Summary

The website outlines three core principles for achieving health: consuming natural, time-tested foods; engaging in functional exercise; and managing stress through self-understanding and ownership of actions.

Abstract

The article "3 Core Principles of Being Healthy" emphasizes a straightforward approach to health that bypasses the complexity of modern diet and lifestyle advice. It suggests that individuals can attain a healthy body and mind by adhering to three fundamental rules: first, eating foods that have been part of human nutrition for millennia, which are more likely to be beneficial due to the Lindy Effect; second, prioritizing broad functional fitness over appearance-focused exercise, advocating for activities that enhance daily physical capabilities; and third, addressing stress by gaining self-awareness and control over one's actions, which is portrayed as more crucial for health than external factors like wealth or social status.

Opinions

The author believes that reliance on extensive research and "evidence-based" health advice is not necessary for achieving health, preferring personal experience and common sense.
Foods that have withstood the test of time are considered more trustworthy than modern processed foods, such as seed oils and high-sugar items.
Exercise should focus on practical, compound movements that improve overall functionality rather than just aesthetic muscle growth, which is seen as potentially harmful and unnatural.
The pursuit of social status through material possessions or physical appearance is viewed as a significant source of stress, which can be detrimental to health.
Self-understanding and the ability to act with autonomy are presented as key to reducing stress and improving health, with a cautious view on meditation as a one-size-fits-all solution.

3 Core Principles of Being Healthy

Achieving a healthy body and mind without tons of background research

Diet and lifestyle advice is very complicated these days. Data conflicts and experts argue with each other vehemently.

I wanted to create a few rules of thumb that you can examine yourself, appealing to your understanding rather than citing research articles that no-one will read and which may have dubious methodologies. It’s possible to be very healthy without the crutch of the latest “evidence” (inverted commas due to promiscuous way the term is commonly used).

Remember that statistical results never “speak for themselves.” There is always an element of interpretation. Even mathematics can’t be carried out without some foundational assumptions.

You don’t have to be familiar with the published research to be healthy. If you go down that route where in life does it stop — should you engage in evidence-based dating? Having skin in the game and experience testing what works will do more for you than academic expertise.

1. Food

“If your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize it as food, don’t eat it.”

— Michael Pollan

The idea here is that you want sources of nutrition that has been submitted to natural trial and error over many years, ideally millennia. The longer a food has been around, the more inherent it is to the survival of the organisms that eat it.

This is an example of the ‘Lindy Effect’, a term coined by Nassim Taleb which you can read more about here. A quick example is the bicycle. It’s been around longer than cars, therefore you can expect it to be around after we stop using cars. That’s because a bicycle requires fewer assumptions. Cars depend on a certain infrastructure, fuel source, tolerance of the risk of a fatal crash, need to travel long distances and many other conditions which could be reversed by the course of history.

Examples of non-Lindy foods:

Seed oils such as sunflower, canola and rapeseed oil. This twitter thread explains the manufacturing process of seed oils.
High sugar content foods. These foods are energy dense way beyond what nature intended. If our ancestors had found enough Mars Bars in the wild to eat almost every day they’d have done little else, would have had no doctors to treat their diabetes and humans would probably have gone extinct.

2. Exercise

The minimum aim should be broad functionality.

I used to play a lot of soccer, and there were always guys who spent 4–5 days per week in the gym, looked jacked and could easily bench over 100Kg, and were out of breath after two minutes on the field. Nassim Taleb joked in one of his books about guys on holidays who let the chauffeur carry their bags while they get their swipe card access to the hotel’s gym.

Some basics

Take the stairs instead of the elevator/escalator
Walk to the grocery shop and carry the bags back
The best cardio is the sport you enjoy

In the gym

First do no harm (avoid injury)
No muscles without strength. Pullups > bicep curls
Prioritize functional (compound) exercises: deadlifts, squats, clean and jerk

You should be comfortable with gravity (climbing steep hills), movement in an irregular and unpredictable environment (e.g. playing sports, Jiu jitsu) and supporting your own body weight (pull ups, pushups, rock climbing).

Huge, whey protein-assisted muscle growth is non-organic, and anything non-organic (non-Lindy) has hidden dangers. Nature requires agility even more than strength, and people’s bodies aren’t necessarily designed to accommodate the kind of muscle growth they’re chasing by artificial means.

In mythology and scripture Wisdom tends to be personified as female: women have a sharp sense for unreliable signals. There’s a good reason they roll their eyes at dudes that spend half their life in the gym. Obviously if you’re a linebacker in the NFL go for it. But unless you plan on becoming a professional athlete leave some time for improving your conversational skills.

3. Stress

People are obsessed with status. They’ll go into extreme debt to buy sports cars and fancy houses to boost it. They’ll form their political beliefs around it.

Having one’s social status undermined is profoundly stressful. Although I’ve just hyperlinked to a paper reviewing the connection between social status and cortisol levels (one of the hormones which mediates the stress response) we obviously don’t need scientific evidence to tell us that. Imagine your reputation has been under threat. Say there’s an embarrassing rumor about your private life that isn’t going away. Your eating patterns will change, you won’t sleep, you’ll look exhausted, you’ll be tense and not fun to be around, and you’ll become lonely. All of this is not healthy in any sense of the word.

Your problem is (probably) not that you don’t have enough money or intelligence or a more attractive spouse. Your problem is that you don’t understand your own mind, which is free to play havoc with you. This causes you to act without ownership, buying things you don’t want and spending time with people you don’t like.

If you keep a cow on its back with its feet facing up, it won’t be happy. The position is stressful because the cow feels a lack of control over its own movements. In the same way people who can’t claim ownership over their actions will experience anxiety because they feel an intense vulnerability to circumstance. On the other hand those who have discovered self-understanding are in harmony with circumstances and their calmness seems almost radiant.

Overcoming stress is probably the best thing anyone can do for their social status and their health. You have to really know yourself, and this requires a fair amount of solitude. I’m personally suspicious of meditation as the solution because it doesn’t change your mind’s core interpretations of the world. In any case, since our combination of DNA and personal experience is unique, everyone has to discover what makes sense for them.