Thinking, Fast and Dirty

It’s difficult to put into words how terrible it feels to be 165 kilograms. Not because I lack specific examples, but rather because it’s a miserable existence, truly, and should be avoided, by everyone. Always sweaty; always out of breath; moving even several dozen meters is excruciating; clothes don’t fit; seats break, or can’t be sat in; nothing satiates, and concern over the next meal is ever present; sex drive plummets; sex appeal plummets; sleep sucks, for a whole host of reasons. It just goes on. Add alcohol binges to the food binges, and you’ve got a real recipe for misery and disaster. No matter how much we deny it when we’re there, at that size; everything sucks. At 185 centimeters in height, that put my Body Mass Index, BMI, an imperfect (and actually probably just patently incorrect, in many cases) measure, at approximately 48.2, Class III morbid obesity. For context, my “correct” BMI should be between 64 and 87 kilograms, approximately, which most people agree when they meet me, seems preposterous. We shall know forsooth, as I’m approaching 25 kilograms away from my purported maximum before the “overweight” class. 

165 kilograms. Drunk. Diabetic. Hypertensive. This was my life from 2020 to 2025, without exception, for long periods. I’m not ungrateful; I’ve had a stable job, friendly colleagues, friends, family, and I’ve managed to see more of the world than I ever expected in that time span. I probably could have found a wife, gotten married, had a few kids even, headed down the same road. But to minimize the significance of my crappy health would be an injustice. And for a long time before I finally started making changes, I knew everything was wrong, and wanted it all to be different. It’s not obvious how to do that. Even now, I’m not sure exactly which moment it was that I finally decided it was time to start. But this is a long, rambling account of my journey to restore myself, at least thus far, barely six months in. I’m on track to be double digits in kilograms by the end of 2026, down roughly 57kgs in mid February from my aforementioned peak; off a host of meds, with only three still to go, two of which I am aiming to be off of within a couple months. I am in functional remission of diabetes and hypertension. I also quit, for a second time, drinking alcohol. 

And I am writing this for many reasons; one is to spare my friends and colleagues from having to continue to hear about it, and redirect some of my energy. Another is because I get interrogated about how I’ve done it. It’s funny to me, because when I started, I had uncountable numbers of people giving me unsolicited advice, almost invariably about gym routines. Now, no one gives me advice. Everyone wants to know what I did. Further, there’s been a trend of some people pathologizing my health success. I’ve been accused of being unnatural because I’ve been taking Rybelsus, a pill-based GLP-1 therapy. I’m curious why, since I’ve been on that since 2023, it only started working in the past 5 months; alas, part of my journey is to also be a kinder person, so I will spare them and spare you any potential resentments. 

Of course, people want to know the secret to health success, which, as it turns out, is actually very easy, and can be done by anyone, at any time, and not through “unnatural” medicated means; if they just listened to their goddamn doctors, they could do it too. Lifestyle modification, proper nutrition, and fitness. For most people, those first two are going to be 90% of the hard work. But, that’s it. Those, perhaps add a bit of toil, and a dash of good fortune; I am incredibly lucky, and no amount of hard work or dedication will subvert this principal fact. 

Three dates in 2025 laid the groundwork for my current success. First, when I finally stopped drinking alcohol, in early summer (precise dates and details around that scandal are reserved). Second, on September 10th, the day after an evening phone call, where I told someone an uncomfortable and vulnerable truth, and which galvanized me into wanting something completely different for my life. I call this my Told the Truth Day, and it will punctuate my calendar as a personal holiday and celebration for the rest of my life. And finally, roughly October 27th, when I began collecting and recording the data of, well; myself. 

It was clear that I couldn’t sustain this new adventure without accountability over compliance. So I began recording my compliance with my nutrition and fitness. A simple daily checkbox, true or false, sufficed, for both. Did I eat something that aligned with my goals? Yes? Check. Did I make it to the gym? Yes? Check. No matter what I did or how much time I spent there, it didn’t matter; for fitness compliance, the goal was to bootload the habit, and compliance with getting physically to the building and inside was the first step. 

