More information is coming out about the abuses at “The Biggest Loser.”  In a May 22, 2016 New York Post article, written by Maureen Callahan, entitled “‘Biggest Loser’ drugged us so we’d lose weight”, it reports how participants were supplied with illegal (Ephedra) and legal drugs (amphetamines, diuretics, water pills, etc.) to promote weight loss. As I have always maintained, shows like these strive for dramatic effect, are abusive, and take advantage of the participants. Even if any of these abuses did not occur, the process of trying to lose weight so fast, in a sequestered environment, is in my view, a recipe for disaster. So my suggestion is to vote with the remote, and avoid watching these types of “reality” shows.

So to continue my thoughts from my previous blog entry, I thought it best to go over some additional actions, strategies and thoughts about maintaining one’s weight loss:

— I believe it is critically important to recognize that you are susceptible to weight gain, so you have to be constantly aware about what you are eating, and how much you are exercising.

— Unless you working out really hard (like you are having a difficult time speaking while you exercise and you are sweating profusely), I would avoid any sports drinks as they are high in calories and sugars. What I do is brew my own iced tea, called Sportea, and I use it instead of a sports drink, and as a beverage.  Water is great alternative, and I drink lots of water during the day, but sometimes you need something different, so that is why I use Sportea.

— Avoid alcohol, as it has sugar and is high in calories, but not much nutritional value. Instead, if you want a drink in your hand at a party, get sparkling water.

— Completely avoid all sugar or sugar-substitute drinks. The sugary drinks are high in calories, and the sugar-free ones can have a detrimental affect on your metabolism.

— Weigh yourself every day, and make changes to what you are eating, and your level of exercise, based upon being able to maintain your weight loss. Even when I travel, I bring a scale with me so I can weigh myself, and track what my weight is doing during the trip.

— Allow yourself one day of the week, for me it is Saturday, where you allow yourself greater freedom what you can eat. This way you do not go crazy, but even on this day, I try not to eat foods that are too high in calories.

— Be prepared to deal with injuries from exercise. I have had many injuries over the years, but a recumbent bike and elliptical allow for low impact exercise. Running, or even walking, however, do involve impact, so during those times I had injuries, e.g, when I had a sore Achilles, or shin splints, so I could continue to maintain my exercise routine on my bike, even when I was not up physically to run/walk, play tennis, etc.

— Exercise first thing in the morning before you eat, and in the evening, exercise after you eat.

— Have a decent breakfast in the morning to get your body’s metabolism going, and do not eat too late (near your bedtime), since you are taking away time from your body to process the food you ate for dinner before your metabolism slows down when you sleep.

— Watch less TV, and get outside more.

— Eat whole grains, and fresh fruit, but stay away from dried fruit since they tend to be high in sugar content. Also, for a snack, think about having air popped pop corn, not popcorn cooked in oil, and if you want to flavor it, lightly spray it with olive oil and add spices.

— Use smaller plates for your food, which help maintain portion control.

— I do not count calories, as I find this too burdensome, particularly when dining out, but I do keep in the back of my mind generally how many calories I have taken in that day.

Well, that is all for Part 2 right now. Maybe I will add some further thoughts at a later time.

I have been working on a blog about the trials, tribulations, and challenges of dating urban professional women, but with the uproar this week about the study in the Journal Obesity regarding of The Biggest Loser reality TV show, and the many articles commenting on same, I thought it best to address the issue immediately. You can find that study at www.obesityjournal.org, and it is entitled “Persistent Metabolic Adaptation 6 Years After ‘The Biggest Loser’ Competition”, Kevin Hall et. al., Volume 00, Number 00 Month 2016. In this blog, I will also be referencing a couple of New York Times articles, the first being “After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight” May 2, 2016, and the second being “Short Answers to Hard Questions About Weight Loss”, May 5, 2016. Lastly, I will be referring, in this blog or the next, to a foxnews.com article, dated April 29, 2016, entitled “‘Having Weight Loss Surgery was a Huge Mistake’: One Woman’s Story of Addition”.  This blog is only part 1, of potentially a multiple part blog, since there are so many issues to discuss, and I cannot fully address the topic in just one blog entry.

