The Boring Path to Health

Estimated Read Time: 8 Minutes

Nine weeks ago I started this series with a question I genuinely didn't know the full answer to. I had suspicions, twenty years of working in health and fitness gives you a strong sense that something is off, but I wanted to follow the trail and understand how we actually got here.

The other articles in this series were written over the course of the last year and edited as I released them week by week. This one is different. I wanted to write it in real time, after reading through the whole series from beginning to end, so I could react to it the way a reader would.

What I found confirmed something I had felt for a long time but never fully articulated.

A system driven by money and incentive is never going to be a system that keeps your health as its primary concern. It's going to find better and better ways to feed itself. The food industry made processed food increasingly unavoidable. The pharmaceutical industry made medi...

The Convenience Trap

Estimated Read Time: 10 Minutes

Last week we established that attention is the gateway. Before any industry can change your behavior, it has to capture your focus first. This week is about what happens next.

A few months ago my phone died in the parking lot of a movie theatre about fifteen or twenty minutes from home. No charger in the car. Just me, a dead screen, and a route I had driven probably a dozen times.

I sat there for a second longer than I'd like to admit.

I knew the general direction. I knew some of the landmarks. And I made it home fine, taking a couple of wrong turns before I figured it out. But what stuck with me wasn't the inconvenience of a dead phone. It was the realization that hit somewhere on the drive back. We moved to Florida about two and a half years ago, and when we first got here I leaned on GPS constantly. New roads, unfamiliar neighborhoods, figuring out where everything was. That made complete sense at the time. What I didn't noti...

The War for Your Attention

Estimated Read Time: 12 Minutes

Last week we followed the money through modern healthcare. Chronic disease as an economic engine, statins, GLP-1 medications, the incentives that reward treatment over prevention. By the end of it one thing kept nagging at me. None of those products become billion-dollar industries simply because they exist. Before someone asks their doctor about a medication, orders the food, or downloads the app, something else has to happen first.

They have to notice it.

A few weeks ago I was standing in line at the grocery store and noticed something.

Nobody was doing nothing.

Every single person had their phone out. The guy in front of me. The woman behind me. Teenagers. Parents. Even the cashier glanced at a screen between customers. Ten years ago, standing in line meant standing in line. Maybe you looked at the magazines by the register. Maybe you watched people. Maybe you just waited. Thirty seconds of idle time was just thirty ...

The Business of Being Sick

Estimated read time: 12 minutes

Last week we traced how modern medicine became extraordinarily good at treating disease while gradually placing less emphasis on understanding how health is created in the first place. By the end of that article, one question kept following me. If prevention genuinely works, and the evidence that it does is not particularly controversial, why does so much of our healthcare economy still revolve around treating chronic disease after it develops rather than preventing it?

To answer that, I had to stop thinking about healthcare as a profession and start thinking about it as an industry.

In 2023, Americans spent nearly five trillion dollars on healthcare. That's roughly fourteen thousand five hundred dollars for every man, woman, and child in the country, accounting for about seventeen percent of the entire U.S. economy. If the American healthcare system were its own country, its economy would rank among the largest on Earth....

How Healthcare Lost Health

Estimated read time: 14 min

Last week we looked at how movement quietly disappeared from everyday life. Not exercise, actual movement, the kind that used to just happen as part of being a person. Walking to things, carrying things, using your body as part of a normal day. We traced how industrialization, the car, the desk job, and the screen slowly removed it from daily life without anyone really deciding that was fine. And at the end of that article, a bigger question started forming. If food and movement have such an enormous influence on long-term health, why do they seem to play such a surprisingly small role in the healthcare system?

That's what this week is about.

Most people know the feeling.

You wait weeks for the appointment, sometimes months. You fill out the same forms you filled out last time, sit in the waiting room longer than expected, get called back, have your blood pressure taken by someone who doesn't make eye contact, answer a few que...

The Day We Stopped Moving

Estimated read time: 8 minutes

Last week was about cooking, how preparing food slowly shifted from being a normal part of daily life into something people feel like they don't have time for anymore. A pattern kept showing up that I couldn't quite shake.