This realization of bootloading habits led me to one of the most effective approaches I would implement: the checklist. I replaced all of my dopamine-seeking on my phone with dopamine-seeking in my compliance with my checklists. I’m serious, I deleted Instagram and Reddit (and later, also removed my television and my microwave) and began checklisting absolutely every aspect of my routines. All of this checklist tracking forced me to define my goals precisely, the foremost of which was obvious immediately: I needed to reverse my medical maladies. At first, I didn’t care about anything else; I just wanted to be off of my medications, and the more I read, the more I realized that diabetes was going to be the first major challenge, and which likely precipitated the treatment of other ones, such as hypertension and high cholesterol.

Therefore, I would begin with tracking my vitals and my nutrition. I bought a blood glucose monitor, a blood pressure machine (I had one that helped start me on my journey, but I quickly upgraded), and dusted off a scale. On October 27th, I decided I would track my blood sugar, blood pressure, and weight thrice per day. I figured, if the Muslims can pray 5 times a day, I can check in with my vitals 3 times, and record the data. I created a spreadsheet. I set up a station in my room for performing the ritual. Since blood glucose strips are one-offs, I decided I would only read my blood sugar once per sitting, unless I got an unusual reading, in which case I would confirm with a second test. My weight, obviously, depends on the quality of my scale, which is acceptable, and for which I would only need one reading.

My blood pressure was a bit more complicated, since I knew basically nothing about it. I navigated to the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website and printed off their guidance for home recording blood pressure. I decided I would collect 3 readings for my logs, and calculate the median of the 3 readings. This turned out to be unwieldy in scope, and by December I nailed my readings down to 1. As your understanding of readings and technique matures, additional readings become irrelevant. 

Next, I went to the hospital and got my 3-month labs. This would give me the first benchmark against which to track my progress. I felt that in order to prove that I was on track to my doctor, and therefore convince them that it would be safe to remove medications, I needed concrete data. So wielding my machines, my spreadsheet, and my routine, I began the vitals grind. Now, it’s difficult to imagine my daily life without it. I’ve since added to my tracking my temperature, daily steps, sleep, and I have data for my ketone levels that I haven’t yet included, but plan to in the near future. I also plan to go back and get the labs from 2023 that gave me the original diabetes diagnosis. Stay tuned. 

Nutrition compliance was a bit more complicated than vitals, and therefore requires a more complex definition of constraints. My diabetes and my weight were interrelated, and I wouldn’t be able to reverse it without grinding down my BMI. I maintain now, and forever, that weight loss is nearly 100% performed in the kitchen. I could stop moving, and as long as I continue compliance with the nutrition plan I’m about to explain, I would continue to lose weight. Fitness is a footnote in this journey compared to the outsized influence food has on the body, and anyone who is serious about their health will apply the fitness after having applied their nutrition. Two alarm bells should go off when people discuss health: fitness, and calories. You can gauge the seriousness and sophistication of someone’s motivation to achieve weight loss (that goal specifically) by their level of concentration on these two false friends. 

The first set of constraints I decided on was a combination of time-restricted eating (TRE) and one meal a day (OMAD). The methods had to be both simple and flexible, otherwise compliance would not be achievable. And they had to fit nicely into a checklist format: eat once per day, within a narrow window of roughly two hours. Check? Check. The window can move, up or down in time, depending on my schedule. If a second meal needed to be added for whatever reason (either nutrition or socialization or other), it could be added, but the same rules applied: eat only one complete meal within a time boundary, not an endless grazing across an entire morning or afternoon or evening.

The second set of constraints applied to the food content. The composition of my meals had to be nutritious, reliable (or, easy to supply consistently), and tasty, or I wouldn’t comply. The first approach within the set that I adopted immediately might be familiar already; Michael Pollan’s proverbial maxim: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. At first, I was eating caesar salads and half of a fruit platter in that window, across the entirety of the window. After extensive reading in online forums, watching YouTube videos, reading a book or two on nutrition, and having various conversations with a few LLMs, I settled on trying to consume roughly my daily recommended macros (whatever they are, I never wrote them down) in the form of a protein, salmon at first, supported by a plentiful bowl of a vegan stir fry, and endless fruit. This worked for a while, but within the two hour window I was not only continuing to overeat, but also began wasting food as my ability to eat in the portions to which I had become accustomed withered away. 

