Cinemorphosis

Tag: health

  • Déjà Chew 

    Déjà Chew 

    When I was a kid, my mother indulged my insatiable appetite for sugary cereal, Cap’n Crunch, in all its glorious variations: Cap’n Crunch plain, Cap’n Crunch with Crunch Berries, Peanut Butter Cap’n Crunch, and the audaciously renamed versions that tasted exactly the same: Quisp, Quake, and King Vitamin. I felt a burning compulsion to taste-test all these varieties with the meticulousness of a sommelier sampling dozens of Zinfandels or a fromager savoring different types of Camembert, or a musicologist analyzing hundreds of versions of Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony. Eating six versions of Cap’n Crunch was my way of embracing the illusion of variety while devouring the same cereal over and over again. I was a preadolescent boy, steadfast in my desire to believe I had choices, yet paradoxically terrified of making any. It’s like hearing about the man who’s on his sixth marriage, each wife a near-carbon copy of the last in appearance, temperament, and personality. The poor sap keeps circling back to the same woman, convincing himself he’s “found someone new” and pinning his hopes on a fresh start. That was me with Cap’n Crunch. I was stuck in a sugary Groundhog Day, endlessly looping through bowls of the same old cereal under different guises. Not only was I stagnant in my food choices, but I was also regressing into a sugar-coated stupor. My love for cereal, which persists to this day, was my way of vanishing into a chosen comfort zone. In that sugary sanctuary, I found both bliss and oblivion, content to float along in a sea of crunchy sameness, convinced I was exploring new culinary frontiers.

    This type of delusional behavior points us to Déjà Chew–the eerie sensation that every “new” cereal tastes exactly like the last one you swore was different. The uncanny sensation of culinary déjà vu happens when, despite the flashy new box, the novelty-shaped marshmallows, or the misleading “limited edition” label, your spoon hits the same old sugary slurry you’ve been eating since the Nixon administration. Déjà Chew convinces you you’re exploring new taste frontiers, when in fact you’re just riding a merry-go-round of processed nostalgia. It’s the foodie equivalent of dating your ex’s identical twin and calling it personal growth. One bite in, you know exactly where this is going—but you chew on, comforted by the illusion of variety and the soothing crunch of your own arrested development.

  • Longing to Return to the Syrupocene Era

    Longing to Return to the Syrupocene Era

    Back in the 60s and 70s, nutritional concerns were as relevant to us as an old vinyl record in a streaming world. We were blissfully unaware of things like sugar grams and carbohydrate counts. On weekend mornings, my parents would sometimes treat me to a local pancake house, where I indulged in my favorite dish: apple pancakes. Now, picture this: a stack of ten flapjacks, each one a marvel of culinary excess. To say the pile was monumental is like calling Mount Everest a hillock. As I sat next to it, I looked like a hapless Lilliputian standing beside a mountain of golden, buttery goodness. The age-old question had to be asked: Was I going to eat these pancakes, or were they going to consume me in a pancake avalanche? Spoiler alert: I ate them. Every last one. These pancakes were no ordinary breakfast fare. They were brimming with cinnamon-spiced apple compote, slathered in creamy butter, and drenched in what must have been a half-gallon of maple syrup. If I had spilled that syrup, it would have created a sugar tsunami. To wash down this syrupy mountain, I guzzled down several tall glasses of orange juice, which was basically just liquid sugar with a side of citrus. The sheer volume of insulin-spiking sugars and carbohydrates I ingested could have given a modern endocrinologist a cerebral hemorrhage. I was consuming enough sugar to make Willy Wonka look like a health food advocate. After these epic breakfasts, rather than running outside to join my friends in their energetic games, I would slump into bed in a state of what could only be described as a Carbohydrate Coma. I was so catatonic, my friends might as well have been playing a game of “Guess Where’s the Sleeping Kid?” The trauma inflicted on my pancreas was beyond imagination. It was like a small factory working overtime without a break, pumping out insulin at a rate that would have made any modern dietitian faint. In those days, gluttony was a virtue, and self-indulgence was a badge of honor. We reveled in our ignorance, blissfully ignoring the fact that our indulgences would make today’s health-obsessed populace break out in a cold sweat. So there I was, a child of the 60s and 70s, living in an era where pancakes and orange juice were not just meals but monumental feats of indulgence. Our motto was simple: “Why worry about nutritional concerns when you can have another stack of apple pancakes?” Our golden era of gluttony was truly a feast for the ages—literally and metaphorically.

