What Everyone Should Be Doing For Their Health

Make sure you're keeping up with the basics.

There are basic things we should all be doing for good health.

You may be struggling to improve a problem and making little progress.

Or, you may be giving up and taking a pharmaceutical shortcut that will later come back to bite you.

Or, you may be missing the forrest for the trees in search of optimizing niche things that hardly matter when you haven’t yet mastered the basics.

Or maybe you’re here because you simply want to cover all your bases and suspect you may be missing one or more.

Regardless of which category you fit in, we should all from time to time review our health routine and make sure we’re covering all the basics.

These are the things we should all be doing for our health as a baseline, not things we should be measuring or things we should be optimizing. If your measurements are coming in looking bad or you’re trying to optimize something that just won’t optimize, come back to this and see if you’re hitting all the basic action items.

This is educational in nature and not medical or dietetic advice. See terms for additional and more complete disclaimers.

The Health and Wellness Checklist

Here’s your simple checklist. Make sure you read the detailed description below before deciding whether you can check off each item.

☐ Eat a nutritious, largely whole-food diet that is digested well and adequate in all the macronutrients and micronutrients. Limit alcohol to no more than 15 drinks per month.

☐ Get plenty of direct outdoor sunshine in the morning, a little bit in the afternoon, spend most of your day in natural lighting, and avoid artificial light at night.

☐ Maintain a healthy body composition.

☐ Breath through your nose and breathe fully.

☐ Live an active lifestyle with healthy movement patterns.

☐ Sleep well.

☐ Take a food-first, pharma-last approach.

☐ Get yearly checkups from your primary care doctor, dentist, and a movement specialist. Women should stay up to date with gynecologists and most people should add hearing and vision screening as they get older, or at any point if they have reason to believe their hearing and vision is suffering.

☐ Treat your eyes and ears well.

☐ Work in healthy positions.

☐ Be a digital intentionalist, and spend time in the real world.

☐ Be clean, from both industrial and microbial toxins.

☐ Nourish positive relationships with our family and friends and a positive outlook within ourselves.

☐ Take bites of life only as big as you can chew, but always be taking bites.

Eat a nutritious, largely whole-food diet that is adequate in all the macronutrients and micronutrients.

What follows is not a list of foods that everyone must eat, but rather how everyone should eat if they want to meet their nutrient needs without thinking any harder or further about it.

Your diet should contain protein diversified across meat, fish, shellfish, and other invertebrates, such as insects if you eat them, eggs, and dairy products. Most of these foods should take up a third of your plate at each meal when used as your main source of protein, but eggs should take up about half your plate when used as your main source of protein. When eating eggs, the white should always be fully cooked solid. When using liquid dairy products as your main source of protein, you need at least two glasses worth at a given meal.

If you eat animals other than shellfish, try to eat nose-to-tail. At a minimum, try to include liver and edible bones or bone broth.

If you don’t eat animals, put special emphasis on legumes (lentils, peas, and beans) that you digest well. These need to make up the bulk of your calories to provide enough protein.

After you meet your protein requirement, you can flexibly decide whether you feel better with the remainder of your diet being fueled by carbohydrate, fat, or a mix of the two.

Limit your total number of alcoholic drinks to more than 15 per month, and, if you do drink alcohol, group the drinks in a way that interferes least with your sleep and quality of life.

To ensure you are getting adequate vitamins and minerals from food, follow these principles:

• Eat an average of one to two ounces of liver per day (you can batch this once per week).

• Eat an average of one or two oysters per day (you need this every day unless you also get your protein for the day primarily as red meat or cheese).

• Use a tablespoon or two per day of unfortified nutritional yeast in anything that could use a cheesy flavor.

• Diversify your carbohydrates among whole grains, legumes (lentils, peas, and beans), starchy tubers such as potatoes, and whole fruits. If you’re going to cut one of those out, you can cut out whole grains. Grains and legumes (alongside nuts and seeds) should be soaked, sprouted, soured, or fermented.

• Eat several cups per day of vegetables, diversified across the color spectrum. Make sure at least one of those cups of vegetables is dark green.

• At least a cup of fruits and vegetables should be raw to maximally preserve vitamin C. The most popular sources of vitamin C-rich foods that could fulfill this purpose are bell peppers, strawberries, oranges, pineapple, papaya, and lemon.

