You need a foundation

Change and age will eventually overwhelm. It’s inevitable. At some point you’ll have to understand entropy and information theory just to make it through a day. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before anything else, you need a foundation.

Get Strong

I’m not using ‘strong’ as some sort of metaphor. Start by getting strong because it will make everything else easier. To do this you will need to lift heavy weights. It’s hard and painful and it’s enough. The focus should be on your posterior chain, which is exactly the opposite of what you find in our arm-curling, ab-crunching gym culture. A key first step is to find someone stronger than you are and get that person to train you. But you don’t want a bodybuilder, a bro-science weekend certification personal trainer, or a crossfit zealot. You want a powerlifter, and you need to learn how to do a few key things with barbells: squats, deadlifts, presses (overhead, incline) and some sort of row (lever incline = my fav). Do it at least twice a week for six months. You will gain weight but don’t get too worried about the numbers on the scale yet.

Get Fast

Again, this isn’t some sort of metaphor. You will need to start running. This is a bit of a challenge because the injury rates for runners are impressively high; usually because people do too much too quickly. Fortunately, technology can solve most of your problems. You can learn how to run from legitimately fast runners as quickly and easily as a simple youtube search. You can also use any of a dozen solidly built couch to 5k apps to keep you from doing too much too soon. They’re all hateful, but I kind of liked zombies run If you can, you want to run outside with where there are trees because your brain prefers it. You need to do it three times a week. I lift on Monday and Friday and run Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday using a weekend day if one of those workouts gets comprimized. But that’s just me.

Get Healthy

A couple of months into the running it’s time to think about diet and nutrition. The first thing to give a damn about is when you eat. On this count, the evidence points to… fasting. Many people can’t do this easily because of their habits or metabolism but everyone who isn’t hypoglycemic or diabetic can probably learn to. An easy, and somewhat simple start is to reduce your ‘feeding window’ to 8 hours a day. For me that’s from 10–6. Significantly: I don’t eat anything before I run or lift and there’s a good reason for that. Your own fat is a great source of energy. I find that I do need electrolytes while I’m lifting to keep from passing out but that’s easily remidied — just grab some gatoraide or juice and adjust the window to compensate or simply start lifting after 10. Whatever your solution the combination of exercise + restricting your eating window will result in good things. Your brain will start functioning. In my case, it started functioning for the first time ever because I wasn’t in pain, I wasn’t tired and I wasn’t hungry. I was just focused.

After you’ve figured out when to eat the thorny question of what to eat rears its slow-roasting bbq pig’s head. I’ll start with an easy prediction: future generations will almost certainly be appaled by our food culture. In 60 years you can show your great-grandchildren an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown and they will be haunted and appaled in exactly the same way you were haunted and appaled when someone showed you Freaks Vegetarianism is almost certainly the direction you should be headed in ethically… but maybe not entirely, because it’s not the world of your great-grandchildren yet. And vegetarians, of course, eat lots of stupid things and are possibly tempted to eat even more stupid things than non-vegetarians. This is because you don’t need to be Gary Taubes to know that you shouldn’t eat sugar. Like, ever. Taubes is a big fan of steak, however, and any cardiologist with a pulse will probably tell you to limit red meat to TWICE (ungh) a month. Cheese, also known as the pure saturated fat that they re-sell after skimming it off reduced fat milk should probably be tossed aside. Add to the no list all of the sugar derivatives and integrals of the ‘white death’ sort (bread, cereal, rice, juice…), becasue sugar’s a con. Also: you shouldn’t eat anything deep-fried because this isn’t 1980 and you know better. On the positive side, you have no need to fear gluten because gluten-free is health industry easy-$$$ bullshit. Unfortunately, you have every reason to be afraid of fish because it’s full of fucking mercury. But it’s delicious, and theoretically healthy. What’s left? Organic chicken, turkey? Maybe?? Whole grain stuff? Perhaps?? You figure it out. Just try and eat healthy, reduce your ‘feeding window’, and gain a healthy paranoia about what the food industry from 5-star to 1-star is trying to sell you.