Cinemorphosis

Tag: health

  • Mr. Olympia Goes to College

    Mr. Olympia Goes to College

    I was the worst college student imaginable. Not mediocre. Not distracted. Catastrophically misaligned with the stated purpose of higher education. But before we get to the academic wreckage, we must begin in the fall of 1979 when I arrived at the university at the age of seventeen carrying not intellectual ambition but bodybuilding delusions of tropical grandeur.

    At the time, I was an Olympic weightlifting champion and competitive bodybuilder whose life plan possessed all the sophistication of a teenage steroid fantasy scribbled on a cocktail napkin. I intended to become Mr. Olympia, conquer Mr. Universe, achieve international fame, and eventually leverage my bronzed magnificence into opening a gym somewhere in the Bahamas. My career goals were astonishingly clear: maintain a beautiful body and construct an entire existence devoted to preserving that beautiful body indefinitely.

    As an added strategic advantage, I was deeply attracted to the tropical lifestyle because it minimized the need for clothing. I hated clothes with almost theological intensity. Clothing felt restrictive, oppressive, and fundamentally hostile to my vision of human flourishing. The moment I finished dressing, my immediate impulse was usually to tear everything off again like a deranged orangutan trapped in formalwear.

    This is why the Bahamas seemed ideal.

    No parkas. No wool sweaters. No suffocating layers of civilization.

    Just tanning oil, ocean air, and perpetual existence in bodybuilding briefs.

    People today talk endlessly about “life hacks,” usually involving productivity apps or minimalist desk setups. Allow me to offer a superior life hack developed by my seventeen-year-old brain in 1979: eliminate clothes altogether. There’s your optimization strategy. Imagine the savings alone. No suits. No winter jackets. No agonizing over fashion. Merely rotate between several pairs of Speedos while glistening permanently beneath the Caribbean sun like a narcissistic sea mammal.

    This, I believed, was adulthood perfected.

    Meanwhile, the university mistakenly assumed I had arrived to pursue an education.

    Whenever I shared this magnificent vision of my future with my recently divorced mother—who was meanwhile trying to perform minor financial miracles just to keep us solvent—she reacted with the exhausted realism of someone who had actually paid utility bills before.

    “Don’t be a nincompoop,” she would say. “You can’t isolate yourself from the world on some tropical island.”

    But I was seventeen, chemically saturated with bodybuilding mythology, and utterly immune to practical concerns.

    “Don’t worry, Mom,” I assured her with the confidence of a man who had never balanced a checkbook. “I’ll be well connected. I’ll invite all my celebrity bodybuilding friends to visit me.”

    Then I would begin listing names with reverential excitement as though reading apostles from sacred scripture: Frank Zane, Tom Platz, Robbie Robinson, Kalman Szkalak, Danny Padilla, Ron Teufel, Pete Grymkowski, Rudy Hermosillo. In my imagination, these men were not distant figures from glossy muscle magazines but intimate companions who would naturally gather around my future Bahamian gym drinking pineapple protein shakes while discussing symmetry, calf development, and the spiritual dimensions of hypertrophy.

    I envisioned myself lounging beside them under swaying palms while explaining how bodybuilding had catalyzed my personal metamorphosis into a bronzed titan of self-actualization.

    My mother stared at me with the expression of a woman realizing she had accidentally raised a delusional peacock.

    “You sound ridiculous,” she said flatly. “For one thing, those aren’t your friends. They’re from your muscle magazines. I’m not stupid.”

    Her remark landed with the force of unwanted reality.

    To me, however, the distinction between celebrity and friendship still seemed negotiable. After all, I had spent hundreds of hours studying these men’s physiques in magazines with such devotional intensity that I felt we already shared a profound spiritual bond. Surely if they someday met me on my tropical bodybuilding island, glistening heroically in tanning oil while handing them frosty pineapple shakes, they too would recognize the connection.

  • The Limits of Gasbaggery

    The Limits of Gasbaggery

    Comparison is a reliable factory of misery. At sixty-four, with retirement in sight, good health, a wife, and twin daughters under the same roof, I possess the raw materials of a decent life. Yet a few minutes of comparing my gasbaggery with the professional gasbags–my favorite podcasters and YouTubers–and the arithmetic collapses. I measure my output against their reach, my voice against their polish, and conclude—too quickly, too confidently—that I am a small, forgettable thing. This kind of self-excoriation is a symptom of comparison collapse: the rapid psychological deflation that occurs when one measures a competent, grounded life against the amplified success of public figures, resulting in an exaggerated sense of smallness untethered from reality.