Salmon was promptly swapped for eggs, the ไข่สะดุ้ง (kai sadung) recipe, and in order to make sure I was receiving the exact recommended daily value of all of the vitamins and minerals, I developed a nascent iteration of the imbizo stir fry that I continue to eat now. Along with the eggs, I eventually caved on my desire to go full vegan and added the greek yogurt recipe I currently now use as the nucleus of my nutrition, the لكاتم (al-katim). I still aim to get as close to vegan as possible for as many meals as I can, but I fail full vegan. All three of these recipes I have eaten (versions of) unbroken since roughly September. I not only now crave them, intensely, but I don’t overeat them. When I’ve finished with the portion of each that I make for when I have my meal time, I feel satiated. Not necessarily full, but I feel that I’ve had not only enough, but of something delicious and satisfying, that I’ve prepared for myself, and used to nourish my body and my mind. I always tell myself that I can have more if I want, but I never want any more. I also still had the “unnatural” assistance of the Rybelsus helping to additionally suppress my vanishing appetite. 

I want to emphasize here that I have never in my life counted a calorie. I don’t have conversations about calories. I don’t know what a calorie is and I suspect no one else does either. I don’t know how they are measured, what they do to me, or why they matter. All I know is that the logic for calories makes no sense to me; if a caloric deficit is how you lose weight, then I could eat 1000 calories of ice cream or potato chips per day, and achieve the weight loss. But I would feel like absolute garbage and I expect that wouldn’t be very healthy, and very likely rebound as soon as I resumed other foods. In order to achieve simplicity and flexibility, I have permitted myself to eat as much food as I can stand that is a part of the basic set of food constraints, as set out in my recipes. It’s impossible to over eat these foods in one sitting, unlike ice cream or potato chips. For my nutrition, as my ability to overeat is reduced, I concentrate on eyeballing the portion sizes, eating real foods that I’ve prepared for myself, and mitigating salt and sugar. Calories be damned.

I just want to rephrase once more what I mean: in order to establish the foundation of proper eating, I allowed myself unlimited quantities of a carefully defined set of nutritious foods, prepared myself, with scheduled outside-prepared feasts wherein I could venture beyond that set. That set contains essential nutrients, proteins, and fats, a daily recommended amount. I have no idea how many calories any of these meals are, and it does not matter in the slightest. As I complied with the recipes over time, my enjoyment of them never waned, but my ability to overeat them did, especially because of the limited TRE window. So while I feel like it looks like I’ve contradicted myself, I haven’t. In order to resolve my overeating generally, I allowed for a period of adjustment. And yes, strict TRE and OMAD would naturally put me in a deficit of daily recommended values, and I therefore would be losing weight as a result. But I’m not at risk of a rebound, and I’m nowhere near malnourish. In fact, I now find it difficult to overeat. 

Fruit went away before the end of September, and I’ve become sensitive to any added sugar in an almost demented fashion. I understand that fruit is good for me, and I think perhaps for others on their own health journeys, it might be a good choice. But not for me. I overeat fruit too easily, and for my journey, sugar is a permanent prohibition for the majority of my meals. My flexibility allows me to occasionally indulge in a portion of fruit or cake or banana bread or some other unnamed treat; but never a full piece or meal’s worth, never grazing, and never two days in a row. The only exception to this is blueberries, which I aim to eat daily on eating days, in my لكاتم (al-katim) recipe. 

This is as much a psychic journey as a physical one. Everything in moderation, including moderation. It is helpful to participate in social indulgences, as well as to inoculate your body against mechanisms it might employ if it falsely predicts you are in a true period of famine. Such indulgences-turned-vaccines also serve as checkpoints; for your tastes, to demonstrate how much your desires have transformed; for your hormones, to prove on a glucose stick that you can consume portions of sweets without an uncontrollable spike in blood sugar; and for yourself, because cheesecake is fucking delicious and deserves a place in your life, at least once in a while.

By mid November, I slowly began to re-introduce salt. I initially banished it from my house and went through a period without it. My taste for salt completely reset. I can’t underscore enough the significance of a salt reset. First adding it back just to water, it tasted like syrup to me. It was so sweet. Then when I began daily drinking my संजीवनी (sanjivani) recipe, a sodium and potassium pinch became a staple of my routine. I think salt is unhelpfully villainized because people are eating ultraprocessed foods with amounts so far above what’s recommended, they could be in low earth orbit. Salt is an essential nutrient that we have to supplement, especially when fasting, and it’s easy to enjoy a healthy amount when you’re dosing it yourself. 

