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Health and Fitness 2014: The Rest of Your Life
I hope that some of you did the NWE Ultimate Health and Fitness
plan. It really is good.
Click
Here for the NWE Ultimate Health and Fitness Series
Now that another year has passed, and I've been monitoring the
endless flood of fitness and food tips that flow forth in our
society, I haven't really found any reason to change it. So, it is
still The Ultimate.
The plan is pretty simple: daily exercise, a raw vegan diet, and a
three-month herbal cleansing program. The results are fantastic.
I talked a lot, in that series, about thinking how you will do these
things for the long term. There are a lot of different approaches
you could take, and I wouldn't want to insist on just one. It's your
life, so make your own plan. However, it also seems to me that
hardly anyone knows what they are doing. People seem lost. I had a
lot of things to say, in that series, about how to go about making
and implementing an eating plan. A Plan for Plan-Making, you might
say.
The herbal cleansing program is really a one-time thing. You can do
a one-month repeat once a year or so, or perhaps try some other
cleansing modality from time to time. But, if you do the big detox
once, and you don't re-tox by eating a bunch of junky stuff, you
should be OK.
I might do the Ejuva Heavy Metal Cleanse this year.
That leaves diet and exercise.
As others have said, I think that diet accounts for maybe 70% of the
results you will get. Exercise is important, but not nearly so
important. Even the simplest kind of daily exercise, such as the
three miles or so a day of walking that a person living a no-car
lifestyle in a place like Osaka or London or New York would
experience, is enough. You can do a lot more than that of course.
And, you should definitely do something.
For me, this year I did a marathon training program in winter and
early spring (the Hanson's Method), which involved six days of
running per week. It was a lot of fun, and definitely moved me
forward as a runner although I'm not sure I'm much faster than
before. This training base is for various events and fun stuff
during the warmer months (but no road marathons). So far, I've done
two: the first was a duathalon, with an 11 mile trail run and a
29-mile bike on a hilly course. I finished second overall on the run
section, out of 44. I'm a weak and sloppy biker (plus I got lost and
added about 2 miles), so that didn't go so well.
My second goal, just one week after the duathalon, was to run the
50K course of the North Face Bear Mountain Endurance Challenge, a
little north of New York City. I didn't enter the event, just ran
the course self-supported, picking up water along the way from
streams and public sources. I also carried all my food, which isn't
so much actually. It took me a piteous 9:53, but I was spending up
to 15 minutes per hour in route finding (stopping to look at the
map), eating, drinking, getting water etc. Slow. Plus, I got lost
and added about 30 minutes right there. Nevertheless, my body felt
great throughout that time. The only real problem was my feet, which
are really not accustomed to this kind of loooong pounding,
especially when wet and with shoes and socks full of sand (muddy),
on a rocky course. The last few hours were rather painful, which
slows things down. This run was five hours longer than anything I've
done before.
I'm not sure that ultra-distance is really my thing, but I have some
other fun stuff planned for the summer. Indeed, I have been
daydreaming a bit about doing the course of the Mohonk "Rock the
Ridge" 50, which is a lot longer but mostly easy gravel carriage
trails, so it might take just about the same time as my Bear
Mountain day and also be a bit drier and less painful on the feet. I
might do it overnight just to make things interesting. I probably
shouldn't get so involved in it but ... maybe I should do it while I
can. The 50 is about the limits of my ambition; to do longer (the
100, which is popular these days) would really require a stepped-up
training schedule of 90+ mile weeks, which is not really something I
want to get involved in as there are more important things to do.
I also want to do a sub-20:00 5K. I did a 20:13 in April, which is
good (personal best) and also a little disappointing since I was
only thirteen seconds off my goal.
I'd like to get a little more serious about biking too. One of the
reasons I wanted to concentrate on running in the cold months is so
that I would build that base to do more biking in the warm months.
No swimming though. I'll drop that to concentrate more on running
and biking.
The point here is: just pick whatever exercise framework rings your
bells, and have fun with it. I'm doing the cardio thing, but if you
want to play basketball or surf, that's fine too.