    If I want to be a professional gasbag, I suppose I could become an online influencer. I have a good communications background, having taught college writing for forty years, but my qualifications stop there. In truth, I have no skills or interests worthy of making me an influencer. I don’t feel compelled to sermonize college writing online. I’ve trained my body for decades, but I have no appetite to package kettlebells and nutrition into content as if they were revelations. I love wristwatches, but talking about them only seems to exacerbate my already debilitating timepiece addiction. 

    Knowing I can’t be an influencer makes me drift into a soft, theatrical lament: I wish I could be somebody–a gasbagger with lots of reach. I succumb to the fallacy: “If only I could become a professional gasbagger, I’d find happiness. Woe is me.”

    To combat my self-pity, I think of my daughter and I playing Yahtzee. When the dice fall short of glory but still land on something usable—a Full House, a Small Straight—we shrug and say, “I’ll take what I can get.” It’s a small sentence with a sturdy backbone. Life does not hand out only Yahtzees or their analog, a life of glory and fanfare. Life offers partial wins, mixed hands, and the occasional quiet competence. Taking what you can get is not surrender; it is calibration. It means knowing the difference between what can be improved through discipline and what must be accepted without drama. It is not mediocrity. It is accuracy.

    The second idea is less a principle than a confession: I cannot will myself into being a YouTube star. I do not have the desire to edit for twelve hours a day, to hype products, or to rehearse insights that anyone can find with a competent search. My attention, such as it is, doesn’t belong so much to my YouTube channel about watch obsession these days as much as it belongs to a small corner of the internet—my less popular piano channel with fewer than eighty subscribers. There, I introduce a piece, play it, and accept the likely outcome: twenty views, one generous like. It is a modest exchange, but it is honest. I am not forcing a persona into existence; I am following a thread that feels like mine.

    This refusal to force myself down a path that doesn’t align with my heart reminds me of a basic truth from yoga. Some days the body opens and the breath cooperates; I go into a state of sweat-induced bliss from the exercise intensity, but about one day every two months, the joints resist, the mind wanders, and the practice feels like a negotiation with gravity. On those days, you do not escalate the conflict. You ease back. You take the version of the practice that the day allows. I see the same pattern on the exercise bike. Most sessions render about 700 calories per hour; but once a month or so the legs turn to lead and the numbers sag. Two days ago, I posted a modest 500 calories and left it there. No drama. No verdict. The next ride would likely return to form. It usually does. It wasn’t the Yahtzee of exercise bike sessions. It was the Full House. 

    So when I hear the voice of envy and my self-grandiosity pouring out operatic self-pity with remarks like “My life is so paltry,” and “Why am I not the YouTube star I deserve to be?,” I have to remind myself I can discipline and push myself to be a better person and make a better life without forcing myself to do things that aren’t driven by my heart or things that are spurred by comparing myself to others. 

    Though I lack the reach of my favorite gasbags–Sam Harris, Mike Pesca, Katie Herzog, Jesse Singal, Andrew Sullivan, Jonah Goldberg–I am nevertheless a gasbag albeit on a smaller scale. They are the Yahtzees. I am the Full House. 

    I am not succumbing to mediocrity. I am simply stating my place on the Gasbag totem pole with the objectivity of reporting the weather. 

    Seething with envy or undergoing some sort of “rebranding” probably won’t change the situation. I’d rather occupy my modest space with a modicum of grace than spend my remaining years as a bitter, self-appointed understudy, convinced that the spotlight was stolen.. 

    As a lifetime gasbagger with the boorish grandiosity of Commander McBragg, I am seeking Full House Acceptance: The sober recognition that most lives are built from partial wins—modest reach, limited audience, quiet competence—and the decision to inhabit that reality without resentment.

    Not all gasbags are created equal.

    And not all of them need to be.

