Sober.Fitness

“Each time we experience something rewarding due to a biological or evolutionary imperative, we get a dopamine kick.

The purpose of this kick is to reinforce certain behaviours and make us associate certain things with feelings of pleasure and satisfaction.

The problem is this can be easily exploited.

Our reward centres function along these dopaminergic pathways.

These pathways can be manipulated by things such as palatable foods, mind-altering substances and s*x.

In the short term, it can cause us to pursue these things more. In the long term, it can cause decreased sensitivity, compulsive behaviour, poor self-control, and the destruction of our life’s ambition.

Being a species of desensitized and overstimulated apes, everything needs to be stronger.

Our drugs need to be more powerful…

Our food needs to be more flavourful…

Our s*x needs to be more wild…

Everything must blow our minds or we are not interested.

Our entertainment is now so intense it consumes US (not the other way around).

All this intense stimuli to keep up with demand perpetuates further desensitization.”

From:
The 90-Day Dopamine Detox 📕
(Link in bio)

Sunlight & ginger tea
No pharmacy

I can’t believe it’s June! ☺️☀️

These days I enjoy life so much I have to make an effort to slow things down. If I don’t try to be in the moment my days absolutely rip by.

This is amazing consider someone recently asked me for some before and after content to show my progress and I had to say: “I few pictures and videos from before because my life sucked so much I didn’t care to document it.”

I wish I could show myself skinny-fat with a can of beer sheltering from the rain behind the grocery store.

I wish I could show myself having a cigarette with shaky hands and liquor in my briefcase.

These are not things I was proud of…

These are things I’m still not proud of…

I share them only to show contrast… to show that if you are stuck in the mud… if you don’t imagine a future for yourself… you can COMPLETELY turn it around! 💪.

Lots of love!

Sober Fitness

If we are painstaking about this stage in our PHYSICAL development, we will be amazed before we are halfway through.

We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness.

We will not regret the past, nor wish to shut the door on it.

We will comprehend the word serenity as it relates to our PHYSICAL health, and we will know peace.

No matter where we have gone on the scale, we will see how our experience can benefit others.

That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear.

We will lose interest in weakness and gain interest in strength.

Fragility will slip away.

Our whole attitude and outlook on life will change.

Fear of others and physical challenges will leave us.

We will have greater energy and handle situations with ease that used to waylay us.

We will suddenly realize that we are doing for ourselves what God could not.

The 🗝️ is combining body and mind ⬇️

There is feedback between the two…

In active addiction we experienced the decay of our mental health positively reinforce the decay of our physical health… which perpetuated further decay of our mental health.

This is the actual mechanism behind the downward spiral of active addiction. This is “the vicious cycle.”

If this is so, recovery must logically be the REVERSAL of this cycle… the development of boy perpetuating the development of mind perpetuating the development of body.

Our recovery is ascent! An ascending feedback loop between the development of body and mind.

We understand this scientifically now. We understand brain chemistry. We know it’s way easier to be healthy in mind if we are healthy in body… before we only understood this intuitively.

When the first recovery programs came around, they didn’t understand this scientifically. This is why in 12 Step for example, there is no reference to physical health. However, if the big book of alcohol is anonymous were written today, it would surely contain a large section on the importance of physical health!

It’s time for this necessary update in our recovery traditions… because recovery without fitness is necessity incomplete! We can’t leverage momentum in an incomplete feedback loop! We can’t recover without recovering everything we lost!!

Step 1: Breakthrough to acceptance…

You don’t need to accept things you can change, but you need to accept that they exist in order to change them!

This is the first step: admitting the problem

Next, you can become willing to do something about it.

Step 2: becoming truly willing to do whatever it takes.

I find this funny ⬇️

When I was a little kid I was underweight. I didn’t eat much… I was late to grow up… I was skinny all my life.

When I started drinking this compounded the poor fizeek: I became skinny fat.

I am the antithesis of this today.

I write and post a lot because it’s very interesting to me my mental and physical evolution.

I’m not lost on how I got here: the path I took is very clear to me.

All I’m doing with my writings is investigating & inventorying these methods.

I want to do two things: acknowledge the things I’ve done that’ve worked and talk about the things I need to do more.

If this helps anyone else this is a nice bonus.

