Reflecting upon the most extreme diet, work ethic and overall lifestyle I could’ve come up with so far.
“OMAD, the acronym for “one meal a day,” is sometimes also called the 23:1 regimen because a person spends up to 23 hours a day fasting and only eats during a brief window.”
Do you speak Veganese?
Now, if you know me a bit, you are probably familiar with the fact that I can have quite a tendency to be a bit over the top with some of my lifestyle choices at times. It’s always been a core part of my personality, that if I find something that I am incredibly interested in with nothing holding me back, that I go full steam ahead. And that often enough on a whim.
One of the areas I was always really juicy about was dieting. It all started, when I decided from one day to the other to become Vegan at age 17. For the record, there was nothing that apparently pushed me into it. I did not watch a single “cowspiracy”, nor did I at all grow up with the mentality of a vegetarian diet. I was pretty much eating junk all day every day and didn’t remotely care about what I put into my body up until then. But I loved animals and had a strong urge to do the “right thing” for them. I just knew that we insanely exploit the earth and animals with our way of farming. It is an obvious disaster. And for any of you that don’t know what I am talking about (if you are living under a rock), please leave this post to watch ”Cowspiracy”.
I decided with my girlfriend at the time that we gotta go vegetarian. Like, right now. But 4 days in, I told her, that I don’t do no half assed sh*t. We somehow tried to help out all those poor animals with our diet, while still eating dairy and other types of products that they produce. And if you think about it for more than 2 minutes, it can only seem hypocritical. So you guessed it, we went Vegan.
To be fair, I did not have a single clue what to actually eat, but being a creative guy, this didn’t stop, but inspired me. Remember, this was some 10 years ago, and being Vegan back then was (at least in Berlin, where I grew up) nothing remotely sensical in the eyes of society. There was no “Vegan Meat”, barely could you find Soy Milk anywhere, nor was it at all trendy at the time. In fact, the closest subcultures to embrace those types of food choices were Punks and the slowly emerging Hipsters. I actually fitted somewhat into both categories, with my ripped and oversized skateboard clothes, plugs in my earlobes and (not so) fashionable laces around my wrists. But I did not care all too much what I looked like, or what people thought of me. I only wanted to be a force of good.
So here I was, eating potato soup and peanut butter jelly sandwiches every day. My mother, the parents of my girl back then, as well as everybody else thought that we totally lost it. My girlfriend at the time was Persian, where meat is in just about every dish, same with my mother having a German/Rumanian background, where animal products are a big part of.. well, everything.
But screw this, I wanna save the damn planet.
And so I did, one Peanut Butter Jelly Sandwich at a time.
After a short while though, my cooking skills improved greatly and it became a big passion of mine to find out about all the different ingredients that edible plants have to offer. To my liking, I figured that about 95% of what you can find in terms of edible goods on this planet all stems from a plant in some way or another. Our parents also slowly adjusted to our teenage boycott and became vegetarian themselves to a satisfying extent. After all, it was not very difficult to just cook what you already did, but without the meat. And maybe just add some extra tofu. Also, one of my best friends at the time (we still are best friends) totally went for veganism himself and an additional amount of friends in our social circle chose the vegetarian route too! To be fair, I never wanted to heavily turn other people around to my liking, because I thought that it anyways wouldn’t work, but rather to myself be the change that I want to see in the world. At the same time, it boggled my mind to notice how much my environment changed by the sheer amount of stubborn teenage willpower that I expressed for myself (and the people who asked about it). People just became curious and wanted to know a lot of stuff regarding veganism. And a large portion of them got very inspired by the luckily coherent answers that I held in place. Gradually more and more people came to tell me that they actually stopped eating so many animal products with a proud smile on their face.
“But I could never become a vegan, I just love cheese too much”
is by far the phrase that I heard and still hear the most often in that regard. I also came to listen to some other funny things and the clowns in my school definitely did not go easy on me thinking it’d be hilarious to mock me for being a Vegan:
“Siemore is only allowed to eat glass!”