This leaves the eating part. Most people get really mixed up here.
One of the great advantages of the NWE Ultimate Health and Fitness
plan, including the six months of raw vegan eating, is that it
clears out all your old habits and notions regarding food. You go
all the way back to what is something like a basic animal diet. The
animals all eat raw food. Admittedly, the raw vegan approach is
actually somewhat artificial, because you can't eat bananas and
clementine oranges in winter in upstate New York without the aid of
the modern supermarket. But, nevertheless, the effect is to break
all your ties with whatever you used to eat, and what other people
eat.
Thus, you can start with a clean slate. You can just go on eating in
the raw vegan way if you want, and that would be a good thing to do.
But, if you decide to do something else, you can do so very
deliberately.
For example, let's say that you decide that your long-term eating
plan will not have any dairy products. There are a lot of good
reasons to do so. Most people would have a lot of difficulty with
this. "No cheese? No pizza? No butter? No cream cheese, or sour
cream, or yogurt? Arrrrgh!" This is because they are still chained
by their old eating habits. Guess what: East Asians, from Thailand
to Japan, traditionally do not eat dairy products. Indeed, most of
them are lactose-intolerant. They got by for thousands of years
without it, and developed a lot of wonderful food to eat along the
way too.
There is so much fun to have with food. Instead of thinking that
not-doing this or not-doing that ("no wheat" or "no dairy") is some
kind of deprivation and hardship, you can look at it as a chance to
try something new. Instead of having a grilled cheese sandwich,
again, probably the 4,322th grilled cheese sandwich of your
lifetime, you could have ... a roasted rhubarb/onion/squash dish,
with some brown rice if you like. If you follow this line of
thinking a little bit, pretty soon there are dozens and dozens of
new things you want to try, and in the process of doing so, you
don't even notice that you stopped eating grilled cheese sandwiches.
This is rhubarb season here, and I am in a cycle of experimentation
with rhubarb, during the four weeks or so that my local
natural/organic farmer friend has it available. It's a rather
bizarre vegetable, as it looks like celery and tastes like lime.
Most available rhubarb recipes stink, so I have been making up some
of my own recipes.
Once your have cleared out your old habits and expectations, and
have become comfortable and familiar with a raw vegan pattern, then
doing without dairy is nothing. You've been doing without it for six
months anyway, and it was no big deal.
Over time, I've found that, unless people break their old patterns
in this way, they remained chained to them. For example, even
something like the "paleo" diet, which has no grains, dairy,
processed sugars, etc., nevertheless has a lot of meat. If you ask
the paleo people: "why don't you just try going raw vegan for three
months, just for giggles, and then you can go back to paleo or
whatever," you will probably find that they are intensely attached
to their high-meat habits, and will refuse such an idea completely,
probably with a lot of pseudoscientific babble about how the "paleo"
approach is the best for all situations and all times. However, if
you have been eating raw vegan for a while, then you might try
adding some meat in a "paleo" approach for a few months just for
fun, and if you don't like it you can go back to raw vegan. It's not
a big deal. You've developed the mental flexibility, and mastery
over your habits, to do such things.
A friend of mine, who is actually quite interested in food-related
issues, has been on a round of enthusiasm about ghee. Ghee is Indian
clarified butter. The milk solids are removed from butter, rendering
it clear.
Why would an American today use ghee? She isn't making Indian food.
Well, it might be "better" than butter in some way. OK, then why not
use olive oil, or coconut oil, or lard? Or just plain butter? Or
just fry less, or not at all, and don't use any kinds of
concentrated fats at all. If you don't want dairy products in your
diet, then just get rid of them. If you allow dairy, then just use
butter. My friend actually drinks a lot of milk, which of course has
all the milk solids that she is taking out of the butter to make
ghee. Doesn't make a lot of sense. I concluded that the ultimate
purpose of ghee is to make people who don't want to give up butter,
but who are sensitive to some of the issues with butter, feel a
little better about their diet.
