WELCOME TO PLANET BEAST

EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW THIS ONE SIMPLE TRICK FOR BUILDING MUSCLE AND BURNING FAT, GETTING IN SHAPE AND STAYING IN SHAPE: work consistently and intelligently, over the course of months and years.

That’s it. Sorry, I have nothing to sell you.

If that’s disappointing, then get ready to be even more disappointed—because I’m about to tell you all the things this blog isn’t going to do. It’s not going to offer you a succinct 6-week program to get fit and jumpstart your health. It’s not going to help you lose weight. It’s not going to present you with a “science” based diet plan for across-the-board improvement of your eating habits and general well-being. It’s probably not going to answer any questions you may have regarding health, fitness or exercise. At least not directly.

Basically, if you’ve seen it on the cover of a health-and-fitness-related magazine, you won’t see it here. Except maybe in the form of belligerent satire.

What you will see on this blog is level-headed, experience-based analysis of what it means to be healthy and “fit.” The goal here isn’t to answer the familiar questions, because a lot of the questions we have surrounding health and fitness and diet are framed in fundamentally wrong ways (and you can’t get a right answer to a wrong question.) The goal is to deconstruct a lot of prevalent questions, and replace them with better questions. Better, stronger, faster.

For instance: ask me how to lose weight, and I’ll ask you if weight is actually a valuable metric in measuring a human being. Ask me how to get fit, and I’ll ask what you mean by “fit,” because you can be fit in a lot of different ways, and some of them mutually exclude each other. Ask me why the sky is blue, and I’ll tell you flat-out that it fucking isn’t. Literally more than 50% of the time, the sky isn’t blue. Maybe that seems like an irrelevant, off-topic observation, but I’m not just trying to be argumentative—I’m pointing out a flawed mode of thought that we generally  bring to bear on matters of health, diet and fitness. We see things as cut-and-dried, black-and-white, good or bad.

Particular foods are either good for you or bad for you. You’re either exercising the right way or the wrong way. There’s no in-between, there’s no variation. There’s a right way to eat and move your body, you just have to find it. The sky is blue. That’s just how it is.

Except, no, it isn’t. The sky isn’t blue. You think you know it is blue, and you’re not wrong—you’re just not right. The sky is blue, and it’s black, and it’s gray, and it’s red and yellow and every color of the literal goddamn rainbow.

Now, apply that thinking elsewhere. In what other contexts are you accepting “the sky is blue” as an answer, glossing over and disregarding hundreds of shades of color?

The purpose of this blog is to look at all those other shades of color. It’s meant to take questions apart and examine their inner workings, and generally won’t settle for an answer that doesn’t multiply into new questions. It will spend a lot more time wondering than defining.

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