Necessary generalists: Physical health

Everyone has a physical human body. As a civilization, we’ve learned a lot about human bodies. But usually the only people who really dig into this wealth of knowledge are specialists: a nutritionist, a doctor, a physical therapist, an athlete. That is an oversight.

The main point of this post is simply that you should know your body very very well. In fact, let’s stop doing the nerdy 20th-century dualism thing of saying “I” am my isolated mind and “my body” is just a vehicle I own to carry myself around in—no, you are your body. Your brain is constantly exchanging mind-altering chemicals with the rest of your body, as well as receiving all sensation from it. Your brain would not survive in a vat. You are your body. How well do you know yourself?

This post is a component of the Necessary generalists theme, which says that there are some fields of study where pretty much everybody should have competence (such as physical health). We are actually forced to be generalists when it comes to these things.

Remind me, why can’t I outsource this?

“Why can’t I just rely on my doctor / nutritionist / personal trainer to tell me about my body?” Obviously they can help you a lot, but you’d be depriving yourself by outsourcing your physical health completely. That’s true for a couple of reasons:

• Body-specific knowledge: Doctors, nutritionists, and trainers are, at best, experts on what’s true of all human bodies (or all human bodies within a very broad category, like “adolescent boys” or “post-menopausal women”). They ultimately get their knowledge from peer-reviewed studies that were done on more-or-less-representative samples of the population. Medical research is mostly looking for generalizable truths: drugs or treatments that will work on everybody. But individual differences are notoriously relevant in medicine. Maybe you respond really well to this treatment and really poorly to that other one: no peer-reviewed study will ever be done to explore this. There is zero scientific literature on your body.
  • And there’s barely any scientific literature on your community, either. Hundreds of contextual factors somehow add up to paradoxes like the Mediterranean diet only working on Mediterraneans and the French diet only working on the French. What unknown improvements might be available to you because of your specific lifestyle and/or genes?
• The weird compartmentalization of Western medicine: This is dipping into that hippie-flavored “We need holistic healthcare maaan” attitude. But look, it’s objectively weird that the person who cares all about whether you’re sick or in pain (your physician), doesn’t care at all how far you can run or how much weight you can lift or how much lean muscle you have. In Western medicine, we look for disasters and fix them. We’re very good at fixing them, but we pretty much only look for disasters. For instance, there’s some range of body fat percentage that we decided is “healthy,” and as long as you’re inside that range, your doctor will not discuss your body fat with you. Never mind that you might feel 100% happier and more alive if you moved to a different point within that range!
  • It’s all like this. Your doctor takes a lot of measurements and addresses the ones that are outside the “normal” range. Everything beyond that is up to you and your own study and experimentation.
  • Related: Compartmentalized medicine misses a lot of things even within the domain of “fixing disasters,” because it misses a lot of the nuanced interactions between different pathologies. Did you know that a virus from your cat’s poop can infect you with no acute symptoms and then make you depressed and/or schizophrenic for the rest of your life, with a 7x increased risk of suicide? Did you know that the virus that causes mono can just hang around in your body after your sickness is over and make you act anxious, defensive, and/or bipolar? Neither virus is regularly tested for by your doctor. I haven’t even mentioned the gut biome and all the health effects it pertains to.
• The sheer inconvenience of modern healthcare systems: It’s way out of scope for me to argue what the best healthcare system is, but most people in the US seem to agree that our current situation is bad. And I mostly hear from foreigners that their systems are bad too, in different ways (or, their systems are “great” but then they come to the US for serious things).
  • Going to the doctor is a pain. In the US, medical services have insanely high costs, because big insurance companies are paying for them, because all major employers offer expensive health insurance to stay competitive, because once upon a time they weren’t allowed to raise wages, so they added insurance to attract competent labor, and then when the wage ceilings were removed they couldn’t all coordinate to take insurance off the table, so now everything costs way more than it would under direct market conditions, and since it’s all handled by insurance, your doctor doesn’t even know what each service costs, and whoops actually your insurance doesn’t cover this service anyway, and when you call them and wait 45 minutes to ask why they don’t cover it, they tell you that the doctor coded the procedure wrong, and when you call the doctor he says they always code it this way at his office and he doesn’t know why your insurance won’t cover it, and then you just pay it while nurturing a bit more hatred for all parties involved. Going to the doctor is a pain.
• The regulatory capture of official health advice: Agriculture corporations have a lot of money, and politicians are available to buy. When I was in school, we were taught that the Food Pyramid represented the optimal healthy diet. This model came from the US Department of Agriculture, so we knew we could trust it. Turns out, the food pyramid is almost perfectly designed to make you obese. That’s a coincidence, of course; really it was designed to make the dairy and grain industries rich. So whoops, the most influential government in the world gave an entire generation diet advice that was almost exactly the opposite of healthy.
  • I use that example because its conclusions are pretty widely accepted today. But a more contentious question is what official health advice is currently being bought out, and by which industries. There’s no reason to expect it isn’t still happening: agricorps are rich, and politicians are cheap to buy. So unfortunately we have to take advice of this nature with a grain of salt (no pun intended; pun expressly detested).