With TRE, OMAD, and a foundation of recipes, I continued to stack habits onto one another. Never eat at work, unless it’s an emergency. What’s an emergency? An impending sense of doom, corroborated by a glucose reading. Or fainting. In November, I fainted twice, once in the middle of the gym. One of my blood pressure meds was removed because it was overcorrecting, and except for a brief rebound, my blood pressure planted in a healthy range. I went off two more medications during this time: my daily aspirin, and ezetimibe. And then came headaches. As I introduced the fasting, I began to experience excruciating headaches, which no amount of salt or water relieved. At first I blamed the weather, in the form of barometric pressure changes. A technique of malingering acquired during my childhood, from my father. However, I noticed my blood sugar also tanking. And therefore, Metformin was removed, and the headaches went away immediately. No blood sugar spikes, nor crashes; no more doom, despite the increased fasting. 

No grazing, or snacking. This is a non-negotiable. If I’ve opened or initiated an eating window, make a plate, plan if I will have a second, or a desert, and eat just those. Minor grazing at socials was permitted, but avoided, and there was a firm cutoff time, after which food stopped being consumed. Nothing beyond the cutoff except acceptable liquids. Defining the boundaries and scope of the eating window means I know if I’ve gone beyond it, and going beyond it will perpetuate the malignant approach to eating that put me on a slew of meds and carried me to 165 kilograms and diabetes.

In my January labs, my A1c went from ~5 to ~4, as outlined in my vitals. Aggressive compliance with vitals tracking and my nutrition worked to begin functional remission of my diabetes. My blood pressure has been more complicated, but I went off another medication by this stage, bisopropol; after a long rebound, my blood pressure has continued to level off and improve without it. My doctor recommended I stay on avortstatin, which I wanted to taper off of, due to my increased cholesterol from my October labs. I am complying with her, although I’ve read that increased cholesterol can be due to another rebound effect from rapid weight loss. I’m hoping to shake the statin before summer. 

Nothing transformed my journey more than the inclusion of the fasting. Originally, in my nutrition compliance plans, it didn’t occur to me to just stop eating. Already on TRE and OMAD, I had been fasting already pretty much every day for around 22 hours. However, once I began to extend to 36 and 48, and eventually 72 and beyond, and began rolling these across stretches of the week, the reverberations of the benefits rippled through every part of my life. I didn’t just want to be healthy, I felt so tuned in and focused that I also wanted to be a better person. I decided in December that I wanted to include one day of the week that I didn’t eat, in perpetuity, for the rest of my life. That has become my Monday fast, my Somvar Vrat (page coming soon). 

Fasting is as old as anything else that’s human, and for such a simple thing, can be extraordinarily complex. For something that is a subtraction, an abstinence of activity, it is utterly bewitching that fasting is more complicated than actually just eating. Besides the fact that precise definitions are already difficult to pin down across various languages and communities, many cultures and religions have captured the practice and impose their own definitions and constraints that, when combined with spiritual and supernatural beliefs, can foster gatekeeping and therefore preclude rational discussion. People get fucking crazy about fasting, and not necessarily in a fun or interesting way. People get downright stupid. Stripped of religious or cultural presuppositions, fasting can be easily understood as simply not eating. You abstain from eating. You don’t eat. Any period of time you don’t eat, technically, under this view, you’re fasting. That’s it. The longer you fast, the greater the purported benefits. There are certainly gradations of fasting that need to be elucidated.

The dry fast is the most extreme of all of the fasts, and I’ve not yet come across any medically endorsed version of it, except perhaps for very fringe cases. In a dry fast, you don’t eat or drink anything, including water. You consume absolutely nothing. I can see why it might be attractive. It comes predominantly from religion, and many major world religions describe a version of it. However, I wholly reject the dry fast for myself, and unless you’re spiritually inclined to those or other beliefs, I strongly advise against, if and when asked about it. Nothing is proved or gained in these fasts beyond the spiritual beliefs believed within those systems, and whilst I wish not to see this approach prohibited for anyone who does practice it, I do not endorse this type of fasting, at least not for purposes of physical health, no matter how many people have been doing it for however long for whatever reasons. You can have it for your spirit, if that suits you. It’s not for me. 