This is why it’s funny if anyone finds my writings to be preachy/dictatorial: THIS IS ADVICE FOR MYSELF!

Everything I suggest is stuff I’m trying to do myself.

All the little reminders for strategies for healthy living are reminders for myself.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to talk and write about my process.

Sharing your experience perpetuates progress.

Help expedite someone else’s learning curve; help someone else avoid making the same mistakes… and you won’t make those mistakes again.

Talking about it is a great reminder.

This is a mentality I’ve struggled to cultivate…

Both and I have recently adopted this in our new business ventures and our expansionary mindsets…

But it hasn’t always been the case.

I don’t know about you, but where I grew up, I was always taught that no matter what I had going on… someone had it worse (the whole “starving kids in Africa” meme).

Later on, in university, with the advent of postmodernism taking over classrooms, I learned that everything was a power struggle and who you are is NOT who you are as an individual, but where you stand at the intersection of your various identities. This intersectional outlook formed a totem pole of victimhood… and once again, no matter your problems… someone has it worse than you… so shut up.

Later on still, I had financial troubles and illness in the family. I was experiencing the throws of addiction in full on alcoholism… still, I didn’t ask for help… I believe this was in part due to the reasons previously expressed: If you’re a young kid, and maybe you’re a sensitive type… I think the cumulative impact of all your teachers… all the adults in you’re life constantly telling you this nonsense… it has an impact; it leaves an impression; you internalize that which is not true.

The truth is it’s your RESPONSIBILITY to grab life by the balls. Screw bending over for someone else and letting them walk all over you. This is why the message of certain Internet personalities have resonated with young men so much lately: you SHOULD make as much money and muscles as possible… gain as much power as possible. You SHOULD’NT roll over and abdicate yourself.

All my life I was told and taught that my problems weren’t real. This led to me not being ambitious, and this led to me not getting the help I needed in addiction.

I was taught that the things I wanted were not important, and I was bad for wanting them; bad for wanting money; bad for wanting girls… bad for wanting anything a young man might want. This message really stunted my growth for a long time and I think it really exasperated my drinking.

I’m here to tell you: screw this message and anyone conveying it. Go get yours. Adopt the attitude WHY NOT ME

It’s amazing to think one upon a time I didn’t imagine a future for myself.

At the time of writing this, I’m on a ferry departing Athens for the tiny Greek island of Milos.

Back home I have assets, I have family and friends that love me, and I have cool toys.

In the not too distant past, I was wondering around in a fog looking for the best way to numb myself.

Now, I enjoy every minute of the day. I can’t get enough life. There’s so many things I want to do I don’t have enough time in the day!

One of the things I enjoy most is building my skill set. My brother and I grew up in suburbia. Before my father passed he was a creative type. We didn’t live a rural life. We didn’t know anything about hunting. and I were Boy Scouts, but it was only a LARP. We loved getting out in nature, but it wasn’t nearly as wild as it could have been.

One of the skillsets I’ve enjoyed cultivating the most is hunting and basic survival skills.

I believe this has contributed greatly to my sobriety (as sense of being capable has eased a lot of underlying anxiety).

Building these skills has been my greatest joy these last few years. It hasn’t always been easy… sometimes it’s been downright uncomfortable… but it’s the thing that has contributed most to my vision for the future.

I want a life closer to nature; closer to animals; closer to the food I eat and the water I drink. I want to exercise in the elements; I want this for myself and my loved ones.

I want all this and more.

Now I can’t stop imagining more and more future for myself.

There’s good rules and there’s bad rules ⬇️

There’s rules to follow and rules to break

For a long time I was breaking all the wrong rules

I was drinking heavily; my finances were a mess; my relationships were a mess.

Now I follow all the right rules: I train hard… I work hard… I invest in my relationships…

This has afforded me a solid platform…

…A solid physical and mental platform to do what I want and start breaking some of those rules that are meant to be broken.

It’s time to bust out of the matrix and start living the life of your dreams!

The 90-Day Dopamine Detox:

This is not a typical dopamine detox program. There’s no prayer and meditation in these pages. This program doesn’t talk about “mindfulness” in any abstract sense...

This detox consists of a basic routine, along with several concrete & actionable strategies, all of which evolve as the program progresses.

This program can completely change your life and forever alter your trajectory. Its purpose is to restore your health & focus by resetting your reward centre.