  • The Protein Prophet Meets Late-Stage Capitalism

    The Protein Prophet Meets Late-Stage Capitalism

    You spent a lifetime preaching the gospel of whey protein to a congregation that greeted you with eye-rolls and the occasional “musclehead” slur. Undeterred, you carried yourself with the calm arrogance of a man who knows the future and is watching everyone else arrive late. While they dabbled in fad diets and moralized over carbs, you quietly mixed your whey protein scoops—one in the morning over your groats, another in the afternoon with yogurt—like a chemist of hypertrophy. You hit your macros. You built your muscle. You extended your health span. And best of all, you did it on the cheap.

    You were right.

    Which is where the trouble begins.

    Now the world has caught up, and like all converts, it has arrived with a fanaticism that would make you blush. GLP-1 users clutch whey like a lifeline to their disappearing muscle mass. Aging populations treat it as insurance against frailty. Influencers chant “protein-maxxing” as if it were a sacrament. Food companies, never ones to miss a profitable crusade, have stuffed protein into everything short of tap water—cereal, ice cream, pancakes, corn chips—each product whispering, You, too, can be righteous.

    The result? Demand has detonated. Prices have surged. The humble tub of whey—once the blue-collar ally of the disciplined lifter—now sits on the shelf with the smug expression of a luxury good. Up 50 percent. Maybe doubling next year. The powder of the people has been gentrified.

    So tell me, prophet of protein, how does it feel?

    You wanted vindication. You got it. You wanted the world to recognize the power of protein. It has. You are no longer a fringe eccentric. You are mainstream. You are validated.

    And you are paying for it.

    There was a time when you were a misunderstood zealot, buying your whey in peace, your habits dismissed as obsessive but harmless. Those were the golden years—the years of ridicule and affordability. Now the masses have joined you, and like all mass movements, they have driven the price of entry skyward.

    You didn’t just win the argument.

    You priced yourself out of it.

  • Three Protein Wafers and a Funeral for Joy

    Three Protein Wafers and a Funeral for Joy

    I drank my first protein shake in 1975, at thirteen—an age when you’ll ingest anything if it promises muscle. It was milk and two heroic scoops of Bob Hoffman’s “Super Hi-Proteen,” a granular blend of soy, brown sugar, and the kind of mystery ingredients that seemed to come with a warning label in spirit if not in ink. I swallowed it like a pledge of allegiance. Years later, I realized I’d been spooning down hog slop with a marketing budget.

    Protein powders, of course, grew up. Whey replaced soy, monk fruit and stevia replaced sugar, and the flavor profile advanced from “punishment” to “tolerable.” I returned, cautiously, folding a scoop into my oatmeal or stirring it into yogurt. A lifetime lifter develops a habit I’ll call protein insurance—the quiet reassurance that your muscles won’t starve because you forgot to eat like a grown man.

    And so the shake became a fixture—less a meal than a policy.

    Bodybuilders and civilians alike now drink these things by the gallon, not just for insurance but for convenience. Which raises a question that refuses to stay polite: assuming we’re not slowly marinating ourselves in trace metals such as lead and cadmium, are we doing something more subtle—something that damages the soul? Rachel Sugar poses a version of this in her Atlantic essay “Admit It, That Protein Shake Is Basically Soylent,” where the modern ideal appears in a hoodie: a tech bro so devoted to efficiency that he outsources eating to a beige slurry. Why cook, why chew, why pause, when a bottle can reduce nourishment to a task you can complete between emails?

    Enter Soylent, the Willy Wonka chewing gum of Silicon Valley—a full meal compressed into a swallow, a dinner table dissolved into a transaction. At best, it tastes like competent baby food. At worst, it tastes like ambition without appetite.

    Soylent had its moment and then receded, but the protein shake did not. It adapted, multiplied, rebranded. Giants like The Coca-Cola Company now print money selling pre-made bottles fortified with protein, “adaptogens,” and antioxidant halos. The label reads like a résumé; the experience reads like chalk. A nation too busy to cook, trained to snack, and newly anxious about muscle retention—thanks to the rise of GLP-1 receptor agonists—is primed to accept frictionless nutrition. Open. Sip. Be optimized.

    None of this is accidental. The arithmetic of food is unforgiving: real food spoils and yields modest margins; ultra-processed food endures and pays dividends. The industry didn’t just produce these powders—it educated us to desire them, dressed them in the language of health, beauty, and time savings, and invited us to trade ritual for efficiency.

