SION

I’ll start by saying that I am nowhere close to being a disciplined person.

I am not one of those people who wakes up at 5 a.m., drinks some disgusting green smoothie, runs five miles, takes an ice bath and then lectures everyone else about how easy it is to be healthy.

I eat fast food all the time. I hate working out. There are days where even taking a shower or brushing my teeth feels like something I have to negotiate with myself over.

So, no, this is not going to be some health guru pretending he has everything figured out.

I don’t.

What I am trying to do, though, is recognize that a lot of my behaviors are self-destructive and slowly start replacing them with better ones.

I am losing weight. I am walking more. I am getting outside and actually letting the sun touch my skin instead of sitting inside all day like some cave creature. When I do shower, I have started using facial cleansers instead of just standing under hot water for ten minutes. When I brush my teeth, I scrape my tongue too.

Small things.

Probably things most normal adults have been doing their entire lives without thinking about them.

For me, they count as progress.

I am trying.

That is really the point of this protocol.

I want a place where I can write down the structure I am trying to build for my life and keep track of the things I am doing to become a healthier person. Part of it is accountability, and part of it is because my brain works better when I can turn something vague like “be healthier” into an actual list of things I am supposed to do.

Eat better.

Walk.

Lose weight.

Sleep better.

Take care of my teeth.

Take care of my skin.

Get blood work.

Take the medications and supplements I decide are worth taking.

Basically, stop treating my body like it is some rental car I plan on returning with an empty gas tank and cigarette burns in the seats.

One thing I notice whenever people talk about improving their health online is that there is always someone waiting to tell them to relax.

“Just live your life.”

“Everything in moderation.”

“You could get hit by a bus tomorrow.”

Okay.

I think a lot of that is cope.

Obviously, there is a point where obsessing over health probably becomes unhealthy itself. I don’t want to spend every waking second terrified that a hamburger shaved seventeen minutes off my lifespan.

At the same time, I don’t understand why making reasonable attempts to live longer is treated like some rejection of living.

I want to live.

That is the entire fucking point.

I want to live for as long as I reasonably can, and I would prefer that the later years of my life are spent walking around and doing things rather than being trapped inside a body that I destroyed through decades of neglect.

We already make choices like this constantly.

People wear sunscreen because they don’t want skin cancer. They get vaccines because they don’t want diseases. They exercise because they want their heart to work better. They take blood pressure medication because having your arteries explode is generally considered undesirable.

None of this means you have stopped enjoying life.

It means you would like to continue having one.

There are also more experimental things that interest me.

Metformin is one example. It is an old diabetes medication that has gotten attention from people interested in longevity, including people who are not diabetic. Whether it actually extends the lifespan of healthy humans is still something being studied, so I am not presenting it as some magic immortality pill.

But the broader idea interests me.

If there eventually turns out to be good evidence that taking a cheap tablet every morning could meaningfully improve my odds of living longer or staying healthier, why wouldn’t I consider doing it?

The same goes for anything else.

I want to follow the science as it develops, make reasonable decisions based on the evidence available and experiment with things that I think have a favorable balance of risk and reward.

Maybe some of it will turn out to be useless.

Maybe ten years from now I will read this and laugh at half the shit I was doing.

That’s fine.

I would rather be the person making an imperfect attempt to take care of himself than the person doing absolutely nothing because the science wasn’t perfect yet.

Life is a game after all.

I have already spent enough time playing mine poorly.

So, this page will eventually contain the protocol I am trying to follow: what I eat, what I take, what I track, what I am trying to improve and probably all the ways I fail to follow my own rules.

For now, consider this the introduction.

Cheers