Was one of the better ones that I remember. After all, I also stopped using plastic bottles, but glass instead. Another interesting notion from all the aspiring 17 year old gym rats in my surroundings was the ever recurring argument, that you can not gain, nor maintain muscle with the low amounts of protein that the vegan diet offers. Let’s keep this one short: It is absolute garbage. Now back then I did not at all care about being muscular, but even then it just seemed incredible to me, how bad some peoples comprehension was, when it came to nutrition. After all, you only have to read the label on the back of the stuff you buy to see how much protein, fats or carbohydrates per 100 grams there is inside. Or just google “best vegan protein sources” for god’s sake. Ever checked out nuts, beans or lentils? You guessed it, they have more protein than most meats. And second of all, you do not even need that much protein to begin with. Even if you work out (what I am doing since like 6 years now and that almost daily). I know this is a bold claim, but it only makes sense to me. If you don’t gain 10 grams of muscle per day, which really no one without the benefit of newbie gains or anabolics does, you can not tell me that you need a daily intake of 3 grams of protein per gram of bodyweight. It just seems ridiculous. And with what I am about to tell you, I am sort of going to prove it.
So let us now continue with the plot I actually wanted to share with you. The story of how I pretty much lost my mind.
Time(for)restricted eating
Fast forward some 5 years, where I just turned 23. At this time, I already kind of gave up on veganism (what I pulled off for two years in total without really cheating ever), while still staying vegetarian to the biggest extent. There were a few reasons for that, but ultimately, I just got too annoyed by my desire to restrict myself that much (which turns out to be strange, because what I was about to do is the biggest restriction I ever put on myself so far). While I did not really try to convince anyone out there with brute force to be a vegan, I cajoled the living bejeezus out of myself to be one. And I did not want to anymore. I just wanted to take eating a bit more lightly. Another reason was that I also just moved on with my research about the topic of what a healthy diet can look like. And while being Vegan can be very healthy indeed, it by far is not the only good way of dieting out there. To be fair though, I am still eating vegan to a big degree, because of the (maybe not so obvious) diversity in plant based food choices that are out there. And if I ever bought animal products, I watched out for a considerable stringency. Organic is the bare minimum because of how animals get treated. I know that I can no longer claim complete sainthood from that perspective, but it is still better than to buy the cheapest you can get, what most people do. And at this point I just wanted to have a well rounded diet and be a bit selfish. To be fair, even as an animal lover, I think it is totally “natural” for our species to kill and eat them to some extent.
But I was not done yet.
See, I was and still am widely obsessed with the topic of health optimization by every measure that I can figure out. And one interesting thing I stumbled upon was so-called “intermittent fasting”. Now I guess that probably everyone at this point knows what it is, but let me briefly explain: You deliberately do not eat for a certain amount of time during the day. Usually people split it up into 16 hours of not eating and 8 hours of eating. (what do you think the word break(-)fast actually means?)
But the idea of time restricted eating is often times, that the longer the fast, the healthier it is. To explain why anyone would believe that, you have to take a step back to get a better understanding of what fasting does to your organism. Let us get the heaviest hitter out of the way: We were to a great extent designed to fast. And it is easy to understand why that is. Way back in the days, when there were no supermarkets, you did not have access to food sources around the clock. In fact, you most often did not have access to food sources at all. It was often enough a very black and white situation, where you stumbled upon something to eat and then ate it. We killed an animal, ate as much as we could of it, hoping to accumulate enough fat for the future, moved on and left everything behind that is not absolutely necessary (and carryable) for the continuation of our journey. You see, the human animal has only been a sedentary (food producing) creature for about 10000 years, which is only a very tiny, insignificant fraction of our actual evolutionary span. Before that, we just strived through the vast landscapes in pursuit of a better future (meat and water). Our bodies got used to the fact that we did not have much to eat in most circumstances. And one of the incredible adaptive features we developed along the way is what scientists call autophagy, literally meaning self-eating. Sounds a little gross and certainly not healthy, but hear me out.
