Status Report: 0627;101325;LUKE;N;DEASY
I’m going through changes.
Getting uncomfortably public about addiction and mental health (and other random stuff) through unfiltered stream-of-consciousness writing [is that redundant?].
Introductory Remarks
Dear Zesters,
In last Friday’s post, Getting Graphic #56: The Hunchback of Botre-Dame, I provided you all with a chart that showed that the majority of internet usage is now pretty much bot-driven—and I don’t necessarily even think that that’s a bad thing or anything like that—but I think it shows where things are going in terms of the internet becoming more of like an international information layer that sits below some sort of consciousness / intelligence layer which will ultimately like sort all of the information for us and then surface what we’re interested in—and then like companies and people affiliated with web content will also start to build like intelligent digital intermediaries that are responsible for convincing consumption agents to consume their thing—and it will all be like this big digital dance that we’re not even really aware of. And least that’s what I think is going to be coming, but we’ll see if that theory turns out to be true.
Body
Food Habits
In a move that will be incredibly unsurprising to many people, I have decided to revert back to eating multiple meals per day. In case you haven’t been following along religiously for the past 4 years (shame on you), I started eating one meal a day probably about 3.5 years ago now around March 2022. There wasn’t really any actual motivation for doing it other than some like latent curiosity in seeing if there was another level of human performance that I could unlock by doing something silly and unorthodox. And so I really really gave it a good go over the past 3.5 years, and stuck to the OMAD mandate pretty religiously. But really over the past few months—and especially in the past few days and weeks—I really haven’t been feeling my best at all, and so I had to do some serious reflection on my life. I thought maybe it was cancer or maybe a heart attack or something. But honestly in all likelihood I’m probably pretty good in those areas (knock on wood) and so really the biggest factor that I know is a little out of whack is my eating habits. Let’s maybe break this down a bit:
Habit: So basically I would only eat once a day, usually not until about 5/6pm, and I would literally not eat anything else for the rest of the day. I’d exercise in the morning and then just have like coffee and water the whole day until 5/6pm. And so my body really got in the habit I think of not expecting nourishment until the evening. And that’s pretty much just how I’ve lived life for quite some time. And then I’d usually go on a pretty substantial walk after I ate and then from there I would usually have some type of sweet treat at night—and then that was pretty much all I did. I trained for a marathon and like lived life with this habit literally for like 3.5 years.
Diet: My actual diet I think was pretty lacking which ultimately I think played a big role in the whole experience. Like I would just get into these rhythms of eating pretty much the same things over and over again—and I don’t think those meals were particularly nourishing at all—and so that definitely didn’t help. Like I’d mostly eat just like fruit and yogurt and granola and honey or like sometimes I ate quinoa or I’d eat like greens and then peppers and stuff and so I guess the point I’m trying to make is that I just wasn’t eating like actually good stuff and I wasn’t eating food that had much protein and so I think the dietary insufficiencies sort of compounded the negative impact of the OMAD approach altogether.
The Final Straw: But so really I think ultimately the final straw sort of came over the past few months where I just really wasn’t feeling my best at all—and I think I sort of knew in the back of my mind that my dietary habits were likely to blame—but I didn’t really want to accept that because I mostly liked how I looked and stuff like that—and so it was difficult for me to I think accept that a change was finally needed. But I was getting to a point where I just felt so fucking awful that something had to give.
So I guess that’s where I leave you today—I’m still in the super beginning stages of all of it, and so I’m going like step-by-step with ChatGPT to figure out what I should eat and when I should eat and stuff like that—and so literally this past Thursday was the first time in like 4 years that I had food before noon—and so it’s been fun. I sort of just do these like experiments on myself and then try to adjust and reorient as I go—and so this is pretty much consistent with my general behavioral orientation—but I think it’s good that I finally made a change here.
I’m feeling pretty optimistic that my body will be resilient and like respond positively to change once I start nourishing it more frequently—and that in a few weeks and definitely within a few months I’ll be back to a somewhat normal-feeling baseline around health and performance and nourishment—and then I’m hoping that maybe I’ll feel like good and healthy and strong in a way that I really haven’t felt for quite some time. I just can’t really remember the last time I felt truly like strong and healthy and vibrant—and I think I need to kind of find / pursue some version of myself that is vibrant and strong and healthy and fit and in shape and stuff within the confines of eating more frequently.
Really, eating more should help me look and feel good and exercise more intensely and stuff—and so I’m just in the early stages of a sort of fundamental restructuring of my relationship with food and thinking about food as something that fuels me to go out and do wonderful stuff and to be at my creative best and so on and so forth—and not food as like something to earn at the end of the day or whatever.
A lot of this is probably Food 101 for most people, but I’ve just never really been good with food for pretty much my entire life, and I’m also really not good at preparing food and purchasing food and knowing what to make, etc., but I guess that’s why ChatGPT has been so helpful to me. So, I guess I’ll kind of keep things updated here as the “journey” unfolds but I’m excited to kind of go back to the drawing board here as well as it relates to my life.
The Drawing Board
I think I talked about this a few status reports ago, but I am in a period of intense change and then also freedom, where I kind of have entered a new chapter of my professional life that allows me to structure my days how I want. I’ve gone through several different iterations of daily routine and rhythm and so now I think I need to rediscover what works best for me in this next chapter of my life. I do enjoy working out first thing in the morning, so I think I’ll stick to that, and then figuring out how to build my life around that. But I also sometimes can do great work when I like ultra-lock in first thing in the morning. So, I don’t know. I’m gonna see how I feel and how things progress and develop and go from there. Because I’m also trying to be a little gentle and like exploratory with myself—just to see where things go, see what I’m drawn to, and see what happens if I follow my feet and let myself wander. And I think that’s the really challenging thing for me because usually I need a plan and have a really strict like rhythm to my life—but now I’m letting myself be a bit freer and more fluid and seeing what happens.
