Note: This blog post is mostly a transcript of the recording I originally did here.
Recently, I did a post on social media, and it got more views and likes than normal. So I want to talk about this, read it here, and expand on it more. So here’s the tweet. It was:
Getting the right kind of exercise and food is oftentimes more sustainable for your health than any pill you can take.
I want to just go into greater detail on this and explain my thinking behind this when I originally wrote it. And I want to do a little disclaimer that I’m not a medical professional. This isn’t medical advice. I’m just speaking from my own experience.
Part of it is having the right kind of exercise. So sometimes this can be having a variety. There are certain exercises that, if you tend to be somebody who just likes to walk, it can be important to mix things up and try weightlifting. In my experience, sometimes when I get stuck in a certain kind of exercise, it becomes less effective. There’s that popular saying that variety is the spice of life. I think that’s also true with exercise, variety is the spice of exercise, of really taking in the effects of exercise. So, sometimes when I forget to jog for a while and I try it, I feel that it was really good. I feel really good. So I think just being aware of many kinds of exercise can be helpful. I’m just going to name a few here. So there is weight training, jogging, and walking. There’s the realm of eastern exercise like tai chi, yoga, falun gong, pilates, and different kinds of breath work. Some kinds of breath work really just feel like exercise. For example, holotropic breathing is one that comes to mind. Here’s another kind of breathwork that I’ve found helpful.
And it’s also not just the different types of exercise, but also the time of day and the frequency. So, for me, I used to be a daily caffeine drinker. I’ve noticed that when I exercise in the morning, it has a similar or even better effect than caffeine. It’s more sustainable. It can wake me up in the morning. Although I’m not always the best at exercise in the morning, when I do it, I notice these good effects.
And the frequency is another one. Are you exercising every day? Are you exercising so many times a week? I think that can make a difference, too.
The context of what I’m talking about here again is in the context that exercise and food can be more sustainable than a pill. Let’s backtrack a little bit and recognize all kinds of symptoms we can have in life. You might be feeling more tired than usual. You might be having some level of anxiety, or having trouble focusing, or depression type symptoms. And, I think a lot of us have been trained by our modern medical system that a pill is going to solve that problem.
And, I do want to say that I’m not against medication. There definitely can be a place for it, especially if it’s been working for you. But what I am against is jumping to that pill when just getting the right diet or the right kinds of exercise could solve your problem. And maybe there’s also another nuance of adding in other modalities, including meditation, community, service, and purpose in your life. All these different things can work together to help you feel healthier and be healthier. That’s the background of where I’m coming from with this mention of the pill part of the social media post.
Let’s pivot over to food because I said the right kinds of food can also be more sustainable oftentimes than a pill. We’ll go back to our cliche again, that variety is the spice of life. A variety of food intake can also be helpful in mixing things up. And I think it’s good to remember, too, there’s this mind-body connection in life. This can include how much you are enjoying your experience of eating food. I recall reading how it can help your digestion and help you take in more nutrients if you are in a good frame of mind when eating.
As for food, I think a good starting point is just to learn one of these diets. If you wanted to go on the Mediterranean diet, for example, what would you really need to eat? Studying these various diets is a good approach to this. When I got into healthy eating around 10 to 15 years ago, I was kinda shocked. I thought I ate fairly healthy, but when I really started to write down what I was eating and talk with a medical professional about it, I was surprised. I learned that I didn’t eat as healthily as I thought. And a good little rule of thumb that’s stuck with me is that anything that is gonna rot fairly quickly is something that you want to veer toward eating. For example, romaine lettuce or chicken would be things that would rot fairly quickly, and boxed cereal, such as Life Cereal or Cheerios, tends to take longer to rot and is therefore less healthy according to this rule of thumb. Nothing against those brands in particular. I’m just trying to throw out names for examples. Something that’s in a box or in a can that has preservatives often lasts longer, and tends to be less healthy.
As I said, a good starting point is learning some of these diets. There’s also the carnivore diet, the Atkins diet. There’s a Candida diet. A lot of them have a lot of similarities. Some of the similarities I’ve found are the principle I mentioned, food that’s more real is more likely to rot sooner than later.
Also, vegetables are a big commonality with a lot of these diets, as well as low-carb diets. So if you are going to eat carbs, more complex carbs, like maybe a baked potato, brown rice, or quinoa. But to limit that. And to have fruits in moderation. Vegetables actually tend to be more important in a diet because they don’t have as much sugar. Fruits tend to contain sugar, so limiting fruits can be important. When you start to study a lot of these diets, those are oftentimes some of the similarities.
Also, gearing more toward meat and protein that has less saturated fat is important. Non-saturated fat meat or protein includes chicken, turkey, fish, and beans. Although there are a lot of diets that say that the steak, hamburger, and four-legged animal meat is also doable.
There’s also the frequency to consider, too. One idea that I’ve learned about is the 16-8 fast. So, going 16 hours without eating. Then eight hours of eating. So, for example, maybe stop eating around eight o’clock at night, and then you continue that through about noon the next day. So, no eating from 8:00 PM one evening till noon the next day, and then eat between 12 and 8. And of course, if you do a 15-9, I don’t think it’s gonna make that much of a difference. The idea is that you’re giving your body time to process the food and letting your body cleanse itself. If you’re constantly eating all the time, it takes energy to do that. And you’re not perhaps getting all the benefits of doing some type of fast. There are other kinds of fasts you can also do. But the idea is to try to pay attention to the frequency of how often you’re eating.
Then there’s the whole calorie intake thing to consider, too. But the idea again is that the context we’re talking about here is another sort of cliche that food is medicine. Maybe that’s part of what would help a person feel better: eating the right kind of foods. Maybe that would help them avoid taking some type of pill that they would otherwise think they need.
Let’s pivot to the medication side of things. I want to reiterate that I’m not against medication. But even the practice of medicine itself will tell you it’s best to take the lowest effective dose. So, with medications come side effects. And, are these side effects worth the benefit you are getting from the medication or not? And the lowest effective dose might be zero if you’re getting the help you need with the food and the diet and other modalities in your life. Maybe you don’t even have to worry about taking a pill and dealing with the side effects of that medication.
The other thing, too, is the history of medicine and human health. If you look back at the history of our time here on Earth, at least from a pharmaceutical medication standpoint, it’s like less than 1%. Probably close to 0% of our history as humans, we have had these pharmaceutical medications. Now, with that being said, there are a lot of other kinds of things that people take for medication that I’m not going to comment on now. But, for example, there are supplements, taking vitamins, IV supplements of say vitamin C or vitamin B. There’s the whole indigenous history we have here of peyote and different kinds of more natural medications from the earth. But that’s a whole other conversation.
I just wanted to focus on exercise and food, and to give that full context. It’s possible that for some people getting the right kinds of exercise and food might help them reduce the number of pills they take. I am going to go back and read this original post one more time.
Getting the right kind of exercise and food is oftentimes more sustainable for your health than any pill you can take.
Listen to this over at my YouTube Channel
September 15, 2025