So what did the study say — basically, that after 6 years from when they appeared on “The Biggest Loser” TV show, most of the participants had regained all the weight they had lost on the show. As I have said previously, I find this shows, and shows like this, exploitative, and in the long term, not beneficial to the participants. This study unfortunately, proves me correct.  And I do have a unique perspective on this issue, since I have lost as much or more weight than all The Biggest Loser contestants, yet I have been able to keep off 90% or more of my weight loss, over a 5-6 year period, which is the same time period as the study participants. Should you need proof, see the above pictures.

Yet, there are many of the same issues I struggle with daily, as brought up in the study, and where I have succeed is a testament to the way I lost the weight, and my vigilance, hard work, and strategies, post-weight loss, that have helped me to keep off the weight, which I will discuss below. I am proud of what I have, and continue to achieve, but the point of this blog entry is to provide hope to those who struggle with their weight, that they can achieve and sustain their weight loss, even without surgery or drugs, which are being pushed by many.

First off, remember that “The Biggest Loser” is a reality TV show, and quick dramatic changes make good TV. So the contestant are essentially sequestered during the series, eating few calories, exercising ridiculous amounts of hours a day, and not living their normal life. So it should not be surprising that they are not prepared, after the show ends, to have a lifestyle that helps them to maintain this quick weight loss. My approach, has been to modify my daily lifestyle to add more exercise (cardio and weight training), reduce calorie intake, and employ better eating strategies, so that I lost only lose 1-2 lbs a week, and the lifestyle has been  sustainable after I reached my weight loss goal. In previous blogs I have gone into the particulars of what needs to be done, so in this blog I will focus on the maintenance side, what I have experienced, and what has worked for me.

What the study points out is that after significant weight loss, the body fights back by changes in one’s resting metabolic rate (RMR), basically, how your body burns calories when you are not active. What happens after significant weight loss is that the body slows down, with a much slower RMR, so it then become easier to gain weight.  What I can tell you from my experience, that it is very easy for me to gain a lot of weight in a short time. For the last 4-5 years, I have been able to keep off 95% or more of my weight loss, however, I was thrown off last year (hence the current 90% figure), when I had shoulder surgery, and ended up losing a lot of lean muscle mass since I could not do weight training for almost a year, even though I was putting in 2 hours of cadio a day, 7 days a week. So here is one tip to sustaining weight loss, weight training, and his is particularly true as you get older. It is only until I restarted weight training (which I admittedly hate) that I have been able to start and make inroads to getting back to that 95% or getter figure.

Another thing from the study, and  also mentioned in the May 2nd New York Times article, is that RMR triggers hunger, cravings and binges. This is something I still experience, and am constantly battling. So what do I do?  For one, if I feel feel really hungry, I try to fill up on vegetables (carrots, cucumbers, “tomatoes”), fruits (blackberries, blue berries), lean proteins (like peanuts or jerk turkey), and low calories carbohydrates (like air popped pop corn, whole wheat bread) — basically, I try to find items that I can eat in bulk, but that are not too fattening. I also weigh myself every day, do not drink sweetened drinks (artificial or natural), and stay away from alcohol.

The May 5th New York Times article downplayed the effectiveness of weight training to help lose and maintain weight, but I must disagree. After my surgery, I lost a tremendous amount of lean muscle mass, and that helps explain why I put on some extra weight, and have struggled to lose that extra weight. So hit the weights. Also, it is important, to take into consideration, when choosing a cadio activity, that is can be duplicated almost every day, and it will not cause you injuries. For that reason, my go-to cardio exercise every morning is the recumbent bike, which unlike the upright bike, does not hurt one’s buttocks and is low impact. Similarly, the elliptical is my machine of choice for my night exercise, In contrast, impact of running outdoors, or on a treadmill, can cause injuries, which can be a set back to your ability to burn calories, and your ability to counter a reduced RMR.

Quick story, in law school I started running, ended up running and completing the NYC Marathon, and lost about 40 lbs which I had put on my first year in law school. That reduced weight was my target when I started losing weight in 2009. What happened is that I injured myself running, and long story short, that was the start of me gaining over 200 lbs in the subsequent years. That is why now, I chose as my go-to exercise, the recumbent bike, which is low impact, and repeatable every day, rain or shine.  And my suggestion to you, and chose a cardio exercise that is equally repeatable and low impact.