You are essentially (by many measures) a biological machine. And machines experience abrasion. So does our body. More precisely, our cells get damaged and stop working properly for a magnitude of reasons. And this is where autophagy kicks in. After a while of not eating, when glucose and insulin levels drop considerably in your system, the body starts to actively look out for those damaged cells and other things that do not belong where they are to eat them away. This has two great benefits. On one hand, you get some good nutrients out of metabolizing all the junk between your bowels and manage to further sustain yourself. On the other hand, you clean yourself up internally. In fact, autophagy is believed to be one of the most potetn ways to ensure health and longevity by getting rid of all the broken stuff that you accumulate. It is basically the equivalent of cleaning up your house. And I do not have to convince anyone that a magnitude of things we have laying around is objectively considered just a bunch of garbage. Sadly for most people, by being alway fed, autophagy fundamentally never kicks in ever.
Additionally, there are loads of other ways that fasting (literally) gets us going. I will not make this all too extensive, but basically, due to the creeping internal understanding that there is and was no food intake happening for prolonged periods of time, your body gets a little agitated. On the hormonal level, we can start to observe an increase in things like adrenaline and dopamine. Both are neuromodulators known for their sharpening and inciting effect on the mind. This usually is subjectively experienced as a heightened state of drive, alertness and concentration, not unlike the effects of drinking a cup of coffee. And this also makes a whole lot of sense. Back in the olden days, when you went through periods of famine (which was more the rule than the exception), your body had to start signaling to you that you better get off your dusty neanderthal butt and start hunting some wildebeest (which really is the modern equivalent of “go get some money”). Also, levels of Human Growth Hormones have been shown to increase significantly especially in male subjects. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2926306/)
There are also a whole bunch of other positive benefits like reduced inflammation and lowered risk of cardiovascular diseases and cancer, but let’s leave it at that here. Certainly, all of this sounded just awesome to me so that I wanted to try intermittent fasting myself and while some people consider it to be difficult to implement, it came pretty natural for me right away. I quickly figured out that I actually do not even like to have breakfast and feel much better without it.
Meet my Guru
After some time and more research, I stumbled upon a very sort of interesting specimen that would change my outlook on things drastically for the next half year ahead. Picture a bold black monk, with the constant facial demeanor of someone meditating. His body is built like a brick house, which manifests no sudden movements but the quietness of a resting shaolin. He is enclosed by an aura of self assuredness and his words are more than carefully chosen. Expressed in a way that represents his apparent peace of mind and superior intellect. His name is Nun Amen-Ra – a self proclaimed Ascetic, Educator, Scientist and Sacred Symbologist… whatever that means.
Now this guy seemed to be the real deal. He was a record holder in powerlifting, only eats vegan and seemed pretty much enlightened in his approach to spiritual pursuits… whatever that means.
Oh and he only eats once a day. Yes, he was going for the notoriously difficult intermittent fasting regimen of what is known for some as OMAD!
“OMAD, the acronym for “one meal a day,” is sometimes also called the 23:1 regimen because a person spends up to 23 hours a day fasting and only eats during a brief window.”
Now Dr. Amen-Ra actively refused to ever call it by its pop culture term of “one meal a day”. In fact, he is so damn superior to the rest of earth’s population, that he came up with his own way of going about things. Basically, he claims only eating very little, on average about 1500 calories a day, in addition to being the originator of the “Amen Amino Elixir”, which is pretty much a protein shake with vitamins.