Water fasting is probably the simplest of all of the fasts, almost as inflexible as the dry fast, and is usually what most people imagine you do when you say you’re fasting. You only are allowed to consume plain uncontaminated water. This is the purists’ fantasy. I have done water fasts, usually when fasting for labs, but it is not my favorite. I aim to improve my ability to extend water fasts; I certainly extoll its benefits and admire its strict adherents. However, at the current time I am writing this, I will only perform a water fast for explicit medical reasons, such as under the direct supervision of a doctor, or for blood work. Performed routinely, it does not suit my current circumstances, purposes, or goals. I hope in future revisions of this text to be able to update this paragraph with progress on the water fast.

The dirty fast is the primary method of fasting that I employ, but a bespoke version that suits my needs. It involves consuming negligible or extremely low amounts of nutrients, but never whole foods. The dirty fast is a combination of simple and flexible, but does not satisfy the purists. Nevermind; much alike to the epicureans who graze unconstrained, eating whatever they want, all day, every day, wondering why they feel and look like shit (me, hitherto), the purists also cannot be satisfied anyway. Encumber yourselves not with their opinions. The dirty fast has transformed my life more than anything else for as far back as I can remember, probably since the pandemic, or since I got my first laptop or smart phone. I have adopted the dirty fast as a lifelong habit. When I fast, I have rarely deviated from what I am about to describe since I began extended fasting in November, with almost metronomic consistency. For those in doubt, kindly review my vitals for the data that proves the efficacy of this approach. 

I consume water throughout the day. The goal is to consume this first before moving on to another substance. Beyond water, the first items I introduce are sodium and potassium. To this, I can include freshly squeezed lemon and lime, avoiding the pith and seeds. Whilst technically containing “calories”, whatever those are, I don’t consume enough to feel like I’ve actually eaten anything, and I stay hydrated. These four ingredients together constitute a recipe I call संजीवनी (sanjivani), and I drink it in the morning, afternoon, and evening, only if I feel that I desire it. I can skip without penalty. Once in the morning and evenings, I supplement my संजीवनी (sanjivani) with apple cider vinegar. This masks the disgusting taste of two magnesium supplements I spoon the powder of into the tonic; magnesium malate in the morning, and magnesium bisglycinate in the evenings. In the morning, I also add creatine to the mix. Further, I am allowed black coffee, a cold brew tea recipe I call pajé, and ἰχώρ (ichor), my recipe for bone broth. I allow myself to have spoons of the bone broth around 5am, when I get home from work, and once, if necessary, before bed. Since I’m not a big fan of hot beverages, I have defaulted to just a few spoons of the bone jelly from the fridge, occasionally with a pinch of salt, a drip of apple cider vinegar, and a squeeze of lemon. I have also been available to chew fresh pieces of ginger, and spit out the fibrous leftovers once I have sucked in the juices. Therefore, when I say that I am fasting, likely I have punctuated the fast with one or a combination of the above. 

There are two further definitions to fasting that I have adopted from the medical and scientific community: maintenance, and therapeutic. It has been helpful for me to measure these in doses. Doses of fasting are measured in time, usually in 6 or 12 hour increments. The therapeutic doses are designed to achieve specific goals and might be far more aggressive or extensive than a maintenance dose. They are also not available to me in the unlimited doses I currently employ once I achieve a healthy weight, when I will resume the pattern that launched me on this journey, regular TRE and OMAD. Unless medically advised, I have no plans to regularly eat more than once a day in my maintenance phase. 

Until I reach my weight and medication goals, however, I apply rigorous and consistent doses of therapeutic fasting, with my current maximum fast having reached 99 hours. I hope to soon acquire a third digit (as I ditch one on my total weight). The effects of food noise and hunger wane profoundly after 48 hours, and usually it’s the first 24 that are the most challenging. The positive mental effects of fasting beyond 48 hours cannot be extolled enough. Food noise completely dissolves, and you are left with a level of concentration unparalleled by any other intervention, measure, or dosage. By 72 hours, you wonder if you ever really need, or want, to eat again. 