    Last week, I tried a thought experiment on my writing students. They’re working on an argument about whether ultra-processed foods are villains to both body and soul.

    “Imagine,” I said, “three protein wafers a day. They regulate appetite, deliver perfect nutrition, sculpt you into an Instagram after photo, and carry you past a hundred. No cooking. No dishes. No decisions.”

    I let that sit for a moment.

    “Now imagine what disappears. The dinners that run long. The laughter that spills over the table. The argument that turns into a story. The quiet, ordinary pleasure of chewing.”

    In this optimized life, your insurer applauds and your followers multiply. But you become something flatter—efficient, photogenic, and faintly ghostlike. Not dead, exactly. Just thinned out where life used to be.

    I asked for a show of hands. Who would choose the wafers?

    Not one hand rose.

    For all our flirtation with powders and promises, the verdict was clear: they want to be healthy, yes—but not at the cost of becoming efficient shadows of themselves. Real food, with all its inconvenience and noise, remains the center. The shake can stay as insurance. It just can’t be the policy that replaces the warmth of home.

  • Leanmaxxing and the New Fantasy of Frictionless Medicine

    Leanmaxxing and the New Fantasy of Frictionless Medicine

    As a boy watching Star Trek, I was transfixed by the Tricorder–that tidy slab of certainty doctors waved over a body the way a priest might wave incense over a mystery. No scalpels, no tubes, no anxious waiting rooms with their stale magazines and fluorescent despair. A quick scan, a soft chirp, and the problem surrendered. The body, usually so coy and uncooperative, became a readable document–its secrets itemized, its fate clarified. It was medicine without friction, diagnosis without drama. In that universe, ignorance lasted seconds.

    For decades, the Tricorder sat where all good fantasies sit: just out of reach, gleaming with impossible efficiency. But reality has a way of cheating. The future did not arrive as a handheld scanner; it arrived as chemistry–specifically, a class of drugs that seems to negotiate directly with the body’s most stubborn impulses. If the Tricorder promised instant knowledge, GLP-1 drugs promise something more unnerving: the quiet rewriting of appetite, metabolism, and behavior from the inside out.

    In her New York Times essay “The Great Ozempic Experiment,” Julia Belluz catalogs the early returns, and they read less like a drug profile than a wish list that forgot to edit itself. Yes, there’s weight loss–the headline act–but the understudies keep stealing the show: concussion recovery, addiction dampening, relief from menopause symptoms, long COVID, alopecia, inflammation, arthritis, IBS, anxiety, brain fog. The list grows with the confidence of a rumor that keeps being confirmed. By the time you finish reading, you suspect the drug might also fix your credit score.

    The catch, for now, is almost comically modest: nausea and paperwork. The body may revolt briefly; the insurance company may revolt permanently. Yet demand surges, fueled by users who report not just slimmer bodies but upgraded lives–better mood, sharper focus, revived social calendars, improved fertility. It’s less a medication than a lifestyle intervention with a prescription pad.

    Clinicians, watching this unfold, have begun to reach for a new framework–the “root-cause” theory–because the old boxes no longer hold. These drugs don’t respect the tidy borders between endocrine, cardiovascular, and neurological disease; they trespass, improve, and move on. Even more disorienting, benefits appear in patients who don’t lose weight at all: better heart, liver, and kidney function, as if the drug were quietly tuning systems we didn’t know were connected.

    And here is where the story turns from miracle to question mark. As GLP-1 use spreads–along with the culture’s sudden enthusiasm for “leanmaxxing”–we risk trading one distortion for another: the cartoon body, now achieved pharmacologically rather than cosmetically. It is far too early to crown these drugs the real-world Tricorder, and just as premature to condemn them as a Faustian bargain. Like AI, they are moving faster than our ability to narrate them. We are watching a technology outrun our categories, and the only honest response, for now, is attention without prophecy.

  • The Day the Gym Lost Its Soul–and I Took Mine Back

    The Day the Gym Lost Its Soul–and I Took Mine Back

    The gym in the 1970s was my holy temple. Not the antiseptic, glass-and-chrome shrines of today, but something closer to a workshop for men trying to hammer themselves into existence. The places I trained were rough, honest, and gloriously indifferent to appearances. No mood lighting. No eucalyptus towels. Just iron, sweat, and a shared work ethic.

