Tag: nutrition

4 years

I’ve been vegan for 4 years as of yesterday.

I vacillate between “it’s the least anyone can do” and “it’s not for the faint of heart” constantly, but in the end it’s worth every piece of bacon I didn’t eat or dairy product I didn’t consume. As a matter of fact, those things are fucking gross.

It started as a step in a health journey that was already underway for a while; partly a physical health decision and partly a spiritual decision, but quickly the welfare of our fellow earthlings became a priority as well.

To me, it’s astonishing that the best diet for my heart, the best diet for my liver, the best diet for my brain, and the best diet for all aspects of my body – including athletic performance – is the same diet that is best for the planet, and is also the best diet for the wellbeing of our fellow earthlings, the animals.

In an amazingly short time we’ve gone from “wHeRe Do YoU gEt YoUr PrOtEiN?” to “I’m reluctant to try (or gave up on) veganism because I’m not an athlete.” Both statements are sad and ill-informed despite the fact that they are polar opposites.

If you feel like you need to make a change, give it a shot.

If you do, I recommend you try it for 21 days. You can do anything for 21 days, and you can eat anything for 21 days. I know that, because you can literally eat nothing for 21 days.

discipline

I’m occasionally complimented on my discipline, and while it’s true that a 4:30am wake-up call is not for the faint of heart (nor is the notion that I occasionally wake up before I alarm goes off) I have to say that waking up at 4:30 is the easy part.

I drink tea, eat oatmeal, breathe, and sit quietly before going to the gym for anywhere from a 60 – 120 minute body pummeling, all before the work day starts. I frequently get my 10,000 steps in before the rooster crows for most people and it feels really good to get that done. Aside from the caffeine in my black tea, I don’t consume alcohol or smoke anything, and work my damnedest at not eating too much sugar or fat through a given day.

A lot of what I do sucks… but whatever. I need rules.

I don’t like rules, but I need them. Me without rules is a nightmare, reverting back to the 300 lb. oaf with bad skin who bitched complained about how the world wasn’t fair… and well, at least I was right about that part – the world isn’t fair. So no, I don’t like rules. I just need ’em.

Chances are pretty good that you need rules, too… but that’s your journey. I’m not responsible for you journey. I am; however, responsible for my child’s journey for the next few years.

My child. My kid. My little girl, who I want to be safe and warm and comfortable. And while safe is certainly a priority for me, warm and comfortable are things that I don’t need to worry about these days. Warm and comfortable are terrible teachers, and my duty as a parent is to prepare my child for the big, ugly, mean world… and to greet that world with a kind heart.

Sound hard? It is.

What’s more is that I won’t be there to enforce the rules… so I have to trust her to do it. It can absolutely happen, but it’s not going to happen over night. People like to tell me that “we went through that and we came out alright” and when people say that I want to pound my fists on the desk and say: “For starters – no we didn’t have to deal with that. We didn’t have to deal with any of the garbage that kids have to deal with now. And secondly – no we didn’t turn out alright. We made a mess. I fucked around for 25 years and ended up in a recovery program in my 40’s.”

So let’s take another look at my discipline then. People throw words around like ‘extreme’ and ‘drastic.’ “It’s extreme to run for 2 hours straight” and “it’s extreme to weigh your food” – well… drastic times, friends… drastic times.

No, I won’t be holding my own child to my standard.
If she wants to level-up later on, that’s her call.
But some serious goal-setting, and the removal of distraction is a solid place to start. She’s a kid, so she’s still got her dreams intact unlike the majority of adults do these days. She can literally do anything she wants to.

But it has to start today. In this moment.
Tomorrow is a fictional place.

don’t sell yourself short

I’ve been selling myself short for most of my life. You probably have, too, but I can’t speak to that other than to say that as a species, we seem to have a tendency to resign ourselves to our own misery, and as cheap compensation, we give ourselves a dopamine hit as frequently as possible.

I’m certainly guilty of this despite my propensity to ‘do hard things’ but for me there has historically been some disconnect between physically doing hard things that are maybe kinda scary, and doing hard things on a spiritually-fulfilling level, like saying no to shitty gigs, or being confident.

A few years ago, I cleaned up my act. I started giving my body the nutrition it needs to thrive and stopped numbing myself to life, and a crazy thing happened. I felt young. That’s not a tangible thing as I type it, but the only way I can explain it is to say that I removed the things in my life that were holding me back the most, and I started to become more energetic and vital.

Energy and vitality weren’t the only things that came back though… the dreams I had as a young teenager came back – those pie in the sky things that I’d eventually talked myself out of over the years came back, and I had the energy to prioritize them, and believe them, and chase them in a way that was impossible 25 years ago.