    This memory points us to the Syrupocene Era–a mythic golden age spanning the 1960s and 70s when nutritional ignorance reigned supreme, and breakfast was less a meal and more a caloric Greek tragedy performed in maple-soaked acts. The Syrupocene was a time when food pyramids hadn’t been built, glycemic indexes hadn’t been discovered, and “carb-loading” wasn’t a fitness strategy—it was a lifestyle.

    During the Syrupocene, children guzzled orange juice like it was an IV drip from the gods, consumed pancakes in stacks that could double as insulation, and considered butter a vegetable. It was a utopia of food denialism, where a carbohydrate coma was mistaken for a nap and diabetic shock was just “a sleepy Sunday morning.” The only sugar tracker in town was your mother asking, “Do you want more syrup, honey?”

    The Syrupocene didn’t end with an apocalypse—just a quiet whimper as food labels, cholesterol, and science crept in like puritans at a Mardi Gras parade. But those who lived through it still carry the memory: a wistful ache for the era when gluttony was innocent, ignorance was delicious, and a pancake wasn’t a sin—it was a ten-layered sacrament.

  • My Personal Sane Eating Lexicon: Cravattenuation, Savorosity, and Munchdrift

    My Personal Sane Eating Lexicon: Cravattenuation, Savorosity, and Munchdrift

    On April 10th, fresh off a family vacation in Miami and still spiritually sticky with airport pastrami sandwich guilt, I stepped on the scale and was greeted with a soul-curdling 247 pounds. Yes, some of it is lifelong muscle from half a century of hoisting kettlebells and playing Hercules in the garage. But make no mistake—this number was a slap in the face, a statistical insult to my dignity. Fueled by a righteous anger I can only describe as metabolic revenge, I went to war.

    First, I cut my meals down to three per day and gamified the system like a psychological Jedi. My lunchtime yogurt-and-berries bowl got reassigned as a post-nap “treat,” and a humble apple—normally the most boring fruit in the bowl—was elevated to nightly “dessert,” strategically scheduled for 8 p.m. to give my inner child something to cling to as the kitchen closed. I also slashed my coffee intake from 36 to 18 ounces (don’t worry, I’m still barely human), and dropped my creatine from 6 grams to a mere 3—enough to retain my swole, but not enough to float like a sodium balloon.

    Meanwhile, I came to grips with the ugly truth that I was overstuffing both my freezer and my face. The freezer had become a metaphor for my appetite: jammed with frozen berries, low-carb snacks, and delusions of future discipline. Constantly raiding it created two problems: overconsumption and literal water puddles from a clogged defrost drain. My wife and I emptied the thing out like detoxing hoarders, and miraculously, the fridge stopped weeping. I then purchased a chest freezer for the garage to create a buffer zone—a cold storage moat to protect the kitchen from my impulsive nibbling.

    By April 19, I had dropped to 240 pounds—a loss of seven pounds in nine days, even with an Easter cheat day that involved chocolate cake and blueberry pie, which I regret nothing about. Today I weigh again after my workout, prepared to assess the pastry fallout. But here’s the real revelation from those ten days: the hunger I thought I was feeling wasn’t hunger—it was performance anxiety from my stomach, a neurotic need to react to every twitch of emptiness like it was a national emergency. That, my friends, is where Cravattenuation comes in.

    Cravattenuation is the noble and necessary art of muting your inner snack gremlin—the one who panics at the first polite growl of your stomach and demands cheese. It’s the mental and metabolic recalibration that teaches you this: real hunger is not a 3 p.m. yawn with a craving for almonds. It’s a deeper emptiness, one you can actually enjoy. Because when you let your appetite stretch out and breathe, you arrive at meals not with guilt or compulsion, but with appetite and joy. Hunger becomes less of a trigger and more of a drumroll.