Well, I am running to of time this evening, but wanted to leave you with another strategy I use before I publish this part of the blog, namely, that I fast for a 24 hour period at least once a week. One thing discussed in the study and in the New York time articles, is that you can change up your metabolism through fasting. So what I try to do, is not eat anything after Friday lunch, and do not eat again until I have my Saturday workout out and weigh-in (which establishes my weight for the week).  What I gain from this is a sense of control over my eating, and a way to try and burn more fat during my workout. But if I am out on a date, or really feel hungry, I will not fast, but that is an tool that I do use.

So in parting, hang in there, and keep in mind that you can also overcome your body’s weight loss defenses, since the benefits are so great.

In a study of Austrians, published in 2014, it concluded that adults who consumed a vegetarian diets were less healthly mentally and physically than those who consumed meat in their diets —  Nutrition and Health – The Association between Eating Behavior and Various Health Parameters: A Matched Sample Study, Nathalie Burkert, Johanna Muckenhuber, Franziska Großschaedl, Wolfgang Friedl, Institute of Social Medicine and Epidemiology, Medical University Graz, Austria, PLoS ONE 9(2): e88278. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0088278 (2014).  Of course there are many other studies that indicate there are health benefits to a vegetarian diet like a lower incidence of cholesterol problems.

It is also interesting to note that the human anatomical system is not a purely herbivore/vegetarian system like a cow’s digestive system (with multiple stomachs for digesting plant material), nor are we purely carnivores (with a wide opening mouth and with a whole set of jagged and sharp teeth), but we are omnivores so we have a system that can handle both plant and animal foods.  The Austrian study was particularly interesting in that is looked at the mental health effects of a vegetarian diet compared to a diet with meat, and found that the meat eaters were better off mentally.

Is this study the final word on the issue — of course not!  The debate about the benefits of a vegetarian diet verse a diet with meat has been raging for decades. Remember the scene in the 1973 film Sleeper where the vegetarian health food owner, portrayed by Woody Allen, awakes from cryoprerservation to a future to learn that eating red is now good for you. My take away is that since we are omnivores, our body is designed to intake both meat and plant food, so why deny our body what it is designed to handle.  In losing weight, and being able to maintain that loss, I have tried to have a balanced diet, and as a result, have become a poster child for my doctors as to my physical state, whereas before, I had high cholestreal and Type II Diabeties, which I no longer have. So the take away, as with just about everything, is balance and moderation are the keys.

As Thanksgiving approaches, it is interesting to note a recent study discussing the benefits of a home cooked meal. In this study, of nearly 100,000 health care professionals, it was observed that those participants who ate an average of 11-14 home-prepared lunches or dinners per week, had a 13% lower risk of developing Type 2 diabetes than those consuming 6 or fewer, and also, those participants who eat more home-cooked meals had a 15% lower risk of developing obesity – study presented on November 8, 2015 at an Orlando meeting of the American Heart Association, Meeting Report Abstract 17285, Geng Zong, Ph.D., Harvard School of Public Health.  According to Dr. Zong, who reported the study results, “[t]he trend for eating commercially prepared meals in restaurants or as take-out in the United States has increased significantly over the last 50 years,” and “[a]t the same time, Type 2 diabetes rates have also increased.”

Lack of a home cooked meal is especially prevalent in a city like New York, where you could go to a different restaurant every day of the year, and only scratch the surface of the restaurants in the City. Also, just about everyone orders takeout, letting our fingers do the walking, and even the local grocery stores have large salad and hot food bars, and a whole section prepared meals.

I certainly believe that my lack of home cooking, and ordering takeout, contributed to my weight gain.  When I started to practice law, I was working long hours, and my girlfriend was also working late hours, so we ordered take out all the time, or ate out, and our weight ballooned, and eventually I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes (which I no longer have). So what might be so bad about eating out, or ordering in, compared to a home cooked meal? For one, prepared meals out are more likely to contain higher levels of fat, salt and sugar, which can all contribute to weight gain. When I started cooking my own meals, and not ordering takeout, which I have not done once since at least December 2009, I rarely use salt or sugar, and have substituted olive oil for butter, plus I stay away from carbohydrates like white rice, pasta, potatoes and white bread – however, I still love bread, so I instead have whole wheat or multi-grain bread. Also, instead of salt or sugar, I use more spices to give my food flavor.