• You need three servings of calcium-rich-foods per day. These can include dairy products like milk, yogurt, kefir, or cheese, but not dairy products that isolate the fat (butter, cream) or the protein (whey protein, casein). They can include edible bones, such as those in canned fish or the soft parts on the ends of chicken bones, or whole bone meal powder. They can include some greens, mainly napa cabbage, Chinese mustard greens, and bok choy.

• Include foods or supplements that aid in digestion at every meal. Examples include ginger, lacto-fermented vegetables, kombucha, raw apple cider vinegar, and Swedish bitters.

• Salt your food to taste. Assume you are not getting enough salt unless you do, especially if you are not eating bread and cheese.

If you are not hitting one or more of these, you should take a multivitamin. I have given guidance on multivitamins in Will Multivitamins Help You Live Longer?

Eat at least eighty percent of your food cooked at home. If you cook with oil, use traditional fats and oils like red palm oil, coconut oil, olive oil, or fats from grass-fed animals (butter, ghee, tallow, lard), not “seed oils.” When you eat out use restaurants that are confirmed to not use seed oils. Across the board, minimize deep fried foods and desserts as special treats.

Select your foods based on what produces stool quality consistent with 3-5 on the Bristol chart most of the time. Your bowel movements should not require excessive strain nor come with excessive urgency. You should at least be in the range of having two to twenty bowel movements per week, but should ideally have one to two per day.

Eat your food sitting down in a relaxed environment, chew it thoroughly without rushing, go for a light walk after eating or at least stay upright for 40 minutes, and avoid laying down within two to three hours of eating.

Get plenty of direct outdoor sunshine in the morning, a little bit in the afternoon, spend most of your day in natural lighting, and avoid artificial blue light at night.

Every morning, get 30 minutes of outdoor unprotected sunshine. Get it as early as possible after you wake up. Try to ditch your glasses if you wear them. Even if it is overcast, go outside. Even if it is raining, try to go outside under shelter.

In the afternoon, usually around 1 PM, the UV light is the strongest. Get at least two minutes of unprotected sunshine during this time to maximize the synthesis of vitamin D. This dose should be less than what is required to even temporarily turn your skin a little pink. However, the darker your skin is the more time you need. For example, very dark skin can require up to two hours to maximize vitamin D synthesis.

Outside of this small afternoon dose, you should protect your skin from the sun using clothing made from natural fibers for most of the day, especially from 10 AM to 5 PM. For example, wear a sun hat when in the sun.

Nevertheless, you should spend as much of your day in natural indirect sunlight as possible. Ideally this is outdoors, where overhead shade protects your skin from excess UV rays but outdoor sunlight is still what is enabling you to see everything around you.

If you must work indoors, to the extent possible, work in an environment that has abundant natural light coming in the windows so that you can see everything you need to see without using any artificial lights. Avoid tinted windows and “environmentally friendly” low-emissivity windows. “Environmentally friendly” windows hate your mitochondria and block the infrared light needed to nourish them.

Preferably after the sun sets, but at least for two hours before bed, avoid any artificial blue light. You can switch your ambient lighting over to red or amber lights and you can wear amber-colored blue-blocking glasses if you have to expose yourself to standard lights (like the refrigerator light or if you have rooms like the bathroom where you don’t switch over the ambient lighting).

Maintain a healthy body composition.

If you spend a lot of time among general populations in the west, a good rule of thumb is that you want to be in the upper half of muscle mass and in the bottom 20-40% of fat mass.

If you plug your height and weight into a BMI calculator, it should be at least 18.5. It should be below 25 if you are white, 24 if you are black, and 23 if you are east or south Asian, with some studies arguing for a very tight 18.5-19.2 optimal for south Asians.

If you look like you carry a “beer gut” when you look in the mirror, you have too much visceral abdominal fat and need to lose fat. It is healthier and less risky to carry “rolls,” and for women it is healthy to carry fat in the hips and thighs.

If you measure your body fat mass and percentage with DEXA, underwater weighing, or bod pod, the percentage for men should be 12-17% and for women should be at least 17%, ideally above 22%, and up to 30%. If you convert your height to square meters (from inches, square your height in inches and multiply by 703) and divide your total fat mass by this number, you can derive your fat mass index. It should be at least 4 but under 10. You can then plug your height, weight, and body fat percentage into a fat-free mass index calculator. Your fat-free mass should be at least 20. If you care more about longevity than aesthetics you should not push it higher than 24.