    Cravattenuation the deliberate process of retraining your body to interpret minor hunger signals not as existential emergencies but as low-priority system notifications: “You might want to eat in a bit” instead of “RAID THE PANTRY OR DIE.” Just as meditation teaches you to sit with discomfort rather than react impulsively, Cravattenuation teaches you that a little hunger isn’t a crisis—it’s foreplay for a better meal.

    We’ve been conditioned by snack culture and anxiety-driven consumption to treat hunger as something to be feared and fixed immediately, like a smoke alarm or a toddler tantrum. But when you practice Cravattenuation, something remarkable happens: your threshold for hunger strengthens, and the urgency softens. You learn to sit with a mild stomach pang without spiraling into carb-lust. Over time, you develop what can only be described as Hunger Discernment: the ability to separate emotional nibble-itching from true physiological need.

    The Unexpected Perk:

    By making your body earn the meal—not through punishment, but patience—you begin to eat with a clarity and joy that’s been missing since the dawn of office vending machines. Food tastes better when you’re actually hungry for it. Not “kinda bored” hungry, not “scrolling through cheese reels” hungry, but real hungry. Cravattenuation helps you not only manage your weight with more ease and grace, it re-enchants the eating experience itself. You’ll start treating meals like mini homecomings rather than pit stops at a dopamine gas station.

    Name for the Healthy State: Savorosity

    (savor + satiety + curiosity)

    Savorosity is the elegant state you enter after mastering Cravattenuation—a zone where hunger feels less like a hostage crisis and more like an invitation. It’s when you greet mealtime with curiosity and pleasure, not guilt or compulsion. It’s when you chew slower, taste deeper, and know you’ve arrived not because you gave in to a craving, but because you earned your appetite.

    Cravattenuation gets you there. Savorosity keeps you there. And together, they free you from the tyranny of the pantry’s siren call.

    Of course, the desired state of Savorosity has an opposite condition: Munchdrift, which is the mindless, momentum-driven eating that results from random grazing, emotional nibbling, and culinary boredom. It’s what happens when hunger is no longer a signal but a background noise, muffled by routine snacking and phantom cravings. In the Munchdrift state, meals are neither anticipated nor savored—they’re accidental. A handful of nuts here, a swipe of hummus there, three spoonfuls of cottage cheese at midnight, and suddenly, you’ve eaten 1,200 calories without ever feeling either full or satisfied. The food doesn’t taste bad; it just doesn’t taste like anything—because your palate is bored and your appetite never had a chance to sharpen.

    While Savorosity is marked by intentionality, restraint, and presence, Munchdrift is all drift and no anchor. It’s eating as ambient noise. It’s the cognitive equivalent of scrolling Instagram while watching TV while wondering why you’re still chewing. 

  • How to Stop Your Appetite from Heckling You and Achieve Savorosity

    How to Stop Your Appetite from Heckling You and Achieve Savorosity

    Coined Term: Cravattenuation

    (craving + attenuation)

    Extended Definition:

    Cravattenuation is the psychological and physiological art of turning down the volume on your inner snack gremlin—the one who starts kicking the back of your consciousness the moment your stomach makes a polite gurgle. It’s the deliberate process of retraining your body to interpret minor hunger signals not as existential emergencies but as low-priority system notifications: “You might want to eat in a bit” instead of “RAID THE PANTRY OR DIE.” Just as meditation teaches you to sit with discomfort rather than react impulsively, Cravattenuation teaches you that a little hunger isn’t a crisis—it’s foreplay for a better meal.

    We’ve been conditioned by snack culture and anxiety-driven consumption to treat hunger as something to be feared and fixed immediately, like a smoke alarm or a toddler tantrum. But when you practice Cravattenuation, something remarkable happens: your threshold for hunger strengthens, and the urgency softens. You learn to sit with a mild stomach pang without spiraling into carb-lust. Over time, you develop what can only be described as Hunger Discernment: the ability to separate emotional nibble-itching from true physiological need.