    There were relics, of course, absurd contraptions left over from the Eisenhower years. Chief among them: the fat-jiggling machine. You strapped a belt around your waist or backside, flipped a switch, and the machine vibrated you like a malfunctioning appliance. The promise was surgical fat loss. The reality was public humiliation. No one touched it. To be seen using that thing was social suicide, a one-way ticket to pariah status. Even as teenagers, we understood that dignity had weight, and that machine stripped it from you ounce by ounce.

    Everything else, though, was perfect. The equipment did its job. The atmosphere did more. You could spend three hours there and feel cheated when you had to leave.

    Then came the 80s and 90s, and the gym got a facelift and a personality disorder. Out went grit; in came gloss. Chrome multiplied. Music was no longer background; it was an assault. Televisions blinked from every angle like slot machines. Smoothie bars appeared, as if protein needed to be accessorized. Personal trainers hovered, predatory, unctuous, and overfamiliar, radiating a kind of rehearsed enthusiasm that made you want to check your wallet.

    I tolerated the spectacle because I had no alternative. I didn’t have a garage full of equipment. The gym, vulgar as it had become, still held a monopoly on my routine. I assumed I’d be there until my dying breath.

    Then, in 2005, at an LA Fitness in Torrance, the illusion cracked. I noticed I was getting sick constantly—four, five colds a year. The common denominator wasn’t mysterious. It was the sauna, that damp Petri dish where strangers exhaled their pathogens in communal harmony. Add to that the blaring music, the social butterflies mistaking gossip for training, and the creeping sense that the place had become a theater of distraction rather than discipline—and I was done. The gym hadn’t betrayed me. It had simply revealed what it had become.

    So I left.

    In my early forties, I had no interest in bulking up. Call it instinct, call it desperation. Whatever it was, it pushed me toward power yoga DVDs. Bryan Kest and Rodney Yee became unlikely guides. I loved the sessions: the control, the focus, the quiet authority of breath over chaos. But yoga had a ceiling. Four to five hundred calories an hour wasn’t enough to outrun my appetite. If I lived on lentils, tofu, moong beans, and restraint, maybe. I didn’t.

    So by 2007, I pivoted to kettlebells.

    That wasn’t a compromise. It was a revelation.

    Kettlebells gave me intensity—eight hundred calories an hour—and something else the gym had quietly drained from me: engagement. Swings, squats, farmer’s carries were simple movements with endless variation. Enough complexity to keep boredom at bay, enough brutality to keep me honest. Nearly twenty years later, I’m still at it.

    And here’s the part no one advertises: I stopped getting sick. The revolving door of colds vanished. The gym, it turns out, had been taxing me in ways I hadn’t fully accounted for. Walking away from it wasn’t just a change in venue; it was a correction.

    Training at home became more than convenience. It became control. No membership fees. No commute. No background noise of other people’s trivialities. Just the work, stripped down to its essentials. I had removed friction where it didn’t belong and kept it where it mattered.

    That’s the difference between a real life hack and a counterfeit one.

    A real life hack replaces the original with something equal or superior. A counterfeit gives you convenience at the cost of substance, then flatters you into believing nothing was lost. My kettlebell training didn’t dilute the gym experience; it surpassed it. It demanded more precision, more coordination, more accountability. No machines to guide you. No rails to hide behind. Just you, the weight, and gravity’s indifference.

    This morning, I found myself studying kettlebell variations on YouTube—stop-start swings, double front squats—scribbling notes with the enthusiasm of a kid circling toys in a catalog. The same pulse I get when I spot a new Seiko Monster or Casio G-Shock release: anticipation, possibility, a little irrational excitement.

    Today is supposed to be an Airdyne day. An hour on the Schwinn, steady and predictable. But the kettlebells are calling. I know better than to give in. Experience has taught me the discipline of alternating days and sparing my joints, but the urge is there, insistent, almost childish.

    That’s how I know I’ve done something right.

    When your “discipline” starts to feel like anticipation, that’s not a workaround.

    That’s a life recalibrated.

