My Rules for Life - Rule 2: Take good care of yourself
Intro
- You are so organized. I could never do that, I need to be free to enjoy life, I hate restrictions!
- I hate restrictions too. Those are not restrictions to me.
This brief excerpt illustrates the average conversation I end up having every time I start talking about my “healthy” lifestyle.
This might be one of the rules that I have almost no issue following, though I find it a little hard to explain without having it suddenly turned into some magical identity that defines me more than anything else. I don’t like to brag about it, I don’t want to sound judgmental when I talk to other people about my routine. To me, that routine is a life saver, and one of the few things I can commit to without losing motivation. But that is not an explanation, is it?
At the same time, I think that explaining what I do without understanding where I come from gives a distorted image of who I am. I’ve been told that I have the same lifestyle of “successful people” and I find it ironic since changing my lifestyle hasn’t made me richer (aka successful in common people speak). My way of living is just what keeps me alive.
A Healthy Body
The backstory aka My body is a temple, no monkey allowed
I was average as a child. Not fat but not too skinny either. I was so average, I don’t even remember much about it.
- Alexa, add “body size” to the list of things that didn’t become a childhood trauma.
Then just before puberty hit, I started eating a lot. My mom kept saying stuff like “oh yeah, he’ll burn all the extra fat developing!”, while feeding me an immoral amount of pasta. - Eat my child, so no one will take you away from me!”. She never said that, but you can’t deny it sounds better with it. Anyways, the magic fat loss didn’t happen, and the journey to get rid of it has been a 20+ year long one (and some of it is still there with me). I didn’t like it then, I don’t like it now. But who does? Apart from that tiny sect of delusional minority in the fat studies department (they’re real, look it up).
My experience trying to reach a healthy body weight (and then trying to get a nice looking physique) has been a non-linear, multi-step one.
Teenage-years - early 20s
Growing taller doesn’t make you skinny, that was the lesson, but most young people can get rid of extra weight easily. Was it because I would walk all the time, was it because school forced you to be active somehow, but I was average in my teenage years. Not skinny, some extra softness, but not too bad overall. It would mostly bother me in summer, when clothes were just an obstacle for us, children of the sea, but it wasn’t that big of an issue.
Then the dramatic combo of girlfriends + graduation made me progressively gain weight. I found myself weighing 20 kg more than now and that wasn’t good for many reasons. Looking back, I can see every little thing in my behavior that progressively brought there, but hindsight is 20/20 and if I had my current mindset when I was 20 I would now probably own Uber so let’s leave it at that.
After breaking up with my girlfriend at the time, I realized I looked like crap and needed to do something to get back in the game. The interesting part is, I had no idea how gaining/losing weight worked, but I still managed to lose more than 10 kg by simply eating less. I remember having tons of apples, sometimes only apples for days. And goodbye to the ungodly amount of pasta. Oh, yeah, the pasta.
I started some kind of feud by constantly asking my parents to make smaller portions. Eventually, I went from being fat to being slightly overweight which is considered normal where I am from. I started exercising. I had a mini-stepper at home that I would use every day to burn calories and started doing some light body-weight training.
(I stopped writing, grabbed a few apples and then took a nap. That’s the power of apples, my friends!)
By the time I started university (at 22), I definitely wasn’t fat anymore, though without clothes on I didn’t have a beach body. But who had back then? Seriously, it feels like nowadays you see WAY more ripped dudes with amazingly hot bodies on the beach. It feels like an epidemic of some sort. Fuck, did I get caught in a fad? Oh god, I digress!
Mid 20s - Late 20s
Nothing much really happened here. I didn’t gain that weight back. Actually, I kept losing it thanks to university. I think I did gain some during my first year in Japan, but nothing much changed. Which is interesting, since it’s a long-ass time when I did absolutely nothing for my physical health. The reason being, I was overall healthy. No unnecessary back pain, no disease of any kind, nothing in my body that wouldn’t work properly. Then something happened.