Nothing happens overnight, but I just returned from an international tour with my band, and our next move is to play the 2 Canadian dates with legit Psychobilly legends The Nekromantix next weekend, before we play with Luke Doucet’s (Whitehorse, Sarah Mclachlan) old band VEAL and play a handful of festival shows. Confusionaires are now booking into 2025.

This is all very small compared to where I see it going, but a few years ago it wouldn’t have only been unattainable for me, but I also would have had a massive chip on my shoulder about someone else having these opportunities.

I feel optimistic.
I feel love.

Thanks for sharing in my joy this morning.

what’s more

I can’t be the only one coming out of the holidays feeling like a bag of shit. This is something I’ve spoken about before. Beyond the nutrient lacking dessert-fest that the void between Christmas & New Years can be, beyond the complete upset of routine and schedule, beyond the stresses of people-pleasing and anxiety-inducing familiar visits, spending money for the sake of spending money, and yes – even genuine excitement, is the event itself.

Steeped in tradition, wrapped in a bad sweater, and wrung out over the dining room table is that little nugget of an event that we’ve blown way out of proportion. It; too, is exhausting – as exhausting as the contemplation of how we can do Christmas better next year: “Should we host a meal?“  ”should we hide under the blankets until it’s over?“  ”should we give ourselves an early gift of a tropical vacation that takes us away for the holidays?“  ”should we spend less?“  ”should we favor quality over quantity?“

There’s no right answer, and there’s no wrong answer, and for most of us, the month of December will once again take on a life of it’s own, flinging us to the edge of our social capabilities before demanding a resolution for January 1st no matter what we think we’re deciding now.

I have a child – and just one – so calling a moratorium has never been an option, but fortunately that child ages each year, and gradual changes are inevitable, which honestly helps keep me interested.

But this…

This feeling of post-holiday malaise feels similar to the day after running an endurance race. I’ve run an endurance race and I can make that comparison with freedom, but if you’ve never done it and are still willing to compare the Christmas holidays to running a marathon, I will assure you that you’re not far off.

Christmas for my family, which has historically been a long, drawn-out ordeal has been summed up quite nicely into 3 days. Next year, I hope to narrow it down to 2 – and preferably not consecutively.

On December 22nd I ran 10 kms and on December 26th I ran 7 kms and in between was a blur. I’m comforted by the fact that running 7k on boxing day is not something most people did, and that it set my head right. I’ve definitely shaken off the holiday blues faster than ever before but it still came up and surprised me all the same. Perhaps it is constant. Perhaps I could even set my watch to it’s predictable intrusion.

But feeling this way is not wrong.
I just hope you can shake it off when it’s time.

You don’t have to be a sloth for that week between Christmas & New Years… but you don’t have to beat yourself up for not being productive, either. Just act when it’s time to act.
And when the oxygen masks drop from the ceiling above you, but your own mask on before helping anyone else.
In other words…
Just be kind.
To you.
And then everyone else.

always searching

With each passing day, it becomes more clear to me that the 40-year game of addiction whack-a-mole I’ve been playing isn’t about substance at all so much as it’s about pacification. Pacification. I almost wrote ‘nurturing’ in place of that word, but it would have been in error.

I’ve not known what I needed or how to go about getting it so I’ve put a metaphorical soother in my mouth to hold back any crying I might have done (but let’s face it, crying still happened) in some half-hearted attempt to appear strong or attractive or badass, all of which worked. For a while, anyway. If these things didn’t work, then we wouldn’t use them as coping mechanisms.

That’s why drugs, sex, money, alcohol, gambling, food, jumping out of airplanes, and social media are such a problem – they work and they are powerful… that is, they work until they don’t, in which case not only do you have to go back to solving the problem and dealing with your newfound (powerful) addiction, which is hard – much easier to spin the ‘wheel of misfortune’ and find something else to; yes, pacify.

That’s what I’ve been doing since I was a kid.

That’s also why junkies & fuck-ups get really into Christianity, or body building, or 12-step programs, or workaholism, or become gym rats and health freaks who find themselves running low on bare skin with which to tattoo something meaningful – this is feeling self referential now, I’d better watch it – and these things will work, too, especially if you don’t want to do the work. Nobody is going to go up to a well dressed man in a $700 suit driving an Acura and tell him he’s clearly got a problem, nor does an Olympic gold medal bring about an intervention, because these things are great achievements… as though great achievements and successes couldn’t be the result of an addiction, or at very least a fixation.

Don’t misread me, though – I’m not saying that the desire to be successful or the desire to be the best at something is unhealthy. Goals are healthy. Achieving them is fantastic. However, these accolades can serve to mask a deeper problem… such as Elon Musk’s fixation on putting people on Mars as an effort to escape his relationship with his own father, or Donald Trump’s fraudulent aspirations for success, for the same reason.