    The Unexpected Perk:

    By making your body earn the meal—not through punishment, but patience—you begin to eat with a clarity and joy that’s been missing since the dawn of office vending machines. Food tastes better when you’re actually hungry for it. Not “kinda bored” hungry, not “scrolling through cheese reels” hungry, but real hungry. Cravattenuation helps you not only manage your weight with more ease and grace, it re-enchants the eating experience itself. You’ll start treating meals like mini homecomings rather than pit stops at a dopamine gas station.

    Name for the Healthy State: Savorosity

    (savor + satiety + curiosity)

    Savorosity is the elegant state you enter after mastering Cravattenuation—a zone where hunger feels less like a hostage crisis and more like an invitation. It’s when you greet mealtime with curiosity and pleasure, not guilt or compulsion. It’s when you chew slower, taste deeper, and know you’ve arrived not because you gave in to a craving, but because you earned your appetite.

    Cravattenuation gets you there. Savorosity keeps you there. And together, they free you from the tyranny of the pantry’s siren call.

  • DeDopaminification: Breaking Up with the Machine That Loves You Too Much

    DeDopaminification: Breaking Up with the Machine That Loves You Too Much

    DeDopaminification is the deliberate and uncomfortable process of recalibrating the brain’s reward circuitry after years—sometimes decades—of synthetic overstimulation. It’s what happens when you look your phone in the face and whisper, “It’s not me, it’s you.” In a culture addicted to frictionless pleasure and frictionless communication, DeDopaminification means reintroducing friction on purpose. It’s the detox of the soul, not with celery juice, but with withdrawal from digital dopamine driplines—apps, feeds, alerts, porn, outrage, and validation loops disguised as “engagement.”

    In Alone Together, Sherry Turkle diagnosed the psychic fragmentation wrought by constant digital interaction: we’ve become people who talk less but text more, who perform connection while starving for authenticity. In one of her most haunting observations, she notes how teens feel panicked without their phones—not because they’re afraid of missing messages, but because they fear missing themselves in the mirror of others’ attention. Turkle’s world is one where dopamine dependency isn’t just neurological—it’s existential. We’ve been trained to outsource our worth to the algorithmic gaze.

    Anne Lembke’s Dopamine Nation picks up this thread like a clinical slap to the face. Lembke, a Stanford psychiatrist, makes it plain: the modern world is engineered to overstimulate us into oblivion. Pleasure is no longer earned—it’s swipeable. Whether it’s TikTok, sugar, or digital outrage, our brains are being rewired to expect fireworks where there used to be a slow-burning candle. Lembke writes that to reset our internal reward systems, we must embrace discomfort—yes, want less, enjoy silence, and learn how to sit with boredom like it’s a spiritual practice.

    DeDopaminification is not some puritanical rejection of pleasure. It’s the fight to reclaim pleasure that isn’t bankrupting us. It’s deleting TikTok not because you’re better than it, but because it’s better than you—so good it’s lethal. It’s deciding that your attention span deserves a tombstone with dignity, not a death-by-scroll. It’s not heroic or Instagrammable. In fact, it’s boring, slow, sometimes lonely—but it’s also real. And that’s what makes it revolutionary.

  • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Dental Horrors

    Harry Potter and the Chamber of Dental Horrors

    My journey with claustrophobia is not a quirk. It is a full-blown, sweat-drenched neurological prison riot. And nowhere does this disorder stage a more operatic coup than in two places: the dentist’s chair and the bowels of Universal Studios, Studio City.

    Let’s start with the latter—a cautionary tale that should be printed on the back of every park map. I should never have stepped foot in that glorified mall of overpriced grease traps and postmodern carnival barkers wearing epaulets, who reeked of mothballs and dashed dreams. But I did it—for my twin daughters. For my wife. For the illusion that fatherhood sometimes requires nobility.

    The fatal mistake? Boarding the Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride, a title that now feels like prophecy. After a Kafkaesque hour in line, I was shoehorned into a toddler-sized aircraft seat, and then came the final insult: a steel bar clamped down on my chest like it was sealing me into a medieval torture rack. My 52-inch ribcage was not consulted. My lungs issued an immediate protest.