Notice that I said "feel a little better." It doesn't actually
change much of anything. Using ghee instead of butter makes an
infinitesimal difference in your overall diet, and that is likely
cancelled completely if you then drink milk or eat cheese or yogurt.
So, in the end, it is about "feeling better" rather than
accomplishing anything at all.
However, in the process, you waste a lot of time. While you spend
weeks and months enthusing about ghee, and "feeling better" about
your essentially-unchanged diet, a lot of time and effort is
expended but nothing is actually accomplished.
And you wonder why nobody gets any meaningful results.
I figure that ghee was a way to preserve butter (i.e. milk fats) in
the hot Indian climate without refrigeration. Regular butter can be
kept without refrigeration in Northern Europe, like Germany and
France, if you are a little careful about it. But not in India,
where it would likely go rancid rather quickly. And, Indians
probably didn't have a lot of other fats, such as olive oil or
peanut oil which is pretty hard to make unless you have the kind of
mechanical press that was uncommon before the latter half of the
19th century. Also, Indians eat dairy but they seem to have
restrictions on slaughtering animals, which rules out animal fats
like lard. So, the real advantage of ghee is it provides a purified
fat (for things like frying), which is also heat-resistant.
All of which is irrelevant in our time of refrigeration and olive
oil for sale in the supermarket.
If you have been eating raw vegan for six months, then you haven't
been eating butter, or ghee, or frying anything at all. So, you
could continue like this if you want, or, if you want to introduce
fried foods, you can add just a little, and use butter, or bacon
fat, or whatever, and do whatever you want.
The point is, I don't think people can even think about these topics
rationally until they have cleared out their old habits and
patterns. Six months of raw vegan eating does that.
Here's another funny story. In the 1960s, a Japanese-American,
Michio Kushi, decided that the Standard American Diet was unhealthy
(this has been around a long time), and that, to resolve this
problem, he would adopt a "country Japanese" approach based on
vegetables and brown rice. This was called the "genmai saishoku"
diet, which literally means "brown rice" ("genmai") and "vegetables"
("saishoku").
"Genmai saishoku" was a little too exotic for Kushi's American
audience, so it was later named "macrobiotic."
Over time, this "macrobiotic" approach became popular, and before
too long, Japanese people living in Japan, who are always keeping up
on new fashions in the U.S. and Europe, began experimenting with the
"macrobiotic" format as promoted by Kushi. This was called
"makuro-bi," a Japanese condensation of "macrobiotic." (Not "genmai
saishoku.")
However, by this time, in response to the desires of the mostly
American audience, "macrobiotic" had expanded far beyond brown rice
and vegetables, into various "healthy" ways of preparing what
amounts to the Traditional American Diet. Like blueberry muffins,
with less sugar and maybe some white flour alternatives. But -- a
blueberry muffin, which doesn't have much to do with brown rice,
vegetables, and a country Japanese theme.
Now, since my wife is keeping tabs on things that are popular in
Japan, and healthy eating ideas, she had a period of interest in
"makuro-bi," and bought a few "makuro-bi" cookbooks -- in Japanese,
from Japan.
And, she started to make "healthy" blueberry muffins.
I thought this was totally idiotic. "Just make things with brown
rice and vegetables, in a country Japanese tradition," I said, which
is what we were actually eating before this period interest in
"makuro-bi."
No more pseudo-blueberry muffins around here. Thank goodness.
Because, once you make a dozen muffins ... you eat them. It just
works out that way. No no no.
People spend years fooling around with "superfoods," or silly
"nutritionist" approaches to garlic, chia seeds or whatever. All of
this is the outcome, I would say, of the fact that people haven't
really broken their ties with the Standard American Diet. The
thinking process I see is something like this:
"My diet sucks. If I keep eating this stuff, then I will have the
same health problems of all the other sickly, fat people around me."
"However, I don't really want to change what I eat. So, I will
change just 10% of what I eat."