Mindfulness is the restoration of our factory settings. With this comes increased sensitivity, which leads to increased focus and attention, less need for constant distraction/external stimuli, and a better appreciation for life’s simple pleasures.

This program approaches dopamine detox in a manageable way. It has been designed for the most amount of people to have the most amount of success possible. It is intentionally scaled back and it takes place over 90 days to allow the process of neuroadaptation to take place.

This program is designed to slowly reduce our tolerance to dopamine highs, by reducing our consumption of overstimulating and desensitizing things, while simultaneously rebuilding the focus and attention we lost chasing dopamine highs.

It’s easy to design a dopamine detox program that just tells us what they can’t do. The point of THIS detox program was to achieve detox in a way that doesn’t radically infringe on our lives. This is achieved through a small daily routine that systematically reduces our tolerance to dopamine highs and evolves in a way that is not overwhelming.

soberfitness

There is a feedback loop between overstimulation and our tolerance to it.

Because everything is extremely overstimulating, we experience sensory overload. Once we acclimatize to this sensory overload, we need more stimulation.

To dopamine detox, we need to reverse this cycle.

What we need is sensory deprivation. We need to create space between us and things trying to hijack our reward centre.

April 23, 2024

If I’m honest, even when I was drunk, even when physically and mentally frail, I always knew I would have a new physique like this one day.

Weird to admit. Not something I’ve ever really acknowledged to myself. Certainly not something I’ve ever said out loud…

The reason I share is to say the power of belief shouldn’t be knocked.

Many things I have believed into reality.

Less than a year ago I was working in a coffee shop looking out the window at truck. It was the truck I’ve always wanted. Recently I was in the same shop looking out the same window at the same truck in the same parking spot, only this time I owned it.

When I was an active drinker, I knew I had a problem. I never once experienced the denial that seems so common.

I often hear how people lied to themselves for years. I hear how fellow problem drinkers did backflips to convince themselves they didn’t have a problem.

This was not me.

I knew from an early age - from the time I shared my first beer with my dad - I really liked alcohol and it would be a problem.

From the start I knew my friends didn’t drink like I did. I even knew one day I would have to stop drinking. I think this helped me:

When it was time, I was ready.

People talk about the power of positive thinking. People use words like “manifesting.”

These words have been abused, but you CAN will something into existence.

Obviously you need all the right ingredients, and willpower alone should never be what fuels you, but you can believe in some possible eventuality so strongly it practically becomes a guarantee.

I’ve believed for a long time sober fitness is the necessary update in our recovery traditions; the closure of the loop between the development of mind and body in recovery, the meeting of fitness and established principles outlined in programs such as ; the update that will help us truly practice these principles in all of our affairs… and not once exclusion of our physical health.

I will believe this into reality, do the work, and not stop until it’s done.

Change body; change mind.

If you’re struggling, try physical development.

Guarantee, if you go through the process of transforming your body, you will transform your mind.

You won’t just look different, you will be different mentally.

A lot of people struggle with poor mental health… they experience depression, anxiety and chronic stress.

It’s not always clear how to approach fixing problems of the mind through processes of the mind…

It’s hard to fix what you can’t see…

It’s relatively MUCH more clear how to fix the body. You can SEE what needs to be done. The changes that need to be made are physical.

This is why if you are struggling, you should try physical development.

This is why every doctor, therapist and “mental health professional” should prescribe fitness FIRST.

Start with what you know. Start with what’s obvious.

You can’t see inside someone’s head.

Only you truly know what you are feeling. Even if you attempt to relay this to someone else to get their help, a certain amount of information will be left out, and a certain amount of the information that IS conveyed will be lost in translation.

If you think problems of the body are hard to solve, they are nothing compared to problems of the mind. However we know there’s feedback between the body and mind, so if you’re trying to solve mental health issues, you should always start issues of PHYSICAL health.

can be found sitting on his a toadstool in his enchanted forest 🌲🍄

Comfort is a warm and enticing poison… and it’s a slow poison.

I heard this^ on a podcast recently and I thought it was a great quote.

You see me here on social media smiling… but this day, this smile and everything I have that’s good in life… has been the product of hard work and sacrifice.

I started down this path soon after I first quit drinking. I was listening Can’t Hurt Me by (a book I really internalized)… and I realized that I was soft.