  • Grazing My Way to Nowhere—and Learning to Stop

    Grazing My Way to Nowhere—and Learning to Stop

    At sixty-four, I’m attempting a late-life renovation project: replace a few durable bad habits with better ones before they fossilize into personality. Chief among them is my relationship with hunger, which I’ve treated for decades as a medical emergency requiring immediate intervention—preferably in the form of a calorie-dense snack. I was raised to believe that hunger is unnecessary suffering, a small indignity that can be smothered with a tasty morsel or two. If I feel it, I fix it. If I might feel it later, I preempt it. I’ve spent years grazing my way out of imaginary famines, topping off the tank before the harrowing ordeal of being without food for four hours. I call this Preemptive Feeding Syndrome: the habitual practice of eating in anticipation of future hunger, based on an exaggerated fear of discomfort, resulting in chronic overconsumption and stalled weight management.

    This approach has produced a familiar cycle. I’ve lost weight half a dozen times—descending heroically from 245 to 200—only to regain it with equal conviction. The pattern is almost admirable in its symmetry. The problem wasn’t the diet. The problem was that the moment hunger appeared, I panicked. I treated every pang like a fire alarm. And when you live that way, fat loss becomes a series of interruptions, each one justified, each one fatal to the larger goal.

    At 231 pounds as I write this, with a modest but persistent halo of fat around my midsection and joints that file quiet complaints during exercises like the Farmer’s Walk, I’ve reached a conclusion that is both obvious and inconvenient: the decisive factor in my weight loss is not willpower. It is interpretation. Specifically, how I interpret hunger.

    For most of my life, I’ve read hunger as danger. Something is wrong. Fix it now. But I’m beginning to suspect that hunger is not a malfunction; it’s a message. Often, it’s the message that the system is finally doing what I’ve asked it to do—burn stored energy. The problem isn’t the signal. It’s my reaction to it.

    So I’m attempting a small but radical shift: treat hunger as information, not alarm.

    A brief pang is not a crisis. It’s a wave. It rises, it lingers, it passes—especially if I don’t chase it down with peanut butter and honey. When I leave it alone, something surprising happens: it weakens. When I don’t treat it as a threat, it stops behaving like one. In that shift—from emergency to data point—I gain leverage. Meals taste better because I arrive at them honestly hungry, not pre-satiated by a trail of defensive snacking. My appetite becomes cleaner, less frantic. What once felt urgent now feels negotiable.

    None of this came naturally. It had to be learned, which is to say, unlearned first. Each time I resist the reflex to patch over a pang with calories, I loosen the old wiring and lay down a better circuit. It’s slow work. It’s also effective. My threshold for discomfort has widened. I’m less reactive, more deliberate. My body will follow, but my mind has to lead.

    Frank Zane understood this decades ago. He treated hunger not as an enemy but as evidence—proof that his diet was doing its job. He didn’t try to abolish hunger; he put it in its place. Years later, he still eats with restraint, having trained himself to live comfortably inside that signal. That’s the model: not a life without hunger, but a life in which hunger has been demoted from tyrant to messenger.

    If I can complete this renovation—if I can rewire my response to hunger—I solve the central problem. If I don’t, no amount of planning, tracking, or good intentions will save me from another well-executed relapse.

  • Exiled from Desert: A Bodybuilder’s Dream of Failure

    Exiled from Desert: A Bodybuilder’s Dream of Failure

    Last night I dreamed I lived in a place so stripped of imagination it had the confidence to call itself Desert, Arizona—as if the planners had looked at a map, shrugged, and said, “Why embellish? We’re in the desert. That’s our name.”

    In Desert, I was a bodybuilder. Not one of the marble statues you see in magazines, but a working stiff with a barbell and delusions of parity. My friends—my friends, I thought—were Serge Nubret and Robbie Robinson in their prime. Thirty years old, luminous, carved out of some superior mineral. We spent our afternoons at a man-made lake, discussing training splits, protein intake, and the eternal question of carbs—as if the fate of civilization hinged on oatmeal versus steak.

    For a while, I forgot who they were. That was the charm. They were just Serge and Robbie—men with opinions, not monuments with lats.

    Then I made the mistake that ruins most good things: I noticed the hierarchy. They were far beyond me in achievement. 

    One afternoon, the thought hit me with the force of a missed squat: I told them I didn’t belong. These were titans. I was a reasonably assembled civilian. I said as much—praised their greatness, confessed my inadequacy, pledged to work ten times harder to catch up.