And then also I think I’m back to the drawing board in terms of like identity and then location and habit and stuff—and that’s really where there’s a lot of leverage I think. I don’t even know what I mean by a lot of this, but I guess following that one shroom trip a couple months ago and then more recently, I’m just like open to anything, and not tethered to external indications of identity in a way that I was in the past. I just have myself, my life, and then I guess my pursuits and passions and desires and stuff. But I’m just more open to experimentation on the details and the specifics of the mechanisms and habits that ultimately propel me to the high-level and long-term objectives that I’ve set for myself.
Active Participation in Negativity = Accountability
And so I think that leads us to some discussion of like, when you live according to the phrase: “You are an active participant in the construction of your life.” then you have to also accept that that’s true for the pieces of our life that we’re less happy about—and I think that can be really tough. It’s easy to like only embrace responsibility for the good things in our life and then play the victim for the less good or not-so-fun things in our lives—and I think that becomes a really dangerous precedent to set—because then it’s harder to embrace agency to fix things that you’re not happy about. And so for me specifically, I have to own and be accountable to the actions and the decisions I’ve made over the past few years to only eat once a day—despite growing biological protests from my body. And so I think there wasn’t a really good reason to keep only eating once a day other than like vanity and then a lack of mindfulness and a lack of like self-grace and stuff. And so I have to sort of really reflect on all of those dynamics and then move forward to make changes and accept the reality of my past and the control I have over my behaviors moving forward (and then the control I don’t have over many other aspects of life, which is okay). And so I guess all I’m saying is that the hardest question is: “how am I complicit in the circumstances of my life that I least enjoy?” (or there’s some question like that that some life coach has put out there). And I guess that’s the type of real-talk that we have to engage in moving forward to effect real change and like continue to grow and develop.
And I think the last quick throw-away thing I’ll say here is that I do think part of the joy of the human experience and part of why I’m so happy that, for example, I don’t drink anymore—is that I do think the body is like infinitely resilient and incredibly dynamic and like infinitely redeemable and stuff—and so I just think that when we sort of course-correct for negative stuff that’s been happening in our lives, I really do honest-to-god think that we can get back to normal and then like become an even better version of ourselves than we previously thought possible. Like we can revert back to some mean of health and vibrancy more effectively than we realize. Like our body is a complex and beautiful biological system that is designed to be healthy and vibrant and to best equip us with the faculties and tools to survive and thrive in the environment. And I think too often we sort of get in the way of that intrinsic intelligence and then don’t trust our bodies to know what’s right and stuff. I’m not sure if that’s making any sense but just something to think about.
Jewelry Guy
Last super basic thing, as I go back to the drawing board in all aspects of life, I’m also starting to reflect on like the look I want to have and where I want to take my life and just kind of becoming the person that I want to become—and part of that, I think, is how I show up in the world and how I look and stuff. But one thing that I’ve been talking about with a friend is what it takes to become a jewelry guy—and I think I’m at a point where maybe I’ll give it a try. I’m generally a less-is-more chap, but I think, like, what the fuck do I have to lose. Why not just try shit out and see what feels good. And then also as I work to build my company I think I like to set up kind of arbitrary-feeling rewards based on achieving certain also arbitrary-feeling performance metrics, and so when I get my second customer (I think) I’m going to like get myself a Tiffany bracelet I think and then maybe when I achieve some amount of monthly revenue or something like that I want to get a Cartier ring. Those are my two vanity-goals in the near-term that would also firmly establish me as a jewelry guy. It’s just like part of this broader journey of self-discovery and self creation where it’s like who the fuck do I want to become and who is anyone else to restrict that or impede that, and then like let’s just fucking do it, ya know? Like if I don’t decide who I want to be then others will implicitly decide for me—and that’s no bueno. So, like, whatever, let’s just see what happens.
Pseudo-Goals
Last thing, I think I’ve also been thinking a lot about goal-setting and like how to structure and pursue different goals and stuff—and I think there are different schools of thought here. But I’ve recently started to think more and more that the way I sort of best accomplish stuff is by setting these longer-term kind of random goals, even when I have very little to show for actually getting there, and even when they maybe feel kind of unrealistic or non-feasible, and then like letting the universe kind of handle the details for me, and then like always having it at the back of my mind, and then in that I think I can kind of push there and achieve things without worrying too much about the details. The counter argument is maybe that I would achieve them more quickly or more effectively if I was very explicit about daily goals and stuff—and so maybe I’ll experiment with that. But in general I think I’ve been pretty good about setting these big long-term plans, without any real clue how I’ll actually get there, and then just sort of seizing opportunity as it arises and letting myself get in front of my skis a bit and then trusting myself and my ability to learn quickly and adapt rapidly as sort of rising to the occasion of new stages of life or something. Just another thing I’ve been thinking about as I set some ambitious goals for myself or have some ambitious desires that I have no idea how I’ll achieve—but that I also trust that I will get there somehow. And that’s the mystery of life and the joy of daily existence! Or so I hope.
Concluding Remarks
Okay I think that’s all from me. The new dietary direction feels exciting and also a little bit like a longtime coming—because I really haven’t been feeling great for a few months now and I’ve been brute-forcing my way through it—which has been impressive to some degree but also I think I’ve really just been grinding my body down and depleting nutrient stores and just sort of whittling myself away. So excited to reconstruct my physical existence with a nutrient-first and nourishment-oriented mindset.
Have a wonderful week!
With infinite zest for life,
Luke