I couldn’t blatantly say something like that anymore than I could say that everyone who does intermittent fasting has an eating disorder. It’s simply not true, though intermittent fasting is an excellent way to mask an eating disorder.

I’ve been told somewhere along the path that I should not become too good at the wrong thing, because the success will keep me unhappy for the rest of my life. As much as I have done that in my professional life, it means something different now.

Now, I’m gonna keep running, and keep playing music, and keep working on cars, and keep getting tattoos, because… fuck you I won’t do what you tell me – possibly forever – but these things have to; for me, anyway, operate in conjunction with doing the brain work, and the soul work, as well as the body work.

It all has to be in alignment or the machine doesn’t run right.

new growth

I have a monstera plant in my home, and allow me to assure you beyond any doubt that it has lived up to it’s name in the 8 months it has dominated our living room. The growth of it’s dominion over our front room was slow, anarchistic and seemingly uncalculated until one day I found myself with a bit of a stiff neck that I can only attribute to my passive attempt at seeing the TV; first around, then through, it’s overt foliage. It’s menace seemed even more obvious when we moved it to an empty and freshly painted room only to discover that it required a quarter of the space in the room.

When it eventually suited me, I found some information online regarding how to prune and take proper care of this plant and was reminded of several things I already knew about plants – the first of which is that there is a specific way to do it. This; I knew. This is why I didn’t just dive in unlearned. The second: that strength and new growth is possible through pruning, sculpting, and when required – bracing.

The aptly named; and to my surprise, toxic, semblance of vine, tree, and massive leaf, needed all three aspects of pruning, so adhering to the guidance of the hostess of the YouTube channel ‘fun with plants and cats’ I cut back the most obviously superfluous 25-30% and propped it’s main stalk up with the strongest bamboo stake in the garden shed before commenting to myself that as though the framework for growth is in place, it’s not where I’d like it to be just yet.

For starters, it’s amazing that the cumulative 12 minutes of time I’ve invested (7 of which were spent watching a video) has led to an expectation of performance based on my investment. It’s also interesting that I began to relate to it, and even as I write this the parallels between the structure and framework I’ve given it and the structure and framework I am giving myself make for easy comparison.

This is the strongest and most ridiculous plant in the house, and thus it takes up a lot of attention. It is loud and boisterous, and at times obnoxious – but it is also the most obviously in-need of assistance, guidance, and nurturing of all of it’s leafy brothers and sisters here. It is beautifully vulnerable but it is not weak.

Perhaps I could stand to be a bit more vulnerable as well.

the most happy

“The revelation hasn’t been “you were happier when you were leaner” because I know that’s superficial bullshit. The truth of the matter is that challenging myself physically brings joy into my life.”

When were you the most happy with your appearance? Chances are decent that you didn’t know it at the time.

I suffer from a bit of body dysmorphia. That’s obviously a self diagnosis, and I’m inclined to downplay it a bit because I’m fairly certain that most of us have a touch of it. I recently stumbled across some old shirtless pictures of myself – no, not the old fat guy pictures, the ones from last year and the year before when I was training for triathlon and rolled that training into a half-marathon run.

What I saw at that time was problematic flab, negligible as it was.
What I see now is that my transformation was truly incredible. Needless to say I’m no longer in that kind of shape, but I can honestly say I’m not far off. I’m less than 15 lbs heavier now, and I am that way because of how hard I was training at the time and I’m certain that a bunch of that weight is muscle. Ultimately the difference between 192 lbs and 180 lbs is not much.

So I opted to dig into what kind of gym efforts I was doing at those times, and how much I was eating, what my protein sources were – everything. I changed my diet a while back to see what would happen, and shortly thereafter some heavy emotional stuff came my way that knocked me off course a bit. I began training less, and with less intensity because my attention was needed elsewhere, and I began eating less because I wasn’t training as hard… so I’m elated to say that my weight hasn’t fluctuated due to poor diet – it’s holding steady, really… but not at a place I would like it to hold steady, necessarily.

All in all, I’m feeling the pull back toward my disciplined morning practice, my purpose-driven workout regime and my optimized diet, and have been making great strides in pursuit of that.

The revelation hasn’t been “you were happier when you were leaner” because I know that’s superficial bullshit. The truth of the matter is that challenging myself physically brings joy into my life. I would like to reclaim that. The thing I see in the mirror now that I don’t like isn’t just pudge… it’s the reflection someone who knows he can do more.

What I’ve learned about happiness is this: Accomplishing tasks will not make you happy. Whatever your level of happiness was when you took on the challenge will be the same after you accomplish the task. You have to be happy where you are if you want to be happy where you’re going.

So I know fine-tuning my body won’t make me happy.
Trying my best, and living with purpose, though… that’s another thing.

The joy you have at the top of the mountain is the joy you bring with you.