The Minutiae of It All. Or—Don't Sweat The Small Stuff

I 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 the entire quality of their health pivots. In an environment rife with limited options, gated by trolls, and an unfathomable amount of choices and information this is not surprising. When we are suffering and we hear this thing or that might be responsible, our natural inclination as humans is to consider it, anything to relieve the unpleasantness. We also do this to wrest some semblance of control from a seemingly uncontrollable world.

The problem is that our health absolutely does not hinge on trivial things such as trace (natural) hormones in food, EMF emitted by cables or weak electronic devices, or the composition ratio of macros in your meals. There are hormones in nearly every food we eat, EMF is emitted by the sun, stars, and the earth itself, and as an animal of natural origin our body long ago adapted to be quite versatile in its ability to assimilate nutrients and maintain health from a wide variety of food sources. Our bodies are much more resilient to these effects as is evidenced by our continued survival in the face of serious industrial poisoning from endocrine disrupting toxins, chlorine, lead, and mercury, breathing toxic air from vehicles, power plants, and oil refineries, and starving and depriving ourselves of the very calories and nutrients we need for survival in the name of looking skinny.

Health hinges on bigger factors, long arcs of dietary habits, and persistent elements such as bacterial and viral interference with our physiology. Most people don’t know this, especially not antagonistic trolls who hunt forums for someone to quarrel with, and fill the absence of real knowledge with fear-mongering and hypersensitivity to things which are actually trivial in attempts to belong to the community by appearing as an authority, and the presence of these types chases away people like me who are actually more informed but less willing to put up with abuse and harassment and the very low bar of human behavior that are these cesspools, and so they are dominated by those who are loud, not those who are helpful. The sad fact is though that many of these places are where people turn for help, and instead of receiving rational, critical thought and information the emphasis is instead on things that sound scary and unhelpful but which in reality are no more serious than what we are already equipped to deal with as human beings, and which are certainly less of a problem than other, more serious contributors to ill health.

Even I, who am an advocate of avoiding common wheat gluten, the exposure to which will contribute to the development of metabolic disease and even cancer, will still have pizza occasionally. Of course, there are serious things which can alter the health of the body, and it can be difficult to decide which things are worth your time and which are not. My book goes in depth into the big things which contribute to ill health, so if it’s not in my book it’s likely not a problem. Often when we come up against walls and feel stuck in our progress we are also tempted to believe that some exotic, unknown variable if it could simply be discovered would turn the tide for us. There is one easy barometer by which you can measure whether or not information is helpful, and that is the proportionality. If some information is said to be the end-all, of paramount concern singular to other factors, it is likely bull-shit, and I have found that the less a person really understands about health and wellness the more likely they are to fixate on a very limited number of things or to overemphasize perilousness and engage in authoritarian type behavior. Even strong EMF signals can be resisted by healthy metabolisms, significant mercury poisoning can be resolved, and our liver and other organs are designed to filter out hormones and other toxic exposure. The body is not weak. It is mightily capable, and you can put more trust in it while facilitating its best performance by suppling high quality nutrients, abundant calories, and all the other things it needs to thrive like sunlight, social interaction, and sweeping your side of the street through amends, integrity, and personal responsibility. In the end we die because we ignore the big things, not miss the small ones, so take a step back, a deep breath, and enjoy your life.