Now, if you understood some of the biological processes that I underlined before of why fasting is so healthy (which I assume you did), only eating once a day in theory doesn’t neccessarily seems like a dumb practice to be caught up with. After all, the longer you go without food, the stronger the aforementioned positive effects are on your body (to a reasonable extent of course, nobody should go Jesus Christ on themselves). And if you follow a workout regimen, which I did, and Mr. Guru here definitely does, then still having a meal is only needed and sensical to regain all the necessary nutrients. But if you only remotely know anything about metabolism, muscle gain, or nutritioning in general, you will way sooner than later think to yourself that there is no way on earth this dude would ever be able to build let alone maintain the physique that he has with 1500 calories a day. In fact, some of the veteran gym rats out there pointed out that for most genetic makeups you would probably need to abuse anabolics to even reach such a physique in the first place. With an intake of 3-4000 calories a day of course.
But I did not think so, nor did I know anything at all about what a juiced body looked like back then. I was pretty much convinced (although still a little sceptical), that this guy figured it all out. This had a few reasons. The first one being, that I was and still am a firm believer of the fact that today’s western society generally has the most outlandish, unhealthy eating habits you could have ever come up with in the evolution of our species. The second being, that, well, It actually makes quite a bit of sense what this egypitan god said, of how and why his protocol works. After all he is the full blown living, powerlifting, doctor title holding proof that it does, who claims to have studied the topics of health and longevity for over 20 years. And most of it is what independent studies show to be the case regardless. He did not necessarily come up with any of those beliefs by himself. On top of him being incredibly eloquent and educated you just can not easily dismantle his opinions as they are backed by science. He just stacked all the factors that make sense by themselves:
Fasting? Promotes health and longevity by a magnitude of processes. Caloric restriction? It has been shown in a whole lot of studies on mice, that the ones constantly “under-eating” their whole life lived significantly longer than the ones having free access to food sources when and wherever they went (although this one still is the most controversial). Exercise? Well, don’t get me started here, but it’s generally speaking the healthiest thing (after sleep) you can come up with on levels beyond our imagination. Also, his argument that the utilization of ingested nutrients is far higher if your body is clean than if it is clogged by every considerable toxin imaginable only makes sense as well. And having the additional tendency to believe in spiritual pursuits and everything alternative as I still somewhat did back then, I was pretty much sold (after all I lived in a traditional Yoga school from age 20 to 22).
A drugless, natural and vegan practice that enhances cognitive and physical performance in a number of ways? Which is basically the healthiest dieting regimen you can come up with by stacking all you know to be beneficial for the organism? Promoted by holy buff man figure Nun Amen-Ra?
Sign me up!
By the way, you can quickly check out the video that got me hooked, you will have to admit that it’s quite persuasive: Vegan Strongman Eats ONE MEAL A DAY !
Let the Madness begin!
I was convinced. At least to really try and see for myself what is really about all of this. And so I went out into the world, with no food, but a lot of excitement. Remember, at this point in time, most of what I could think of would be athletics, health and mental and physical performance in general. And anyone who at all ever placed a foot into the world of meatheads and weekend warriors alike knows the first commandment by heart:
“Eat a lot. Often.”
So even considering this stuff was somewhat counterintuitive. Well, I still fondly remember the very first day of this challenge. It was a warm summer day and I decided to go swimming at one of Berlin’s buzzing lakes. There was a nice and beautiful energy around and the underlying excitement of trying something so different from anything anyone ever told me before was my own little drug for the evening. And to my genuine surprise, at about six in the evening, having eaten nothing so far for the first time in my life, I felt good. In fact, I felt pretty amazing.
And I should continue to feel amazing, for a large quantity of days to come. Additionally, I had so much more time at my hands now by not preparing food, eating it afterwards and cleaning everything up, that I implemented a bunch of new behaviors like reading and writing a whole lot more and taking big trips through the city. I also started waking up earlier and earlier, until I got up at 5 in the morning, ready to go for a jog. You see, something was really riding me. And I do not know if it was the overconfidence from my newly discovered superior lifestyle, the placebo from believing in it without much questioning, or all the actual positive effects that fasting brings to you. Most likely it was a potent cocktail of all of these factors. And surely, I was grinding it out. Mind you, the real test was just about to begin, because at this point in my life, I was not working or doing anything demanding, due to the reason that I was just about to start studying Design in a few weeks. And oh boy, you better believe that I was.