    And just like that, the air changed.

    They didn’t argue. They didn’t correct me. They simply withdrew, as if I had violated an unspoken clause in the friendship agreement: Do not turn us into symbols. The moment I stopped seeing them as people and started seeing them as achievements, the spell broke. They eased me out of the circle with the quiet efficiency of men accustomed to dropping dead weight.

    A replacement arrived with the punctuality of a cautionary tale: a young Englishman in his early twenties, newly employed as a high school teacher, brimming with the kind of metabolic optimism that borders on arrogance. He made gains at a rate that suggested divine favoritism. Within weeks, he surpassed me. Within days of that, he lost interest in me. He graduated upward—into the company of Serge and Robbie—leaving me where all the surpassed are left: behind, holding yesterday’s program.

    That’s when I knew I had to leave Desert.

    My in-laws were waiting to drive me to Prescott Valley, a destination that sounded like a compromise. Before the journey, we stopped at an overnight smoothie station—an oasis for the nutritionally anxious. Imagine a row of blenders stretching into the horizon, bins of organic ingredients arranged like offerings, and travelers preparing their liquid penance before braving the heat.

    I approached the blender with the confidence of a man who has learned nothing.

    I added fruit. Then vegetables. Then protein powder. Then more of everything, because moderation is for people who have already succeeded. The machine whirred, strained, and then produced something biblical: a green, algae-like tendril that rose from the blender and clawed at the ceiling, as if trying to escape my dietary philosophy.

    The proprietor—a matronly woman in an apron who had seen too many men confuse excess with virtue—fixed me with a look that could curdle whey. “You overloaded it,” she said, with the calm authority of someone accustomed to cleaning up after ambition.

    Nearby, bodybuilder and YouTuber Greg Doucette produced a perfect smoothie with surgical precision and regarded me the way a pilot regards turbulence: an inconvenience best ignored. His competence was an indictment.

    We got in the car.

    As we drove away from Desert, the realization settled in: this wasn’t a relocation. It was a retreat. I had committed the small, accumulating sins of a man who wants the result without fully respecting the method. I ate buckwheat groats when I should have eaten steak and eggs. I entertained carbs with a softness bordering on affection. I mistook enthusiasm for discipline and variety for virtue.

    But the deeper failure wasn’t nutritional. It was philosophical. I had tried to stand among the great by admiring them as great, which is the surest way to exile yourself. I had reduced people to their achievements, and in doing so, reduced myself to a spectator.

    In Desert, that’s a disqualifying offense.

    And so I left, not because I was banished, but because I finally understood the terms of my own eviction: in a city that rewards precision, I had been imprecise—in diet, in discipline, and worst of all, in how I saw other people.

  • The Vegan Diet That Actually Behaves

    The Vegan Diet That Actually Behaves

    Most vegan diets chase variety. This one chases something else: predictability. I wanted a plan that supports gut health, delivers about 150 grams of protein, and stays around 2,300 calories—without turning every meal into a digestive gamble. The result is not a celebration of abundance. It’s a system that behaves.

    The guiding idea is simple. Every meal is built from three parts: a stable starch, a low-residue protein, and a measured dose of fiber. The aim is not to flood the gut with “healthy” inputs, but to give it clear, consistent instructions.

    Breakfast is structured but quiet. I start with well-cooked buckwheat groats—soft enough to digest without resistance. Into that goes a scoop of pea-and-rice protein powder, half a banana, a teaspoon of psyllium husk, and a small pour of unsweetened soy milk. It’s not exciting, but it is dependable. The psyllium adds just enough cohesion, the banana binds, and the protein arrives without the usual legume side effects.

    Lunch simplifies things even further. Oatmeal becomes the base—again, in a controlled portion. I add another scoop of protein powder, then rotate between half a banana and a small serving of applesauce. A modest amount of soy milk smooths it out. That’s it. No stacking of proteins, no fiber fireworks. Lunch is designed to send a single, clear signal to the body: digest, don’t negotiate.

