How I Fixed My Health

This blog is going to be a little different because it will not have study after study cited as usual, but I thought it would be a fun topic to write about right after Christmas and the New Year break.

For background, I have always been on the heavy side for my height and age; I wasn’t fat, just dense, what some people would call big-boned. I hit 180lbs in early high school and started running cross country with an unofficial fastest time trial of 17 minutes and 30 seconds my senior year. At that time trial I weighed a bit over 160lbs at 5’9”. I hope that gives an idea of how dense I am.

At the end college I was running many miles – up to 60 a week – for a couple of weeks then I dropped down to 20-30 miles a week as I was preparing for finals. Many studies show that cortisol increases significantly during long runs, and I know that the amount of cortisol I was producing from running so many miles on top of preparing for and going through my last three weeks of undergrad was probably harmful to me.

I weighed about 180lbs by the end of my undergrad track “career,” and then my senior year I decided to quite track and just run long distance for fun but even at 60 miles a week, I could not fall under 170lbs. Again, I was relatively lean, probably fluctuating between 12-14% body fat.

In college, I ran D3 track for three years (I was not very good), I did the 400 hurdles and the 800 meter run. I was very involved in many different clubs and activities and friend groups, I was eating the garbage college food almost all the time, and I was in a science major so needless to say, I think my cortisol levels were always elevated, always harming me. When I returned home during school breaks, I would sleep 11 hours a night for the first couple nights I was home probably because of this cortisol response and from chronic sleep deprivation.

The whole COVID reaction followed, and I contracted COVID from a family member and then I hit a long rut in my life. I was always tired or sad unless I has some major life event happening like moving home or packing up, or switching jobs. I noticed my face aging relatively rapidly so I knew I had to change my lifestyle before I looked decrepit during the healthiest years of my life.

The last many months I have been fixing my life bit by bit and recuperating from the long haul of lies, heartbreaks, irresponsible behavior, and overall fatigue from college. So here is my best explanation for how I feel so incredibly normal now, and then what I plan to do and where I plan to go from here with my health and lifestyle.

INITIAL CHANGES

What is a good life without prayer? Most of the world is religious, and those who are, always find peace and or some type of pleasure during prayer. Sensory deprivation decreases serotonin and can regulate your dopamine receptors so the quiet time I spend in prayer is very restorative and keeps my body’s expectations of stimulation low so that when life hits, I can be ready to go and more stimulated than I otherwise would be.

I stopped eating seed oils! Seed oils are machine lubricants and, if in food, they are the Devil’s Delight. Once I made this change, I started feeling immensely better within a week. I felt less “blown up.” My stomach flattened probably from less inflammation and gas in my intestines. I felt more energetic and overall, my quality of life increased substantially. Something fascinating that I have noticed because of this change is that even though I get sore after my workouts, I haven’t felt a need to be massaged, to stretch, or to wait more than a day to workout a certain muscle group. I think this is because my body can now divert energy away from detoxification and more toward muscle recovery.

Although, neglecting seed oils have helped my muscles, it could also be because the level of intensity of my exercise has decreased a significant amount. I have been exercising at an intensity much lower than collegiate track and field. I walk for about an hour a day and weight train for an hour a day, otherwise, if I run, it is two or three times a week for 10-15 minutes. I have achieved a relatively lean and stead 12% body fat and 210 lbs at 5’10”!

I supplement on Vitamin D mostly because we were going into the winter, and I get some pretty severe “Winter sickness” and/or “seasonal affectiveness disorder (SAD).” The Vitamin D has practically eliminated the SAD and I feel a lot more normal because of it. In addition, I have been able to put on more lean mass from this. The reason for this, I believe, is that Vitamin D and cholesterol basically make your hormones. Vitamin A is also important in that process, and while I am not supplementing on Vitamin A currently, I plan to do that in the near future.

At the same time as Vitamin D supplementation, I started eating more fat: The fat on chicken, red meat, butter, you name it, I was eating the fat in addition to the meat, and staying away from seed oils and carbohydrates. This has helped me to eat less which also helps with being lean, but interestingly, I have not lost any mass except fat mass.