"Since I am changing only 10% of what I eat, that 10% must have
'super-powers' to make up for the fact that I'm not changing the
other 90% of what I eat. So, it had better be some kind of
Vitamineral superfood, chia seed, or acai berry."
You don't really have these issues if you change 100% of what you
eat. There is nothing wrong with your diet that you need to correct
by substituting 10% 'superfoods.' You are already healthy, because
you eat healthy things, like plain old apples and cabbage and
almonds. What do you need a 'superfood' for?
On the other hand, if your diet is 90% unchanged, then the results
will be about 90% the same, no matter how much you want to delude
yourself about 'superfoods.'
The point is, this is all the result of the fact that the great
majority of people are still chained by their habits. Get free of
your habits, and then you can choose to do whatever you feel is
best, in a calculated and deliberate fashion.
There are three basic problems with the Standard American Diet
today. They are:
1) The Traditional American Diet, as was common around 1940
for example, is really not so good. It is based almost completely on
meat, processed grains (mostly wheat, some corn, oats etc.), dairy,
processed oils and white sugar. There might be a few potatoes and
some sweet corn in there. That is why soldiers in the Korean War --
people in their early 20s around 1951 -- already showed the onset of
artherosclerosis.
For example, a ham and cheese sandwich. Obviously, it consists of
white bread, cheese, and ham, perhaps with some mayonnaise (oil and
eggs). There might be a little vegetable element, like a single leaf
of lettuce or some fried onions (in butter), but that is more of a
flavoring than anything.
Hamburger: meat and white bread, maybe some cheese.
Pizza: white bread and cheese.
Fried chicken. Chicken, oils for frying, perhaps some white flour
for breading.
Strawberry pie. Wheat and butter for the crust, which is where most
of the calories are. The calories in the filling are almost entirely
from white sugar, with some strawberries to flavor the sugar.
Banana muffin. Wheat, butter and sugar, with some bananas to add
flavor.
Yogurt: milk and sugar.
Granola: Oats, sugar (honey), oil/butter
Eggs, bacon, toast: meat and white flour
Oatmeal, breakfast cereals: processed grains, eaten with milk and
sugar.
Ice cream. Milk, cream and sugar.
Cream of Broccoli soup: milk, with some broccoli for flavoring
New England Clam Chowder: milk, clams, potatoes.
French Onion Soup: most of the calories come from butter, white
bread, and cheese. In a beef broth.
Green salad. You can have a lot of greens here, although hardly
anyone eats significant amounts of salad if even for the simple
reason that it is almost impossible to do so from the tiny
undersized "salad bowls" common in the U.S. However, almost all the
calories come from the dressing, which almost always contains a lot
of oils, and possibly some cream, cheese, bacon, and sugar or honey.
Other kinds of "salad": Most "salad" in the U.S. is really things
like chicken, ham and cheese on a bed of lettuce. Plus, there are
things like "chicken salad," "pasta salad," and "potato salad,"
which are mostly chicken, pasta (white flour) and potatoes, with
mayonnaise (eggs and oil).
Mashed potatoes. Potatoes of course, often with milk, butter, and
salt.
Baked potatoes. Potatoes with butter, sour cream and salt.
French fries, and other fried foods: the calories are mostly from
oils.
2) Even if you are actually eating the Traditional American
Diet as it might have existed in 1940, the quality of food today is
much lower. Wheat today is not the wheat of 1940, due to
considerable genetic engineering, which seems to be causing all
kinds of problems. Corn and soy are GMO today. Cheap oils, such as
"canola" (rapeseed) and "salad oils," such as "Mazola" (corn oil)
and "Wesson" (soy oil) are all GMO unless specifically indicated as
"organic." Most sugar is from sugar beets instead of sugar cane
today, and sugar beets are GMO. Meats have been drastically degraded
from the pasture-raised, non-GMO-fed beef, pork and chicken of 1940.
Same for dairy. Even a broad range of vegetables have less
nutritional value than they did then, due to soil depletion, and
also due to the fact that vegetable varieties today found in
supermarkets have been bred for durability during transport and long
shelf life, which generally renders them less nutritious.