I punctuate my periods of fasting with feasting. Indeed, a prolonged fast is easier when I know something special is coming, and I schedule “feasts” in my calendar the same way that I schedule my fasts. Structured feasts still tick the boxes on my checklist. Whilst I have yet to succumb to a pizza or fried chicken feast, I try to feast routinely to keep myself on track. Overdoses of fasting will only set me back and won’t allow me to enjoy my life. This is why I’ve set a holistic compliance goal for the whole project of my nutrition at 85%. Since my Told the Truth Day, I track my daily compliance with my nutrition goals. The goals are not strictly defined or excluded to any specific category; but I know when I’ve reached them, I know when I’ve flagrantly broken them, and the space in between is flexible enough for me to decide when to tick off the day, or when not to. I’m currently at ~88% compliance, which, given a few bouts of illness (vanishingly fewer as I restore my health and immunity), 36 years of continuous shitty eating habits and a fundamentally sick food environment, I think is a stellar accomplishment.

In my experience, the success of a fast has everything to do with what you have been eating, and will be eating, prior to and after the fast, and therefore is bound to compliance with nutrition. My most effective fasts have been when I consumed my routine recipes for a few days, without exception, and when I broke the fasts with the same recipes. Beginning a fast after eating any kind of bread or grain multiplies the difficulty at least twofold. Difficulty in fasting has everything to do with food noise, and very little to do with actual hunger, at least for me. Hunger is a very brief wave, and I think at this point I actually enjoy the sensation of hunger. Because I don’t have unconditioned eating habits, a hunger pang can be easily ignored or treated with water and a pinch of salt. But my mind’s presentation of the need to eat, an intrusive fantasy usually brought on by cravings for specific foods, is absolutely a demon to be slain. The two might coincide; I might have a craving at the very instance of a wave of hunger, but they are not equivalent.

A pang of craving hits like a sledgehammer, and must be acknowledged and rejected head on. And these occur whether or not I am fasting; indeed, they tended to hit hardest when I was at my heaviest. It is an experience you must immediately name, get hold over, and decide before it decides you, gets hold over you, and names you its victim. The greatest food noise for me is pizza, followed by fried chicken, and finally, curry. Curry is the only of the three that I allow myself to indulge in intervals; the former two I avoid like an alcoholic. One single indulgence will result in a guaranteed cascade of food noise, over days, possibly even weeks. Once the noise for those foods subsides, it is relatively easy to manage and ignore, but it is permanently there. Once rooted, a craving for pizza can be more challenging to ignore than both of the two times I’ve quit alcohol. It even eclipses nicotine cravings. Food noise is more than a nuisance; it is a scourge, one of life’s essential torments, afflictions; to be certain. But once you begin to free yourself from the noise, and attain understanding of it, you begin to see and react to every aspect of life differently. And it is how we respond to food noise that determines far more of our lives and behaviors than we can even clearly understand. 

Indeed, people will excuse preposterous behaviors surrounding food and eating, with two notorious culprits. Cultural traditions dictate when you eat, what you eat, and who you eat with. Prior to the superabundance of the food system we currently enjoy, much in these traditions ensured that people survived. However, this is no longer so, and it is unthinkable to most to question or revise those traditions now that they can be enjoyed without restriction. I have been told that someone couldn’t stop eating a particular food, no matter how poisonous or dangerous it was, because it was part of their cultural identity. This is compounded by reinforcement from family and communities, where not only do other members of the same group propagate bad habits, but they all validate each other through shared traditions.

This cultural training determines exactly how deeply food noise will take hold over your mind. I am a single, never married, childless American bachelor whose appetite for the richness of the world of food stops only at licorice. And even then, I will gladly try it once in a while, just to prove I still don’t like it. But I can choose how and what I eat without restriction, or interference, depending on the food environment that surrounds me. However, for most people, their approach to food is trained and sustained by their families and friends, and their ability to mitigate the effects of this is limited. Indeed, even our knowledge about food is limited to calories, and therefore it is both the sadism of our cultures and the failure of science to reach our erudition, combined with the unlimited supply of cheap, easy foods, that cultivate the perfect conditions for food noise to thrive.