Because this is where jet another driver got stacked onto the already strange looking tower of performance enhancing practices. And this one was boiling deep within me for several years without notice. Which was the severe feeling of insignificance to society. I finally wanted to get my goddamn life together, my ass off the figurative couch and out into the world with a work ethic that no one has seen before. You see, I was quite a bit ashamed of myself for the time it took me to find something work related that at least somewhat suits my personality. As the story goes, I was already 23 at an age where most kids have already finished studying. This internal pressure of finally putting myself to good use got greatly amplified by a severe interest in the self help/improvement literature out there. I read books like “Deep Work” from Cal Newport over and over again and looked up more “stop procrastinating” and “do the work” videos on Youtube that anyone could have considered healthy. So as someone who never remotely shined bright in anything work related, this was my time to finally prove myself. And so I did. Like a real only once a day eating self improvement Madman.
I was really excited, got all my stuff together, and moved into the city where I was about to study. Here I got a flat with two other guys from the same course and while I had a good chemistry with everyone around, it quickly became evident that I was the odd one out. Fairly spoken, everyone that studies something like Design is a strange figure in some fundamental way to begin with. After all, you end up as someone artistic, because all you did in school was to draw on the tables.
But what made me personally look so weird was that I got so incredibly excited about overachievement and discipline when it came to areas that most of my fellow students disregarded happily many years ago. I never did alcohol or other drugs when partying, worked out every day, read lots of books on far flung topics like business, health or biology (as someone who did not take any biology classes since the 9th grade) and cared greatly for the development of my mental capacity. And only ate once a day.
The least thing that actually captivated me was designing stuff. You see. It may have been the best choice at the time to root for design, but I was actually not all that interested in it to begin with. It is true though that I made fairly good art for the biggest portion of my life and that my skill set in everything hand eye coordination related is very considerable. So when I asked myself one day, “what I am good at?”, “what will I be able to monetize?”, was the answer to design. You know, to make appealing things. But to be fair, I already lost my childhood love for it many years ago and only picked it up again out of desperation. I just needed something to start out with in my state of rut that ran through my veins at this stage of my life. My real passion though was all about personal growth, athleticism and generally figuring out all the possible levers I could crank to boost performance, skill acquisition and overall health. But obviously, you can not claim success on a general level without actually having somewhat of a proper outlook in terms of finances and business ventures in your life. It just happened to be that studying Design was where I could now prove my concept. And to refresh your memory and conclude what I’ve told you so far, at the height of my regimen this concept now looked the following:
I got up early at 5:30am, quietly put on my shoes to not wake up my flat mates and went out for a jog around the block in the now freezing winter mornings. Next in line was a cold shower to prove even further that I was a hard self improvement gangster after which I proceeded to work on my school tasks for 3 hours. At 10 I went to university classes, went home during the Lunch break, when the mortals chose to ingest their food and took a nap until I got back to Uni which usually finished at around 4pm. Afterwards , when I did not have more uni to do, I went straight to the gym, where I grinded out some more 1,5 hours of resistance exercise every day, be it weightlifting or bodyweight exercises. All of this I did in a fasted state, because up until this point I had an intake of 0 calories since my last meal the evening before. After the workout I finally chose to refeed, which caloric density I counted of course. On average, I ate no more than 1700 calories in a single meal, the only meal I had in a given day.