Early 30s - Pre Lockdown
During my second job as a software developer, a coworker started telling me about this gym he was going to. I don’t know how it started but I remember how much I liked the idea and how excited I was. No more than a few days later I was already hitting the gym 4 days a week. On top of that, I bought a book to teach me not only how to work out, but also the basics of nutrition. And man, did my life change then. For almost a year, I kept hitting the gym 4 days a week. I started eating in a healthy way, cooking my own food, counting calories and so on. It was painful at first, but once I got in the loop, it got easier. I lost some body fat and started putting some muscles on, though I never reached a body fat composition low enough to convince me to start bulking. Once I moved to a new apartment, I realized how living further away from the gym killed all my motivation and first reduced it to 3 times a week and then stopped going altogether. Then I moved to London!
In London I would try to be healthy and even started going to a gym, but didn’t like it and after work it was insanely crowded. I changed gym to one close to work, but it still felt like I barely had time to do what I wanted to do. Awful. Then, 6 months after being here, I had the chance to move to a new apartment with a gym inside. A-ma-zing! And I moved in, in February 2020! And then, after moving in, I traveled to the US and stayed there for a few weeks! I came back early March, finally being able to start my long-awaited gym routine. I could already taste the magic of those 5+ days a week of workout magic. Oh, the bliss! Oh, the high! Oh, the…
Lockdown
…Goddamn pandemic. I think I’m only now starting to realize how much this pandemic has affected/is affecting me. Yeah, yeah, it’s affecting everyone, you’re right. But whose blog is this, huh? Exactly.
Truth is, physically the pandemic hasn’t been that bad for me. It started and destroyed temporarily the dreams of a beach body that could finally kickstart my modeling career, but it wasn’t that bad for my health overall. As a matter of fact, during the first lockdown I tried to work out as much as I could, while being on a relatively strict diet. It worked, I didn’t gain weight, I actually lost some. When summer finally arrived and life felt normal again, I could count on that. I did my best not to drink alcohol but once a week and made sure I was always eating less than I needed, to always be in a calory deficit. I saw how that wasn’t enough to make me as lean as I wanted, but overall it was good. I came out really well physically. Physically. This is what we’re talking about here.
Summer ended, I went back home, could hit the gym again for a couple of months and then round 2 started. This time it was much worse than the previous. It lasted longer and although I kept trying to be healthy, I had to give in a little bit. Counting calories got to the point of diminished return during the first lockdown, so during the second I started doing it roughly and didn’t work out much. I’m really not the type for half-assed measures, and the lockdown really felt like it. I could barely track any progress so what was the point? Another hiccup, another stop. I had lost 7 months already, what was the pain of rounding it up to a year?
One thing did happen during this lockdown though. I realized how much I was abusing caffeine and how bad that was for me. I was having around 4 cups of coffee a day, thinking it had no effect on me. It had. I was addicted to coffee, it caused me terrible anxiety (more on this later) and it affected my sleeping dramatically. Luckily, my beautiful problem-solving brain is willing to try anything that might make it feel better when it reaches rock bottom and reducing the amount of caffeine has improved my mood, anxiety and sleeping pattern. That makes a world of a difference. I still drink coffee, but I limit myself to 2 caffeinated drinks a day. Everything else is decaf. I’m Italian, after all.
The “For Now”
Things have been normal-ish since April. I’ve been hitting the gym 5 days a week as I wanted and I am feeling and looking much better as a consequence. I go to bed and wake up earlier than before. I try to get at least 7 hours of sleep per night and this shouldn’t be harmed even in case of another lockdown. Which, fingers crossed, won’t happen. And I’m saying that with the same confidence of a cat crossing the highway at night. Meow!
A Healthy Mind
It’s good that we hear so much speaking of mental health nowadays. It wasn’t the case when I was younger and for a long, long time, I really couldn’t tell the difference between what was wrong with me and what was wrong in me. When I say wrong, I am not really trying to disparage people with mental illness. But I think it’s important to give it some kind of negative connotation instead of bundling it under the umbrella of neurodiversity and making it an identity. Because that’s exactly what I did for a very long time and I think it didn’t do me any favor, just prolonged unnecessary hurt.
