Free Weekly Personal Development Insights
Subscribe to The List — Short, practical tips on integrating healthy ancestral origins and unearthing latent creative potential. Straight to your inbox, 1-3 times a week.
“This just blew my mind!” – Travis W.
Recent Newsletters
Here are a few selected works from my most recent newsletters.
Spoiler alert: I’m going to ruin sugar for you
Almost a decade ago now I gave up sugar for good…
Now this is no easy feat…
Not only is sugar the most addictive substance known to mankind…
But it’s in just about everything you find in the center aisles of the grocery store…
Want to eat healthy? Shop the perimeter…
Sugar is even harder to avoid when you go out to eat because while the cooks aren’t necessarily scooping refined sugar into your dish, many of our favorite sauces and seasonings come pre-packed with tons of it.
So, unless your cooks are scrupulously reading the nutrition facts on every single one of their ingredients, no one really knows how much sugar is in your food.
That said, sugar wreaks havoc on our bodies and our minds…
An egregious surge of dopamine leaves the brain saying, “Yes!”
While the body’s saying, “Oh no!”
Sugar competes, very well, against all other nutrients and fuel sources for entry into every cell of your body…
So well in fact that sugar always wins…
And when your cells are operating on sugar, it’s like rocket fuel, and we all know where rockets end up after they’ve completed their mission…
Burned to a crisp at the bottom of the ocean…
Now this number will vary for most folks but in my experience, anything more than 16g a day of added sugar wreaks havoc on our cells, arteries, and hormone function…
Blood sugar levels surge and the pancreas begins sending out insulin to mop up the mess of excess sugar…
Too much sugar in your blood causes inflammation and damages the lining of your arteries…
The truth about atherosclerosis is that sugar causes the damage and scar tissue made from healthy fats comes in to do the repairs and gets a bad rap for “clogging arteries.” If sugar wasn’t doing the damage in the first place, it wouldn’t be an issue.
And if your body has to constantly produce more insulin to keep cleaning up the mess, our hormone production gets taxed…
Our growth and repair functions run out of resources…
And in extreme cases, the body gives up and stops producing insulin altogether…
In some cultures, refined sugar is known as the “White Devil” and perhaps at this point you’re beginning to have some idea why…
And if you’re running into any challenges with your physical or mental health, eliminating sugar is a good place to begin.
Until next time,
Kevin
Don’t chase happiness, chase grasshoppers
Turns out…
We’re not that great at predicting how future events will make us feel, nor for how long those events might leave us feeling any particular way…
Mostly because we have no idea how much we will have changed as a person by the time the future arrives…
It also turns out, we’re pretty bad at predicting how much time changes who we are, what we care about, and what we’re capable of…
As a result, it’s pretty tough to aim directly at happiness…
Or even the things that we think will make our future selves happy…
But with the ongoing moment to moment process of feedback & calibration…
(trying a thing, evaluating the results, modifying future actions)
We can certainly improve our aim along the way…
But some methods of improvement are better than others…
In The Journey of Crazy Horse, Joseph M. Marshall III reveals the training methods used for the adolescent boys of the Oglala Lakota to sharpen their aim with a bow and arrow…
After learning to consistently fly their arrow through the center of a rolling hoop, they’re taught to lay still in a field, holding their arrow ready, and wait for a grasshopper to appear as it leaps through the air…
Difficult, yes…
Impossible, no…
But if you really want to sharpen your aim…
Chase grasshoppers.
Until next time,
Kevin
Your willingness to transcend the limits of reality will dictate your ability to do so
Ideas cannot advance without transcending the limits of reality…
It takes courage and bravery to dabble in what would be considered absurd or irrational by the majority of your peers…
Without the willingness to endure this possibility of ridicule…
The Pythagoreans might never have claimed that the Earth was round and, in fact, not the center of the universe, despite their inability to directly observe this was so…
Nor would those who dared to dream of the mythological origins of astrology which laid the foundations for our more observable discipline of astronomy…
And eventually our ability to physically travel to outer space…
And so too, you cannot advance without transcending the limitations of your own reality…
Without daring to dream of what might, absurdly, seem possible…
And according to Ernst Cassirer:
“It is this symbolic thought which overcomes the natural inertia of man and endows him with a new ability, the ability to constantly reshape his human universe.”
Until next time,
Kevin