Sometimes when I open social media, or even just overhear everyday conversations, I can’t help but marvel at the elaborate adult version of one of my favorite childhood games: telephone.
Back then, it was simple joy, watching something average blossom into the absurd as it was passed from person to person. I remember once playing with my kids and watching them experience that same delight. We didn’t hear the changes along the way, but we knew they were good when the next person burst out laughing before whispering it along.
I can still remember the first time I heard about the Paleo Diet. It seemed straightforward enough: eat like they did in the Paleolithic era. And so I did.
I wanted to lose weight, and an enthusiastic adherent whispered that this was the way. And just like that, my tenure as an anti-modernist began. At the time, I saw agriculture, especially what it had evolved into, as the root of all evil. The bane of my existence. Civilization’s original sin, basically wrapped in shrink wrap and stacked on grocery store shelves.
All the while, I was buying my meat and veggies from the big-box grocery store down the street.
I played my part in the game of telephone too. I remember once getting into a long philosophical debate about milk while preaching the virtues of Paleo. I argued that occasional milk was probably fine. Sure, humans weren’t milking domesticated animals in the Paleolithic era, but if they happened to kill one full of milk, you think they’d just pour it out, let it go to waste? No chance.
I’m pretty sure the person I was proselytizing to walked away that day and became a milk-swilling Paleo adherent from then on.
Paleo reduced my life. I’d set out to lose weight, and I really hadn’t lost much. But I was consumed with the idea of eating “clean” and “natural” food. So much so that I refused to go out to restaurants with my family. Tons of stores were off-limits. Thank God the one down the street had organic, grass-fed/grass-finished beef and a plentiful supply of non-GMO vegetables.
I was also terrifically judgmental. There was a small group of Paleo acolytes at the CrossFit gym I went to at the time. Every morning, a few of them would hit the neighboring grocery store’s breakfast bar and fill up cardboard containers with bacon, snacking on it before and after the Workout Of the Day.
“Bacon is filled with nitrates and sugar!” I wanted to yell at them. But they were all young and in incredible shape, so instead I just judged them silently from across the room.
I pictured someone poisoning their line in the telephone game by giving the thumbs-up to bacon. It made me sad.
Paleo finally came to an end for me when the person who’d originally introduced me to it casually mentioned one day that salt was a big no-no. That was it. That was the bright red line. What’s next, am I supposed to hunt my own meat?
I was out.
Apparently, those poor, savage, prehistoric dudes never got to season their food. Thank God for modernity.
These games of telephone can blossom into the extreme. A choice I decide to make for myself one day, may just grow into something I insist everyone should be doing.
Brandy won’t touch a receipt from the grocery store, apparently they’re poisonous 🤷♂️ (Brandy got to read this before you. She says that while she may have once called the receipts “poisonous” or “toxic,” that’s not actually why she avoids them. She just doesn’t want to handle a useless scrap of paper that’s headed straight for the trash. With that cleared up, I still want it noted that everything I’ve said here is true, including the little dance she performs in an effort not to touch a receipt).
She doesn’t like to drink out of plastic, takes the occasional vitamin, eats organic… she’s a modern-day Health Person. But none of it interrupts her life.
If the person behind the counter insists on handing her the receipt, she’ll do her best to get it dropped into the bag. And if that’s not possible, she’ll just take the damn receipt, without any subtle insinuation that the checkout person is trying to poison her.
(I doubt I’d be as kind if I held her beliefs. Though honestly, if receipts are poisoning people, I feel for the folks who have to hand them out all day. You’d think we’d be seeing symptoms by now. Maybe it’ll be the basis of a class-action lawsuit in the future, like popcorn lung or Roundup.)
These days, I’m trying to take in more points of view, or at least a broader one. The broadest I can muster.
With that said, I can still see the extremes when I look for them.
In the great debate of High Fructose Corn Syrup vs. cane sugar, I’m doing my best to see it from all sides. Will switching from HFCS to “real” sugar raise the cost of Coca-Cola so much that fewer people drink it? Or will it rebrand the product as healthier and expand its reach? I used to smoke organic American Spirits for that very reason, because they were the “healthy” cigarette.
If just as many people consume just as much calorically dense soda (as opposed to the “zero sugar” variety, FKA diet), I suspect the only real winners in that proposed swap will be the cane sugar producers.
BTW, moderation isn’t easy. It’s a juggling act. What do I want from, and with, my body? How do I want to move through life? With my wife, my kids, my work, at home, out in the world. How much diet and exercise, exactly, is necessary for me? To get me going in the direction I want to be going, without losing sight of the rest of my life?
Brandy got me an Oura ring for my birthday in May. It took a couple weeks to get to know me, and then it started spitting out data. The most alarming readout? It rated my cardio capacity as merely fair.
“Fair” is about as brutally low as the Oura ring gets. It doesn’t seem to have a “You’re blowing it, dude” setting, but fair feels close. It’s passive-aggressive in a very clinical, Nordic way. Like, technically you’re alive, but let’s not pretend you’re thriving.
My first instinct? Get addicted to cardio. I genuinely considered becoming a full-blown cardio fiend, scrapping resistance training altogether and getting my heart rate up for as long as possible, every single day. The extreme was calling to me.
Instead, I made a trade: two days of lifting swapped for strict cardio sessions, plus some light cardio added to two of my regular lifting days.
And in just a few short months, I’ve seen huge leaps. All without donning the kerchief of the extremist.
It’s cost me nothing in the other areas of my life. I’m more present, not less. My Oura ring, which initially gave me a cardiovascular age just three years younger than I am, now says I’m 12.5 years younger.
And yet, it still lists my cardio capacity as “fair.”
I guess that just reconfirms what I already know: there is no finish line. The work is never done, and so forth.
If that effort had catapulted me to exceptional cardio capacity, maybe I’d be done. But no such luck.
Life endures.