    Dinner does the heavy lifting. This is the anchor meal, the one that determines how the next morning unfolds. A plate of white rice and red potatoes forms the foundation—arguably the most reliable pairing for digestive stability. On top of that, I add about six ounces of extra-firm tofu and a side of sautéed zucchini or carrots. Everything is cooked soft. Everything is deliberate. A tablespoon of olive oil finishes the plate, not for indulgence, but for smooth passage.

    If I need something at night, I keep it controlled: half a banana, a tablespoon of peanut butter, and a small glass of soy milk. Enough to take the edge off, not enough to start a second digestive act.

    Across the day, the numbers line up: roughly 2,300 calories, about 150 grams of protein, and a moderate fiber intake that stays in the zone where things hold together instead of falling apart. The real achievement, though, isn’t the macros—it’s the consistency. Meals repeat. Ingredients overlap. The system stabilizes.

    There are rules. Beans and lentils are out as daily staples—not because they’re unhealthy, but because they introduce too much variability. Raw vegetables are unnecessary friction. Fiber is measured, not celebrated. Variety is limited on purpose. This is a diet built on the belief that clarity beats complexity.

    Is it boring? Often. But boredom, in this context, is a kind of luxury. It means nothing is going wrong. It means your body is no longer improvising. It means the system is working.

    Can I sustain my health and muscle on a plant-based diet? What if I feel weak? To be honest, I have two contingency plans: I may have to add a scoop of Greek yogurt a day, and replace the vegan protein powder with whey protein powder. That will be the tentative part of the journey. 

  • Why the Word “Stress” Has Outlived Its Usefulness

    Why the Word “Stress” Has Outlived Its Usefulness

    The word stress has been talked into exhaustion. It shows up everywhere—therapy sessions, productivity podcasts, corporate memos—until it becomes a kind of verbal white noise. Everything is stressful. Traffic is stressful. Email is stressful. Existence itself is apparently one long panic attack. The result is not clarity but numbness. A word that once pointed to something real now floats, bloated and imprecise, over every inconvenience and calamity alike. It needs to be stripped down, cleaned up, and returned to service.

    Start by dividing what we lazily call “stress” into three distinct experiences.

    First, there is what we might call existential friction—the strain that comes from living a life that actually matters. Sartre described it as getting your hands dirty. It is the tension of responsibility, of choosing action over comfort. Think of Viktor Frankl, who could have escaped a concentration camp but stayed to tend to the suffering around him. To say he was “stressed” is to trivialize the moment. He was engaged in a moral confrontation with evil. The discomfort was not a malfunction; it was the price of meaning. A bodybuilder tears muscle to grow stronger. A moral person strains against life’s conflicts to become more fully human. This is not pathology. It is construction.

    Second, there is narcissistic agitation—the counterfeit version of stress, self-generated and corrosive. This is the anxiety of the addict chasing relief, the restless paranoia of the status-obsessed, the brittle ego that reads every room as a threat. Here the individual is both the engine and the victim of the distress. It is not the friction of purpose but the turbulence of misalignment. To confuse this with existential friction is not just sloppy; it is morally obtuse. One builds character. The other erodes it.

    Finally, there is existential overload—the strain that arrives uninvited and exceeds your capacity to absorb it. This is not heroic and not self-inflicted. It is what happens when life stacks too many weights on the bar at once. Divorce, illness, financial collapse—events that don’t ask for your permission before they rearrange your nervous system. In this state, the body begins to narrate what the mind cannot contain. Appetite disappears. Sleep fractures. Symptoms bloom. There is no lesson neatly packaged inside it, no redemptive arc guaranteed. It is endured, not chosen.

    I think of my brother in 2020. His marriage collapsed. He was suddenly alone during the pandemic, financially strained, disoriented. Then came the diagnosis: Burkitt lymphoma. Two months to live. That is not “stress.” That is existential overload in its purest form. And yet, against those odds, he found a narrow corridor of hope—a CAR T-cell therapy trial at UCSF. He took it. He survived. He is in remission. The word stress does not belong anywhere near that story.

    This is why the word needs to be retired from serious use. It flattens distinctions that matter. It places the inconvenience of a crowded inbox on the same plane as a confrontation with mortality. Better to replace it with terms that carry weight: existential friction, narcissistic agitation, existential overload. Precision is not pedantry; it is navigation. If you’re trying to find your way out of the dark, you don’t need a vague feeling. You need a compass that actually points somewhere.