My number one rule is I listen to my body
I eat what it tells me to eat and sleep when it tells me to sleep.
A lot of folks ask me why I don’t try to eat healthier.
Or why I don’t exercise more.
With the underlying assumption that it will help me.
But today I want to clarify my position as I think it is a bit misunderstood.
I do not go out of my way to eat or live unhealthy.
I simply listen to my body.
That is my #1 rule. And today i’ll explain why.
Let’s first wind it back to my twenties
In my twenties I was a health nut.
Mainly because I was a bit chubby when I was a kid and then got lean as a teenager and vowed to stay that way.
Plus it helped that my mother was a lifelong health nut. Always listening to health radio programs as I was a kid and making sure I ate lots of fruits & vegetables. To this day she exercises something like 2-3 hours per day in her 70’s (yoga, ballroom dancing, etc).
So for a lot of my twenties I was the guy that was eating salads and avoiding fat like the plague. Even though I was a pretty skinny dude.
I also forced myself to go to the gym like 3x a week or more. Regardless if I was tired.
I just had it ingrained in me that that is what you do to be healthy. Even though i had throat, neck and back tightness that just seemed to be getting worse and worse.
I was visiting various specialists an average of 2x per week all throughout my twenties and most of my thirties. I’d been to 100+ doctors of various sorts. Taken all kinds of pharmaceuticals. But to no avail.
I was the guy that on Friday night if we went to a club was falling asleep at like midnight while my friends were all going strong.
I learned to just accept it as normal for me.
My collapse of 2014 re-wired my brain
I think I would have lived and died my entire life with this diet & exercise mindset if 2014 had not happened.
2014 was the year that a dentist in Vietnam flattened my back teeth considerably and everything went into a tailspin. I couldn’t retain information, felt like a hermit, and my body and face were aging at an incredibly fast rate.
This despite my best efforts to prevent it from happening.
I remember running around my apartment block in the blistering heat of Saigon in 2014 to try to stay in shape. Meanwhile my brain was in a complete fog.
I was age 37 and I was doing the exact same exercise & diet routine I’d done my entire adult life. The same one that had kept me as a lean and fairly decent looking guy.
But now it wasn’t working.
I was aging like a mofo and there seemed to be no stopping it.
Had I been deceived my entire life about how the body works? It sure felt like it.
These days I live by the opposite logic
Fast forward another 11 years of going up and down with these biomechanics and now I live by a completely different logic.
I listen to my body.
My assumption is that the body is extremely intelligent as to how to keep me healthy. And trying to outsmart it is an exercise in futility because it has far better data than i do.
So I eat when it tells me to eat. And I eat what it tells me to eat.
This doesn’t mean I go out of my way to eat unhealthy. But it does mean that if my body tells me it is fine to eat cookies or chips at 1am then that is what I do. And the reality is that it often does.
I used to eat McDonald’s sausage egg mcmuffins most mornings for breakfast… but for the past month or so it has told me to eat a bagel with cream cheese instead.
Why? I have no idea.
But it is not telling me to eat green vegetable shakes… so I don’t! haha
It also kind of indicates to me that it doesn’t want alcohol. So i don’t think i’ve had a beer in over a month.
When I’m tired I don’t question it. I just take a nap. Regardless of the time or how much I slept.
My logic is… my body speaks and I obey. Period.
And so far this is working out very well… i feel like i function far better than I did when i was in my early 20’s.
Note that I think this only applies IF you have the correct biomechanics
By this I mean that for this rule to work out well I view that you need to have the correct biomechanics.
Meaning that you are wearing a mouthguard and resurrecting your structure.
If your structure is collapsing (as most people naturally are while aging), then yes… exercise, diet and all the rest of it plays a role.
Because your body is fighting structural collapse and so it’s signals are a bit scrambled.
It might be telling you to eat foods that are going to shorten the number of days till you have a heart attack.
I kind of view it like a computer getting a virus. It might start doing the wrong things because it is under attack.
Closing thoughts
So to wrap up I’d like to make clear that I do not go out of my way to eat unhealthy.
I do not go out of my way to not exercise.
I simply listen to my body.
I eat what it tells me to eat, sleep when it tells me to sleep, and funny enough…
…for some reason it never tells me to do any strenuous exercise. LOL
I actually think we were designed a bit like the lions in this tree above. There is no need for us to run around in circles to stay in shape. It’s not how we were designed.
It would make zero sense from an evolutionary standpoint to be designed that way.
Rather we were probably designed to be able to live off whatever food was available and conserve our energy.
If i’m wrong.. i guess I have some big impending health mishap coming.
But somehow… by the way i’m working circles around kids half my age without burning out…. i don’t think i’m gonna be wrong ;)