Breath through your nose and breathe fully.

By default, your breathing should occur through your nose.

There are exceptions, with the primary two being when you are unable to breathe through your nose and when your oxygen demand from exercise exceeds what you are able to get through nose breathing.

When you inhale, your default should be to fill your entire torso with breath, allowing your ribs and diaphragm to expand in all three dimensions, without letting your belly hang out and while keeping your shoulders relaxed.

By default, you should take long, full inhales and exhales that last around 6.5 seconds each.

You don’t want to be thinking about your breath all the time, but you can occasionally check in with how it’s behaving and set apart small amounts of time each day to practice proper breathing if needed.

Live an active lifestyle with healthy movement patterns.

You should have an active lifestyle that incorporates all of the essential movement patterns and challenges to your system.

You do not need to track your workouts or optimize for specific skills, but your movement regime needs to fulfill all the challenges necessary to keep your body working properly, because everything in your body follows a “use it or lose it” principle.

Thus, if you simply want to maintain a series of sports games for fun, this is fine, but review them to make sure that all of the following get challenged. Fill in any gaps you discover.

It is definitely possible to find creative ways to hit more than one of each item in a single exercise, but if you aren’t a trainer or a biomechanics expert you should seek one out if trying to design the most efficient program you can.

Every ten days, your exercise should include the following types of cardio sessions:

• At least one intense 30-second sprint using any type of exercise that leaves you huffing and puffing afterward.

• One cardio session where you sustain one pace for an hour that you probably couldn’t have held for another 10-15 minutes without slowing down or giving up.

• One cardio session where you hit a mix of different intensities (a sports game or group workout class could fit).

Every week, you should hit at least one heavy working set of resistance exercise for each of the following domains:

• Upper body vertical pull (e.g. pullup).

• Upper body vertical push (e.g. overhead press).

• Upper body horizontal pull (e.g. row).

• Upper body horizontal push (e.g. pushup).

• Lower body pull (e.g. deadlift).

• Lower body push (e.g. squat).

• Horizontal rotation (e.g. banded or cable trunk rotation).

• Diagonal rotation (e.g. regular and reverse chop and lifts).

• Side bending at the torso (e.g. side plank, dumbell side bends, or a kettlebell windmill).

• Abduction and adduction of the hip (e.g. standing banded or cable abduction and adduction).

• Internal and external rotation of the shoulder (e.g. banded or cable internal and external rotation).

• External and internal hip rotation (e.g. clamshells and reverse clamshells).

• The six directions of the neck (bending up and down, rotating to each side, and side-bending to each side).

If this seems too complicated, you might want to look for a group workout class that naturally hits many of the bases you tend to miss when you design your own workouts. For example, a pilates class will often hit almost all of the strength points listed above. A Lagree class will mix this with sustained or mixed cardio intensity for an hour.

The resistance exercise sets only “count” if you are within 80% of what you could have done before being unable to do any further work. For example, if you hit eight reps and could have gotten 10, it counts. But if you hit eight reps and you could have gotten 12, it was a warmup and doesn’t count toward the minimum of one set per week. To estimate this properly, you should have experienced at least several times in your life a rep where you hit a wall where you spent five to eight seconds pushing with all your might through the failure point in order to complete it. If you haven’t, you are probably underestimating your capacity.

Make sure that at least every 7-10 days elements of your exercise challenge your balance, your ability to quickly change directions, your ability to be quick on your feet, and your ability to respond to unexpected stimuli outside your control (such as having to catch a ball that someone else throws).

Get as much light movement in as possible (for example, comfortable walking), aiming for at least one if not several hours per day.

If you track your workouts, you should not be losing strength, endurance, speed, balance, or agility over time. If you are, it could be a sign that something else is wrong, but the most obvious place to look is that you are training too much. Try reducing your exercise volume, duration, frequency, or intensity, or choose easier exercises, and see if it helps.

If you don’t track your workouts, make sure that they are not leaving you tired all the time. If they are, it could be a sign that something else is wrong, but the most obvious place to look is that you are training too much. Try reducing your exercise volume, duration, frequency, or intensity, or choose easier exercises, and see if it helps.