As things became more convenient, they also became easier to opt out of. Cooking wasn't the only place that happened.

A few years ago I moved from Washington DC to Florida. There were a lot of reasons for the move, but one thing I didn't see coming was how much it would change how much I actually moved throughout the day.

In DC, walking was just part of the deal. I walked to restaurants, coffee shops, the grocery store, meetings. If I needed to run an errand there was a decent chance I'd cover a mile or two without really thinking about it. Movement wasn't something I planned. It just happened because the city made it happen.

Florida is a different experience. Almost everything requires a car. Grocery sto...

 The Day We Stopped Cooking

estimated read time: 12 minutes

Last week, we spent an entire article talking about fat. Eggs. Butter. Cholesterol. The Seven Countries Study. The low-fat movement. We followed the story of how a complicated health problem gradually became associated with a single nutrient and how that idea eventually shaped everything from government guidelines to grocery store shelves. But by the time I finished writing it, the thing that kept sticking with me wasn't fat at all. It was a detail that had been quietly sitting in the background the entire time. While everyone was busy arguing about fat and sugar, people were spending less and less time preparing food themselves.

A client told me recently that they wanted to eat healthier but didn't have time to cook.

The conversation moved on almost immediately. We talked about protein. We talked about meal planning. We talked about a few practical ways to make healthy eating fit into a busy schedule. It was a productive ...

How We Learned to Fear the Wrong Foods

Estimated Read Time: 9 Minutes

Last week we traced how tobacco companies quietly bought their way into the American food industry and brought decades of expertise in engineering habit and repeat consumption with them. What I found when I kept digging was stranger than I expected.

When I was thirty-one I started having serious gut health issues. The kind that make you wonder if something is genuinely wrong. Chronic bloating, inflammation, symptoms that didn't resolve no matter what I adjusted. I'd spent years working in health and fitness at that point and knew the human body reasonably well, but this was beyond what I could figure out on my own. So I went to get bloodwork done and sat across from my doctor hoping to understand what was going on.

The thing he zeroed in on wasn't my gut. It was my cholesterol. Specifically my LDL, the so-called bad cholesterol, which was elevated. His recommendation was a low cholesterol diet or a statin. I wa...

The Day Cigarette Companies Took Over Your Pantry

Estimated Read Time: 10 Minutes

Last week I wrote that maybe you're not broken. Maybe you're just living in a weird time. This week I want to show you one of the first things that made me stop and say: wait, what?

Oddly enough, it starts with school lunch.

If you grew up in the 80s, 90s, or early 2000s, you probably remember the food. Lunchables. Capri Sun. Kool-Aid. Oreos. Ritz Crackers. Fruit snacks. Pudding cups. Tiny bags of chips that somehow tasted better when they came out of somebody else's lunchbox. There was always that one kid who had the good snacks. The kid everyone wanted to trade with. The kid running a small black-market economy out of his lunchbox, somehow turning two fruit roll-ups into a package of Oreos and a Capri Sun before recess was over.

Nobody thought twice about any of it. These foods weren't controversial. They weren't viewed as unusual. They were just there, woven into childhood the same way Saturday ...

You're Not Broken. You're Living in a Weird Time.

8 minute read

A few weeks ago I caught myself standing in my kitchen eating dinner while simultaneously scrolling Instagram, half-listening to a podcast, and replying to a text message that absolutely could have waited until tomorrow. I had one of those moments where you suddenly become aware of what you're doing in real time, almost like your brain briefly zooms out and goes:

"Dude. What am I doing?"

The thing is, I wasn't even surprised. That's what got me. I've been doing some version of that routine for years and it barely registers anymore. Most people have. You probably know exactly what I'm talking about because you've done it too, maybe this morning, maybe ten minutes ago. Wake up exhausted. Drink caffeine just to feel functional. Stare at screens all day. Eat lunch while answering emails. Listen to a podcast about reducing stress while multitasking six other things. Scroll social media while watching TV. Climb into bed exha...