For example, at Thanksgiving, I now make mashed cauliflower instead of mashed potatoes, and it tastes great.  Also, instead of pie or cake for dessert, I have fresh fruit, and if I want a chocolate taste, I get Lindt’s 99% dark chocolate, which is low in sugar, but satisfies any coca craving.

The secret to being able to have home cooked meals, with a busy lifestyle, and in an urban environment (without your own chef), is to prepare food in advance that can be cooked quickly once you get home. As I have mentioned previously, I prepare meats and vegetables on the weekend, and then it does not take long to cook once I get home. So make a change in your life, and have more home-cooked meals, not just on Thanksgiving, and enjoy better health.

I have a round trip commute of at least two hours to get to my job, and if traffic is bad, it can be much longer. Before I focused on losing weight, and maintaining that loss, I used to eat in my car both going and coming back from work. What I have learned over the years is that commuting long distances raises issues about burnout, unhappiness, and weight gain, which need to addressed.

One of the first articles that brought this to my attention was in the AAA’s Car & Travel Magazine, March 2011, entitled “Angst, Lethargy, Unhappiness/All in a Day’s Commute, by Tom Vanderbilt.  In that article, it pointed out that many surveys show that people with longer commutes are less happy, and suggests that ones that have a shorter commute tend to happier, and that it helps not to pay so much attention to how long the commute is taking. In that article, they suggest listening to a book, or music on the radio, and not focusing on the traffic reports broadcast over the radio, were good practices to lessen the negative effects of commuting. Although listening to traffic reports was discouraged, watching the traffic information on your car’s navigation system was deemed to be OK, since it gave you alternate routes, real-time traffic, and provided you with an accurate ETA.

I can also tell you, from personal experience, that eating in a car is not good, and it tends to involve fattening items (sandwiches, candy bars, chips, etc.), which tend to be those items that can be eaten with one hand as you drive. In addition, you tend to overeat, since you tend to eat throughout the trip, rather than at one discrete time — another practice that encourages overeating. Also, if you drink soda, they have a lot of calories, and even if it is sugar-free and reduced calorie soda, studies have shown how these items promote further eating.

So what I do is wait to eat breakfast once I arrive at my office (breakfast is a must have meal since it sets the tone for the whole day), and on my return trip, I will eat something before I leave the office. The reason for not eating breakfast at home is that after a long car journey, I tend to get hungry, and I want to limit myself to just one meal, rather than a continuation of smaller meals. On the way home, a good choice before my trip is something with protein like nuts or peanut butter. As for beverages, I do not drink coffee, so I have either unsweetened ice tea, or water. I also keep breath spray in my car, so if my mouth is feeling dry with a bad taste, and I use the breath spray.

Another article on commuting comes from Université de Montréal, entitled, “You’re driving yourself to burnout, literally.” 26 May 2015. In that article, based upon research at the University of Montreal’s School of Industrial Relations, it discusses how commuting length, distance, and means are stress factors, and that a correlation exists between commuting stress factors and the likelihood of suffering from burnout. The research shows that the risk of burnout increases significantly when a commute lasts more than 20 minutes. One way to address this issue, besides moving closer to work, it more telecommuting. Fortunately, my present employer does allow some telecommuting, and that has helped me to address some of the complications from commuting.

Just a quick update from last week. The stitches have now been removed from my shoulder, and I no longer have to sleep in a sling at an inclined angle, and as a result I have gotten some sleep the last 3 days, something that did not occur for 2 weeks. Next week my physical therapy starts, and this week I lost an additional 1.5 lbs, but I still have to lose 5 more pounds to reach my pre-surgery weight. My goal is the get below 200 lbs by the end of August.

In a separate matter, I have always been inspired by great speeches, and one of the past speeches I find motivating and inspiring is Steve Job’s commencement address at Stanford University on June 12, 2005.  Below is the prepared text of the commencement address.  Enjoy and be similarly motivated.

Prepared text of address:

“I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College [Portland, Oregon] after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz [Steve Wozniak] and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2bn company with over 4,000 employees. We had just released our finest creation – the Macintosh – a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling-out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over. I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, some day you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “no” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7.30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for “prepare to die”. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful, but purely intellectual, concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but some day not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And, most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called the Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of the Whole Earth Catalog, and then, when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words “Stay hungry. Stay foolish”. It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay hungry. Stay foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry. Stay foolish.Thank you all very much.”