I’m returning to the best part of my single life after divorcing and marrying Doris. I deeply love here and don’t regret any decision. But I have to just own up to the fact that a lot of changes to my life, health, and happiness happened after getting married. Here’s a summary I’ll share in the hopes of helping some other unsuspecting person out there going through the same thing:
I don’t have my own refrigerator. This might seem like a small thing but my entire diet and health have been a major casualty to this one change. Doris and Otto are foodies and love stuffing the fridge and freezer to maximum capacity and rearranging the food in it about every two weeks. Every time I lose my shit because my food routing is completely blown to hell. I don’t have any control over what I eat because I can’t fucking find anything. When I had my own fridge I knew the exact location of every item and could create a smoothy in under five minutes because of the muscle memory. Solution: buy my own fucking fridge and find someplace in our shitting apartment kitchen for it.
I don’t eat on the same schedule as everyone else. Every time I try to be a good family member and wait for meals I get fucked. Doris schedule is all over the place, plus I don’t even really want to eat the amazing meals she makes. They are so amazing, and so fucking bad for me. They are usually full of carbs and meat and food I cannot digest. She tries so hard to balance our meals and guilty when I get sick. But it isn’t her fault. I’m the only one who can control all those variables. Solution: Prepare my own meals and eat on my own schedule.
The food I need/want is never in the house. Depending on another to purchase the food you need, when you need it is a disaster waiting to happen. Whether it is water, coffee, bananas, or beer, expecting another family member to know everything to you need and be responsible for getting it to you in the right time frame and putting it someplace you can find it is just plain unrealistic. This never works. The answer is to do what I did when we were first married. Solution: Do your own shopping and manage your own food storage area.
Eating meat fucks up my system (and the world’s). The best physical shape I have ever been in, that photo of me on my Twitch “About” page was when I was vegan. I can’t explain all the reasons why, and I don’t care. For me there is overwhelming objective evidence that when I followed a vegan diet I was the healthiest I have ever been. I did eat eggs and I went so far as to no longer purchase products that promoted exploitation of animals beyond the natural balance that other humans have had with the natural world. I’m not particularly interested in the implications and perceptions of others. It works for me and I don’t have to be a dick about it. My best guess about my health is that my digestive system is aging and been really traumatized by years of triathlete diet experimentation. Digesting any meat is really hard on my system. For some reason, I don’t have the same problem with sushi fish. Solution: Go vegan-ish again, stop eating meat except eggs and sushi.
My digestive system is fucked. All of my digestive track seems fucked up in some way. I don’t get nutrients from food the way I should. I don’t know all the reasons and I don’t give a fuck. I do know, that I accidentally discovered the solution when I bought a Blendtec blender all those years ago. My diet became 90% liquid. In fact, I had the opposite problem, I would lose so much weight that I had to figure out how to bring back some solid carbs without disrupting my system (sweet potatoes, brown rice, btw, brown rice is the answer for ultra-marathon paddle boarders who are diabetic to control their blood sugar). Solution: Go back to mostly liquid diet, for a while.
I’m still too stressed out. As much as I try, I have a very high-stress level in my life, day to day, I’m failing miserably. Life has gotten much less stressful since going back to corporate and not worrying about money anymore, but other things sneak in to ruin my zen, usually of my own making. Ironically, coding stresses me out. Maybe because I get so intense into it. Gaming definitely stresses me out, even though even Dota2 can sometimes relax me. Music — especially playing it myself — is a huge calming factor. So is doing yoga regularly. Yoga is not just for “soy boys” (even though I am one and proud). It’s transformative when done right. It’s meditation with a physical component that makes you sweat. Running a moderate paces to a consistent cadence does the same thing, for me. Just thinking about those already calms me as I’m writing this. Solution: Return to daily running for 15-20 minutes and 20-40 yoga practice, running when I wake, then voiding, then yoga at home upon return.
All my shit is all over the place. Living in this apartment “temporarily” has been one of the biggest challenges of my life. I have no room at all, have mold growing all around, have a dog that loves to rub her body all over my carpet (I’m allergic) and, until very recently, I didn’t even have a car or bike so I was literally a prisoner of this fucking apartment. I have stuff everywhere that I need to organize, but that was always going to be organized once we moved into a house and now that a house is no longer in the five-year plan I have to starting getting rid of a lot of stuff, including stuff that is useful but not worth keeping around. Plus, I have to prepare for possibility of being forced to live in a New York apartment with most everything I own in a storage unit someplace outside of town. Solution: Get rid of everything that I have not used without the last year, no exceptions.
I’ve been eating wheat. I gave up wheat in any form for three years and saw amazing results. I don’t know if it was latent allergies to gluten or the Monsanto-altered grain, or just the reduction in carbs. But it was a huge factor. As Barry Sears says, “treat anything passing through your mouth as medication, because it is.” This was a major factor is really cutting to 3% body fat. Solution: Stop eating anything with wheat.
I’m eating too many carbs. Wheat or no wheat, I’m eating a lot more empty carbs that I use to. I don’t mind carbs, but they are best when they come from nutrient-rich foods instead. Solution: Stop eating complex and empty carbs, no more bread, pasta, or potatoes in any form.
I’ve been drinking “lactose free” milk. I’m convinced “lactose free” just means they add more sugar to the thing. I went totally non-dairy before and it did wonders. If you think about it, ancient humans didn’t have much dairy at all, if they did it was a specialty. It certainly wasn’t a part of their regular diet. Solution: No more dairy or dairy by products.
I don’t eat nearly as many fruits and veggies. When I was single and would go shopping the only department I would even go to was the produce section. Okay, the frozen section sometimes, but still for frozen produce. I memorized the produce section in every grocery store for miles and could tell you the lowest prices on Roma tomatoes anywhere. These days, I don’t even do my own shopping and when I do I don’t often go to the produce section as much. The hard thing with buying produce is that it goes bad if you don’t eat it. You have to make sure to get the stuff frequently and specifically what you need. This means doing my own shopping to be sure of that, which I can do not that I (finally) have my own car (even though technically every car has been “my” car). Solution: Shop primarily in the produce sections and do my own shopping.
I’ve been drinking more alcohol consistently. Alcohol isn’t bad, it’s too much of it and in what form. Solution: Limit Alcohol per week to equivalent of three Sapporo. Find options without sugar or wheat.
Not eating when I’m hungry. I decided when I was single that I would listen to my gut, how bloated, how inflamed, how hungry, and I would baby it by eating good food even at the slightest pain of hunger. It worked, for me. But that meant I was drinking 4-5 light smoothies a day. It does take time to do that and it is a pain in the ass if the food is hard to get out of the fridge every time, but it really, really worked. Solution: Eat small meals/smoothies when hungry.
Not eating one guac meal per day. I used to make guac and chips my lunch every single day. Avocados provide a solid meal that lasts because of the good fat content. I believe this kept my other cravings at bay because of it. I always make sure to add the lime, and tomato, and cilantro, and green onion and I believe the nutrients in them made it even better. I would pile up as much on a single chip as possible, and near the end started eating it with Romaine lettuce to replace the chips. Solution: Add back one guac meal per day.