- Andrew's Apples 🍎
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- The Great Anxiety Society
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Here's your daily dose of Andrew's Apples, a small white bag of four fresh *fruits* to nourish your soul and make you feel great. All in under 2 minutes. Let's go picking
🦹 Fitness standards for 'Batman' villains. This tweet. Funny how by and large our politicians (whose job, as it were, is to determine how best we should live) look like they work at a laser tag 'fun center' or spinning pizzas at a go-kart park. Yellow skin, dead eyes, triple chin, brittle hair, a perpetual sweaty glisten. What the h*ll is happening here? They look like Batman villains... but I want vascular vigilantes! No fat fake cats. We have fitness standards for the military, so why not for the ones who manage the military? We can start small with PE class basics: sit-and-reach, jumping jacks, an arm hang?!
😞 The Great Anxiety Society. Over 40 million adults in the US have an anxiety disorder. Aside from daily table stakes like getting sun, lifting, high intensity training, eating clean, sleeping >7h a night... there is one missing piece we must avoid. Which is: diagnosing yourself as an anxiety-poisoned person and then identifying as such. Writer Joan Didion said, We tell ourselves stories in order to live, which is a beautiful sentence and a scary one. Venting to friends and family about how "bad" your anxiety is can even will into existence something that wasn't there in the first place. This quickly can eat into your diet, exercise, sleep, weight loss, relationship health. It will even show up in your skin and your stool. I have a little sister who's 21 (Zoomer zone!), and not a day goes by without young people like her self-diagnosing their mental health concerns on a national scale. Previous generations chalked this up to a "bad day" and moved on. Like Didion alluded to, we all have our mantras, but I can think of hundreds that are better than: I'm not ok I'm not ok I'm definitely not ok.
🍉 The Grocery Story. Thumbing through my Sunday paper ad insert (I'm 29, but got some Boomer Blood in me) I decide to do napkin math on a 10-page local grocery store ad. It listed 112 food/beverage products, and 57% of them were certifiable junk. To be clear, this is a "nice" community grocery store, where upper-middle class people shop regularly - something in between Walmart and Whole Foods. I am still being generous with the aforementioned 57% (I even throw bottled water and farm-raised salmon in the "healthy" camp... our quality standards in the US have been in freefall for decades). There is a sound theory that fast-casual restaurants like Chipotle keep a cold climate so (a) cheaper heating bill and (b) patrons don't hang out too long thus turning tables. Grocery store layouts have a similar logic: shoppers will spend less time in the uncomfortably chilly *fresh* perimeter of the store and more time in the warmer, Frankenfood-filled interior. That's where the most addictive drugs sit, which by definition sell the best.
🍓 To fast or too fast? It's a common question: should I work out in a fasted state or a carbed-up state? For athletes (or normies training like animals), it's likely best to add carbs before training to optimize performance; but for the vast majority of either sedentary or older folks, working out without having eaten anything for 3-5 hours prior could be better. In other words, if your session looks like a Nike ad spot, slug some clean carbs; if you're moseying around at the gym to café jazz, skip the food.
How do you like them Apples? Suggestions? Hate me? If you ever need anything, hit reply.
Your friend,
Andrew 🍎
laser tagline: those vests were deceivingly heavy but made one feel like a Man at War
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