The second preposterous monstrosity of behavior embedded in food regards emotion. Our emotions are so inherently entangled with our food habits, that we can scarcely even imagine what it would feel like to examine them. The absurdity and perniciousness of the concept of “hanger” becomes acutely apparent once deep into a fasting routine. It is a disguise, deployed by the emotionally immature, to beg you to look past their inability to control the way that they behave because they haven’t had an injection of salt or sugar in the past hour. I say this because I have done this, to other people. “Sorry man, I’m just hungry.” Prove to me on the glucose strip that you are hypoglycemic, and I may have cause to excuse an outburst, due to a medical emergency. Otherwise, it is a scandal that we have normalized violence-adjacent behaviors under the justification of food. And I include myself in the camp of the guilty. 

Conversely, the narcotic effects of food are so horrifically real, that I myself can feel my mood elevating in real time when eating during my TRE and OMAD window. This is especially true after a long fast where I’ve had a few hectic days of work, I’m ashamed to admit. But until you deliberately go through the process of long food restrictions, and then reintroduce it, you won’t realize the intensity of the effects. None of this excuses my or anyone’s ability, or lack thereof, to treat other people with dignity and respect regardless of whether or not we’ve eaten something. If we are apt to accept the negative emotions that result from claiming that someone has “not eaten”, then along we go into accepting food as a device for boosting positive emotions when someone has. I can’t be the only one who sees how fucking insane this logic is. We should be aiming to cultivate environments where your mood is influenced foremost by your wishes and will over it, not by the presence or absence of a burst of hormones. I further extend this into cultures and traditions; we can’t blindly accept our approach to eating a particular way because we used to do it, or because people around us are doing it. 

Imagine our current food world. We begin the day, with breakfast. Immediately. Mid-morning, we graze a snack. Probably a whole or at least half a bag of something. Wouldn’t be surprised if there was something sweet in addition. You’re passing through another student’s desk, or a colleague’s office, and they offer you a bite of something. You don’t even think about you, you just eat it. Then lunch. A while after lunch, a mid-afternoon snack, probably again a combo of something salty topped by something sweet. I remember getting home from school and having an advanced snack, a post-lunch lunch or pre-dinner dinner. Then dinner, a full dinner, followed by a desert, and if awake late enough, a nightcap snack. Repeat, daily. Then, you have a bank holiday, or religious festivity, where you pump steroids into a version of the same damn day, with even more options and reinforced by loved ones and probably friends, maybe a few events to attach core memories to. And not long thereafter, another holiday, another tradition. Or perhaps a celebration, or a trip to a restaurant. Over and over, rinse and repeat, without punctuation. Continuous, nonstop, unexamined eating.

And throughout, the full scope of emotions embedded in each instance, each moment. Eating because you’re hungry. Then because you’re happy. Then because you’re bored. Then because you’re anxious. Frustrated. Angry. Then hangry. Then because you’re sick. Fully integrated, immersed in a seamless eternal food-emotion comorbidity that slowly poisons your body and your mind, the fatal effects of which you will eventually try to medicate. Couldn’t possibly evaluate your culture, or your emotions. Make the doctor responsible. And then, do it to your children. Perpetuate the farce intergenerationally, because you have to have a legacy, right? How else can you find meaning in your life, if you haven’t handed down a malignant tradition to a child who can neither do nor know better? And because you can’t control your emotions or food habits, you have to feed the child the same way. It’s hungry! Or, at least, it’s upset! I eat when I’m upset, this will make it feel better too! This is what my parents did for me! 

I will pause here to remind that I have no children, and I fully appreciate that children and adolescents are constantly growing, and require different amounts and frequency of food than adults. I also am keenly aware that I do not have a uterus, and that women experience a variety of reasons why and what and when they should be eating that don’t apply to me. And anyway, I think I’ve made my thinking clear enough.

I also am not trying to villainize all cultural or religious traditions. But when every day is a feast, the real feasts diminish in their stature and significance, and the only people in society telling us that it’s unhealthy to skip meals or stop eating are either part of the food manufacturing establishment, or beholden to it. Once emancipated from daily overconsumption, I guarantee your appreciation of Christmas or Ramadan or Taco Tuesday will multiply tenfold. 

Sanctimonious rant over. I’ve put the brakes on these malignant approaches to food, at least for myself. And in so doing I’ve transformed my health. But I can also tell that there is disagreement with my approaches. Eating exactly the same things every day, not eating, “obsessively” checking your vitals; it’s too much, too fast, at least for some on the outside. I’m utterly unconcerned. For me, it’s a lifestyle modification, one I hope mounts itself to my life like a barnacle. It’s time now to outline the role that fitness has played for me these past few months of my journey. Fitness is crucial, for my mental health, and for my strength. It builds fortitude, and discipline. But it’s not for losing weight. 

