The Path is Too Deep

In software development, an "Exception Error" occurs when a program encounters an unexpected condition that disrupts the normal flow of instructions. This week, I encountered a critical exception error. My mother was admitted to the hospital with pneumonia. In the rush to leave work early and travel to the Valley to see her, the "System"—my carefully curated routine of fasting, clean eating, and exercise—encountered a glitch. The "Crash" Stress is a powerful disruptor. Triggered by worry and a disruption in my schedule, I reverted to old code. On the drive down, I stopped at a (keto) bakery. I broke my 22:2 fast early (around 2:00 PM) with treats rather than nutrition. Treats from Locally Baked Outlet (picture credit to them) By the time I returned to Halifax that evening, I was mentally and physically drained. I managed to cook a compliant dinner—a simple clean keto chicken curry with cauliflower rice—but the tank was empty. I skipped my calisthenics rou...

If you live in Atlantic Canada, you know that from November to April, the weather is essentially a personal attack. It’s damp, it’s windy, and it cuts right through you. The natural human instinct is to hide. We crank the thermostat to 22°C (72°F). We start our cars ten minutes early to warm the seats. We bundle up in Gore-Tex armor just to walk to the mailbox. We are addicted to thermal comfort. But as I’ve rebuilt my metabolic engine over the last few months, I’ve started doing something that makes my friends look at me like I’ve lost my mind. I’ve stopped hiding from the cold. In fact, I’m actively seeking it out. I don't do it because I’m tough (I’m not). I do it because I’m an optimizer. I’ve learned that cold is not just a weather condition; it is a powerful metabolic switch that turns my body from a storage unit into a furnace. Here is the science of Hormesis and why I’ve learned to embrace the chill. Part 1: The "Good" Fat (Brown vs. White) To understand why I wa...

In the tech world, there is a concept known as a "System Restore." When a computer becomes bogged down by years of accumulated junk files, corrupted registry entries, and conflicting software, you don't necessarily throw it in the trash. You roll it back. You strip away the bloatware. You wipe the cache. You return the operating system to a point where it actually functioned. I turned 53 this year. In our culture, 53 is often viewed as the beginning of the "End of Life" phase for the "hardware". We are told to expect the proverbial "Blue Screen of Death" at any moment. We are told that the "Dad Bod" is inevitable, that our metabolism has deprecated, and that we should just get comfortable in the recliner and wait for the obsolescence date. "It's too late," they say. "You can't teach an old dog new tricks." I am here to tell you that is a lie . 53 isn't the end of the user manual. It’s just time for a ...

In my introductory post , I laid out the "highlight reel" of my life from the last decade or so—a relentless series of events involving profound grief, career upheaval, health crises, and personal loss. I also mentioned that when my doctors and therapists, with the best of intentions, tell me, "you should bring your stress levels down," I often just burst out laughing. It's absurd advice. When the stressors are this significant and largely out of your control, you can't just "reduce" them. You can't tell the universe to "please stop." The stress is a given. It’s a non-negotiable reality of the world I'm living in. For decades, my response to that stress was what destroyed me. As I wrote in my "Loop Policy" post, my response was to turn to food—specifically, the high-sugar, high-starch, high-fat "comfort foods" that triggered my emotional eating loop. This was a disaster. I was trying to put out a fire with ga...

For decades, we’ve been fed a single, unchallenged "truth" about exercise: to perform, you must "carb-load." This rule is so ingrained that the modern athlete's greatest fear is "hitting the wall," or "bonking"—that catastrophic, all-systems-failure moment where the body's fuel tank runs empty. We’ve all seen marathon runners staggering, their bodies and minds shutting down at the 20-mile mark. This fear is why people look at my lifestyle with such confusion. They ask, "How do you do 15 km of cardio both Saturday and Sunday, 16 hours into a fast? How do you do calisthenics every day with no 'fuel' in the tank?" The answer is simple: The "carb-loader" and I are using two completely different engines, and one of them is built on a falsehood. The "bonk" is not a mandatory part of exercise; it is a symptom of a deeply flawed and metabolically inflexible fueling system. Part 1: The "Bonk" — The...