Is this lindy?

It feels weird to say everyone needs to actively learn about their health, when most individuals across all of history have done fine without investing much thought into that particular area. Being intentional about your physical health is not lindy, but there are several reasons to do it anyway:

• Most people in history have lived lives that are “nasty, brutish, and short.” We did not evolve to feel great at 55 or be alive at 85, yet we all want that. So if the means exist, why shouldn’t we aim high? Most people in history had no idea how to be healthier than the previous generation, or even how to go about obtaining that knowledge. It just wasn’t an option for them, so they didn’t try.
• Most people in history have used tribal/traditional/”non-Western” knowledge to manage their own healthcare, but we shouldn’t expect that to work very well for us. Tribal/traditional healthcare evidently worked well enough in the past. We can think of it as having undergone a kind of evolution of its own: the groups with bad healthcare died out, and those with good healthcare survived to tell us that acupuncture works or that there are seven chakras that need to be nourished with energy. But of course, peer-reviewed research often finds “no effect” for things like this. What’s going on, then? My best guess is that traditional healthcare often worked well enough (either through the placebo effect, or some other mechanism not fully understood at the time) in whatever specific context it came from: the specific environment, diet, activity, and genetic makeup of its people. These medicines and practices might only work when a hundred little variables are set just right (because that’s the context they evolved in). Nowadays, we live so differently from isolated ethnic groups in traditional cultures that we can’t expect any traditional health program to fully take care of us (not that some things aren’t worth trying though!).
  • Related: Food today is a little crazy. It used to be that you’d eat whatever foods your people had been eating for hundreds of years—a diet tested by time. And you’d likely be eating food that was more “wild,” less cultivated: it probably tasted worse, had fewer calories, and in many cases had more nutrients. Today, most of our food is made in factories, and the plants and animals that source it have been bred for size and flavor, sometimes beyond any similarity to their wild ancestors (some examples). It’s much harder to know exactly what we’re eating, so there are many more things that can go wrong in our diets.

• Most people in history were much more physically active than most of us reading this blog. Figuring out how to match a lifetime of daily physical labor with a couple of one-hour gym sessions per week is an audacious goal we’ve undertaken in the modern world. I’m impressed it actually works at all, but that just speaks to how good we’ve gotten at optimizing our exercise nowadays.

The basics of your body

You should know your body very well. It blows my mind that people have lived in their bodies for 20+ (or 50+) years and still haven’t cared to learn the very basic “bio hacks” that actually work on pretty much everyone.