    As the ride lurched forward into a black tunnel engineered by Satan himself, I realized I was not going to survive. I began pleading, then shrieking for them to stop the ride—a desperate man reduced to primal terror. Mercifully, the passengers next to me joined in my hysteria, and their collective outcry finally penetrated the headset of some underpaid engineer who ground the machine to a halt. A stoic security guy with a Secret Service haircut approached as I peeled myself out of the deathtrap.

    “You want to debrief me in the trauma tent?” I muttered, trying to laugh through the ash cloud of my dignity.

    Fast-forward to a few weeks later: I’m back in another chamber of horrors—Dr. Howard Chen’s dental office. A kind, soft-spoken man, Dr. Chen has the patience of a monk and the eyes of someone who’s seen too much. During a routine procedure, he inserted a rubber bite block into my mouth—also known as the Mouth Prop from Hell. It jammed my jaw open, restricted my ability to swallow, and in seconds, transported me back to that Potter ride with its clamping harness and tunnel of doom.

    I shot up from the chair, peeled off my flannel shirt like it was doused in napalm, and stood hyperventilating while sweat poured down my face like I’d just run the Boston Marathon with a fever.

    Dr. Chen asked gently, “Are you going to be okay, Jeff?”

    “I can’t have this rubber thing in my mouth,” I gasped, holding it like it was radioactive.

    He removed it. Deep breaths. Back in the chair. We finished the procedure bite-block free, no further incidents—except for my lingering shame.

    My visits to Dr. Chen are a multisensory assault. I am what polite society would call a “super smeller.” What that means in a dental context is that I’m stewing in a noxious stew of clove oil, latex gloves, glutaraldehyde, and ghostly wafts of tooth dust from patients past. Throw in the sound of Neil Diamond warbling over the speakers and it becomes less a cleaning and more a ritualistic descent into madness.

    Every visit turns existential. I begin contemplating my soul, my legacy, and the probability that I’ll die while getting a fluoride rinse. It’s the only time I think about the afterlife more than I do during a colonoscopy—and that includes the part when they say, “You may feel a little pressure.”

    To his credit, Dr. Chen is a saint. He accommodates all my neuroses, never rushes me, and tries to soothe me with words that sound like Buddhist proverbs run through a dental insurance filter. “Let the Sonicare do the work,” he tells me. “But I don’t trust it,” I reply. “Then you must learn to trust.” “But I am a man of doubt.” “That, Jeff,” he says, “is obvious.”

    At my most recent appointment, he warned me of potential decay under an old filling. “We may need to do a root canal.” I responded like a man learning he’d tested positive for eternal damnation.

    “What can I do to stop this?”

    “Cut the sugar. Don’t brush like you’re sanding drywall.”

    “So what you’re saying is, I’m threading the needle here.”

    “Basically, yes.”

    “Doctor, I crave absolutes.”

    “Join the club.”

    Dr. Chen’s resignation to life’s uncertainty is what keeps me coming back. That, and the knowledge that no other dentist could possibly endure the psychological obstacle course that is my biannual cleaning.

    After my last visit, dazed from polishing paste and light dental trauma, I left the office only to nearly reverse my car into a black SUV. The horn blast nearly cracked my molars. As I sat there recovering, I looked up and saw Dr. Chen watching me from behind the blinds—no longer smiling, but staring with the flat, weary eyes of a man who had just confirmed what he’d long suspected: his patient was, in fact, completely insane.

    And he was right.

  • The Kettlebell Monk and the Return of the Yoga Cult

    The Kettlebell Monk and the Return of the Yoga Cult

    I’ve been lifting weights since I was 12 years old—long enough to have calluses older than some of my students. My loyalty has always been to iron, not incense. And yet, twice in my life I’ve flirted with the cult of yoga. First from 2005 to 2008, when Power Yoga made me sweat like a sinner in a sweat lodge, and again recently, from 2023 to 2024, when something primal in me remembered the bliss of holding Warrior Two while the room turned into a personal rainforest.