Since mind and body age differently, I don’t think it makes sense to do the same and try to create a timeline for my mental health. After having dug somehow deep into CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy), I started understanding a lot more about myself and the way people think in general. It hasn’t made my life simple, but I am definitely in a better place and feel like I have the tools to examine and deal with those feelings that have been with me for a very long time. I still haven’t found the perfect way to express/explain myself, but this is probably the best I can do.
This next section is going to be a HUGE tangent that I hope will make sense by the time we get to the conclusion. If you’re afraid I might waste your time (I mean, you’re reading my blog, that’s on you), skip to the bottom directly. I speak about myself to speak about everything else. I am the only tool I have.
No one gets me
It’s time to let the teenager out. I’ll call it that, even though it’s been with me for much longer than my teenage years.
No one gets me, I’m so lonely! So sad! Or wait, no one gets me, because I’m too special, that’s it! It’s a shitty world made of dumb people who wouldn’t be able to point at their ass if they weren’t sitting on it all day. Everyone sucks, everything sucks! I wish I could find people like me, so that I wouldn’t have to live this painful, boring, complicated existence! You have no idea what it means to be me, YOU SHOULD feel bad about it. But the truth is, I’m the only one feeling bad about it and you can keep living your sad, shitty, meaningless life while I suffer alone here in my box, unable to get out. Unable to let anyone in. It’s just me. Me versus the rest of the world.
~ Teenage Sacha
There’s a sentence from “The Sublime Art of Not Giving a Fuck” that resonated with me hard.
“If you think it’s you against the world, chances are it’s really just you against yourself”. And Mark Manson got it absolutely right there. That sentence could have nailed me down to the ground, if someone ever bothered to tell it to me at the right time. Deep inside, I always knew it to be the case, but we humans are masters of deceit when it comes to ourselves. We create well-crafted lies to justify our doing absolutely nothing to improve ourselves. The world is the problem, I can’t change the world, so what can I do?
The sad truth is different. The sad truth is, no one can fully understand us. We are special machines, with such a complex wiring, it’s impossible to predict anyone’s behavior with 100% accuracy. Yes, some people understand us better than others, some people don’t but try their best, some other could but don’t care about us enough to make an effort. The sad truth is, it just bothers some more than others, but it’s the same for everyone. If you have ever had thoughts like those quoted above here, congratulations: you’re just human and need a connection. And no one has the right to make fun of you for that. However, stop expecting people to just understand you.
Among all the great skills we have, the word is probably the most powerful. Be it written or spoken, we can communicate in a way no animal can. It adds to the complexity, sure, but it also allows us to be precise in our speech. To tell a friend to meet a specific date, to tell our lover what hurt us, our family we miss them. The solution to no one understands me is more communication. Expecting people to just understand you is just giving up on yourself. Is accepting defeat in front of the hurdle of being a human being. Few things are worse than that. Pineapple on pizza is better than that.
Mental health as identity - This is all I am
I used to write often when I was younger. It wasn’t as much as it is today word-wise, but I would often write something in a text file. It’d be the idea for a song, a poem, or something I liked. I would also often hate it the very next day, but it was a way of expressing myself. Most of the material is now lost, but reading what’s left of it, one thing is clear: I wasn’t doing great. What I needed to express were negative feelings. I, as a matter of fact, would only write when I wasn’t feeling great. Nothing wrong about that, I still do it and it really helps, but in the past it was only that. Sharing that part of me was never easy. I have scared some people with what I’ve written. I’ve had people laugh at me for what I’ve written. And that was oaky. What wasn’t okay is that, in my mind, I was writing about me instead of how I was feeling. There was no difference, no clear cut. “That is how art is made, it comes from pain. That pain makes me an artist.” - I told myself. “Pretentious shithead, I wish you had spent less time thinking you were an artist and produced ANY FUCKING KIND OF ART, YOU GOAT!” - Is what I would tell that guy now. What, that’s still me? Crap.
