Health For Internet Hustlers
(Part One, Probably)
Since the last time I was blogging regularly, I started taking my health a lot more seriously. I’ve had a number of health issues that have plagued me everywhere from all my life (I’ve had insomnia issues due to Nightmare Disorder since my teenage years) through to a couple of years back, a traumatic injury to my foot. (I’ll spare the details.)
As I am getting older now, I don’t have the 20’s-something-guy-energy where you just push through, heal and so on. Also, with my first grey hair (I have two just besides my left ear,) I became the recipient of ancient wisdom: you’re not going to live forever and you only get one body.
With that said, I decided to stop being stubborn and sort myself out.
Now…
A preface to this is that, issues aside, I’ve never been unhealthy to any real extent. I don’t drink, smoke, do drugs, engage in anything particularly risky. Well, at least in a way that compromises physical health. My diet has always been decent in terms of not eating huge amounts of junk food or having a sweet tooth.
I bring those things up because ultimately, if you want to improve your health and you’ve got obvious flaws like the above, those are the difficult-to-get yet still low-hanging fruit.
If, like me you’re not particularly interesting partial to any obvious vices, then taking care of health is really a case of taking care of the big stuff and then dealing increasingly with the smaller details.
Of course, I got all a bit obsessive-compulsive with certain aspects as I do with everything else. Let’s look at the more “normal” stuff though.
Diet
Diet is going to be the first Pareto Principle 80/20 move you can make. Also, look at it from the following points of view:
- You are going to have to eat every day for the rest of your life. You might as well get good at the skill of feeding yourself
- Outside of drugs/chemicals, diet is probably the way poisons or bad environmental factors are most likely to enter your body
- Diet is a lynchpin that everything else rests on; you can exercise like a mad man (see the section below,) work a ton of hours, or take it easy and do some minimal training – your food intake dictates how you’ll succeed at that while retaining health
- Learning to cook well returns a massive improvement on life quality, finances and while it’s a time sink at first, as you get better and more ambitious, you can create pretty sophisticated systems (that then play into other stuff which we’ll talk about in a later instalment)
As a workflow, I suggest:
- Downloading a calorie tracking app to see what your current intake is, (mine was a lot lower than I thought, and coincidentally, sugars and other bad stuff made up a higher percentage despite being low overall)
- Making a handful of decent meals that you can cook well, quickly and can stomach eating regularly. Log them in the tracker, make sure you get what you need
- Get more ambitious; add to your meal rotation, try new stuff, try and emulate foods you’d get when out
You can go a long way doing this.
Exercise
I’ve always been reasonably active. I’d walk, swim, and when I’m not working, don’t really sit still for long.
Then back in 2018 I started getting weird dizzy spells. The problem resolved itself, but not until I’d had over a year of tests, scans and all sorts. I’m still none-the-wiser as to what it was.
This then led into Covid when I became a couch potato. I got a bit skinny-fat for the first time and overall, it wasn’t great. My health suffered through niggling little issues that mostly came from sitting and working and not doing anything good to combat it.
After Covid, I decided I needed to sort myself out, (shout out to the friends who bullied me relentlessly about joining the gym) and then went a bit mad on the flipside.
Having done a lot of stuff, I think there are three main areas for physical fitness that will pay dividends for your continued success as a writer/hustler:
- Lifting weights
- Cardiovascular work
- Mobility and flexibility work
Now, I’m not an expert in any of these, and you can all find people who can talk about the intricacies far better than I can. However… mixing and matching the three, (I tried to do all of them, all at the same time, without changing my diet accordingly,) gives the best benefit if you’re sensible.
They all share a symbiotic relationship. So, for instance, when I started lifting, I had zero endurance full stop. I could lift weights, but my heart rate would shoot up and I’d be done in 15 minutes. When I started training cardio, my endurance went up and my muscular endurance followed it.
I was stiff as health, hence the mobility. I do yoga regularly and now I do more concentrated mobility work as well. This is made a lot easier by lifting weights. (e.g. if you want to stand well on one-foot, you can do hours of yoga at a low level or you can do heavy calf raises with every lifting session for three weeks and you’ll make more progress.)
And with cardio; high levels of cardio make life easier in all kinds of ways but too much intensity or duration is the only way I’ve found to overtrain, (and believe me… I couldn’t remember people’s names or addresses at one point.)
Stress
Here’s the missing piece for general wellness that probably affects you if you’re a cold-blooded internet pirate hustler like me. (Obviously, that sentence is 100% true and %100 tongue-in-cheek.)
I think I’ve been pretty old-fashioned, (or maybe just stupid,) when it comes to my attitude towards work and stress.
Push through it. Deal with it. Bottle whatever else is left up.
This is deleterious to your health and if you recognise yourself in that, you need to change course immediately.
Stress is a killer, and even when it doesn’t kill, it ruins the ecosystem that is you – not just your body but everything else.
It needs to be limited but this little ditty has gone on for longer than I thought. More on this to follow.