3) Most people today aren't even eating the Traditional
American Diet, but are eating a ton of processed foods such as soda
drinks (sugars and artificial flavorings) and other canned drinks
(Snapple and Tazo teas have as much sugar as Coke, and not much
else), and various snack foods (GMO grains, GMO oils, salt, white
sugar, chemical crap). Even when people think they are eating a
Traditional American dish, like an apple pie, it is usually full of
weird chemicals. Just look at the list of ingredients in the apple
pie for sale at a supermarket.
I find that it is good to think about what your diet is based on.
Start from the bottom up. If the Standard American Diet is based on
meat, dairy, processed grains, sugar, and oils, then what would be a
better solution? Obviously, the raw vegan diet is based mostly on
fruit (in terms of calorie sources at least), with a lot of
vegetables and greens, plus a little oils mostly in salad dressings
although I went almost entirely to no-oil dressings myself. Oil in
salad dressing doesn't actually have any meaningful flavor. It does
add a sort of texture, but I think the main reason it is in there is
to make salad seem "more filling," because your body understands
that the oil has a lot of calories, and green leafy vegetables have
almost none. Well, that is the exact opposite of what I want, so I
just leave it out.
But, you can do it your own way. If you were to take a more varied
cooked-food diet, think about what it is based on. For example, the
traditional Japanese diet (pre-1870) was based on brown rice,
vegetables, and wild meat such as fish and wild game.
Today, you might base a diet on rice, beans, potatoes, vegetables,
fruit, and a little high-quality meat and eggs. You would be
avoiding all the GMO foods, plus problematic wheat. You might add
some other grains, such as (organic) corn, oats, millet, quinoa,
amaranth and so forth, but among the biggies, rice is the obvious
go-to if you ask me. You would allow meat, but in small quantities
(less than 15% of total calories), more of a flavoring or side dish
than anything. Let's say that you decide to eliminate dairy and
white sugar, but allow a little honey here and there. One aspect of
this approach is that, unlike the fruit-heavy supermarket-dependent
raw vegan approach, it could be accomplished with seasonal, local
foods in the colder parts of North America. Things like rice, beans,
potatoes, onions, cabbage and squash keep for a long time over the
winter.
Now the question is: how to you cook things like rice, beans and
potatoes, which are rather drab in their natural state, to make
something that is really delicious? This is not a problem with raw
food, because a watermelon tastes great just as it is.
This is a totally different approach than what 95% of people do,
which is: how do I imitate the wheat-meat-dairy-sugar-based Standard
American Diet without wheat, meat, dairy and sugar? Obviously, this
is idiotic. But, that doesn't keep people from trying to make
"hamburgers" out of soybeans and gluten-free "bread" concocted out
of garbanzo bean flour and xanthan gum, and "chocolate cake" without
wheat flour, sugar, or dairy, which is 98% of what a chocolate cake
actually is.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Start from the bottom up. Once you decide on, for example, rice,
beans, potatoes, vegetables, fruit and so forth, then you just look
for really great ways to make things out of rice, beans, potatoes,
vegetables and fruit, and some meat, eggs and fish in moderation,
which inherently have no need for wheat, sugar, or dairy. Probably
you would get real involved in herbs and spices, and various
vegetable combos, different kinds of sauces, and so forth. Many
cultures have highly developed cuisines based on all of these
things, so you can just take their proven solutions and use them.
For example, if you happen to like meat, you can make something in a
Chinese tradition, which can be "beef with broccoli" (actually more
American than Chinese I think), but which actually consists of white
rice (brown if you like), broccoli, sauce, and maybe 2 oz. of beef
per serving. But, you get a lot of meat flavor, if you want that,
and there was never any need for wheat, sugar or dairy.
Or, if you are a little more "paleo," just eat a big slab of meat or
fish. But, leave out the wheat, dairy and sugar. This is often a
solution for me in restaurants, where I don't really want to be a
food zealot picking around the sides of the menu.