You should not be experiencing joint pain and it should certainly not be getting worse over time. If you are, you may simply be moving wrong, or you may simply have put together a poor selection of exercises to create an imbalanced program. Have a trainer or your movement specialist (see below) review your movement quality and program design to look for flaws that could be causing joint pain. You also need to look at how you are distributing the load of your workouts. Make sure that the hurting joint is getting a long enough multi-day rest period before it gets worked hard again. Don’t use anabolic steroids, which make your muscles too strong for your joints. Don’t do the same exercise all the time while constantly pushing it to the highest load possible, which is joint suicide.

You shouldn’t be getting injured, whether acutely or chronically. If you are, have a trainer or your movement specialist (see below) thoroughly review and revise your practice to focus on injury prevention.

On the other hand, if your joints hurt and you aren’t exercising, you need to start exercising for joint health. If you are falling and injuring yourself and don’t exercise, you need to start exercising for balance, strength, and to train safe ways of falling.

Every once in a while, try a new sport or group activity. If you notice you are bad at something, or are losing the ability to do it, and it is important to you, find a way to add it to your training regimen.

If hitting all the bases above exceeds your total capacity for exercise, reduce the frequency of the exercises or the number of components you are hitting until you find something sustainable. First try doing them less often, such as every two weeks instead of every one week. If you find that this is not frequent enough for you to get better at anything, then cut down the number of exercises and focus on doing at least one thing frequently enough to keep getting better at it. Try to train your way into handling a well-rounded regime that does hit all the bases.

Your movement patterns should be checked at least yearly by a specialist (see below). Whatever you learn about healthy movement patterns from your specialist should be incorporated into your training program to improve the quality of your movement.

Sleep well.

Allow yourself at least a nine-hour window to sleep. Prioritize it above anything else you might do at night and be consistent about it every day. Start this sleeping window at the same time every day.

Frame this in a period of mental relaxation and zero exposure to artificial blue light. This winding down period should be two to four hours long.

If you notice patterns in how eating impacts your sleep — for example, if going to bed hungry or going to bed after eating a big meal hurts your sleep — eat in the way that maximizes the quantity and quality of your sleep, with the primary endpoint being that you wake up feeling rested and ready to tackle the new day.

Do not set an alarm clock. To the extent possible, schedule your day so that you have room to wake up a little later than usual and you will not be late for anything important. If you have to use an alarm clock as a safety measure, schedule your day so that you can set the alarm two hours after you expect to wake up and you will still have time to get ready for anything important even in the event you wake up to the alarm.

Take a food-first, pharma-last approach.

You should always try to meet your nutrient requirements from food before you try to meet them with supplements.

When you use supplements, you should use the least number of supplements at the lowest doses needed to achieve your purpose.

If you can solve a problem with foods and supplements you should always do so before you try to solve it with pharmaceuticals.

None of this is meant to say that there is no place for supplements — even at megadose levels — or drugs. However, you should maintain a bias to solve problems with foods and natural remedies first, with supplements second, and with pharmaceuticals last, and should be very conservative about the need to progress from one type of solution to the next.

Get yearly checkups from your primary care doctor, dentist, and a movement specialist.

The doctor and dentist are largely self-explanatory: you want to know if you are developing a problem and address it in a timely manner.

Inflammation in your oral cavity can be a systemic source of inflammation, so the dentist is not merely an aesthetic appointment.

Ideally your doctor follows your food-first, pharma-last approach.

Ideally your dentist is familiar with Weston Price and Sir Edward Mellanby’s research showing that good nutrition can lead to refilling of cavities without surgery, and errs on the side of putting the least number of foreign objects in your mouth possible using the least toxic materials available, and does not believe root canals are safe. Often searching for a “biological dentist” can help turn that up.

You need someone to assess your joint alignments and movement patterns to make sure your activity regime reinforces good movement patterns that will lead to a pain-free life from now into your old age. Try seeking someone associated with the Postural Restoration Institute, the Institute of Physical Art, or the Ida Rolf Institute.

Treat your eyes and ears well.

Use maximal ear protection when you are exposed to unnaturally loud, repeatable noises. For example, at the gun range or concerts.