There’s a pattern of breath and muscle activation that lets you stretch farther than you thought you could. Seriously, you could do it right now and you’d notice the difference. There’s a pattern of breathing that makes you feel sleepy! Your sleep happens in cycles, and waking up at the end of a cycle feels best (which is why, for example, I normally feel less tired after 7.5 hours of sleep than after 8). You can cancel an imminent sneeze by some combination of scrunching up your nose, pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth, and looking away from sources of light (yes really). Lying down on your left side helps digestion and can sometimes cure stomach aches immediately.

(If you know of some other “hacks,” I desperately want you to comment and share them! If they’re said to work on just about everyone, I’ll add them above).

None of the above are really that important, but they’re things that could be helpful daily, and yet we can go years and years without ever knowing them. To me this highlights the extreme apathy we have toward our bodies most of the time.

Your physical competencies

If your body isn’t the size you want it to be, you should know why. You should be able to guess offhand how many calories are in any given food that you eat regularly, and you should roughly know the macronutrients too. You should know how many calories your body costs per day—understand your body as the complex-yet-deterministic physical system that it is.

If you lift weights, you should know which program(s) work well for you, or you should have read enough blogs and books to design your own program that works. In terms of experiential knowledge: You should know what it feels like right before you injure a muscle. You should know what conditions feel best for training: time of day, empty or full stomach, etc. You should be able to recognize unusual tightness or fatigue in any given muscle group.

If you work in front of a computer a lot, you should know what your body needs to thrive in that (highly unnatural) environment. You should know that viewing artificial blue light (from your monitor) in the evening will keep your cortisol levels elevated and make it hard for you to sleep (and so you should use f.lux or some other solution that reduces the blue light). You should know that if you don’t stand or stretch enough, you’re going to get tight hip flexors, which is going to give you anterior pelvic tilt, which is going to give you excess lordosis, which is going to give you a back injury someday when you’re older. You should know that if your monitor is lower than eye level, you’re going to get forward head syndrome, which is also going to give you a back injury when you’re older.

The last three paragraphs start with “if” because they’re specific to my own life. You’re different, and I don’t know exactly what you need to know about your body. But you do need to know it!

How do I learn?

Experiential knowledge

There’s a lot you can learn by direct experience. It’s a matter of noticing what happens in and to your body at different times. Again, in the modern age we often have this delusion that our bodies are something detached from “us,” so we ignore them. We can now do a lot of things in a disembodied way, that we didn’t used to, because of the utility of the Internet and small electronics. Making friends, making money, getting in arguments, consuming entertainment, shopping for food—you can now do so much of your life without consciously engaging your body at all. This is very unnatural, and you should value any opportunity to go against it.

Exercise helps with this, especially when you’re actively paying attention to your body and not drowning your mind in caffeine and loud music to get through it (though that has its advantages, too!). I’ve heard yoga helps a lot. Parkour helped a lot for me.

It’s also a matter of being willing to do little experiments. Try a new diet, a new sleep schedule, a new exercise program. Try some supplement or other product you’ve read about, if it’s cheap and safe and you feel you understand how it works. Some people would spend hours scraping Google Scholar to confirm that there’s “no evidence” for a particular intervention, rather than just run the actual experiment for $20. This is, again, the unfortunate idea that there’s no valuable knowledge to be gained beyond what’s found in widely accepted peer-reviewed studies—this is simply not true, for the reasons mentioned above.

You are allowed to try things. Not everything good for your body will have a scientific paper written about it already, or in the next five years, or ever.

Intellectual knowledge

Still, there’s a lot you can only learn by reading about others’ experimentation and research. This is hard, because information about physical health is notoriously muddled by people trying to sell you things. I could recommend specific blogs and books, but that’s not really my place: what’s credible enough for me to use myself is not always credible enough for me to recommend to a wide audience. I have, however, written some meta-advice on how to assess peoples’ credibility in areas you don’t know much about: On Credibility – Whom to trust on the Internet.

I hope this post, while maybe not directly informative, encourages and inspires you to advance with intention down the path of mastering your physical health.