The problem is, I can write nowadays even when I’m not at my lowest. I do recognize that some melon collie is and will forever be with me, and I’m really okay with it. The passing of time, waking up after a dream, feeling like drowning in nostalgia, the chances you missed, regrets. They don’t go away and are part of what makes a healthy human being. Feeling hopeless, like nothing good will ever happen again, useless. That is different.
There is a big difference between the almost pleasant sadness of being alive and a black tar pit swallowing you whole. There is so much beauty to be found in sadness. Artists aren’t depressed, they are melancholic. Because they’re sensitive to beauty and know beauty has to end. If you can’t find any beauty, something isn’t right. It’s as simple as that.
The Divine Art of Balance
An investment in health pays the best interest
I’m paraphrasing that top shagger of Benjamin Franklin here, yes. Far from me wanting to take anything from knowledge, I am after all the one in love with learning, humanity and pointy-eared animals. But I also believe that our body is not just a tool, it’s the ONLY tool we have to experience the world and without taking good care of all aspects of it, you’re basically limiting your potential. An unhealthy but unregulated lifestyle might sound more enticing than the alternative, but it’s all debt future you will have to repay. Too vague?
Your being overweight, caused by a shitty diet you call “being a foodie” and the lack of “move-your-ass” today might not sound like a big deal, but in 20 years you might have damaged your body in a way that will make the rest of your life less enjoyable. Is that a good compromise? Not for me.
That can be extended to your mental health as well. The things you don’t want to accept about yourself, the things you don’t want to talk about, the past you try to forget and the fears you don’t want to face, won’t go away by themselves. And if left free to run in playground of your head, it’s just a matter of time until they’ll manifest themselves in the most unpleasant ways. At best, they’ll hold you back, at worst, they’ll pin you down.
But that sounds like a lot of effort, doesn’t it? And self-perfection in itself can be even more hurtful than the alternative. A life of deprivation is not a life worth living. It sounds contradictory, but it really isn’t. I see it as a constant trial and error, trying to do what is good for you, without becoming obsessed. A pizza and a couple of beers once a week aren’t going to kill you. As a matter of fact, they can make life worth living. Just make sure they’re not the only things you’re living for.
Sleep, for f***‘s sake. SLEEP
TLDR version of this post would be “eat well, exercise, take care of your mental health and get enough sleep”. Boom, that’s my strategy and it’s not going to rock your world like a giant tortilla made of smaller tortillas. However, if I had to put it everything in order, the sleep thing would come first. And the second wouldn’t be even close. If you want to improve your life drastically, start to aim to 7:30 hours of sleep per night. It might require a change of mindset, but it’s worth it.
It’s good for your general health. Your mood will improve. Your memory will improve. You will build muscles faster (if you work out). The secret the ancient aliens from Repenistia don’t want you to know!
Of layers upon layers, your head is made
It’s actually hard to go deep into mental health without sounding catastrophic. You’re sad? Go see a doctor! Nah. Feeling sad is absolutely fine and feelings shouldn’t be repressed. If you’re sad today, it’s okay. Being sad is part of being alive. Happiness wouldn’t exist without sadness, and that wouldn’t be a good world to live in. But if you’re feeling constantly sad and feel like the world has turned gray, you might need help.
Anxiety is a great tool that keeps us and many other animals alive. Feeling anxious when some terrible event has happened is normal, feeling anxious when picking up the phone or when a stranger talks to you it’s not. Feeling anxious when absolutely nothing happens is probably the worst. Your mind becomes a dog chasing its tail. No worse, it’s a snake eating its tail. Or both, a dog chasing its snake-eating-its-tail-shaped tail! Yes! In other words, you want to make sure that great tool is stable and in the right place or it might come down to crush you. I like this metaphor.
The truth is, mental health is some kind of lottery. I’ve struggled a lot with it in the past and I can’t really count many traumatic events in my life and I know very positive people who have dealt with the worst kind of crap in their lives. Some people are just happier than others and it’s probably a good mix of biological and environmental factors. We’re complex beings, we can all agree on that. That doesn’t mean that we should accept to be perpetually unhappy or down. Maybe you’ll never be as happy as those people who wake up every day with a smile on their face for no reason, but you CAN do something to wake up without that heavy feeling in your stomach. And maybe being always happy and satisfied isn’t that great either.