What did my meal look like? First of all, I ate the same every day. And my version of the sacred “Amen Amino Elixr” was a thick dark green fluid that had some of the most disgusting ingredients combined in one of the unholiest shakes imaginable: Spirulina, Soy Protein, Turmeric, Creatine, Ashwagandha, you name it. Without any sweeteners of course. The main meal did not look any better. It was basically brown rice with olive oil, salt, garlic and some herbs here and there if I felt extra creative. Nothing else. And the dessert? A few teaspoons of 100% pure peanut butter. To be honest with you though, I utterly enjoyed every part this meal. If you do not eat anything the whole day but have such a high energy output and generally nothing in terms of leisurely activities or overall enjoyment planned ahead of you, you really start to appreciate whatever food there is to take in. And let us be real for a second, I was no Viktor Frankl who almost worked himself to death in one of the Nazis’ Concentration Camps, not eating more than 400 calories of white bread a day. So who am I to b*tch around? I finished my day off with reading and writing, to stimulate my brain in ways that university could not offer, just to get up the next morning after 7 hours of sleep, ready to tackle the same madness once again.
Breaking it all down
In all honesty, it is hard to imagine that I actually ever did anything like this to myself. And I do not have much of a clue how I could’ve thought of a lifestyle like this to be healthy. But I totally went for it for about 6 months in total. And it actually worked out quite okay. To be fair, I thrived to a considerable extent and the amount of work I squeezed out still blows my mind. I was crushing it in university, the gym and in my personal education and felt pretty good besides some of the malnourishment and sleep deprivation I was suffering from, not to mention the non-existent social life. Another side effect of my living like that when I started out was that I often got black in front of my eyes when standing up too quickly, so that I almost fainted many times. But it went away pretty effectively after a few weeks. By far the most disturbing side effect I was suffering from in the cold winter months of Germany was that I had chronically cold hands and feet. My solution was often to go to the bathroom to get a stream of warm water onto my not properly with blood supplied extremities. And somehow my eyes were always bloodshot… “My body is still adjusting” was my thinking process behind it. But I wasn’t really. In fact, I was becoming more and more miserable. There were some (rare) instances, where I could just not get myself to either go jogging in the morning, take a cold shower or eat for the first time at 9 o’clock in the evening. And every time I failed my regimen, I got heavily upset from being so weak. Sometimes I even cried a bit, to the confusion of my roommates. There was nothing that made any sense to me in these moments. I was surrounded by people who thought that I had completely lost my mind, jet admired me to a noticeable extent for the work that I was able to produce. I fondly remember the week in which I maxed out all the gears as much as possible.
We had a task in our 3D (product design) course to come up with a superhero-like action figure that we should craft with a dremel into a small block of gray foam. Now without boasting, my figure and its sketches were a real stretch to begin with. It was basically a cartoon version of an upright standing motorcycle with an eye as the rim of the front wheel. And while most people came up with round figures that more or less looked like some iteration of the pokemon Jigglypuff with only a little amount of details, I blew everyone away with the insanity that I had ahead of me. The easiest (and most reasonable) would have been to just make every part on its own and glue them together afterwards. But I was not about to be easy (nor reasonable). I wanted it to be hard and obsessed and craft the product out of one piece. And so I sat down in the workshop in which I easily killed 8-11 hours of work every day, while I basically took no breaks, but visited the toilet here and there. Whatever student was there the earliest and left the latest, I was already and still there when they came and went, chipping away on my block of grey foam. And to my liking, everybody noticed my efforts. One student from israel once looked at me and my figure and called me a “sick fuck” as a joke. I laughed about it and pretty much said that he was right. Afterwards we still had to paint the grey figure and design a little booklet about it. And I also had to hit the gym dailie. When I pulled up with my finished project, the expression on my professor’s face was priceless. I left her speechless until she let everybody know how immensely impressed she was by my work and called it the best result since she started this course some 3 years ago. When I told her that it was ultimately still one piece of grey foam and that I did not use any glue to hold the distinguished looking parts together, she could not believe it. I was satisfied.
But not for all too long. In fact, I was slowly getting to a point, where I was more and more doubting what I was doing to myself. As stated, I was actually doing pretty good most of the time, but I knew well enough that I built all this insanity on top of a very unstable foundation. I was still somehow balancing out all the different ventures I signed myself up for, but it most certainly was not sustainable. Amazingly, I was still building muscle long into the diet, but also lost body fat like crazy. I was shredded like never before while maintaining most of my musculature and felt pretty pleased about it. And from my performance in the gym alone, there weren’t any considerable signs of a impaired performance due to a lack of nutriens, energy or things alike.