Avoid putting sound inside your ears whenever you can. For example, listen to a podcast with external speakers and put phone calls on speaker when you can get away with it socially.

If you read regularly, take frequent breaks to look at things that are far away. You could set a timer every 20 minutes as a reminder to spend one minute looking at things in the distance, or you could use a task-based reminder to avoid interruptions, such as finishing a section or chapter of what you are reading.

If you do regular reading on your phone or computer, you need to address not only distance, but also screen exposure. Aim to do as much of your reading on physical paper in natural lighting as possible. One way to negotiate this would be to read online when you know you have to frequently flip between many sources, but to print something out and read it when you know you are going to read a document from beginning to end.

Work in healthy positions.

If you work on a computer, you need to minimize the crowding together of your head, your hands, and everything in between in space. Have your primary setup keep your monitor at eye level and your hands resting on an external keyboard at slightly below elbow level when your shoulders are in a relaxed and retracted position. Have the distances set while you maintain a neutral spine with your ribs stacked over your hips and your head centered over your torso, not sliding forward or looking downward. Your keyboard should be designed to allow you to separate your hands and rotate them to a less flat position, like the Kinesis 2.

If you are able to maintain this setup, it will help minimize the stress of a disorganized posture on your upper body, but your upper body still won’t get enough movement in this position, so you will need to take frequent breaks to get your upper body moving.

If you are staring at a screen for hours, you will also need to give breaks to your eyes to look at things that are far away. You may therefore want to take breaks every twenty minutes or after certain types of tasks are complete to get in “movement snacks” that include head and torso rotation as well as external rotation of your shoulders and elbows and supination of your wrists, while also getting some “eye snacks” in by looking at objects in the distance.

Even while doing computer work, however, you can find many healthier positions with your lower body to alternate. For example, if you have an adjustable standing desk with a treadmill, you can alternate between standing, walking, sitting, lunging, squatting, kneeling, sitting on your shins, sitting cross-legged or in a half lotus or lotus, and sitting in a 90-90 while you work.

If you need to use a laptop without an external keyboard because, for example, you frequently work at coffee shops or while traveling, you should take more frequent breaks for full-body exercises to break up the monotony of a poor working position.

If you do a different type of physical work where these ideas don’t apply, get input from a movement specialist on how you can best position yourself for your work.

If you do stationary work, you will need to find ways to work in movement snacks. If you do physical labor, you will need to find ways to mitigate overuse injuries from doing one type of movement over and over, or from using one side of your body so much more than the other.

Be a digital intentionalist, and spend time in the real world.

A digital minimalist tries to minimize their connection to the digital world.

A digital intentionalist thinks, “is this connection to the digital world useful to me?” and adopts the digital custom only when the answer is clearly yes.

Our bodies and minds are designed for the physical world, not the digital world.

If we spend lots of time on the computer or phone, it puts us into a stressed state. If we “forrest bathe,” it reduces stress.

Our social media feeds are designed to addict us with dopamine hits that facilitate doom scrolling.

No one goes out to a 3-hour group dinner and laments having “doom dinnerred.”

In general, then, we want to opt for the “real world” over the digital world at least as a preference, opting for the digital world only when we intentionally choose it because we see a specific benefit to it.

While we have a long way to go in understanding the impacts of electromagnetic frequency (EMF) on health, the principle that is emerging from the research is that we want a high exposure to the native EMF generated by people, animals, the earth, and by the sun as experienced from earth when following the light exposure guidelines described earlier. On the other hand, we want a low exposure to non-native EMF from electrical devices.

It may be that grounding is an important aspect of being connected to the real world, alongside attending social events with real people and spending time in nature. This means being barefoot or wearing shoes made from leather you sweat in or made from modern “grounding” materials while being connected either to the earth itself or to a conductive material like the salt water of the ocean or unsealed concrete.

At a minimum, for EMF:

• Put at least 8-12 inches of distance between yourself and your phone or your laptop, unless you have an EMF-blocking pad in the way. Even then, maintain whatever distance you can, such as having your laptop on an EMF-blocking pad on top of a pillow instead of on your lap if you are working while reclining on a couch.

• Turn your wifi off when you sleep.

• Turn off and unplug devices you are close to when you aren’t using them.

• Whenever practical, charge your devices in between using them rather than while using them.