My philosophy of fitness extends to most things in my life: every day is an opportunity to show up, and rehearse the basics, step by step. Get to the gym? Check. Do the bar. Just do the bar. For whatever exercise routine you’ve planned, just do the basic weight. You’ll want to do more over time. I started with 5 minute sessions on the treadmill. That was it. Done. Check. It was very difficult at 165 kilograms. Now I can breeze through 30 minutes, after 30 minutes on the elliptical. I very gradually built back up my strength. And some days, if I really really don’t feel like going, I just promise myself to do the bar. I never regret going, and I almost always do more than I wanted. And it provides me with stamina for everything else in my life. Just show up, and do something. Check the box, get the dopamine, and sustain the habit. 

I moved my daily timing from 2:30pm after work to 2:30am after meds. Despite having to give up my swimming, because, although 24 hours, my gym’s pool doesn’t open until 6am, a routine which I cherished. Nevertheless, this time swap has helped also achieve ~88% compliance with my fitness goals. Those goals are as loosely defined as the nutrition, but I know when I have or haven’t met them for the day and I check or don’t check accordingly. When I reach my fitness goals, I feel good. But I feel better when I reach my nutrition goals. But when I don’t meet my nutrition compliance, I don’t feel nearly as bad as when I skip my fitness. I feel like this further indicates how fitness underpins my mental health in a foundational way.

Strength training and cardio are my “nice to haves”, but 8000 steps is my minimal activity goal. If I don’t achieve that, I don’t check the box for the day. If I do, I do. Increasing my ambient levels of movement is one way I slowly began to achieve this minimum. In between sets at the gym, I pace. I pace at home. I pace on the phone. I clean more. I sweep. I cook. Preparing my food has added countless ambient moments to be upright and moving. At work, every hour, on the hour, I walk once around my floor’s hallways. In the building I work in, the hallways wrap around in a circle, and this circle can be walked in full between 2-5 minutes, depending on the pace. This one small habit has been hard won. I force myself to do it, no matter how focused or busy I am. 

And crucially, I don’t try to amplify or otherwise make this habit more complex. Many people have walked this routine with me, and many have suggested walking another floor, or walking stairs, or walking outside, or walking further. None have made the habit permanent like I have. The more complex you make the habit, the less likely you are to achieve compliance. Walk the floor, every hour, on the hour. That’s it. All I have to do is show up to the habit, and rehearse the basics. Do the bar. Do the minimum, and the maximum will find itself increasing. I recently went on a trip to India and walked 25 kilometers in one day, over 30,000 steps. If not for my flight the next day, and the full knowledge that I could jeopardize it if I didn’t rest, I could have kept going. Just 6 months ago, that level of activity would have been unthinkable, or could have hospitalized me.

I find myself pacing everywhere. Airports, train stations, bus stations, hotels. Just aimless ambling and wonder. My knees don’t hurt much anymore. My gout has vanished. Rarely do I ache, and when I do, I’m very sensitive to it. For the first year as far back as I can remember, I didn’t get the flu. I don’t get hot nearly as easily. This has been a huge transformation for me. I haven’t turned on my air conditioning yet, despite the outside temperature reaching up to 33C. Even the fan was a bit chilly. Strength is why we exercise. And stamina. And to feel great. To be comfortable in yourself. I can see the veins on my hands and arms, and the shape of my abdomen, that isn’t just one big free floating mass of jelly. I haven’t seen either so clearly in more than ten years. I don't know how I got here, but I know how to get back. 

I will revisit this account when there are relevant updates or revisions. There’s no easy way to conclude it, because it’s so fresh, and ongoing. It won’t be relevant for many people out there who never lost track of their health, or always had normal eating habits, or who otherwise don’t struggle the way I do with my nutrition and fitness. But anyone else reading this, who related to even a tiny part, I just want you to know: I do not possess anything you also do not possess. Anything I’ve done, can be done by anyone, given a bit of grit, and accountability. Hold yourself accountable. You’re worth it, and remember: just rehearse the basics, step by step. If you miss today, tomorrow’s another chance…until it isn’t.