I think that I would have been able to live on like that for many more months to come, even if I was probably far from optimizing my health. There were one too many little mental breakdowns that I suffered from when not following up on my regimen. As well as from being such an alien compared to all the other people around. It was heavily dissonant to me, because I was doing the “right thing”, but barely enjoying anything other then the dumb feeling of confidence and overachievement, while all the people around me were actually happy and content. Now, I am a driven person by heart and always knew that I have high standards for myself and could not be easily pleased without much of a reason. But still, I also noticed that there was no satisfaction whatsoever regarding the lifestyle that I chose to live. Overall, there was nothing remotely fun about it, I was emotionally irritable and felt pretty empty inside. But out of all the things that got to me the most was a striking realization that came creeping up on me:
It doesn’t matter.
Yes, some were intrigued by me, but only up to a certain point. And again, there were a handful of people who I actually inspired the same way I did back as a vegan. They wanted to try intermittent fasting themselfs or were curious about my practices. But my professors certainly did not care whether I found the key to life or worked harder than anyone else, if the result was not to their satisfaction. Which was still highly subjective to their human personality, which pissed me off and made me loose the drive to be diligent in their courses. Also, I was obviously just not good in every domain. You have to think of the first semesters in our Design program as an orientational phase, in which we had to look into every area that can be considered “Design”. There were the classical two-dimensional courses for flat graphic things and everything imigery and aforementioned 3D product design classes. Where I had the least interest in was the so-called “4D” aspect like programming and UX/UI stuff. And even if I knocked out a ton of hours on them as well, the results were never worth the effort. After observing the other students closely, I came to realize that all I had to do for university was a miniscule fraction of what I actually tried pulling off on a daily basis. There was nothing to be gained, no money to be made and no respect to be earned from anyone that meant anything to me. The grades do not matter at all as long as I did not fail the courses and end up with a proper portfolio of any sorts at the end. And if your portfolio is proper, it does not even matter if you have a degree in the first place. My fellow students could not bother either about my performances, if I never showed up to social gatherings to actually spend time with them. Nobody ever wanted me to be so relentless, but present with them for easy conversations.
But ultimately, the person who cared the least, was actually myself. As stated before, I did not really give a damn about the curriculum of studying “Design”. It was neither my passion, nor what I would want me to follow through with in life. I didn’t really want to be a designer of any sorts. I already knew that, but tried covering up the uncertain future that would result from once again rejecting the safest and most obvious path in front of me. The only reason I followed through with my insane schedule was the general urge to outperform in life. And while I still have this desire deep down, it needs to be somewhat aligned with something I actually like and have a natural tendency for. After all, my life has never been about safety first. I am anyways safe as I will always find work. Heck, I am way too overqualified for a whole load of possible income streams or “jobs” out there. I want to build something that matters to me and the people around. Something that still challenges me. Making a living from drawing designs on an ipad would have been far too easy, as I already know how to do it extensively. I should not have time for getting good grades in a class, if I anyways get my degree in the end. Better take all this extra time to invest it into actually figuring myself out in other areas.
At the same time, it came to me that there is something not right about my Guru Nun Amen-Ra. I have still not figured whether he found something out that not a single person on earth grasped before, or if he is just a hoax who abuses anabolics and bullshitted everyone with his unobtainable dieting regimen, as many believed. I do not know anything about the guy and am therefore not in the right position to judge, but my common sense tells me there is something wrong with it all, to say the least with my relation to it. One thing was clear: I could not find a single person on the internet, who was actually able to maintain his utterly complicated diet. Some guy called Spencer Mack for example was somebody who shared his experiences with following Amen-Ra’s dietary incantation to a very strict extent. His efforts of following through were many times larger than mine, while I also butchered the recipes and rituals to my current possibilities. Mind you, there was far more about the whole setup than what I described to you briefly in the beginning. Amen-Ra has written several books about the topic and you would seriously need to get deep into the (expensive) weeds if you wanted to figure out all the secret ingredients and practices surrounding this shadowy nutritioning landscape.