Personally, I think that part of my restlessness is what motivates me to do and get more from life. I look back at the darkest periods of my life and I realize they are the reasons why I pushed myself to get more. Not always in the healthiest way, but their rewards are still here with me.
Are you still with me? Cause here we go:
My rules for physical health:
- Work out at least 3 times a week, but aim for more. (I do 5).
- Don’t forget to rest. I know this sounds crazy, but some people get addicted to exercising and without resting you raise the chances of injuring yourself. Injuries will make you lose more days of training.
- Lifting weight > cardio.
- The best workouts start and end in the kitchen: 70% diet - 30 % gym.
- If you want to lose weight, you will need to eat fewer calories than you consume. If you don’t understand how that works, see an expert.
- Think of sleeping as an important task that you need to do every day.
- Set an alarm for sleeping, ideally 30 or 60 minutes before going to bed.
- Avoid caffeine after lunch. Switch to decaf or caffeine free alternatives.
- Set an alarm for your naps. They’re exceptional, but 15 - 20 minutes should be enough. If you need more, that means you didn’t get enough sleep at night.
- Find out how much you need and stick to the schedule.
- Aim to wake up at the same time every day, including holidays and weekends. The time you think you might be losing will be added to the morning. You CAN adjust your lifestyle to make it work.
My rules for mental health:
- Find the right amount of worry for your mental state. Don’t worry about being worried.
- Light sadness and anxiety can be “cured” by meditation. Learn to free your mind and disconnect from everything. This is nothing religious or spiritual and there’s a scientific basis to why it helps. No thoughts, means no harmful thoughts.
- Heavier (but not extreme) cases of depression and anxiety can be cured by cognitive behavioral therapy.
- Learn what cognitive distortions are and how they affect your everyday life. Start to recognize patterns and you’ll soon realize how most of what you feel is caused by the way you think.
- Figure out what works for you. Get to know yourself and learn the difference between what you can and cannot control.
Reading suggestions: Leaner, Bigger, Stronger by Michael Matthews, if you’re a man Thinner Leaner Stronger, if you’re a woman (same author). These books are very similar, they only change in the training, but they include pretty much everything you need to know when it comes to nutrition, gaining/losing weight, muscle building and supplements. I devoured it in a few days and it has changed my life.
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker This book changed my relationship with sleeping and it’s highly recommended. It’s fascinating, easy to read and will convince you that sleeping is important. I would avoid it if you have any medical or mental condition that prevents you from sleeping. You don’t want to know what happens to your brain (spoiler alert: it turns purple and starts smelling like onion) when you’re sleep deprived!
Feeling Great by David Burns This is how you can practice CBT by yourself. Just a couple of chapters could change your life drastically.
Take good care of yourself
Here we are, at the end of this long post that summarizes part of my life from the point of view of both physical and mental health, trying to explain what I do and why I do it. The rules can be summarized in nutrition, training, sleep, meditation and CBT. I think everybody should learn about them, but not from a random post on a web developer’s blog.
Regardless of what I said until now, I believe there’s a baseline of avoiding harmful behaviors/preserving your wellbeing that everyone should follow, but also that everything more should be considered an extra. I don’t think everybody should aim for a beach body. I don’t think everybody needs to be super productive. Do whatever makes you feel good about yourself, as long as it’s not detrimental. These last few weeks I let go of my diet a little, I have reduced some of the weights at the gym and I’ve been having almost a small beer a day. Because I needed it.
You are the only thing you really own and therefore, you’re fully responsible for your own wellbeing. Imagine your existence like a long line. What comes before can’t be changed, but what extends from now to your end is a beautiful maze of possibilities in your own control. You don’t want to get to the point of non-return too early. The good news is, it’s probably not too late to improve your situation. The other good news is, the first step is always the hardest. Once you start doing it, it will feel natural. There is no bad news, start as soon as you can. Take good care of yourself.