    But iron always calls me back. Resistance training, especially kettlebells, is my native language. It’s the blunt poetry of movement: swing, squat, grind. There’s no chanting, no ambient whale noises—just the thud of steel against gravity and the holy ache of delayed-onset muscle soreness. Still, yoga lingered in my subconscious like a forgotten lover with a very flexible spine.

    Then came the dream.

    I was living in what could only be described as a monastic exercise gulag perched high in the Swiss Alps—imagine if The Sound of Music were choreographed by a CrossFit cult and everyone smelled faintly of magnesium chalk and regret. My cell was a minimalist slab of concrete, colder than a Russian novel and just as unforgiving. There I was, hammering out kettlebell swings with the grim dedication of a prisoner serving a life sentence for crimes against rest days, when it hit me—not just a muscle cramp, but a full-body epiphany.

    I missed the sweat.

    But not just any sweat. Not the stoic, industrial, man-against-iron kind that kettlebells demand. I missed yoga sweat. That slow, creeping, mind-liquefying ooze you earn by holding Crescent Lunge for six minutes while your brain gently transitions from “I am one with the universe” to “I am dying alone on this mat.” It’s the kind of sweat that doesn’t just leave the body—it evacuates your ego with it.

    The sense of FOMO hit me like a rogue medicine ball to the face. I wasn’t just missing out on yoga—I was exiled from it, cast into the outer darkness where there is weeping, gnashing of teeth, and tight hip flexors. The regret was theological. Yoga wasn’t just an option anymore. It was a spiritual ventilator.

    In the dream, I staggered from my training cell like a sinner leaving the confessional. I entered my quarters—bare except for a desk, a lamp, and the faint scent of despair—and rearranged it like a man staging his own resurrection. Then, with the urgency of a convert and the shame of a backslider, I Googled yoga poses. Warrior. Triangle. Pigeon. All the old apostles.

    I wandered the grounds like a deranged prophet in compression leggings, possessed by a holy compulsion to evangelize. I whispered gospel truths: “Downward Dog is deliverance,” “You are your breath,” “Meat is a distraction.” People followed. Of course they did. We began practicing together, flowing through vinyasas with cult-like synchronicity. We ate vegan three times a day, spoke only in Sanskrit-inflected aphorisms, and achieved a level of hamstring enlightenment most people only dream about.

    It was utopia, with better posture.

    Then I woke up.

    Still in a fog of sacred revelation, I marched to my computer, opened my long-neglected list of yoga sequences in Google Docs, and committed to the third phase of my yoga life: twice a week, no excuses. Five days of kettlebell discipline to keep me grounded, two days of yoga to unlock whatever transcendental weirdness lives in my hips.

    Because as much as I love kettlebells—and I do—they’ve never given me that hallucinatory bliss, that euphoric disintegration of self, that only comes from holding Triangle Pose until your consciousness starts leaking out of your ears.

    Iron builds the body. Yoga does something else. And I’m not going to miss out this time. 

  • Brains for Glory: How Football Became the Lottery of the Left Behind

    Brains for Glory: How Football Became the Lottery of the Left Behind

    In Alana Semuels’ “The White Flight from Football,” we meet Shantavia Jackson, a single mother working the night shift at Home Depot. With three sons—ages 11, 12, and 14—she turns to youth football not just for recreation but as a form of structure, mentorship, and protection. Coaches become surrogate father figures, teaching discipline and teamwork. For her son Qway, who lives with a mental disorder, football provides a stabilizing force: a team that functions as his support system.

    For Shantavia, football isn’t just a sport—it’s an escape hatch. She can’t afford to send her sons to college, and she sees football as the only viable route out of a life circumscribed by poverty. It’s a desperate gamble, but in communities like hers, desperate gambles are often the only kind available.