Also, what got me personally very put off was his reaction, when I commented on one of his posts on Instagram, where he was lifting some heavy weights. Loud, definitely not so sacred rap music was playing in the background of his personal gym. You know, something with a lot of sh*its, f*cks and b*tches. I just wrote a short comment that this type of music does not really suit his “ascetic” lifestyle.. you know, as a cheeky little sidenote. But his answer was something that felt like a two paged essay on how I am a dumb little boy who does not understand anything about asceticism and life in general. The language he used was very lofty, as you’d expect, yet utterly insulting and personal so that I was reasonably perplexed. After all, this guy did not know me at all. He was a grown ass man, who had nothing better to do than to express enormous rage on a random comment on the internet… that was not even ment insulting in any way. This certainly broke the illusion of his personality being steadfast, let alone “enlightened” in any form or shape to the extent that he portrayed it.
Finishing thoughts
And so my opinion and outlook on life took a drastic turn. I may have not ended up in the hospital for some sort of malnourishment, but was pretty wrecked by how many of my delusions were slowly falling apart. At this point (as well as every semester that followed) I thought of breaking off my studies altogether (which I miraculously didn’t). And it took me a fair amount of time to rebalance my diet, lifestyle and certainly social life. On the last notion of eating once a day, I am very confident to say that it is a great practice to engage in from time to time. It offers a large amount of health benefits, while giving you a heightened state of alertness and concentration throughout the day. If you are interested in this topic, but would like to hear more reasonable voices, I highly recommend the works of Peter Attia or Jason Fung. They have done a great service to society with a lot of free and qualitative content out there, where you will surely find a lot of interesting insights. I might be a little salty, but Amen-Ra on the other hand acts far more in the background and holds tight onto his mysterious and for most people unrelatable aura.
Still, I only recommend OMAD as something temporary, to benefit greatly from all the miracle processes your body can only execute on, when the intake of food sources are fully stopped. A lot of people will not ever want to fast, which I guess is okay. For me personally, eating one meal a day is something I do not feel really good about anymore, since I came to accept that I am just far too active for it. My muscles are constantly sore from some form of physical activity, my body fat is always in a very low percentile, and my mind is often working on something. Also, eating a little more frequently seems to be generally better for a balanced hormone production and protein synthesis, which my sore muscle system is definitely craving for around the clock. Caloric restriction is something I would consider never again though. It is obviously true, that the higher the bioavailability of a given food source is, the less you need to eat of it. This boils down to the fact that a calorie is not a calorie. Some of the food you take in is for example just not properly digestible. May it be due to being too highly processed, or that your personal gut microbiome is not adjusted to it, or that you may have a genetic preference for certain food sources. A lot plays into the complicated picture of having a proper diet. Some people will never care about it, while there are some folks who won’t ever accept a mediocre intake of junk on a daily basis. I just hope that you choose your camp wisely and that your way of eating is a source of health and pleasure in your life. It definitely has been a wild ride for me.
Till this day I am still doing intermittent fasting, as it is the most healthy in my eyes and comes super natural to me. I gave up on being a vegan again, while I am still highly inspired by it. The amount of time I am not eating is dependent on the circumstances I find myself in. But in general, I developed a good balance between eating to be happy and satisfied and actually using it as a smart fuel source while making good use of the knowledge regarding the health practices that I accumulated. Here and there I fast completely for 1-4 days if I know that I can afford it, meaning that I do not have too much to do and that there will not be anything overly demanding. But in general, I found myself in a good position.
I hope you enjoyed reading this article. It was interesting to get all of those unspoken words out of my system. Have a great day.