Are you ready to live your best life ever? Because if you’re not always on volume 10, eating the purest foods and shouting your truth at every turn, you’re certainly doing life wrong. Derek looks at the ever-growing anxiety marketed as optimal health in wellness spaces, wondering when will enough be…enough? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Spirituality Patreon bonus sample. | |
| And I've also talked a lot about dealing with an eating disorder known as orthorexia and the cognitive and emotional strain that put on my life for many years. | |
| If you don't know orthorexia, basically you constantly remove foods from your diet because they're not pure or healthy enough. | |
| And then in my case, you stress out about the things you do put into your body, so you end up skipping meals due to a paralysis of inaction. | |
| And I take responsibility for succumbing to my problems. | |
| But the wellness industry I was working in at that time played a pretty large role in that. | |
| Many yoga instructors were always talking about toxic this and don't get fat that. | |
| And to be clear, I suffered the worst of orthorexia before social media existed, so I can only imagine the downward pressures that people are going through today. | |
| I feel very liberated not having to worry about food and the ways that I did. | |
| But that also doesn't mean I don't think about my current nutritional choices. | |
| My wife and I are always talking about what we're buying, what we're eating, how we're preparing it, where we're buying from. | |
| I mean, I'll gladly crush a pizza or a burger, but I also know that most of my meals are vegetable-based. | |
| Most people I know struggle with the same issues that I do, and the reasons for that are many. | |
| There's navigating the ridiculous insurance restrictions in a for-profit healthcare system. | |
| There's trying to understand complex and at times contradictory medical advice, and then dealing with the overwhelming amount of junk science being passed off as optimal health choices on social media. | |
| And yes, maybe I swim in these waters a little too much given my job on this podcast, but I think it's important to wrap our heads around, especially if you only notice it in passing and it can affect your choices. | |
| From what I've noticed, sometimes we get so caught up in what's going on right now that we fail to step back, take stock, and look at the progress that we've made. | |
| And I'm talking about the progress we've made as a species, not necessarily individual progress. | |
| And right now, we live better and longer than at any point in history. | |
| And again, I know that personal anecdotes will take that to varying degrees. | |
| If you're someone with a chronic disease, you're going to reflect on that differently, and it's hard. | |
| So there is no ultimate way to address everyone's situation. | |
| But when I look at the larger data set, we're doing pretty well. | |
| Now I know that's not what the romanticized wellness myth of living in accordance with nature preaches, but as I just said, we have a lot of data. | |
| So for example, I know COVID was really tough. | |
| I lost some people. | |
| I know people closer to me lost people closer to them. | |
| But it wasn't that long ago that the Black Plague claimed up to 200 million lives. | |
| And the world's population during the peak of the plague, which was in the middle of the 14th century, was only 370 million people. | |
| Now that bacteria killed up to 60% of the population of Europe and a third of the population of the Middle East. | |
| And right now, we don't have any real way to even wrap our heads around what such a thing would look like. | |
| But it also helps me understand why people during that time would dream of a fountain of youth in which all their problems would be solved. | |
| And we're aspirational today as well, and aspiration is often a good thing, but not when it sells us a bunch of useless shit. | |
| And that's what I'm really addressing today. | |
| And also, our circumstances are different. | |
| I don't want to say we have it too good, because I know how many people are struggling right now. | |
| I'm on my sixth insurance company in three years at the moment, and that brings with it a ridiculous amount of stress going through that process. | |
| But as I said, as a collective, relatively, we're not in bad shape. | |
| So, just for a moment, forget about all the chatter about anti-vax this or terrain theory that which we cover often. | |
| Let's just state a fact. | |
| Researchers developed effective vaccines in about a year based on decades-old, ongoing research in a particular technology, and that certainly saved a lot of lives. | |
| Now, in reflection, miasma theory, which was the going theory during all of the Black Plague, it took centuries for us to psychologically overcome and medically overcome, and that's partly why the Black Plague persisted for so long. | |
| Now, we might have to live with COVID for the rest of our lives, but at least we have some protection and therapeutics to turn to. | |
| Now let's look at another aspect. | |
| Food availability is pretty good right now. | |
| The quality of some foods and the soil, they're all issues. | |
| And we might have a Black Plague level existential crisis on our hands thanks to climate change. | |
| Now I don't take the fortunes of today for granted and I do my best to recognize that all of these conditions are relative. | |
| But as a general rule of thumb, attaining enough nutrients to live a decent and healthy life is not out of the cards for many people. |