    Against this backdrop, research continues to pile up showing that tackle football can cause severe and irreversible brain trauma. In response, many parents—particularly white and affluent—are pulling their children out of youth leagues. The ability to make that choice is, at its core, an expression of privilege. While white participation in youth football declines, Black participation remains disproportionately high: 44 percent of Black boys play tackle football, compared to just 29 percent of their white peers. This racial divide plays out on the national stage: today, Black athletes make up nearly half of all Division I college football players, up from 39 percent in 2000, while white athletes have dropped from 51 percent to 37 percent.

    The implication is grim: Black children are more likely to accept long-term risks because they have fewer short-term options. White children, cushioned by economic security and broader educational opportunities, can afford to walk away. The more the science reveals about the dangers of early head trauma, the more it becomes clear who is left holding the risk.

    And the science is damning. A 2017 Boston University study found that athletes who began playing tackle football before age 12 were twice as likely to develop behavioral problems and three times as likely to suffer from clinical depression. A separate study by Wake Forest University revealed that boys who played just one season of tackle football between the ages of 8 and 13 showed diminished brain function. The greatest fear is CTE—chronic traumatic encephalopathy—a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated hits to the head, not just concussions. Even subconcussive blows can cause lasting damage. In 2017, researchers examined the brains of 111 deceased NFL players. They found CTE in 110 of them.

    In response, some former players and medical experts now advocate delaying tackle football until high school, when bodies are more physically mature and kids are better able to understand and implement safe tackling techniques. But the sport is growing, not shrinking, and its profitability only reinforces the risk. At Texas A&M University, football generates $148 million a year. That revenue stream depends on a constant influx of young talent—often from families like Shantavia’s—eager for a scholarship and a shot at something better.

    The decision to play football, or not to, has become yet another expression of America’s racial wealth divide. As of 2021, the median wealth of white households was $250,400—about 9.2 times that of Black households, which stood at just $27,100. Though there have been modest gains in Black wealth, the gap remains vast. In 2022, the median wealth for Black households rose to $44,890—still far behind the $285,000 median for white households. This disparity isn’t merely numerical; it’s structural, baked into the opportunities people can or cannot access.

    In this context, football becomes less a sport and more a bloodletting ritual—one that disproportionately brutalizes the bodies of those with the fewest alternatives. For children growing up in neighborhoods with failing schools, limited healthcare, and short life expectancies, football isn’t just a game. It’s a high-stakes wager: risk your brain for a future, or settle for no future at all.

  • The Santa Claus of Donuts Must Die

    The Santa Claus of Donuts Must Die

    Let’s start with the obvious: your family bonds over food because food is reliable. It doesn’t argue with you about politics, it doesn’t criticize your life choices, and it doesn’t ask to borrow your car. It just shows up, warm and sugary, like a friend who never judges. And when you show up holding that pink box of donuts? You’re not just a guy walking through the front door—you’re the Santa Claus of Donuts, bearing gifts that turn your living room into a dopamine theme park. Everyone lights up. You are loved. You are admired. You are a hero.

    Until the sugar crash hits and you’re lying on the couch wondering how a simple box of pastries turned into a hostile takeover of your waistline. Again.

    You, my friend, have what polite society calls an “addictive personality,” but let’s not sugarcoat it (pun intended). You go overboard like it’s your patriotic duty. One treat turns into three. One bite into a blackout. You need boundaries, not Pinterest recipes.

    So here’s your prescription. It’s boring, brutal, and blessedly effective:

    Breakfast: Plain Greek yogurt, a scoop of protein powder, flaxseeds, chia seeds, and a handful of berries. Also, coffee. Strong enough to slap you awake and maybe shake loose some of your delusions.

    Lunch: A salad—yes, a salad—with actual protein in it. Maybe chicken. Maybe tuna. Add a scoop of cottage cheese if you hate joy a little less that day. Have some fruit so you don’t hallucinate cookies.
    Dinner: Protein again. Vegetables. Herbal tea, like the sad monk you are becoming. Cap it off with an apple and the faint memory of dessert.
    Snack Defense Protocol: If you start prowling like a raccoon between lunch and dinner, shove a carrot in your mouth, sip some green tea, and crack open a diet root beer. It’s not a thrill, it’s a strategy.