I started putting salt on everything. Even a dash in my water every now and then. This is because I eat generally healthy, I do not eat out much (restaurants, and fast food use a lot of salt) and I realized that my muscles and neurons basically run on salt. I have felt more awake due to this change, I urinate less while drinking slightly but noticeably less, and I mentally fatigue much more slowly.

I started nose breathing. Nose breathing is phenomenal, check out this article on nose breathing. The changes I have seen in myself because of it are a finer jaw line, increased time until mental fatigue, and more evenly paced exercised sessions. Nasal breathing also helps to take cold showers. I remember reading and hearing that when actors and actresses fake cry for their roles in movies, it makes them still feel truly sad. I believe the same principle applies here, where the straight face induced by nose breathing helps a person to truly take on the feeling of fearlessness.

I switched away from fluoride toothpaste and started using hydroxyapatite toothpaste instead. I found recently that fluoride is a neurotoxin, and it effects the pineal gland. After making this switch, I have found it easier to control my sleep schedule, although, admittedly, there are a lot of other confounding variables in this discovery. On another note, I have not seen an increase in dental health. For what my opinion is worth, if this switch has helped, it has helped minimally but since there seems to be no downside, its worth a shot!

I did not usually have a problem with falling asleep in college because I was so exhausted all the time. Now, outside of college, I have not been eating anything 2-3 hours before I get in bed, and I have put my phone on the “Night shift” setting and I do not use my phone 2 hours before bed. Sleeping well is fundamentally the best habit I have fixed since being in college.

I started switching my selection of clothes to mostly cotton and I cannot be sure if the positive change in quality of life is a placebo effect or not. Polyesters to my knowledge, are made of plastic-like material, and it is well known that the microplastics and phthalates are endocrine disruptors, specifically, they are xeno-estrogens which are related to inflammation. Switching to cotton has made me feel less “blown up,” or subliminally irritated to whatever small extent it can happen. In addition, I have noticed that my leanness has increased since the conscious switch, although I admit that there are plenty of confounding variables in this scenario too.

RED LIGHT IS INCREDIBLE. I use red light on my thyroid, my sore muscles, and my face mostly. Secondarily, I use it on my stomach, Liver, and frontal lobe of my brain. Red Light is fantastic as long as I do not use it so much as to get a Herck’s reaction which for me is usually a meager fever like when physically exhausted. The red light is definitely the most important addition out of any of the above “LiFe HaCkS.” Red light was the last addition to this line up of lifestyle changes, but noticeably, it has accelerated my metabolism greatly, it has reduced my time of recovery between resistance training workouts immensely and it has increased my leanness and decreased even further my SAD symptoms. Although Red Light seems to be the “cherry on top” of all these lifestyle changes, I am sure that if I did not fix my diet and sleep schedule, the red light would have minimal effects.

FUTURE CHANGES

I would like to start eating animal organs, specifically heart, testes, and thyroid. Since I have been reading Ray Peat, and researching in PubMed all day, it seems like an easy choice to supplement my diet with the vitamins and hormones found in the organs of animals. The vitamins and hormones from animals are allegedly much more bioavailable than those in fruits and vegetables mostly because they are already dissolved in fat and ready to be bioactive in an animal.

I would also like to get rid of gluten and starches from my diet and replace those carbs with mostly sucrose and fructose. Supposedly, those simple sugars are good for metabolism, especially since they are involved in the conversions of hormones.

Eventually I would like to get married and have children. I think this concept is severely underrated in the 21st century. The ancient greeks understood that one of the ways that you knew that you reached your telos is that you could teach another how to be what you are. For example, if I call myself a man, then I can raise a boy to be a man. For Aristotle, and many who abide by the natural law, reaching our telos is essential to a truly happy life, so a “lifestyle” change I would like to make would be to get married, have children and teach my son (hopefully sons) to be a man (hopefully men), and to reach my telos in that way.

I will update this article when I can to have you faithful readers check out any new changes I have made and if they have helped at all.