Maybe you like noodles. Corn pasta (organic) can be a good
alternative for Italian pasta dishes, but there are also a lot of
varieties of Asian rice noodles. For example, Thailand's pad thai
noodles are rice, as are Vietnam's pho. Thus, instead of a "rice
noodle badly imitating an Italian wheat pasta," you can just have a
pad thai noodle that is exactly what it is supposed to be, made of
rice. You don't have to make pad thai from pad thai noodles. You can
use it as a base for all kinds of Asian-style noodle dishes,
including Chinese-themed ones, or perhaps Indonesian-themed
approaches.
I am still on basically a 50% raw diet, combined with 50% something
like just described above, mostly vegetable dishes (with a "country
Japanese" theme) with some rice and meat. We could incorporate more
beans and potatoes, but we never seem to get around to it, in part
because it doesn't really fit the Japanese (and other Asian) types
of approaches that we tend to use around here.
Some experimentation along these lines here have been some dishes
with lentils, onions and tomato, variants of which seem to be common
throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa. Also, I put some
rhubarb in a dish with roasted potatoes and onions, with a bit of
maple syrup, soy sauce and marjoram to flavor, which worked pretty
well.
The 50% raw portion is basically breakfast and lunch, which are
typically rather casual. In addition to being very healthy, and also
very tasty, there is hardly any preparation or cleanup with raw
food. No cooking! The convenience is an added bonus.
We have a strong in-the-house/outside-the-house strategy, whereby a
lot of our food guidelines are not so strict outside the house, at a
restaurant or friend's house for example. I might have a sandwich in
a restaurant, with wheat bread, but we have a gluten-free policy
within the house. In effect, it is something like a "10% exceptions"
rule, which is a common element for a lot of long-term healthy
eaters, with our 10% defined as being "outside the house" rather
than "only on Saturday" or some other rule one might use.
Even within the "exceptions" framework, I find that I am happiest if
I don't stray too far from my healthy eating ideals. I actually like
visiting many of the country diners around my area, but I've found
that there is hardly anything there I can eat without regret.
I'm not doing much of anything at all with smoothies these days.
Don't really need to. I've been eating more dried fruit, however,
for whatever that might be worth. I ate a lot of dried fruit during
last year's backpacking trip, and found that it was really good, and
there's a ton of variety if you look into it. Trader Joe's has a
jackpot of dried fruit options.
If you did want to use wheat, I would look into things like spelt or
emmer, which are related to older forms of wheat, perhaps without
the problems of contemporary wheat.
I even suggested a "traditional French" approach, for those who
might want to explore that framework. Note that real French people
often have a very light breakfast and dinner, with lunch the big
meal of the day. They don't do the whole Julia Child extravaganza
for every meal, or even every day, or even every week. So, you can
still be healthy about it. Here, I would suggest a lot of attention
to ingredients quality, such as dairy from organic pasture-raised
sources, organic pasture-raised eggs and so forth. Also, I would
suggest again trying spelt, emmer and other "old wheat" solutions,
instead of modern wheat, organic or otherwise. Also, you can still
reduce your wheat/meat/dairy/sugar levels from what it would be in
the Traditional American Diet, while still remaining in the
Traditional French framework. (In other words, don't use
"Traditional French" as just a way to add a little cosmetic variety
to what amounts to a Traditional American diet.) Just look for
recipes that have a lot of vegetables like onions, squash, tomatoes,
potatoes, beans, broccoli, and so forth. Go ahead and enjoy the
"wheat/dairy/sugar bomb" desserts and baked goods, but not every
day, and keep the portions also "Traditional French", i.e., much
smaller than is typical in the U.S. today.
Even in the "Traditional French" context, we can set things out
deliberately, rather than being chained to our Standard American
Diet habits.