    And let us not forget why you had to slam the snack door shut like it owed you money: snacks are traitors. They pretend to be innocent little diversions—just a handful here, a nibble there—but they’re silent assassins. Those calories accumulate like guilt after a Vegas weekend, slowly padding your frame while you’re busy telling yourself you’re “cutting back.”

    Now, let’s address the hard truth, as spoken by the philosopher-king of overweight comedians, Tom Segura: “You don’t lose weight until you hate your fatness more than you love food.” Yes, it’s harsh. But he’s not wrong.

    Still, let’s reframe it with a little less bile and a touch more clarity:
    You won’t change until you prefer discipline to chaos. Until your craving for stability outweighs your need for a dopamine hit. Until your love of self-respect outweighs your love of Cheez-Its.

    You don’t need another meal plan—you need a code. A way of eating that doesn’t just fill your stomach, but recalibrates your priorities. Food is not your therapist. Food is not your friend. Food is fuel. And you? You’re not Santa Claus anymore. You’re something better: a man in control of his appetite, his identity, and his damn life.

    Now go make that yogurt bowl like it’s a holy ritual and not a punishment. The rest will follow.

  • An Argument for Healthy Denial: A Self-Help Sermon for the Self-Indulgent

    An Argument for Healthy Denial: A Self-Help Sermon for the Self-Indulgent

    Let’s be honest. You’ve tried the soft-glow Instagram mantras and the overpriced journaling apps. You’ve danced with dopamine like a lab rat in a Vegas casino, chasing every ping, snack, scroll, and retail hit like it was divine revelation. And where has it gotten you? Nowhere worth photographing.

    So here’s your wake-up call, preacher-style, minus the tambourine: take care of your damn self. Not in that syrupy “self-care” way that means binge-watching prestige TV while mainlining DoorDash and calling it therapy. No, I mean the kind of care that involves discipline, boundaries, and strategic discomfort—also known as healthy denial.

    Phil Stutz is right: your relationship with your body, your soul, and the people around you depends on your ability to say “no” like your life depends on it—because it does. Not “no” out of self-loathing or ascetic performance art, but “no” because you actually give a damn about the human being you’re becoming.

    You don’t skip the donut because you hate yourself. You skip it because you respect yourself enough not to let your biology, your boredom, or your bastardized idea of “treat culture” run your life. You are not a French bulldog in a baby stroller. You are a fully grown adult with responsibilities and, presumably, a spine.

    And no, this isn’t some narcissistic glow-up project. You’re not chiseling your abs to become a thirst trap or launching your “healing journey” vlog. This is not a TED Talk in the making. This is about getting better because the people who count on you deserve more than your bloated, distracted, half-baked self. Society doesn’t need another dopamine junkie sucking on algorithmic pacifiers while pretending to be “living their truth.”

    Yes, some will tell you denial is toxic, puritanical, even abusive. These are the same people who believe “treating yourself” five times a day is a human right. But let’s get something straight: healthy denial is not self-hatred—it’s self-respect with a steel backbone. You deny yourself garbage because you’re aiming for gold. You crave meaning, not just muffins. You want to die with fewer regrets, not a legacy of half-eaten potato chips and unread terms of service.

    So here’s what you’re going to do.
    You will stop snacking. Period.
    You will stop scrolling like a brainless peasant begging for dopamine crumbs from tech oligarchs.
    You will stop curating materialistic trinkets—yes, even the “limited edition” timepieces—and broadcasting your conspicuous consumption like a status-starved magpie.

    Instead, you will create.

    You will write.
    You will make music.
    You will work out with the devotion of a monk in a burning temple.
    You will show up for your family like it matters—because it does.
    And you will treat your time on this spinning sphere not as an entitlement but as the limited-edition miracle it is.

    This is not about being better than others. This is about being better for others. And if that sounds corny to you, maybe you’ve been swimming in irony so long you’ve forgotten what sincerity feels like.

    Here’s your new gospel: eat clean, think clearly, serve humbly, and waste nothing—not even time.

    Now get to it. The clock is ticking, and you’re not getting any younger.