The Behavior of Change
Perception is reality
Food is food. Medicine is medicine. Poison is poison.
Let’s not confuse things.
It’s not even that food is medicine it’s that all this other shit is fucking poison. Framing food as medicine creates skepticism because people already have a perception of what medicine is, and it’s not food. Let’s let medicine be medicine. Food be food. And poison be poison. And clear up any confusion.
See, I do think medicine has the power to heal. In specific cases there are medicinal therapies that can help. But mostly, healing doesn’t come from eating real food, it comes from the elimination of poisonous ones.
It would kind of be like telling a smoker that oxygen heals. So they stop smoking, stop inhaling CO2 and nicotine and all of the other harmful substances in cigarettes, only breathing oxygen, and cite oxygen as the medicine. But it’s not. The poisonous cigarette was the culprit. And when they stopped that their body began to heal.
Or telling someone who drinks soda that water is medicine. It’s not. If a soda drinker replaces their soda with water, the water has no healing benefits. The elimination of liquid sugar called soda is the reason they begin to heal.
Food is medicine. Sounds nice. Hippocrates said it a million years ago. Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food. Yes, food has vitamins, minerals, macros, that you need, but are they really healing? If that’s all the stuff you already need, then is it healing or maintaining?
Food is medicine feels complicated. It feels like extra work. Medicine not only already has its own perception about what it is, but it also has its own perception about what it means to take medicine. And I don’t think food should be mixed up in that.
I also think that by emphasizing real food as medicine it lets the food industry off the hook for the toxic substances that it creates. It doesn’t put enough emphasis on the illness that their products create. It shifts the focus away from their poison and onto eating healthy food, and I don’t think that anything will change until the products that they make are banned or severely limited.
Recently there was that stupid debate going on about Fruit Loops Canada versus Fruit Loops America and the ingredients in each. RFK Jr, someone I actually like, was arguing that we need to make our Fruit Loops like that of Canada’s with less toxic ingredients, but that misses the point. The issue is not what’s in Fruit Loops, the issue is that Fruit Loops exists as a cheap, accessible, and easy choice for consumers. Another inane debate that’s been going on is people trying to push McDonalds to go back to using beef tallow for their french fry oil instead of the seed oil they switched to many years ago. The issue isn’t the oil. The issue is that McDonalds, and garbage like it, are allowed to exists as cheap, accessible, and abundant options for people.
Ban the poison and fix our health.
To avoid the perils of the products manufactured by the ultra processed food industry requires a heightened state of awareness and vigilance. It requires preparedness to head out into the world and not fall victim to these substances. For my finances birthday we rented a few lanes at the local bowling alley. We had a 5:30 - 8 pm slot. Too early to eat dinner, too late to wait to be done. I knew I was going to be hungry, and I knew the only options at the bowling alley would be highly processed and refined poison devoid of anything even resembling food. So before walking out of the door I stuffed a piece of steak and a 1/4 of an avocado into my mouth. I figured at the very least it would take the edge off, and hopefully prevent me from indulging in bowling alley food until I got home.
I ended up eating one slice of bowling alley pizza. Not terrible, and I did enjoy it, but I was able to avoid the french fries, chicken fingers, and three varieties of birthday cakes that her friends brought. But how many people have the time, awareness, or dedication to do that? My senses are not many, and understandably so.
One other lady that joined us to bowl also didn’t indulge in any food. She’s training to do some mountaineering this winter and looking to lose a few pounds.
But we were in the minority, and when cheap toxic food is the only option, most people are going to have a hard time turning it down.
Timing the market
To understand why you can’t time the market, take the simple case of United Healthgroup. Previously trading at an all time high of $630 per share, is now (at the time of this writing) down to $489 in the weeks following the murder of their CEO, Brian Thompson. Down over 20% in a few short weeks. Unpredictable and therefore impossible to time. That of course is an extreme example, but I think the extreme examples are the ones that provide the most clarity because it’s hard to dispute the facts. COVID, when the market dropped 40% in a matter of days, is another extreme but important example. You can’t time the market.
Peloton growing too fast and being unable to keep up with demand, followed by the death of a child using the treadmill, coupled with the death of an actor using a peloton on a TV show, crashing the stock to an all time low is another clear cut example. None of that could be predicted. Peloton’s stock has never recovered.
Over the last few years, with this lesson in mind, I’ve been selling off my individual holdings, and reinvesting them slowly into ETFs. The major one in my portfolio being VTI. While an ETF like VTI will swing with the market, the swings will be far less volatile than say what happened with UNH. After COVID a number of my stocks went from all time highs, to all time lows, and after seeing my money dry up, I realized I had learned my lesson and that I needed to do what I can to prevent that from happening again in the future.