Another nice find around here is the Yonanas frozen banana "ice
cream" machine. This is a specialized appliance which turns frozen
bananas into something a lot like soft-serve ice cream. But, it is
100% banana. I really like the gentle sweetness of ripe banana
(freeze them when they are brown and just about to get mushy), as an
alternative to the smack-in-the-head-with-a-2x4 sweetness of ice
cream, with its cups of white sugar. You can use the machine with
all kinds of fruit, and I often put in some frozen berries to get a
"sorbet" kind of result, without all the sugar of real sorbet or
gelato. May is rhubarb season, so I've been combining our "banana
ice cream" with a rhubarb sauce made from rhubarb and stevia, often
combined with berries or other fruit such as orange (cooked in this
case). (A typical rhubarb sauce or "compote" recipe has about 1 cup
of sugar per pound of rhubarb. I cut this by 80%+ and used stevia.)
Oddly enough, we often eat this for breakfast. The next trick will
be to combine the "banana ice cream" with some cocoa to make a
chocolate-banana result, but without sugar. I'll experiment with
just using the natural sweetness of the banana, without additional
sweeteners, even stevia or honey. I tried using the rhubarb and
rhubarb-berry sauce as a combo with granola, instead of milk, which
worked very well. I'm not a big granola eater, but if you like
granola it might be a nice option. Or, you might just try something
like apple juice instead of milk. It would probably take a few
moments to get used to ... and then, you might decide that you like
it better. But mostly I'm eating raw for breakfast and lunch anyway,
so there's no place for granola.
This is such a lot of fun. Explore and enjoy. Last year, we happened
to have a whole lot of locally-grown cucumber -- it just did well
that year -- so I handed my wife a dozen or so cucumbers and said:
do something with this. She invented a cucumber salad with a
Vietnamese fish sauce and dried chili flavor, which was so good that
we literally ate it every day and never got tired of it.
One last part of the six-month Ultimate Health and Fitness program
was to declutter and beautify your living environment, and your
clothing wardrobe. I'm still not so good at this, but one
interesting thing this year is that I slimmed down my t-shirt
collection to ... zero. Yes, I am now a no-t-shirt guy. I still have
white t-shirts for use strictly as undergarments, and I still have
synthetic t-shirts for workouts, but nothing for regular daily use.
I also went without blue jeans for a long time, about twenty years,
although I now have jeans again. So, you can play with that sort of
thing too.
You probably think that getting rid of all your t-shirts is no big
deal. Oh yeah? Try it. I mean actually do it. In fact, it is no big
deal, but people have their clothing habits just as they have their
eating habits. These habits are totally arbitrary. They are just
habits. Now that you are attaining mastery of your habits, and the
habituation process, you can spread that mastery to other areas of
your life. I've become very deliberate about my clothes, and am
slowly expanding this to "mastery and deliberation" over other
aspects of my material possessions (lots of selling on eBay and
Craigslist, plus selective buying). This in itself is a fine hobby
of sorts, and quite challenging and subtle in the sort of way that
can engage a mature adult mind. While you are doing it, you are, by
default, not doing something which is really not so "healthy" for
your overall lifestyle, like daydreaming about vacation homes and
sports cars.
For those of you who can see the big picture, you may have noticed
that everything here is actually a part of a bigger plan, which is
to establish the format of endeavor -- our values and aspirations --
for the age that comes after Heroic Materialism. I said that this
would be a focus of "lifestyle," whether our living spaces
(Traditional City, architecture), the way we eat, our clothing and
interior decoration, and all the other aspects to artify and
beautify our lives, rather than simply being "consumers" in the
Heroic Materialist modality. For the upper-middle class, this means
vacation homes and sports cars. Which, if you noticed, isn't really
accomplishing much, even at violent levels of expenditure -- the
diminishing returns of Heroic Materialism. You would get more out of
changing your eating and exercise habits, and maybe even from
tossing all your t-shirts, than you would from a whole garage full
of sports cars, even one including a forty-year-old Detroit-built
muscle car, which some ding-dong bought for $4 million.
November
22, 2009: What Comes After Heroic Materialism?
March
2, 2014: The Eco-Technic Civilization
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