I started doing difficult and uncomfortable things… getting up early, running in the cold & the rain, increasing my skillset and tolerance for pain…

Life changed.

I went from broke, depressed and alcoholic… to money in the bank, sober, happy and healthy.

It blows my mind in just a few short years I went from punching a clock labouring on a construction site, to an apprentice, to a carpenter, to doing my securities licensing, to getting a job in finance, to working for myself!!! Blows my freaking mind.

I’m going to think of this quote every time I get soft… because with prosperity comes relaxation… and you can’t relax and take it easy. This is the death of your dreams. This is the slow poison of comfort.

I shall return this summer!

(This picture as taken at the base of Rainier last August. My goal is to climb it this August!)

As I put away the heavy barbells and transition into a more solar fitness routine, one thing I aim to do about more this summer is bagging local peaks!

This is one of the beautiful things of a seasonally adjusted fitness program: you build a seasonally appropriate physique!

In the spring (now) as snow melts I hit the trails more and focus on trimming the fat and beginning anew. This is my favourite time of year. It involves a lot of cycling, running and hiking in the mountains.

In a word, all these cardio/high intensity activities amount to: speed.

They help us prepare for summer when we get to enjoy the fruits of our labour: we enjoy a nice refined physique.

There is something extremely natural and healthy about having a seasonally appropriate physique. Being in tune with the seasons is good for us… being unchanged year round is weird and unnatural. This is how an animal trapped in cage under artificial light would live.

All we have is a daily reprieve.

I think this is profound…

All we have is one day separating us from all of our bad habits.

This is what is meant by “one day at a time.”

If all we have is one day separating us from all of our bad habits, then we have one day separating us from a LIFETIME of bad habits.

This is why change is not cumulative. This is why change is not quantitative. Change is QUALITATIVE.

What is the quality of change?

DIRECTION.

Change is which way you are headed at any given moment in time.

Overtime, a slight change has a massive impact on where we end up. And this is not even mentioning aspect of momentum. (A small change is something you can build on). The impact of a slight change in your direction extended into the future can’t even be measured. The quantitative and cumulative aspects of change are not the change itself… they are the product of change… and they can’t even be measured in the case of real directional change!

This is where the fitness dailies came from.

If all you have is one day separating you from a lifetime of bad habits, then all you have is one day separating you from a lifetime of GOOD habits.

If you just pick up those dumbbells today and spend 5 minutes doing your daily arm curls, this will literally change your life.

Your fitness dailies are your delta. They are your daily reprieve.

A fitness identity is what we must cultivate to achieve the physical transformations we seek.

Everyone says “fitness is mental.” What does this mean?

This means: that as we train our bodies, we train our minds... and vice versa.

If this is true, we must transform our minds to transform our bodies.

A good place to start is in our approach to fitness.

We must focus on making fitness part of who we are as opposed to something we are trying to do.

We can do this through the principles of a good routine:

Make it neither overwhelming nor boring

Make it in an area with lots of room for growth

Make it personalized

This will help us build a routine that is personal and unique to us... one where we can build rituals around our fitness practice, and learn to love the process.

A more detailed guide for cultivating your own fitness identity ⬇️
The Fitness Identity
(Link in bio)

There are numerous reasons to empathize with Gen Z.

The fact that 40% of them experience depression is not one; however, the fact that 40% are BEING MADE TO BELIEVE they have depression IS definitely concerning.

I’m on the tail end of the millennials just before GenZ. I remember when I was going thru a rough patch a counsellor tried to tell me I had PTSD because of my father’s passing. Thank god I didn’t listen.

I can only imagine what they are being told now…

I see these kids. I see the boys walking around with zero confidence and the girls walking around with too much…

(This probably has something to do with constantly being told there’s something wrong with being a boy/man and the only thing good among the s*xes is feminine empowerment…)

EITHER WAY… they ALL act mentally ill.

However, I submit it’s not because they actually are… it’s because they have been TOLD they are.

Teachers and therapists (yes kids have therapists now) have been telling kids they have depression and ptsd from COMPLETELY NORMAL AND EXPECTED life experiences. Breakups… deaths in the family (I can attest to this one).

It’s creating a problem, not fixing one.

Don’t think I’m right about this?

Why is the generation with the most counselling; the most therapy; the most supervision... the least mentally fit?

