I enjoy experimenting with my diet, as my umpteen posts on the subject illustrate. I learnt the term ‘bio-hacking’ recently, and I suppose I am low level doing that in my quest to feel the best I can feel. What I like the most, is seeing the variety of ways my body responds to different foods, positive and negative. I wish more people would do it: figuring out the best clean diet for yourself, plus adequate exercise, is simple preventative healthcare. The more you read about nutrition, the more you realise how shaky the foundations of this field are. For starters, most nutritional studies are observational studies, rather than interventional ones. This means that they rely on people self-reporting what they eat, and also cannot properly account for other factors in a person’s life which may be impacting on the results. So when they say ‘eat your leafy greens’, they aren’t
I started the novel I am currently writing, Tools Down, in 2019 when I was bored out of my mind at my job. I would wake up at 6am and write an hour before work; however, I was derailed by a sexual assault which my wanker boss found hilarious. So I downed tools in real life, walked out, and then the pandemic struck. During the pandemic, I wrote a memoir which I finished on New Years Eve, 2022. I then attempted to come back to Tools Down this year, in between the second and third edits of the memoir and the agent submission package creation. Unfortunately, this proved a very unproductive toing and froing of my attention. As such, I have struggled to get into Tools Down at all. This struggle turned into full-blown procrastination after I submitted my memoir to agents. I could tell that the anxiety from that—one rejection
Despite my earlier commitment to stick with the carnivore diet for a full three months, I reluctantly started adding plants back in to my diet a few weeks ago. I got a spot/zit, and as that is a novel experience for me (I rarely get them, not even when I was a teen), I behaved like I was twelve and picked it. This resulted in a strange hypertrophic scar which persisted for a couple of weeks, something I have never experienced before. This suggested to me that I was deficient in something, likely the vitamins E and/or C. So, I reluctantly started adding in some plants to my diet. I genuinely felt incredible eating only animal-based foods. To recap, my mood was significantly improved (to the point that people asked me if I was high, to which I replied: HIGH ON MEAT!), my tendonitis, joint stiffness, and muscle tension went away
When I turned vegetarian at aged 13, it was due to making the connection between the sweet lambs I would help bottle feed on my dad’s friend’s farm, and the (delicious) lamb chop on my plate. I decided that I didn’t want to kill an animal if I could survive without eating them. I remained vegetarian for over twenty years until it became clear that eating that way was compromising my health. I was originally only going to add in fish to my diet, but I went to Uzbekistan shortly after ending my vegetarianism and was confronted with a (delicious) lamb kebab and that was the end of pescatarian me. Despite realising that I needed to eat meat to be healthy, the ethics around meat eating have not left me. This is why I refuse to buy cheap meat: not only for my health (no thanks to all those antibiotics and Omega