The promising things in life mean nothing when your soul is as empty as a late 90's AOL sub-category chatroom. By the time I was able to have a legal drink my depression was a Shakespearean tempest, having grown over four years from a gentle glumness into a great, black dragon of despair.
Read MoreI had my first orgasm just before turning twelve. It happened under the sheets late one night while quarantined in a room with all five of my younger siblings. My father was remodeling the house we lived in, one-half entombed in a wall of clear plastic to keep the construction dust from contaminating what spare livable space remained.
Read MoreCoffee. God. Thank God. Coffee is amazing. Coffee is life. Without coffee I probably wouldn’t have survived my brush with cancer and thyroid disease, and certainly not my depression (which I almost didn’t). Many times during my journey I often questioned whether coffee was hurting or helping. There is no shortage of people who believe it to be harmful.
Read MoreMicrogreens are hands down some of the most healthy foods you can eat. They are so healthy, in fact, they are one of the few foods you can actually feel making you better after you eat them. The reason that microgreens are so healthy is because they have such compact nutrition both from the seed from which it germinated and the early burst of other nutrients created in the early stages of growth…
Read MoreWhen my health first started to really go downhill in my mid-twenties I thought that I could probably find relief in cutting back on my meat consumption. Fruits and vegetables are, after all, the most foundational form of nutrition that we have as a species, and plant-free diets are pretty obviously harmful to our health—While it is possible for people to get by on meat-free diets, health plummets pretty quickly when we do the opposite.
Read MoreI spend much of my time ruminating on the possible origins of who and why we are as human beings and the various dynamics that might have lead to establish everything from the size of our brains to the reasons we enjoy fried potato chips (it’s because they resemble crunchy bugs which roughly four billion people on the planet still consume).
Read MoreOn days like today it’s easy to believe the world is going to shit. One of my friends committed suicide. I’d known he was having a hard time. It’s one of those things you can just see even if they don’t say it. I met Ben way back in like 2003 or 2004 and we had sex almost daily until I moved to LA. If I hadn’t moved we would have certainly got together. He was one of the most beautiful boys I had ever seen—ecstatic for life, tanned, hair sun-bleached from a summer job
Read MoreThe collective memory of the waking public is short indeed. After George W. Bush nearly bankrupted our country we turned around just eight years later and elected another serial failure with a long history of bankruptcies and financial mismanagement. When it comes to diets the same lapse of history lessons is even more severe. It wasn’t that long ago that the Atkin’s diet took hold of America and excited dieters who reveled in the possibility of an all meat and fat diet being healthy.
Read MoreGratin is the most comforting French comfort food and is not hard nor time consuming to make. Though a gratin is technically any dish with a crunchy top, it has typically come to reflect one which is filled with cream and a carbohydrate and topped with cheese. While a gratin can be made of anything—
Read MoreI get a lot of questions from the people I coach about things which they have read about or been advised on from places like forums or facebook, and more times than not these issues come with an emotional charge to them, as if eating carbohydrate with fats or the EMF from a cable is the pin on which their entire quality of their health pivots.
Read MoreMushrooms are a great source of nutrition, and cream of mushroom is really easy to make, easy to digest, and supportive of a healthy metabolism. But most cream of mushroom makes me angry—over flavoring with herbs or spices will mask the mushroom, and most recipes turn this dish into nothing more than a bisque or purée with no heft which leaves you underwhelmed yet somehow overfull
Read MoreJust a few years ago I was working with a young lady who had been experiencing some health issues. She already had two children and while she wasn’t trying to get pregnant again she also wasn’t not trying. She noticed that she didn’t conceive even though they weren’t using any kind of protection.
Read MoreWhen you’re struggling with thyroid cancer the least of your worries is what kind of lube to use during sex. But after I started to get better and learned how to restore my ability to even get aroused at all I began to notice something very strange in regard to lube that I had never noticed when I was younger and able to fuck through the most egregious interruptions
Read MoreI was almost fourteen-years old when I gathered the courage to draw my first penis. I was alone at my desk during a rare moment of privacy in our bustling household. Out of fear I drew the penis fairly small in the middle of a blank white sheet of paper in case anyone barged in so that I could quickly cover it with one hand. The penis was beautiful, not exactly like my own but more like one I might like to see, perhaps that of an older boy with more experience. Drawing it made me feel more whole…
Read MoreFood fortification has been a standard practice in Western industrial nations ever since mass produced nutrients became a possibility. The advent of fortification really took off with the addition of iron to wheat flour in a misguided attempt to help populations suffering from anemia. Any simple minded person can see that a lack of iron exposure is not a cause of anemia…
Read MoreMost people find getting vegetables to be rather boring simply because they see vegetables as a necessary evil instead of something to be cherished. Zucchini is a great vegetable which can be equally bland as satisfying, but pesto also has hidden vegetables due to lots of vitamin K rich basil disguised by oily, garlic-y, olive-y goodness.
Read MoreMost people think of desserts as something to get fat to. But as I point out in my book, Fuck Portion Control that is absolutely not how fat works. We get fat when there are significant stressors to our metabolic health—it is a protective mechanism against death, and in most people this a result of gut microbial dysbiosis.
Read MoreCommon wheat is murder on our gastrointestinal systems. Gluten from strains of red, white, and winter wheat are impossible for our bodies to digest, and even seemingly healthy people will suffer the effects of eating it. Heirloom grains such as spelt, einkorn, and kamut are not only easier to digest—they taste better.
Read MoreChicken is one of the meats which should absolutely be consumed organic. Animal fats absorb agricultural toxins like pesticides and dioxins, but chicken fat is also already not the best fat to consume for our own metabolic health, and too much chicken can contribute to metabolic decline or prevent you from healing things like thyroid disease, hair loss, or even cancer if eaten in excess or prepared incorrectly.
Read MoreChatting with Austin at Heightened Living about EMFs, Metabolic Health, Drugs, Sleepiness, and a whole lot of other random things. There is also an audio podcast stream if you prefer that…
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