm curious what season it is outside when you'll read these lines. Right now, here in Colmar, it's summer, early August, with temperatures around 30 degrees. In a few days you'll both get to enjoy the sandy beach in Spain, and Laura, you'll finally be able to get into the pool you've missed so much. Luca, you're still little, you still need some time before you can go in the water. Today, my dears, I wa

Hi there, my loves, how are you doing? I hope this post finds you well in the future. I'm curious what age you'll be when you read it. Today I want to talk to you about money. And no, this isn't a conversation about how much money we're leaving you as inheritance, but about the very notion of money. You see, your mother and I were born in Romania, to parents who were never encouraged to understand the world around them. In a communist state, that was simply normal. I don't th

The term family medicine defines treating the patient while taking his family context into account. Treating several family members in the same practice can be an advantage, but also a disadvantage. Possible conflicts or delicate situations can arise when the people responsible for the patient are not the ones most emotionally involved or closest to him. Most of the time, a patient who needs medical support from us will also need emotional and financial support from his famil