At a minimum, for the real world:

• Spend some time in nature at least once a week, even if it’s just a walk on the beach or through the woods.

• Eat dinner with family or friends at least once a week, or do something else with genuine social value.

Other good ideas in this area are to try grounding, have your home evaluated for dirty electricity, choose areas to live that are less dense with power lines and 5g antennas, practice “phone fasts,” and anything else you think of to anchor you more in the real world than the digital world.

An important part of connecting to the real world is being barefoot. Being barefoot on the earth can be a way to practice grounding, but another important part of going barefoot is that you get far more neurological stimulation to your feet when they have to adjust to hard surfaces without shoes in the way. This trains your proprioception, which is your sense of how you are positioned within three-dimensional space. Robust proprioception is extremely important to injury prevention. Cleanliness concerns about this are covered in the section below.

Another important part of connecting to the real world is your exteroception. Whereas proprioception is your sense of yourself and your position with respect to your environment, exteroception is your perception of the environment itself through your five senses. The recommendation in the exercise section to make sure your exercise regimen trains “your ability to respond to unexpected stimuli outside your control (such as having to catch a ball that someone else throws)” will help train your exteroception. Using a sport that requires traversing an area while navigating around obstacles or making decisions of where to go based on things you observe — for example, hiking, skiing, snowboarding, an obstacle course, and many others — will help train your exteroception. Ditching your GPS and going for a ride can train it. If you are always “in your head” you should consider training it with something like my Walking Sensory Meditation.

Be clean, from both industrial and microbial toxins.

Being clean by washing your hands, taking showers, keeping your house in order, throwing old food out of your fridge, cleaning the remains of food waste from your eating environment, and cleaning the kitchen and taking out the trash is important to prevent overgrowth of pathogenic microbes on your skin, mucous membranes, and in your home. The reason pathogenic microbes are pathogenic is because they produce toxins.

We therefore want to consider water—>soap—>antimicrobial cleaners similarly to foods—>supplements/herbs—>drugs.

You may be surprised what can be cleaned with water and a cloth alone.

A soap with no fragrances or other additional ingredients is not toxic at all, though it does have the downside of dissolving the lipids of your skin. It is obvious you need soap to clean dishes because the soap dissolves the greasy elements in water just like it dissolves your skin lipids into the water. Soap is also more effective at washing pathogenic microbes off your skin, so you should use it after your hands get dirty or after you go to the bathroom and before you eat. In fact, you almost never need to kill pathogenic microbes on your hands (with obvious exceptions like surgery prep or after coming into contact with something egregiously pathogenic) because they haven’t colonized your skin and soap is incredibly effective at washing them right off into the drain.

However, it still makes sense to minimize unnecessary contact with soap. For example, if you are washing dishes by hand for a whole house all day, wearing dish gloves will be a great way to protect your hands from too much soap (as well as too much water).

Rarely do you actually need antimicrobial killers. When something kills a microbe it will inevitably have at least a little toxicity to us, so you should be judicious about using them, because the entire point of being clean from pathogenic microbes is to be clean from their toxins.

Stagnant environments breed microbial overgrowth. You want your digestive motility to be fast enough to prevent overgrowth of bacteria and fungi in your small intestine. You want light to enter your home and any water to be dried rather than to sit stagnant so you don’t get overgrowth of toxic mold. If your room is a mess, there is probably something funky growing underneath something you haven’t picked up over the last year that comes bearing gifts of toxins.

By the same token we don’t want industrial toxins bombarding us from all the entry points into our living space, so filter your drinking water, your shower water, and your air.

Synthetic clothing does contain toxins, but how often they leach into your skin probably depends on how much you sweat in them. On the other hand, working up a sweat in a material that has no sweat-wicking properties can get fungal toxins being produced in your skin quite quickly. So make choices to minimize unnecessary synthetic fibers, but be aware that industrial toxins and fungal toxins are equally problematic. Make the choice that minimizes total toxin exposure. If you wind up with an itchy rash after your workout, you haven’t done that.

You have to consider that a microbial infection leads to self-reproduction of the toxin factory within your skin, whereas synthetic fibers can only leach toxins from the clothing to the surface of your skin acutely and you may be able to wash much of them off the surface before absorption. Therefore, it is more important to wear whatever material will prevent you from getting an ugly rash after you workout than it is to avoid synthetic fibers, but once you have this part under control, you should still err on the side of natural fibers.

