The Great Learning of 2016: Part I

  T   his past thirty days has taught me a lot—I told you from the outset that I was doing this so you didn't have to—so now you can just pass Go and go straight to the Gold.
So what is my advice to you? What are the conclusions that I have come to after cogitating 200% every single day of the past thirty days—recording, I'll remind you, every single relevant thing that happened to my body: what I ate, when I ate it, what I drank. My blood sugar levels, sometimes six times a day, how I napped and how I slept.

I made charts of every single day; I will post them on this blog in due course, in addition to the test results from uBiome and my blood tests.

If you have the logical mind and the discerning eye, you might be able to make sense of the patterns on my charts, especially the hours that I slept and the duration of the sleep, because I regard the quality of sleep to be the defining marker of your overall health. (After all, if your sleep is fucked up, *you* are liable to be fucked up. It is, after all, a third of your healthy lifetime, and, I think, a kind of dark matter to your life: unseen, unappreciated, but absolutely crucial to existence.)

I didn't record my exercise, but that's because it should be such an innate part of your lifestyle, like sleep, that you should somehow work it into your daily existence and *leave it there.* Don't think of it as a drag that your "diet doctor" is admonishing you to do; think of it as . . . well, all that in a minute.

So here goes. Here is the Wisdom that I will impart from the "Great Learning of 2016."

Be Smart.

EDUCATE YOURSELF. The Internet is the biggest library every created. At your fingertips is almost every speck of human knowledge ever accumulated. Want to know what Louis XIV ate for breakfast? No problem. (Beef madrilène with gold leaf spangles?!)

Avoid obviously spurious websites. There are a LOT of people out there spouting nonsense that almost sounds credible. These people work hard to spread their dangerous gibberish-ideas that are often based on conspiracy theories and other typical lunatic-fringe hysteria.

You will learn to spot these places; usually, but not always, they will be flogging some book or "system" that will be based on science, but then will veer wildly into nonsense territory, the better to differentiate themselves from the other charlatans who infest the cybersphere like Emerald Ash Borers.

Avoid obvious pseudo-science hucksters who call themselves anything like "Chiropractor" "Reflexologist" "Integrative medicine doctor""homeopath/naturopath/insert fraudulent pseudo-science here" and just *use your common sense.* How do you spot them? *They usually want your money in some manner.*

It's not hard, d'oh: USE YOUR BRAIN!!! It's not rocket science.

A great place to start that tries its best to expose these quacks and the bizarre and sometimes dangerous theories they espouse is right here. Type your keyword in the search box and get ready to see the chicanery massacred.

DON'T FEEL PERSECUTED. This is not something someone is forcing you to do because you've been a naughty, idiot loser who's been stuffing your face all your life with complete and utter junk, even if you ARE a naughty, idiot loser who's been stuffing your face all your life with complete and utter junk.

For an analogy, just think of your car. You love your car, right? You want your car to run the best it can; it may be old, but it works, and you want it to work really well. You don't want to put the lowest-priced-lowest-grade Chinese oil into its engine so it sputters and coughs clouds of Beijing smoke.

You don't want to ignore that clattering sound until it finally quits and you have to have it towed to a mechanic who tells you it's blown its fraximillik and will now cost you your paycheck-and-a-half.

*You wouldn't do that to your car, so why would you do it to yourself?*

YOU ARE LOVING THE BIOME. You don't seriously think that there is some magic life process going on in the background that enables you to eat, sleep and, err, use the toilet in a comfortable, pain-free and happy manner, do you?

*This is not magic.*

There are very real, very living creatures inside your gut that are *totally dependent* upon you to feed them right so they can do the essential jobs that evolution has spent millions of years crafting in order to enable walking, talking, two-legged biological machines of the highest order of superiority in the entire observable universe that we know of.

Be mindful of everything that you put into yourself; there are consequences. You may not pay much attention to that bag of M&Ms but believe me, your gut bacteria are paying attention.

In all likelihood, entire genomes of bacteria that are specifically attracted to all the sugar and chemicals inside those M&Ms are racing to the scene, like Crips and Bloods and Mexican drug cartels, to wipe out all the normal bacteria who are there, patiently trying to clean you up and make you efficient, these bad guys wreaking havoc as they usually do, not caring whom they kill and what the consequences will be to the Biome.

That's what these vermin do; it's their jobs. And you're enabling them.

Next time you get the urge to stuff your face with that Costco hot dog and french fries, just imagine the consequences to all your little friends, and by extension, to yourself. That one hot dog may not seem like a big deal—you work hard, you're on the go, you need food, you deserve it—but that one hot dog turns into ten hot dogs and all the garbage accumulates, poisoning every working organ in your body with the utter shit, the dregs of leavings from the slaughterhouse floor that is cursorily inspected by bored meat inspectors and handled by unhappy carcass slingers. THAT'S what that hot dog is. You just don't want to admit it.

EVERY TIME you choose the junk option instead of the easily obtainable, healthy option, you're poisoning your little friends who are trying to take care of you. Trust me, they don't want to be fed that shit. So what do they do? They just GIVE UP AND DIE. The bad guys move in.

Cluster of fucking carrots

DRESS IT UP. Who the fuck wants to chew on a fucking carrot stick? I sure don't. Yet that's what all these advice sites basically tell you to do. "For a noontime snack how about a nice healthy serving of carrots sticks with a fat-free yogurt dip!" Fuck you.

They put a nice happy photograph of a cluster of carrots in a Martha Stewart bowl. Hey! It's not legumes de conteneur en porcelaine fusée à la Chine. It's a cluster of fucking carrots!

And we're supposed to space out our meals to five times a day, chopping little carrots sticks or celery sticks, only to have to eat them with some bland Dr. Weil-approved fat-free-gluten-free-fair-trade-probiotic yogurt that just happens to be available to order on his website?! Recurring subscription for a monthly $39.95!



I knew that I would never be able to survive on a regimen like that. So I changed it. You like shrimp? You can buy them, already cooked, at the grocery store, or you can sauté a batch one lazy day and put them in the refrigerator for snacks. They're very healthy, contrary to the fallacious claims by health mavens in the 80s that they had too much cholesterol.

I just made my noontime and 6 o'clock snack a few shrimp, cold and dipped in a homemade soy-ginger-garlic sauce (recipe on request).

It was delicious, super-fast, pretty healthy (beats chips and a fucking Coke; if I see you drinking one of those, I'll never speak to you again) and it fills you up nicely. If you're extra-hungry, just add extra shrimp.

MORE IDEAS and conclusions coming up in The Great Learning of 2016: Part II