Some of the individual stocks I got out of, like Uber and Netflix, went on to rebound to new highs, and in theory I lost out on that upside. But gains in the stock market are only made when you sell. Otherwise they are just unrealized. And it’s very easy to get enamored with your “unrealized” gains and have them slip out from under you without you even noticing. Separating your emotional buy-in for a stock is an important part of the game. Not getting too greedy is just as important.
If you want to win the market, then you need to believe in long term gains. Sticking it out for the long term and putting your money into ETFs that provide the least amount of volatility and the most amount of stability. Another small bonus is the dividend that comes with most (if not all) ETFs. Use those dividends to reinvest in the security and I think you’ll have a winning strategy you can’t go wrong with.
Proud of myself
I’m proud of myself. And not because of doing the hard things or working hard. Working hard and doing the hard thing has always come naturally to me. As naturally as working hard can. I’m sure there’s a trauma reason behind it.
But no, I’m proud of myself for doing the small things, taking my time, and not pushing myself too hard.
I went skiing the other day and my boot was killing me. Normally I would’ve just kept going, not wanting to waste time stopping. Not wanting to be a bitch having to stop to fix my boot. It’s skiing, isn’t your boot supposed to hurt? But instead, I stopped. Took my boots off and relaxed enough to fix my boot, relieve the pain, and even write myself this note.
Even going skiing was an accomplishment for me. My in laws were coming in that same day and I still had a lot of things I wanted to before they got in. The house needed to be cleaned. There were a couple of pieces of furniture I wanted to pick up. Some minor groceries I wanted to get for them. In a past life I would’ve put my desire to go skiing and be outside for a few hours aside, and decided that it was more important to get every little last thing done. And then for the next few days I would’ve suffered as I had ignored that calling to get outside. Which would’ve been a far worse result than if I didn’t get everything done on time at the house.
But this time I decided to take a chance. To go skiing and see what happens. See if I can get everything done anyway. See if in the long run the time outside, listening to my inner voice, outweighed rushing to get everything done and stressing myself out. Like I said, in so many words, I’ve always been good at stressing myself out and pushing through. Relaxing and taking time for me has never been a skill of mine.
But not this time. I think I’ve started to feel a shift. Figuring out that balance is more important than nonstop work.
Follow up note… it worked. I got everything done, and had an awesome day on the mountain.
Sleep
Sleep is the most important thing. If you don’t get good sleep, nothing else will matter. You can go a few nights with bad sleep and get by, but those days will eventually catch up, and you won’t make much progress during that time. In fact you’ll likely regress.
That’s why everything you do should be with sleep as the priority. What foods should I eat and what foods should I avoid? What drinks should I have and what drinks should I avoid? Should I back off my exercise or push hard? What should my technology hygiene look like? What should I engage with and what should I avoid? How’s stress impacting my sleep and how can I improve it?
Because the thing is, that while some of this will require short term sacrifices, the benefits of quality sleep will very quickly begin to outweigh them. Your body will begin to heal and transform. Your mind will be clear. Your relationships will improve. It will be easier to make better food choices. It will be easier to be active. Nothing in life escapes the impact of poor sleep. And everything improves with good sleep.
Health
I want to be healthy so that I can participate fully in life. Health as a stand alone has never been the focus for me. Health has always been a means to an end. To be able to wake up and say yes to any invitation that comes my way. Yes I want to take that trip. Yes I want to climb that mountain. Yes, let’s go to the beach. Yes, yes, yes.
I want to wake up and feel good. And to me that’s health. And it’s not possible without health. I fear how many people don’t wake up feeling that way. How many people have felt poor for so long that they no longer know how poor they feel. Often worse. It upsets me.
Death Penalty
Something just dawned on me that should’ve seemed obvious before. While reading Judgment at Tokyo, I read about how the lead judge of the trial agonized over sentencing any of the accused war criminals to the death penalty. He had never sent anyone to death before.
Which made me realize, and ask myself the question: if a judge sentences someone to death, doesn’t that make them a murderer? Even if the accused is convicted of heinous crimes, doesn’t that make the judge equally as heinous?
I know the idea is to serve justice and protect society, but it’s kind of like the abortion question. An abortion is killing a baby. You might agree with the procedure or not, but at the end of it, a life has ended. Same goes for the accused.
You may or may not agree with it, but at the end of the day, when someone is executed for a crime, the people involved have taken a life.