How is it that the generation with the most focus on mental health is the least mentally healthy?

It’s because we are indulging fragility at every turn and possible opportunity. We are not making resilient people. We are telling kids they can run away from anything they don’t like at any time.

This is the OPPOSITE of what you should do!

You get over your fear by systematic desensitization and exposure, not therapy that reinforces all your worst fears and makes them real!

We indulge every possible form of victimhood and wonder why we have a generation with the least feelings of efficacy out in the world.

It’s because no one ever says “suck it up” or “shake it off” anymore.

What if you told an alcoholic “you’re right, life is hard, I understand why you want to run away from ur problems…“ WE HAVE TO TELL PPL WHAT THEY DON’T WANT TO HEAR…KIDS ESPECIALLY!

I got sober for the 3rd and final time on December 27th, 2019, at age 25.

I quit drinking for the first time when I was 21. I scraped a year of sobriety (minus a couple beers in Panama with the boys).

Several relapses later (each worse than the last) and I achieved what I have now: strong and lasting sobriety.

Why do I say this? It’s not to say “relapse is part of the journey…” it doesn’t have to be.

I say this as a reminder to myself…

EACH RELAPSE WAS WORSE THAN THE LAST

Each time I went out, I was out for longer, and it was harder for me to get back.

I have found something amazing in sober fitness (combining the principles of recovery with my physical development)… it’s a form of recovery that enables actual progress…

I thank God for Sober Fitness and the strong sobriety I’ve found… but without a reminder, it can be easy to forget where you come from, how much progress you’ve made, and why you do the things you do. If you forget why you put in the work every day, you will lose everything.

This is why:

“We neither regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.”

= we don’t dwell on the past; we learn from it.

The hardest vibe is the invincibility vibe.

Why do people appreciate the likes of ?

They know this man has been to hell and back… and yet he keeps coming.

This man is a zombie.

Maybe of us are powered by what we remember…

We keep it close… and occasionally peak over the edge to remind ourselves of where we were… to draw contrast with where we are now… and fuel us as we push forward away from what we escaped.

Our undoing has come cloaked in the virtue of acceptance:

The act of discriminating is the act of drawing a distinction and we are losing all distinction in the world of acceptance.

This carries frightening implications for those who have or are currently struggling with poor mental health and/or addiction. Fat acceptance is one short step removed from substance abuse acceptance.

We in the recovery community must hold the line against the erosion of distinction concerning decisions that affect our physical health… because we rely on this for our mental well-being.

It’s not only ok but advisable to discriminate when it comes to decisions that will either produce a happy life or put us in the ground… and we should regard anyone saying otherwise as an absolute threat to our well-being.

It’s very interesting to think my back was once my weak point.

Indeed, one of the things that led me to the fitness dailies (besides arm curls in the morning before work) was when I got fed up with being built forward.

They say you need to work back to front in at least a 2:1 ratio… pulling to pushing. This is for good reason.

There is something very satisfying about the lockout when you’re pressing… however when your rowing or doing overhead pulling… where the movement starts and ends is less clear (especially when you’re fatigued).

For this reason it’s common to get built forward from excess pushing and not enough pulling (which is what happened to me).

The reason my back is quite strong now is because I got frustrated with this imbalance in my physique and just decided to stubbornly do 20 mins of barbell rows everyday.

I figured: 10 sets, 25 reps every minute and rest every other minute… and if I did this everyday (which wouldn’t be difficult because it was on 20 minutes out of my day) eventually I would see results.

Doing these barbell rows everyday for a season of fitness dailies led me to pull-ups. (Another one I can’t believe I used to hate). I got after them with the same increased frequency and consistency i applied to the barbell rows with.

Eventually I built my back like a barn door… and I’m no longer unbalanced (which is why I say among other things the fitness dailies are good for rebalancing your physique).

You see the power of doing something every day did not just yield some nice physical results, but it yielded some nice mental results.

We always say fitness is mental… why then is there no mental program for physical development? Well, because you can’t see it. It’s difficult to see mental progress while it’s relatively more clear to see physical progress. In fact, one way we can see mental progress is through physical manifestation! For example, you can’t read my mind and see that it was changed through a season of fitness dailies… but you can see it in my action. I hated overhead pulling until I did it everyday. This involves rewiring.