Try to use glass, stainless steel, and ceramic over plastic for your cooking and the storage of your food and drink. Cast iron is good for cooking if you don’t have an iron overload problem.

In the previous section, we discussed the benefit of going barefoot for grounding and proprioception. If you do this for grounding, you do want to consider the quality of the ground you are on. You can avoid the risk of soil parasites by avoiding land with fecal matter from wild animals, pets, and application of unheated manure. You should definitely wash your feet before entering your home. A convenient way to do this is to carry water-based disposable wipes to clean your feet as you switch back into your shoes. However, if you suspect you have been exposed to fecal matter you should wash thoroughly with soap and water as fast as possible.

While you cannot ground on the floors of your home, you can certainly develop proprioception by walking barefoot inside your home. If you do this, you certainly want your floors to be clean, which means you should follow the Asian practice of no shoes in the house, and dedicated slippers for special dirty areas. For example, special slippers for the bathroom, and, if you have one, the balcony, while having dedicated areas for bare feet. In the Asian practice this might be limited to tatami flooring, but if your goal is to develop better proprioception, this could be all the flat floors of your house. Just wash them off with water before you get into bed or otherwise put your feet places that will rub against your face, since no matter how clean your floor is you would never eat off it.

The best way to negotiate these concerns is to use grounding shoes for grounding, use Asian traditions to keep your home floors pristine, walk barefoot on your pristine home floors, and wipe your feet with water wipes before bed.

Nourish positive relationships with your family and friends and maintain a positive outlook.

Humans are social animals. Every introvert needs to socialize and every extrovert needs to introspect. Make sure you make time for both. Seek friends who bring out the best in you.

Health requires a disposition toward hope, optimism, and gratitude. Experiment with whatever helps you maintain this disposition and keep what works. Prayer, meditation, and gratitude journaling are some things you could try.

Have a strong sense of purpose, but do something trivial.

We can see the importance of purpose and calling to longevity in the famous story of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both dying on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1826. The last words of Adams were “Thomas Jefferson survives,” though Jefferson had in fact died several hours earlier.

I also saw this when my grandmother died. About a week earlier, she told me she was depressed because she didn’t understand why she was still on earth when my grandfather had left her several years earlier, but that she felt the family needed her. Her sense of purpose was conflicted so she was left in a state of limbo. While she got sick and fell in the days that followed, she passed from this life after internally reconciling herself that her purpose on this earth had been completed and it was time to meet her husband and Lord in heaven.

If a strong sense of purpose can determine whether we defeat or submit to death, it certainly must be a central driver of health.

At the same time, it is important to be able to do something trivial. Something strictly for enjoyment.

Many of us are so obsessed with the purpose of everything that we cannot do something that we have no answer for when asked “what is the purpose of this?”

For example, having a hobby is great, but if you are constantly trying to optimize it and improve your performance, you aren’t genuinely resting in the pure enjoyment of it. Find something that you do for fun and only for fun. You don’t even need to call it “fun.” Just something whose purpose is nothing other than the experience. Even if that is simply resting.

Take bites of life only as big as you can chew, but always be taking bites.

Our comfort zone is where we go to shrivel and die.

Outside the outer atmosphere of our comfort zone is where we go to give up.

Just outside our comfort zone is where we go to grow.

What we want to do is exit our comfort zone just far enough to obtain a growth stimulus, then come back to our comfort zone to rest and recover. Then rinse and repeat.

We can apply this to exercise, cold plunging, sauna, intermittent hypobaric hypoxia training, learning a language, mastering a new discipline, learning a new hobby, or any other type of growth.

To some extent, these will occupy specific stress buckets, and to some extent we have a total stress bucket.

If you aren’t growing, you probably aren’t taking off a big enough bite.

If you keep getting worse at something the more you bite, your bites are too big.

Always make sure you are challenged and always make sure you are properly resting and recovering from the challenge. This balance is what sets us on the path to always learn and grow.

Checked All the Boxes?

If you checked all the boxes, great! You’re doing all the basics right.

If you feel like you’re on top of the world with your health, rest on your laurels a bit.

But if there are still problems to solve or goals to reach, consider entering an Optimization Cycle.

Learn more about that in the next article: