And then I stopped, because I realized I had no idea if any of it was going to do anything for me.

I’m 32, I sleep eight to nine hours a night, I train six days a week, I eat almost entirely whole foods, I walk four to five miles a day. There is no published data showing that someone in my position derives a meaningful benefit from those specific supplements at this stage of life. The research is interesting. The marketing is incredible. But the actual answer to “does this help me” — based on my baseline — was probably no. Or at best, we don’t know.

So I closed the cart. And I started thinking about why I’d almost spent $1,500 on something I didn’t have evidence I needed.

This post is the answer I worked out.

What Supplements Actually Are

Start with the word. Supplement. It exists to fill a gap.

That’s the entire premise. A supplement is a substance — a vitamin, a mineral, a compound — that you take because your body isn’t getting enough of it from food, sunlight, or some other normal source. The supplement makes up the difference.

Which means the entire logic of taking one rests on three questions:

1. Do I have a gap?

2. Do I know I have a gap?

3. Will this specific supplement actually fill it?

If you can answer yes to all three, supplementation is straightforward. If you can’t, you’re guessing. And most of us — most of the time — are guessing.

The wellness industry has done an incredible job of inverting this logic. We’ve gone from “take this because you’re deficient” to “take this because it might help.” That shift sounds small. It’s not. It’s the difference between treatment and speculation, and almost the entire $230 billion global supplement industry now lives on the speculation side of the line.

I want to be careful here: I’m not saying supplements are useless. There are people with real deficiencies, real conditions, real reasons to take real things. There are also supplements with strong evidence behind them for specific use cases. I take a few myself. The point isn’t that supplements don’t work. The point is that “filling a gap” is the only honest test of whether you should take this, and most of us never run that test.

Why It’s So Hard to Know If You Have a Gap

This is the part of the supplement conversation that gets skipped, and it’s the part that matters most. There are four reasons it’s genuinely difficult to know whether you need a given supplement.

Reason 1: The regulation is from 1994

In 1994, Congress passed a law called DSHEA, the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. That law defined supplements as a category of food, not as drugs. The practical consequence: supplements don’t need FDA approval before they go to market. The manufacturer is responsible for the safety and accuracy of their own product. The FDA can only act after something has gone wrong — after reports of harm, after a lawsuit, after someone catches the problem.

That law is over thirty years old. In that time the U.S. supplement market has grown roughly fifteenfold — from about $4 billion to more than $60 billion — and gone from around 4,000 products to more than 80,000. The regulatory floor has not moved.

This isn’t a niche policy point. It’s the foundation underneath every supplement decision you make. When you pick up a bottle of vitamin D or magnesium or fish oil, no government agency has verified that the bottle contains what the label claims, in the amount the label claims, free from the contaminants you’d assume aren’t in there. That verification, if it happens at all, is done by the manufacturer themselves — or by a third party they hired.

Reason 2: Without enforcement, the label often isn’t true

Marion Nestle, a public-health nutritionist who’s spent her career on this, has made the point as bluntly as anyone: “Nobody has the resources to check whether those supplements have in them what it says on the label, unless somebody sues the company. If there’s no lawsuit involved, there’s nobody minding the store.”

If that sounds dramatic, the testing data is worse.

ConsumerLab, an independent supplement-testing organization, found that more than two-thirds of elderberry supplements sold on Amazon did not contain authentic elderberry. Not diluted, not underdosed — whatever was in those bottles, testing couldn’t identify it as the plant on the label.

That isn’t an isolated finding. A 2022 study published in JAMA Network Open tested thirty top-listed immune-support supplements on Amazon and found that more than half listed ingredients that couldn’t be detected in the product when tested. Again — not low doses. Couldn’t be detected.

ConsumerLab has run similar tests across categories. Turmeric. Echinacea. Astaxanthin. Resveratrol. Glutathione. The pattern keeps repeating: a portion of products on the shelves contain less than what the label claims, contain ingredients the label doesn’t disclose, or contain contaminants — heavy metals like lead, cadmium, and arsenic — at levels you do not want in your body.

This is the structural problem. It isn’t that all supplements are fraudulent. It’s that you, as a consumer, have no reliable way to tell the legitimate ones from the fake ones without an independent third party doing the work.

Reason 3: Even the research is harder to read than it looks

The third reason is more subtle. Even when you set aside the regulation and the counterfeits, the actual science on most supplements is more complicated than the headlines suggest.

The clearest example is vitamin D — possibly the single supplement with the broadest cultural consensus. Everyone should take vitamin D. It’s good for bones, mood, immunity, sleep. You’ve heard it. I’ve heard it. It shows up on almost every “must-take” list I’ve ever read.

The data is more interesting than that.

A 2023 review identified a negative correlation between vitamin D supplementation and nighttime melatonin: as vitamin D goes up, melatonin can go down. One study found that a daily dose of 4,370 IU of vitamin D decreased nighttime melatonin levels. A 2025 trial supplementing 4,000 IU per day for four weeks found that total sleep time actually decreased by about 40 minutes, and concluded that 4,000 IU was not effective at improving circadian rhythms.

Four thousand IU isn’t an extreme dose. It sits at or below what’s routinely recommended across the wellness and longevity space, and below what many prominent voices report taking themselves. So the dose shown to cut sleep time in that trial isn’t the outlier — it’s closer to the floor.

So what’s actually true about vitamin D? Real deficiency is real, especially in northern climates and people with limited sun exposure. Correcting that deficiency has documented benefits. But “everyone should take 4,000 IU” is not what the research says, and at that dose it may be worsening the sleep of people who have no deficiency to correct.

This is the third layer of difficulty. Even with good intentions and a willingness to read the research, the truth on any specific supplement is usually more nuanced than the consensus version. The dose matters. The form matters. Your baseline matters. The interactions with the rest of your body matter.

Reason 4: Testing for a gap is expensive and slow

Even if you want to do this properly — measure first, supplement second — the practical barrier is real. A comprehensive panel that actually tells you something useful runs several hundred dollars, often isn’t covered by insurance, and takes weeks to turn around. And there isn’t one test. There are dozens: vitamin D, B12, folate, ferritin and full iron panel, magnesium (which is notoriously hard to measure accurately from blood), zinc, omega-3 index, thyroid markers, homocysteine. Testing all of it is expensive. Testing some of it means you’re still guessing about the rest. Then, if you do supplement, the honest version requires testing again to see whether it worked — doubling the cost and the wait.

Most people, reasonably, don’t do this. Which means most people are choosing supplements based on a podcast, a friend, or a hunch. That’s not a character failure. It’s what happens when the correct process is priced out of reach.

Which Is Why Opinions Diverge So Wildly

Once you stack all of those problems on top of each other — outdated regulation, unenforced labels, complex underlying science, cost in time and money — it makes sense that the supplement conversation is so polarized. Smart, well-intentioned people can look at the same landscape and reach completely different conclusions about what to do.

You have the Huberman pole. Research-forward, citation-heavy, broadly pro-supplementation: vitamin D, fish oil, magnesium, creatine, AG1, the standard stack. The case is built on what the research suggests is possible, and the implicit assumption is that more optimization is better.

You have the Bryan Johnson pole. Don’t Die. A hundred-plus supplements a day. The most public example of the “your body is a system, optimize it like one” worldview. Whether you find it admirable or alarming, it represents the logical endpoint of “if some is good, more must be better.”

And you have the Marion Nestle pole. A career public-health nutritionist with a PhD in molecular biology and seventeen books on food and supplement policy. Her position is essentially: the industry is unregulated, the labels are unreliable, the evidence base for most supplements is weaker than the marketing suggests, and most supplements function as “fabulous placebos.”

I don’t think any of these three is straightforwardly right or straightforwardly wrong. They’re three different responses to the same underlying problem: it’s really hard to know what you need, hard to know if what you’re buying contains what it claims, and hard to know if it’s going to help.

How to Decide, If You’re Going to Decide

If you’re going to take supplements anyway — and most of us are — the practical question is how to do it intelligently. Four principles have worked for me.

Principle 1: Food first, supplements second

Whole foods are not the same as the same nutrient in a pill. The food matrix matters. The nutrient combinations that occur naturally in food do work that the isolated compound often can’t.

Collagen peptides are a good example. Collagen is poorly bioavailable on its own — your body needs vitamin C to actually synthesize it into usable connective tissue. Foods that naturally contain collagen (bone broth, skin-on meats) also tend to come alongside vitamin C in a normal diet. The isolated collagen powder doesn’t — which is why every reasonable collagen protocol pairs it with vitamin C. You can do it. But you have to know to do it. The food version handles it for you.

Vitamin A is a sharper example, and an important one for anyone who is pregnant or planning to be. High-dose vitamin A supplements are well-documented teratogens — they can cause birth defects. But the same nutrient consumed through whole foods like liver behaves differently in the body, partly because of the dose typically consumed in a meal, partly because the food matrix moderates absorption. The dietitian Lily Nichols has written about this distinction in her work on prenatal nutrition: the supplement and the food are not interchangeable in either direction. Pregnant women are appropriately cautious about high-dose vitamin A supplements; they generally do not need to avoid whole-food sources at reasonable intake.

The general principle holds across most supplements: if you can get it from food, that’s almost always the better delivery system. Supplements exist to fill gaps that food can’t fill — not to replace the food.

Principle 2: If you do supplement, only buy third-party tested products

Given the labeling problem, the single most important habit you can build is to look for a third-party certification seal on anything you put in your body.

There are three to know:

• USP Verified — United States Pharmacopeia. Verifies that the product contains the ingredients listed, at the strengths listed, free from harmful levels of contaminants.

• NSF Certified — National Sanitation Foundation. Similar verification, with NSF Certified for Sport being the stricter version, also screening for banned substances athletes need to avoid.

• ConsumerLab Approved — the CL Seal. The same organization that has been doing independent supplement testing for over twenty years.

If a bottle doesn’t carry one of these three, you are taking the manufacturer’s word for what’s inside. Given everything in the section above, that’s not a bet I’d make. The certifications aren’t perfect — third-party seals don’t tell you a supplement works, only that it contains what the label says — but they solve the most basic problem in the industry, which is whether what’s on the label is in the bottle.

Principle 3: Test, supplement, test again

The framework is this: do the foundation work first. Sleep, food, movement, hydration. Then, if you still suspect you have a gap, test for it. Then supplement specifically to fill the gap you actually have. Then test again to see if the supplement is doing what you thought it would.

For people who can do bloodwork — through their doctor, through Function Health, through any of the new direct-to-consumer panels — this is the cleanest path. You’re not guessing about a gap; you’re measuring it. You can target a specific deficiency with a specific dose and verify the effect.

Most people won’t do that, and I understand why. It’s expensive, it’s a hassle, it requires a level of engagement most people aren’t going to bring to this.

So the next-best version is to AB-test yourself. Pick one supplement — third-party verified — that you think might help with something specific. Take it for thirty days. Pay honest attention to whether anything actually changed. Energy, sleep, recovery, focus, whatever the target was. If yes, keep it. If no, drop it.

Is some of that effect placebo? Probably. But honestly, if a third-party-verified, high-quality supplement makes you feel a little better, and you can afford it, and it’s not interacting badly with anything else, that’s a reasonable trade. The goal isn’t pharmacological purity. The goal is to feel and operate better.

The point of the framework is that you are deciding, not inheriting. You picked the supplement on purpose. You verified its quality. You set a window. You evaluated honestly. That process, repeated, builds an honest stack — instead of one you absorbed from a podcast.

Principle 4: Once you’ve chosen, maximize how it’s absorbed

Picking the right supplement is only half the job. The other half is making sure your body can actually use it — and most people leave a lot on the table here.

Two things to look up for anything you take:

What it should be paired with. Many nutrients are absorbed dramatically better in the presence of others, and poorly without them. Collagen needs vitamin C. Fat-soluble vitamins — A, D, E, K — need to be taken with a source of fat to absorb at all. Iron absorbs better with vitamin C and worse with calcium or coffee. Curcumin is nearly useless without piperine (black pepper) or fat. A two-minute search on any supplement will tell you what it wants to be taken with — and often the easiest move is to simply eat it alongside a meal that already contains the co-nutrient, the way whole foods bundle these things naturally.

When to take it. Timing changes the effect. Magnesium bisglycinate does more for you at night, when its calming effect supports sleep. Vitamin D is often better in the morning, partly to avoid the melatonin issue from earlier in this post. Creatine is fine anytime, but many people find it easier on the gut split across the day. Stimulatory supplements early, calming ones late, fat-soluble ones with your fattiest meal. Again, a quick search on optimal timing for anything in your stack takes two minutes and can meaningfully change whether the supplement does what you’re paying for.

The principle underneath both: a well-absorbed cheap supplement beats a poorly-absorbed expensive one. Once you’ve decided something earns a place in your routine, spend the two minutes to take it in a way your body can actually use.

What I Actually Take

I sleep eight to nine hours a night. I eat almost entirely whole foods. I train six days a week and walk four to five miles a day. That foundation is what makes the supplements I take meaningful — without it, no stack is going to do much.

Given that, here’s what’s in my daily routine:

Creatine monohydrate, 10g per day. I split it into two 5g doses — one in the morning and one around my workout — because that’s easier on my gut than taking it all at once. The standard research-backed dose is 3-5g per day for maintenance, and that’s where most people should start. I take 10g for two reasons. The ISSN position stand notes that once muscle stores are saturated, larger athletes may need 5–10g per day just to maintain elevated levels — so at my size and training volume, the top of that range is defensible on the established research alone. The second reason is more speculative: there's emerging work on higher doses and cognitive effects, since the brain takes up creatine less readily than muscle does. My strength and focus shifted upward noticeably and quickly once I started taking it.

One scoop of grass-fed whey protein with my workout. This is less about supplementation and more about logistics. It’s the cleanest way to hit my daily protein target on training days. The supplement is functioning as a food substitute, not as something I’m using to address a deficiency.

320 mg of magnesium bisglycinate at night. Magnesium is one of the more commonly real deficiencies — the modern diet tends to be low in it — and bisglycinate is the more bioavailable form. I sleep more deeply and dream more vividly on it. This is one I’d defend on the evidence, and the form matters: magnesium oxide is dramatically less bioavailable than bisglycinate or threonate.

Collagen peptides with a small amount of vitamin C. This one is specific to my history — multiple spinal surgeries, a repaired hip labrum, and a running list of joint and tendon issues from years of training on a body that’s been through a lot. The evidence on collagen for connective-tissue and joint support is still developing, but it’s promising enough, and the downside is low enough, that I take it. The vitamin C isn’t optional: collagen is poorly bioavailable without it, because your body needs vitamin C to actually synthesize collagen into usable tissue. This is the bioavailability principle in action — the two belong together, so I take them together.

Homemade electrolytes for hard sessions and travel. Sodium, potassium, and magnesium with organic lemon juice powder for some flavor. I mix my own because the commercial electrolyte powders are 5x+ the price. On high-intensity training days, and on flights, plain water doesn’t hit the same way as water with the right minerals in it. (More on that in my hydration post.)

That’s the entire list. Five things. Each one was picked because I had a specific reason — performance, protein logistics, sleep, joint support, hydration — and each one passes a basic version of the three-question test: there’s a plausible gap, there’s reasonable evidence the supplement helps fill it, and I’m using a version I’d defend on quality.

What’s not on the list is everything I considered last year and didn’t end up adding. The ubiquinol. The urolithin A. The NMN. The half-dozen other things that looked interesting but didn’t survive the framework. They might do something. The research is genuinely promising on some of them. But for me, at this baseline, the case for spending $1,500 a year on them wasn’t there.

Where to Start

If the supplement world feels overwhelming, the entry point is the same as it is everywhere else in this series: don’t optimize. Foundation first.

If you’re not sleeping well, eating well, moving regularly, and staying hydrated, no supplement is going to be the thing that fixes you. Those four are doing more work than any pill on any shelf — and they don’t have a label problem, a regulation problem, or a contamination problem. They cost nothing or close to it. They have decades of research behind them. Start there.

If the foundation is in place and you suspect a gap, the order is:

1. Identify a specific reason. “I want to be optimized” is not a reason. “I have low energy in the afternoons” or “I’m not recovering well from training” or “my sleep is fragmented” is.

2. Test if you can. Bloodwork tells you whether the gap you think you have actually exists.

3. Buy third-party verified. USP, NSF, or ConsumerLab Approved. If a bottle doesn’t carry one of those, put it back.

4. Try one thing at a time, for thirty days. Pay honest attention. Decide.

5. Take it in a way your body can use. Look up what it pairs with and when to take it. Two minutes of searching can change whether it works.

6. Drop what doesn’t work. This is the part most people skip. The stack should shrink over time, not grow.

The goal isn’t a perfect supplement routine. The goal is an honest one — where every item earned its place, and you know why it’s there.

Drink your water. Eat your food. Move your body. Sleep your sleep. And then, if you’re going to supplement, do it on purpose.

— Max

And yet most people walk around mildly dehydrated for most of the day — not enough to notice, but enough to cost them. That’s the strange thing about water. The deficit is invisible right up until it’s degrading your focus, your mood, and your physical output, and you have no idea it’s happening.

Why Hydration Matters

Your body is about 60% water. Every system you care about runs on it — circulation, temperature regulation, joint lubrication, digestion, the delivery of nutrients into cells and the removal of waste out of them. Your brain is roughly 75% water. When the tank runs low, the brain notices first.

Here’s the number that matters: losing as little as 2% of your body weight in water measurably impairs both physical and cognitive performance. For a 200-pound person, that’s 4 pounds of fluid — a deficit you can easily hit on a hot afternoon, in the sauna, or during a training session. At that threshold, the research consistently shows declines in attention, short-term memory, reaction time, and mood. You feel more tired, more tense, and the task in front of you feels harder than it should.

That’s the underhydration side. But the other end of the spectrum is real too, and more dangerous than most people realize.

Drinking too much water — especially quickly, especially during endurance exercise — dilutes the sodium in your blood and causes a condition called hyponatremia. In mild form it’s nausea and headache. In severe form it can be life-threatening. This is why the goal isn’t “drink as much as possible.” The goal is balance: enough to stay ahead of the 2% deficit, not so much that you flush your electrolytes out of range.

Hydration is a band, not a ceiling. You want to live in the middle of it.

How You Get There (And How You Fall Behind)

You hydrate through two channels: fluids and food. Most of your intake is the obvious stuff — water, coffee, tea, whatever you drink, but a meaningful share comes from food, especially fruits and vegetables with high water content. This is part of why the “eight glasses a day” rule was always too crude. It ignored everything you eat.

Electrolytes are the other half of the equation, and the half most people miss. Sodium, potassium, and magnesium are what allow your body to actually hold onto the water you drink and move it into your cells. Drink a large volume of plain water without enough electrolytes — particularly after heavy sweating — and a lot of it passes straight through you. This is why a glass of water with a pinch of quality salt, or an electrolyte mix without the sugar, often hydrates you better than the same volume of plain water. It’s not the amount. It’s whether it stays.

On the other side, you fall behind in two main ways. The first is obvious: not drinking enough. The second is diuretics — substances that increase fluid loss. Alcohol is the big one; it actively pulls water out of you, which is most of what a hangover actually is. Caffeine has a mild diuretic effect, but here’s a myth worth killing: at habitual doses, the effect is small enough that coffee and tea still count toward your daily fluid. Your morning coffee is hydrating you more than it’s drying you out.

How to Know Where You Stand

You don’t need a lab test or a smart water bottle. There’s a simple, validated way to read your own hydration, and it uses three signals together. Researchers call it the WUT method — Weight, Urine, Thirst. No single one is reliable on its own, but if two of the three are flashing, you’re dehydrated.

1. Urine color is the most useful of the three. Validated color charts correctly identify hydration status in 80 to 95% of cases — remarkably accurate for something you can check without any equipment. Aim for pale yellow or straw-colored. Darker than that means drink more. But here’s the part most people get wrong: completely clear urine isn’t the goal either. Clear, colorless urine for much of the day can signal overhydration — you’re flushing electrolytes you’d rather keep. Pale yellow, not clear. That’s the target, and it’s another reminder that hydration is a band.

2. Thirst is real but late. By the time you feel genuinely thirsty, you’re usually already drifting toward a deficit — thirst lags behind your actual fluid status. It’s also an imperfect signal: it dulls with age, and stress, focus, and fatigue all suppress it, which is why you can go an entire busy workday without registering thirst and still end up behind. So use thirst as a prompt to drink, but don’t use the absence of thirst as proof you’re fine. It’s the least reliable of the three signals on its own.

3. Weight is the precision tool. Your body weight fluctuates with fluid, so a sudden drop across a workout is almost entirely water you need to replace — about 16 ounces per pound lost. Day to day, a stable morning weight is a quiet sign your hydration is steady.

The practical version: glance at the color, notice your thirst, and if you train hard, pay attention to weight around sessions. If two of those three are off, you have your answer.

My Four Rules

I don’t track ounces. I don’t use an app. I use four heuristics that keep me in the band without thinking about it. None of these are completely validated formulas — they’re my shortcuts. But each one maps onto something the research actually supports, so I’ll give you both: the rule, and the evidence underneath it.

1. Drink 50% of your bodyweight in ounces per day.

A 200-pound person drinks about 100 ounces. It’s an easy number to remember and it lands in a sensible range for most people — and remember that's just what you drink. You're also getting about 20% of your total water from food, so your real intake runs higher than the number in your glass.

What the research actually says: the National Academies of Sciences sets total daily fluid intake at roughly 125 ounces for men and 91 ounces for women — from all sources, including food. Then adjust for your size and activity.

2. Drink 3% of your bodyweight every 15 minutes during exercise.

The harder and hotter the session, the more you need to replace. I drink more around training, and more still when it’s a sweaty conditioning day versus a slow lifting day.

What the research actually says: the most accurate method is to weigh yourself before and after a workout — every pound lost is about 16 ounces of fluid to replace. During exercise, the guidance is to drink enough to keep your losses under that 2% threshold, but not to exceed roughly 27 ounces per hour, above which hyponatremia risk climbs. So the principle is replace what you sweat — but don’t force water far beyond your losses. More is not better past a point.

3. Drink 15% of your bodyweight within the first hour of waking

I drink 1 blender bottle of water (24oz) within the first hour of my day — and a second one in the second hour of my day. You wake up mildly dehydrated after eight hours without fluid, and starting the day behind tends to mean staying behind.

This one is practical rather than research-derived — there’s no study prescribing a specific morning percentage. But the rationale is sound: you’ve gone all night without water, and front-loading means you’re not scrambling to catch up at 9 p.m.

4. Finish almost all of it about four hours before bed.

This is the one that protects your sleep. I taper fluids in the evening so I’m not waking up at 3 a.m. to use the bathroom.

Again, the four-hour figure is my practice, not a research output, but it ties directly to the sleep post. Nighttime waking fragments your sleep architecture, and a full bladder is one of the most common and most preventable causes. Drink your water during the day. Taper it at night. Protect your sleep.

A Note on Water Quality

There’s a growing conversation about what’s in your water. Here are the things that I do to keep the quality of my hydration as high as possible and avoid negatives like microplastics and metals:

• Filter your water at home. A quality filter — reverse osmosis or a high-grade carbon system like a Berkey (what my wife and I have)

• Don’t heat food in plastic. Heat is what drives plastics to leach. Chemical leaching is what can cause endocrine disruption

• Use stainless steel or glass for storage — but for the food-contact and heat reasons, not because glass bottles are magically particle-free

  • A 2025 study from France’s food safety agency found that glass bottles often contained more microplastics than plastic ones because the particles came from the painted metal caps, not the bottle. So “use glass” isn’t the clean fix it sounds like

This is a “reduce where you can, don’t catastrophize” situation. Filter your water, stop microwaving in plastic, and move on with your life.

Where to Start

Hydration is the easiest win for your health. Here’s the whole thing in four sentences:

Drink roughly half your bodyweight in ounces a day. Add more around exercise, in proportion to how hard you sweat. Front-load it in the morning and taper it before bed. Add a little salt or electrolytes if you sweat a lot, and filter your water if you can.

That’s it. No app, no tracking, no overthinking. Get this one right and you’ve claimed the highest-return health habit there is for almost no effort at all.

Drink your water. Your body will thank you.

— Max

When I came home, I had gained seven pounds.

Someone made a comment about how I looked. I didn’t like how I looked either. I was about to hit puberty — the stage right before everything stretches out — and I decided I would simply stop eating.

I lost fourteen pounds in two weeks. My mother had to ask my teacher to check that I was actually eating lunch at school.

That pattern continued, in varying forms, for years. I’ll come back to the rest of the story later — the shame and guilt-fueled overcorrection that followed and the turning point that finally unlocked something.

My own experience and observing the way the world treats food is why I believe nutrition is the most complex of the three health pillars for most people.

Why Nutrition Is the Hardest One

Sleep happens in the dark. You do it alone. No one watches you do it.

Exercise happens in your own time, in a space you’ve chosen, with whatever level of visibility you want.

Nutrition is different.

You eat multiple times a day. You do it in front of other people. It’s harder to hide — both the not doing it and the overdoing it. Every meal is a small public performance, whether you want it to be or not.

It also carries more weight than almost any other health behavior. Cultural weight — every cuisine, every family, every holiday has food at its center. Emotional weight — food is one of the first ways we are comforted as infants, and that association never fully leaves. Hormonal weight — your hunger, your satiety, your cravings are not always within your conscious control. Historical weight — generations of diet culture, food insecurity, religious fasting, and shifting nutritional advice have shaped how every one of us thinks about what we eat.

Food can be a friend, a therapist, a reward, a punishment, a social ritual, a source of shame. Most of us are using it as several of these things at once, often without realizing it.

Disordered eating, taken as a spectrum rather than a diagnostic category, affects more people than most realize. Research based on the largest nationally representative sample of U.S. adults ever studied estimates that approximately 9 percent of Americans — roughly 28.8 million people — will experience a clinically diagnosable eating disorder in their lifetime. And those numbers are almost certainly underestimated. Eating disorders in men in particular have been widely documented as underdiagnosed, undertreated, and misunderstood.

That complexity is why the scope of this post matters. Before I offer principles, I want to be clear about who they’re for and who they’re not for.

The Scope of This Post

This post is not about solving a food-related disorder. It is not about fixing a hormone issue. It is not about recovering from trauma that expresses itself through food.

All of those are real. All of those require work that is different from — and often precedes — what I’m going to describe.

This post is for people who can look at food with some degree of objectivity and want a framework that helps them feel better and operate at a fuller capacity. Maybe it makes you feel safer to step into the world of trying.

If you’re not there yet, that’s not a failure. It’s just a different starting point. The work of untangling a difficult relationship with food is its own kind of work — and it usually needs to happen before any set of principles can help. There’s a parallel here to something I wrote about pain: you have to convince the mind before you can train the body. The same is true for food. Sometimes you have to fix the relationship before the principles can do their work.

If that’s where you are, the principles will be here when you’re ready.

Here’s what I’ll cover in the rest of this post: what nutrition actually is and why that definition gets lost inside the landscape of diets, the arc of how my own dysfunction with food eventually led me to the principles I use now, what those principles are, an example day of me applying them, and where you might start.

What Nutrition Actually Is (And Why It Gets Lost in the Diet Landscape)

Before the principles, a reframe.

Nutrition is not a diet. It is not a number on a scale. It is not a list of foods you are allowed and not allowed to eat.

Nutrition is giving your body what it needs to operate at its fullest capacity — to feel good, to show you it’s responding well, to sleep, to move, to think, to show up for your life — and to keep doing all of that for a long time.

Everything else is a means to that end.

This is where most diets go sideways. Vegan, vegetarian, keto, Paleo, Mediterranean, Atkins, Whole 30 — these frameworks exist for a legitimate reason. They remove ambiguity. When you don’t know what’s healthy, a set of rules tells you. For some people, at some stages, that’s genuinely useful. It’s a starting point. A container. A structure to build on.

But the rules are proxies, not the point. And proxies fail at the edges.

Consider dates. Whole 30 allows them — they’re a whole food, naturally sweet, nutrient-dense. I love dates. A single Medjool date contains about sixteen grams of sugar. Three of them contain more sugar than a can of Coke. Yes, there’s fiber. Yes, there are micronutrients. But “it’s allowed on Whole 30” is not the same as “eating unlimited quantities is nutritious.”

Now consider the opposite problem: just because something is healthy doesn’t mean excess is harmless. Vitamin A is fat-soluble, which means your body stores it rather than flushing what it doesn’t need. It’s abundant in liver, egg yolks, and many “healthy” whole foods. Chronic excess — which can happen more easily than most people realize — causes everything from nausea and headaches to liver damage. Your body doesn’t always signal overconsumption the way it signals hunger.

The point is not to pick apart specific diets. The point is that a diet gives you a container, and the container isn’t the goal. Understanding what your body actually needs — and responding to that honestly — is the goal. The container can help you get there. It is not a substitute for the work of paying attention.

From Restriction to Principles

The fourteen pounds I lost in two weeks was the beginning, not the end.

I don’t remember exactly when my mother told me what her friend — a top-ten triathlete in the Pacific Northwest — had said about eating. I was probably thirteen. The message was simple: you need to eat food to look and feel good. When your body is hungry, you should eat.

I know now there is more nuance to that than those two sentences. I know about unconscious eating, emotional eating, hunger cues that are hormonally dysregulated, all of it. But for a thirteen-year-old who had stopped eating, it was exactly right. It was the first framework I had ever been given that did not treat food as the enemy.

I started eating again. And then I overcorrected.

The version of me that emerged from restriction was rigid in a different way. I had rules. I had opinions. I had a running internal tally of what was “healthy” and “unhealthy,” and if I ate anything in the second column, I felt guilty. The guilt would convert into a plan — I would work out more that day, or restrict the next day, or find some other way to punish myself for the transgression.

I was also, I am embarrassed to admit, a jerk about it. I would tell friends that what they were eating was unhealthy. I would comment. I would judge. I remember a friend in high school finally telling me he didn’t care, and that he would appreciate it if I would stop saying something every time he ate a bag of chips. He was right. The judgment wasn’t about him. It was about me — I was angry that he could eat freely while I could not.

I would then eat what I thought was healthy and pat myself on the back for it. Yoplait yogurt cups, for example. I crushed them. I thought yogurt was a health food. It had “live cultures.” It came in small containers that suggested portion control.

My aunt, one afternoon, looked at what I was eating and asked if I knew how much sugar was in one of those cups. I did not. Twenty-seven grams per cup – closing in on soda territory.

That was the moment I realized my framework wasn’t built on science. It was built on accumulated misinformation and fear. I had no actual understanding of what I was eating. I had been operating on a combination of what other people had told me was healthy, what felt like it should be healthy, and what gave me permission to eat without guilt. None of it had been stress-tested.

So I started over. Slowly. I read. I paid attention. I built — not a diet, but a set of loose principles that gave me structure without rigidity. Principles that made it feel safe to eat all foods, as long as I was mostly eating well.

The real turning point came during college.

There was a rundown Mexican place in Wheaton, Illinois — where I went to school — called Los Burritos. It was open twenty-four hours a day. The burritos tasted incredible. They would absolutely turn your insides. Everyone who went there knew both of those things were true.

My friends would go, and for a long time I would skip or go and eat nothing while they ate freely. One night, I realized something. I felt worse about skipping out on Los Burritos with my friends than my body would have felt eating the burrito.

That was the moment the framework started working. Not because I ate the burrito. Because I understood why I was eating it. The principles I had built weren’t supposed to keep me from my friends. They were supposed to give me freedom — so that when I chose to break them, I was actually choosing, not failing.

That is where I am now. Still somewhat strict. Still adapted to my back, my training, my life. But genuinely free around food in a way I was not for most of my life.

The Principles

I’ve organized these in tiers. If you try to take on all of them at once, you’ll fail — which is exactly what the diet landscape has been teaching people to do for decades. Start with Tier 1. Build from there.

Tier 1 — Foundational (Start Here)

These three principles alone will change more than most people expect.

1. Eat whole, one-ingredient foods.

The fewer ingredients on a label, the better. If there’s no label at all, even better. This single principle eliminates most of the noise in nutrition — processed foods tend to be higher in added sugar, seed oils, and sodium, and lower in protein, fiber, and micronutrients than the whole foods they replace. You don’t need to read every ingredient list if you’re mostly not buying things that have ingredient lists.

2. Protein first — at your ideal bodyweight.

Aim for 0.7 to 1 gram of protein per pound of your ideal bodyweight, not your current bodyweight. The distinction matters. Current bodyweight can overcalculate for people carrying excess fat and undercalculate for people who are underweight. Ideal bodyweight gives you a target your body is actually built to support.

Protein is the most satiating macronutrient — it reduces hunger between meals and supports muscle maintenance, especially with training and with age. It’s the one macronutrient where the downside of getting more is minimal and the downside of getting too little is significant.

Bonus points: front-load it. A protein-rich breakfast is associated with reduced hunger throughout the day, better body composition outcomes, and improved concentration the hours after eating. Eggs, meat, yogurt, cottage cheese — something substantial in the morning changes the trajectory of the rest of the day.

As a note, I get most of my protein from whole foods — eggs, chicken, red meat, yogurt — and supplement with protein powder around training, when the convenience outweighs the preference for whole food. The research on whether whole food protein is meaningfully better than supplemental protein is less settled than most assume. What the evidence does show is that total daily protein intake matters more than the source. If you can hit your protein target through whole foods alone, great. If you can’t — because of schedule, budget, or appetite — a quality protein powder is a tool, not a compromise.

3. Avoid inflammatory foods — sugar, gluten, and seed oils.

These three are grouped together not because the evidence against each is equally strong, but because the mechanism is similar: chronic, low-grade inflammation that degrades how your body operates over time.

Added sugar is the most well-established of the three. Elevated added sugar intake is associated with increased markers of systemic inflammation, insulin resistance, and cardiovascular risk. Note the distinction between added sugar and naturally occurring sugar in whole foods — the Medjool date is still sugar, but it comes with fiber, water, and micronutrients that slow the absorption and soften the impact. A teaspoon of sugar stirred into coffee does not have those mitigating factors.

Gluten is more nuanced. The strongest evidence is for people with celiac disease, where gluten triggers a well-documented immune response and intestinal damage. More recent research has also identified a distinct immune signature in people with non-celiac gluten sensitivity — a separate inflammatory response from celiac, but a real one with a biological basis. For the general population without either condition, the case is less clear.

I will tell you my own experience: when I consume gluten, I feel more lethargic. Not dramatically. Not immediately. But consistently enough that I now avoid it. That is an n=1 observation layered on top of the emerging research. If you don’t notice a difference, you probably don’t need to avoid it. If you do notice a difference, trust that.

Seed oils — canola, soybean, corn, sunflower, safflower — are the most recent addition to the inflammatory conversation and the evidence is still developing. The mechanism has to do with the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids in the modern diet, which has shifted dramatically toward omega-6 over the past century, and with the oxidation that occurs when these oils are heated to high temperatures. Seed oils also tend to be markers of highly processed foods.

I cook with avocado oil and ghee because they have a high smoke point and a more favorable fat profile. Olive oil and butter for low-heat and unheated applications.

The evidence on seed oils is not as settled as the evidence on sugar. But the downside of switching to avocado oil, olive oil, or butter is low, and the upside — if the research continues to develop — is real.

Tier 2 — Structural (Add These Next)

4. Structure your eating around real meals. Snack with intention.

The case against snacking is metabolic. Research consistently shows that eating patterns characterized by irregular meals and frequent snacking are associated with worse insulin sensitivity and cardiometabolic markers than regular three-meal patterns. Keeping your eating contained to three discrete meals gives your body extended windows between eating occasions, which supports metabolic regulation and lets hunger and satiety signals actually register.

That’s the research, and it aligns with my own experience. Most of my eating happens at three substantial meals. That’s the default I come back to — it keeps me out of grazing patterns, it lets hunger and satiety signals actually register, and it aligns with how I structure the rest of my day.

But it’s more nuanced than this. A registered dietitian I spoke to recently, who specializes in eating disorder treatment, pushed back on the strict no-snacking framing when she read an earlier draft of this post. Her point: going more than four hours without food can set people up for exactly the kind of failure that fuels shame cycles. The physiological drive to eat after long gaps is not weakness — it’s your body doing what bodies do. Glucose is your brain’s primary fuel, and your body will find it one way or another. A planned snack before you get too hungry — something with protein plus carbs or fats to buffer the glucose release — is not a failure of discipline. It’s a reasonable response to how metabolism actually works.

So here’s the more honest version of this principle: eat real meals. Don’t graze mindlessly. But don’t let “no snacking” become another rigid rule that your body eventually breaks — and then blames you for breaking. If you need food between meals, eat. Make it intentional — something substantial enough to actually carry you to the next meal.

Training is the clearest example — pre- and post-workout fuel are purposeful and timed. But it’s not the only valid reason to eat between meals. Long days, early mornings, hard weeks, and bodies that simply need more fuel are all legitimate reasons too.

The point of this principle is not to create white space between meals. It’s to avoid the stretched-out, unconscious grazing that never fully registers as eating. Those are different things.

5. Eat when the sun is up.

The circadian system I wrote about in the sleep post does not stop at the eyes. It governs almost every metabolic process in the body, including how you process food. Eating late — particularly within a few hours of sleep — has been associated with impaired glucose regulation, disrupted sleep architecture, and elevated overnight cortisol.

The practical version: front-load your calories. A substantial breakfast. A solid lunch. A dinner that finishes at least two hours before bed — ideally four. The same circadian rhythm you’re protecting with your light protocols is also governing when your body processes food most efficiently. Align them.

6. Your body should show you it’s responding well.

Not “look good” — that phrase carries too much baggage, especially for anyone with a complicated history around food. What I mean is more specific: your skin should be clear, your energy should be steady, your digestion should be quiet, your inflammation should be low. These are signals. Your body is telling you what it thinks of what you’re feeding it.

The clarification is important: this is not the fleeting dopamine hit twenty minutes after a sugary snack. That feels good in the moment and collapses shortly after. What I mean is sustained — how you feel thirty to sixty minutes after a meal, how you feel the next morning, how you feel over weeks of eating a certain way. That is the real data.

For me: dairy makes me feel sluggish and bloated, so I limit it to the small amount of A2 yogurt I tolerate. Nuts cause my nose to develop scaly patches that peel. Gluten makes me lethargic. These are not claims about whether those foods are universally bad. They are claims about what my body is telling me. I pay attention.

Tier 3 — Refinements (Once the Foundation Is Solid)

7. You eat what your food eats.

Pasture-raised. Grass-fed. Organic where it matters most — typically animal products and the thin-skinned produce on the Dirty Dozen list. The nutrient density of your food varies meaningfully with how it was raised and what it ate. Some examples? Grass-fed beef has a substantially better fat profile than grain-fed. Pasture-raised eggs have higher omega-3s and fat-soluble vitamins than conventional. This isn’t about food purity. It’s about getting more from the same food.

I will be honest: this costs more. It is not equally accessible to everyone. Consider it a principle to move toward as you’re able, not a binary requirement.

8. Manage liquids around meals.

Avoid drinking liquids thirty minutes before and thirty minutes after eating. The common explanation — that liquids dilute stomach acid and impair digestion — is somewhat contested in the research. The stomach is actually quite effective at maintaining its own pH. The more defensible version of this principle is about satiety: drinking before a meal creates false fullness, and drinking during a meal can mask the hunger and fullness cues your body is trying to send. Learning to eat until you’re full — not to stop eating because your stomach is full of water — is worth practicing.

9. Be careful eating around screens.

Research on distracted eating is consistent: people consume significantly more when their attention is elsewhere. The mechanism is straightforward — satiety signals require attention to register, and a screen displaces that attention. If you eat a meal in front of a laptop or a TV, you are likely to eat more than you would have eaten paying attention, and to feel less satisfied by what you did eat.

The practical version: portion your meal before you sit down. Don’t eat from the container. If you must eat in front of a screen, know how much is on the plate.

10. Find foods that feel like cheating when they aren’t.

This is the sustainability principle. If the foods you are “supposed” to eat taste like punishment, you will not eat them long enough to benefit.

My easy go-to example: I cook a pound of organic ground grass-fed beef in avocado oil with garlic salt, form it into a thick patty, and top it with caramelized organic onions cooked in ghee, Primal Kitchen ketchup, and Primal Kitchen mayo. No bun. It is high in protein, high in iron, fully aligned with every other principle on this list — and it feels indulgent every time I eat it. My wife loves it too.

That’s the point. Build a repertoire of foods like that and the framework stops feeling like a framework.

11. Cheat sometimes, and don’t feel guilty about it.

The closing principle is the most important one.

Los Burritos with old college friends is on the menu. Lovely’s Fifty Fifty pizza when friends come to town is on the menu. The 80/20 rule is on the menu. The framework holds because the exceptions are exceptions — not habits. You are not going to these places daily. You are going occasionally, for a reason, with full awareness, and you are genuinely enjoying them when you do.

The guilt, if you have built the framework well, should be minimal. That is the point. The principles exist to give you freedom — not to restrict it.

An Example Day

This is what I eat on a typical day. I’m sharing the full detail so you can see the principles in action.

Breakfast: Five pasture-raised organic eggs. Half an organic avocado. Two large Aidell’s organic apple chicken sausages. A quarter cup of organic sauerkraut.

Protein-rich start, whole foods, healthy fats, fermented food for gut health. Hits the protein target early and sets up the rest of the day.

Lunch: One pound of organic chicken breast. A green smoothie made with a cup of organic greens (kale, celery, rainbow chard), a teaspoon of hemp hearts, a teaspoon of chia seeds, a handful of organic goji berries, a handful of organic frozen berries, water as the base.

More protein. Micronutrients come through the smoothie rather than a large salad — because large volumes of raw vegetables make me feel bloated. This is the “your body shows you it’s responding well” principle in action. I’m not forcing down food that doesn’t work for me just because it’s conventionally healthy.

Pre-workout: An organic banana and an RX bar.

Carbohydrates timed around training — fuel for the session, not mindless eating. I’m also generally low-carb throughout the day except around workouts, when I feel the benefit of the carbohydrate both for performance and recovery.

Post-workout: A protein smoothie with grass-fed whey protein, water as a base, a handful of organic frozen berries, and a handful of organic oats if the workout was cardio-heavy.

Recovery window. Post-workout protein supports muscle synthesis and the return to baseline.

Dinner: One pound of organic, pasture-raised, grass-fed red meat — beef, elk, venison, or bison depending on the night. I’ll often eat it ancestral (ground with organ meats) to improve the nutrition profile. A serving of A2 organic whole-fat grass-fed yogurt with Ceylon cinnamon, a teaspoon of chia, a teaspoon of hemp, and a handful of berries.

High protein. High iron. Anti-inflammatory Ceylon cinnamon. Omega-3s from hemp and chia. Dinner finished well before bed.

A few notes on what you may have noticed:

Low carbohydrate volume. Except around training, I keep carbohydrates intentionally low. I feel more cognitively focused and less lethargic this way. Your body may respond differently — this is not a prescription, it’s what my body has told me over years of paying attention.

Low vegetable volume. Less than the conventional recommendation. Large amounts of raw vegetables cause me to bloat and feel uncomfortable. I still get micronutrients — through the smoothie, through berries, through sauerkraut, through the quality of the proteins I’m sourcing — but I do not force down three cups of salad because I am “supposed to.”

Hydration not listed. I drink half my bodyweight in ounces of water throughout the day and adjust based on training. That’s a separate post.

Supplements not listed. I take a handful of supplements daily. That’s also a separate post.

While I have tried Paleo, Whole 30, mostly vegetarian, and high-carb diets previously, what I listed above is what works for me, in this body, at this stage of my life. Your version will look different — and it should. The principles are the point. The specific foods are an example.

Where You Can Start

Nutrition has two tracks. The body and the mind. Most posts about nutrition address only the first. Both matter.

For the body — start with Tier 1.

If you’re starting from nothing, pick one whole food today that wasn’t there yesterday. An egg instead of a granola bar. A piece of chicken instead of a frozen meal. That’s it.

If you’re ready to build a framework, commit to Tier 1 for thirty days. Whole foods. Protein at ideal bodyweight. No added sugar, no gluten, no seed oils. That’s three principles. They will change more than you expect.

For the mind — start with curiosity.

As I mentioned earlier, food can be so many things – a friend, a therapist, a tool, a reward, a punishment, a social ritual. And many of us are using it as several of these things at once without realizing it.

Three questions, practiced over time:

1. Why am I eating right now?

2. Am I actually hungry?

3. How do I feel after I’ve eaten?

Not as restriction. Not as surveillance. As curiosity. The answers, over weeks and months, will teach you more about your relationship with food than any diet ever could.

The two tracks work together.

The body and the mind are not separate projects. The principles work better when you understand why you eat. The questions get easier to answer when your body is actually fueled. You cannot reason your way out of a nutrient deficiency. You also cannot eat your way out of an unexamined relationship with food.

The goal isn’t to eat perfectly. The goal is to eat in a way that lets you sleep, move, think, and show up for the life you’re actually living — and still have Lovely’s Fifty Fifty pizza with your friends when they come to town.

Start there. Build slowly. Pay attention.

— Max

***My gratitude to Tammy Beasley (MS, RD, CEDS-C), a registered dietitian and certified eating disorder specialist, and Tyler Patrick (PT, DPT, OCS), a doctor of physical therapy, who generously vetted the ideas here. Any errors that remain are entirely my own.

Not ten hours a week – not even 1 hour per week. Not a gym membership. Not a program.

Three minutes.

The fitness industry doesn’t want you to know this. It sells complexity — programming, periodization, optimal rep ranges, recovery protocols, heart rate zones. All of that has its place. But the single most important thing is simpler and lower than almost anyone tells you: move. Something. Anything. Consistently.

This post is about what that looks like when your body makes it hard.

What Movement Actually Is

Before the protocols, a reframe.

Movement isn’t a workout. It isn’t going to the gym. It isn’t hitting a number on a fitness tracker. Movement is taking your joints through their full range of motion — or as close to it as your body allows — under some degree of load, consistently enough that the body adapts.

That definition includes a ten-minute walk. It includes the bodyweight squat you do in your living room. It includes standing up from your desk twelve times a day and sitting back down slowly. It includes a static lunge with a PVC pipe for stability.

The reason this matters: most people who aren’t moving have built a mental model of exercise that is too demanding to start. They’re comparing their starting point to someone else’s maintenance. They’re looking at what exercise is supposed to look like — a CrossFit class, a marathon training plan, a perfectly periodized strength program — and deciding they’re not ready for that yet.

They’re right. They’re not ready for that yet. But they’re ready for something. And something, done consistently, is the entire game.

My Exercise Framework

1. Find Your Floor

In 2020, three years after my spinal fusion and disc replacement surgery, I had effectively proved to myself that most of my remaining pain was neuroplastic. The neuroscience supported it. The logic held. I had done the cognitive work.

My body had not gotten the memo.

I had operated from a lying down or occasionally standing position for five years. No load. No training. A body that had forgotten what movement felt like. I remember trying to do a plank and feeling the compressive load of gravity on the lower portion of my spine like something that shouldn’t be happening. I remember attempting bodyweight squats with a range of motion so limited it was almost more of a standing bob. I had gone from sports, CrossFit, lifting, and sprinting — explosive, heavy, fast — to being unable to sit without pain.

This is where Tom and Dan at Cortho-X came in.

What Tom and Dan understood — and what I came to understand through them — is that the body needs to be convinced through movement, not just thought. You can know intellectually that pain doesn’t equal damage. You can recite the neuroscience. But the nervous system has its own timeline, and you cannot rush it with arguments. You have to move through it.

We started with isometric holds. Static contractions. No dynamic movement, no range of motion, no load beyond bodyweight. Just holding positions long enough for the nervous system to register that the world wasn’t ending. It sounds almost insultingly simple. It was exactly right.

The principle embedded in that approach is the most important thing I can share about exercise: there is always a version of the movement available to you. Your job is to find it.

I was reminded of this recently with a client. She came to me a breast cancer survivor managing fibromyalgia, a healed broken leg, and a baker’s cyst in her other knee. She lives in chronic pain and is managing medications for both the cancer and its side effects. She came over on her day off and told me she simply couldn’t do one of the leg exercises I had prescribed for her - bodyweight Bulgarian split squats.

I had her try a normal step-back lunge. The instability was too much — her body couldn’t find purchase. So I handed her a PVC pipe, positioned her in a static lunge, and asked her to do slow, controlled up-and-downs with a limited range of motion.

She stopped mid-set and looked up.

“I can do this,” she said.

The movement was manageable in a way that didn’t increase her pain. And there was a clear path forward.

That moment is the whole framework in miniature. Not “can you do the movement” but “can you find the version of the movement that doesn’t hurt.” The answer is almost always yes — if you’re willing to remove enough variables to find it.

One more thing we talked about: the difference between hurt and harm. Pain during movement is not automatically a signal to stop. With a baker’s cyst, it’s possible to perform movements without increasing damage — the goal is to find a range of motion where the pain stays at a two or three out of ten or below. We also track what happens after: how does she feel immediately post-workout, during the night, the next morning? If pain levels are similar or better than baseline, we push a little further next session. If they’re worse, we back off — fewer reps, less range of motion, more support. The movement is always on the table. The variables are always adjustable.

Her progression from that first session: PVC pipe for stability → remove the pipe and do it bodyweight → move to a dynamic lunge → add weight. She’s been doing it for a few weeks. She’s working to move up the progression. It is the first time in years that lower body balance training movement felt accessible.

How to Find a Floor

Do something today that makes your muscles work harder than they have been. Apply the Goldilocks principle — not so much that you hurt yourself or dread doing it again, and not too little that your body doesn’t have to adapt at all.

Do something today that elevates your heart rate and makes your lungs work harder than they have been. The talk test will help you find this threshold — you should be able to speak in short sentences, but not comfortably.

Strength and cardio work will each individually lead to a longer and healthier life, but they have an even greater benefit when paired together.

The 85-year-old Olympic cross-country skier may have the heart and lung capacity to get up and down their stairs ten times over, but without the quadricep strength to push their bodyweight up each step, that capacity goes to waste. The 85-year-old former bodybuilder may have the leg strength to climb each step, but may not have the cardiovascular endurance to make it to the top.

Be the 85-year-old who is neither a former Olympian nor a bodybuilder, but who can still get to the top of their stairs.

2. Build Structure

From Tom and Dan’s, I found Corepower yoga through a free trial.

The heat was deliberate. A warm body moves better, hurts less, and — if I’m being honest — the sweat made it feel like more than it was. But the real value was the variety: squats, lunges, push-ups, planks, side planks, rows, presses — a full gamut of movements with extremely light weight, in a controlled environment, with enough structure to keep me honest. It was the bridge between isometric holds and something that felt like actual training.

From Corepower, I moved to a conventional gym. An LA Fitness in Portland. I did short HIIT workouts — as many rounds as possible of five pull-ups, ten push-ups, fifteen air squats in twenty minutes. Before each session I’d do careful strength movements: goblet squats and Bulgarian split squats instead of back squats, and light dumbbell rows instead of anything heavy for the back. Nothing that loaded the spine in ways I wasn’t ready for.

During COVID I had access to a backyard gym. One of the other guys wanted to try deadlifting again. I figured I should too.

I started embarrassingly light. The bar on a platform to reduce range of motion. Slow and controlled. A lacrosse ball to roll out my back, glutes, and hips between sets. Long core work after every session — not crunches, but anti-extension, anti-flexion, and anti-lateral flexion work. Movements that teach the spine to resist force rather than produce it, which is what a compromised back actually needs.

And I kept adding. Slowly. A little more weight. A few more reps. A slightly deeper range of motion.

That compounding is how you get from static lunges with a PVC pipe to loaded Bulgarian split squats. It’s how I got from bodyweight squats with a four-inch range of motion to pulling more weight off the floor than I ever did before I was injured.

The version of me lying on that floor had no framework for that possibility. Which is exactly why the floor — however low it is — is where you start.

How to Build Structure

Once you’ve found your floor and started moving consistently, structure starts to matter. Not because it’s required to get benefit — the exercise snack data makes clear it isn’t — but because structure is how you compound the benefit over time.

Here are some simple rules of thumb that I’ve landed on, both personally and in how I program for others:

Strength:

Use the 3-5 rule. A useful heuristic for strength work: three to five days per week, three to five exercises per session, three to five sets per exercise, three to five reps per set at challenging weight, three to five minutes of rest between sets. Simple enough to remember in the gym, effective enough to produce real adaptation.

On days where you’re busy or feeling worse, stick with the 3. On days where you’re feeling good and or have the time to push a bit harder, go with the 5.

Do movement pattern-centric sets. When selecting exercises, think in movement patterns rather than muscle groups. Your body is designed to push horizontally (bench press, push-up), push vertically (shoulder press, dip), pull horizontally (row), pull vertically (pull-up, lat pulldown), hinge (deadlift, RDL), lunge (split squat, step-up), and squat (goblet squat, leg press).

A well-structured training week touches all of these. If you find yourself doing three variations of bench press and nothing that pulls or hinges, you’re building imbalances that will eventually show up as pain or injury. Cover the patterns and the muscles take care of themselves.

Cardio:

The research is clear that there are distinct physiological adaptations worth pursuing, and they require different approaches:

Do Zone 2 (conversational pace, sustained): approximately 150 minutes per week. 150 minutes sounds like a lot. It’s five 30-minute sessions. If you’re already walking daily, you may already be close. Just dial up the intensity slightly. This is the aerobic base that supports everything else.

Do high intensity work (brief, hard efforts): approximately ten minutes per week total. This is where the exercise snack data lives — short, hard efforts that produce outsized mortality benefit. The data on even small amounts of hard effort is striking — in one of the largest and longest randomized exercise studies of older adults, the HIIT group had the lowest mortality rates of any group, including those who exercised moderately.

I do most of my cardio on machines that are kinder to my body — ski erg, assault bike, rower. With them, I can hit my zone 2 through hour-long sessions at a pace where I’m breathing only through my nose and my high intensity work with rounds of twenty-second all-out sprints.

I’ve removed running sprints and high box jumps from my programming not because they’re bad but because my body pays a tax on them that isn’t worth the benefit right now.

Other Foundational Movement:

Do anti-extension, anti-flexion, and anti-lateral flexion core work: Palloff presses, dead bugs, ab rollouts, weighted front and side planks, waiter’s walks, suitcase carries. These teach the spine to resist force, which is what protects it during everything else. I include some form of this type of core work in almost every session.

Walk every day. Walk 8,000 steps a day, split into two walks. This isn’t optional and it isn’t cardio — it’s maintenance. The Lancet WalkBack trial found that people with a history of low back pain who walked regularly went nearly twice as long without a recurrence. Walking provides rhythmic, low-compression loading to the spine that supports disc nutrition and keeps the surrounding musculature active without demanding recovery. It restores rather than depletes.

The back pain data is the clearest, but the benefits of daily walking for mortality, metabolic health, and cardiovascular function are among the most replicated findings in exercise science.

3. Adapt Perpetually

Here’s the honest version of where my training is today: it is never fixed.

There are perpetually movements being swapped on a weekly basis because of what’s pinging that week. When I do too much quad-dominant work my previously torn labrum reminds me it exists — so I’ll replace a lower body day with a core-centric session or shift the emphasis to hamstrings and glutes. Because of my back history I do multi-second deadlift holds rather than chasing higher weight — the time under tension produces adaptation without the spinal loading that comes from heavier pulls. I use dumbbells over barbells wherever possible because the freedom of movement supports my shoulder. I do single-leg and single-arm work regularly to uncover imbalances that bilateral movements can mask.

My warm-ups are long. My cool-downs include breathing work. I do at least one stretch session every week. I don’t skip these things when I’m pressed for time — I shorten the workout instead.

Some weeks the adaptation is the workout. The session where I swap the movement, reduce the load, find the modified version — that session is still training. It still counts. The body is still adapting.

This is the thing I most want to convey about exercise with a compromised body: it does not have a finish line. The goal is not to return to some prior version of yourself, or to arrive at some ideal program that you then execute perfectly forever. The goal is to keep moving, keep adjusting, keep finding the version of the movement that’s available to you today.

I recently pulled more weight off the floor than I ever did before I was injured. I didn’t get there by following an optimal program. I got there by finding my floor, building structure, adjusting perpetually, and never stopping.

How to Adapt Perpetually

Increase the adaptation demand by five percent per week. That five percent can take any form — more weight, more reps, more time under tension, less rest, greater range of motion. You don’t need to track it precisely. You just need to feel slightly more challenged than last week, every week, without crossing into harm.

Change your movements continuously. Once you’ve built your structure, change your movements so your body is always learning to move and use weight in different ways.

If you’re used to doing quick full range push ups, try doing four seconds down, hold one at the bottom and explode up. If you’re used to heavy deadlifts, lower the weight and do twice the amount of reps. If you usually take five minutes to rest in between movements, try cutting your rest between movements in half.

Adapt to your body. When something hurts, ask whether it’s hurt or harm. Pain at a two or three out of ten that doesn’t worsen after the session is usually safe to work through. Pain that spikes during movement or lingers the next morning is a signal to back off, not push through.

Warm up longer if you feel stiffer. Go lighter on the legs if the knee is giving you trouble, or even cut a movement that doesn’t feel right for the day.

The goal isn’t to execute the plan perfectly. The goal is to keep showing up.

Where You Can Start

You don’t need a gym. You don’t need a program. You don’t need to be recovered or pain-free or at a baseline you feel good about.

You need to find the version of the movement that doesn’t hurt and do it. Consistently. Then make it slightly harder next week.

If you’re starting from nothing: walk more than you did yesterday. Add three minutes of something that makes you breathe hard. That’s it. The Nature Medicine data says that’s enough to begin materially changing your mortality risk.

If you’re managing pain or injury: find your PVC pipe moment. The movement you thought you couldn’t do — there’s a version of it available to you. Reduce the load. Reduce the range of motion. Add support. Find the version where the pain stays below a three out of ten. Start there. Track how you feel after. Build from there.

If you’re ready to build structure: focus on movement patterns rather than muscle groups. Walk every day. Add brief hard cardio twice a week. Build core strength that resists force rather than produces it. Increase the demand by five percent per week in whatever form makes sense.

The question I’d leave you with is the same one I asked in post three: what does your body need to do? Not what should it be able to do. Not what it used to do. What does it need to do — to work, to play, to show up for the life you’re actually living?

Start there. Find the version of the movement that gets you from where you are to where you need to be.

That’s the whole game.

— Max

Sleep was second (behind only smoking).

More than diet. More than exercise. More than loneliness or social isolation. The senior author said he didn’t expect it to be so strongly correlated with life expectancy. A researcher who studies sleep for a living was surprised by his own finding.

I wasn’t surprised. I’ve known this in my body for a long time before I could cite it.

This is why I’ve chosen to write about sleep before my other non-negotiables.

Next, I’m going to share what sleep has looked like for me at its worst, the protocols I now use to protect it, where my sleep honestly is today, and where you might start to improve your sleep.

Sleep At Its Worst Part 1: A Specific Night

December 26, 2017. Four days after my spinal fusion and disc replacement surgery.

I cut the opiates that day. I couldn’t think straight on them and they made me sick. I decided I’d rather face the pain clearly than be absent from my own life. That was the last pain medication I took for my back.

What followed were the worst nights I can remember — and I had set a high bar for bad nights by that point.

I could barely move. But staying in the same position was its own unbearable. So I’d lie there until I couldn’t anymore, and then I’d try to get up and shuffle around the room in the dark, just to change the geometry of the pain for a minute, and then I’d try to get back down. Every transition cost something. Every waking — and there were many — took hours to recover from. The nights felt endless and the mornings offered no relief because the mornings just meant it was daylight while I was still in pain.

It made me feel like life wasn’t worth living.

I mean that plainly, not dramatically. Sleep deprivation at that level doesn’t just make you tired. It removes the forward-looking part of your mind — the part that knows things will eventually be different. Night after night of it and you stop being able to imagine a version of yourself that isn’t this. The horizon disappears.

I know now what was happening biologically. Research from UC Berkeley has shown that sleep deprivation produces a 120% increase in activity in the somatosensory cortex — the region of the brain that processes pain — while simultaneously producing a 60 to 90% drop in activity in the regions that normally dampen it. My pain signal was turned all the way up and my natural pain relief was turned all the way off, every single night, with nothing in between.

The one good thing about those nights: my puppy would eventually come find me on the floor I was sleeping on. I am still grateful to him for that.

Sleep At Its Worst Part 2: The Night Owl Who Lost the Night

I have always been a night owl. My brain doesn’t quiet easily — it runs, and the running tends to accelerate in the dark when there’s nothing else to compete with it. Before the injury, pushing late was a choice I made willingly. I liked those hours. They were mine.

After the injury, something different took over. Avoidance. I didn’t want to face the nights, so I’d delay them — push further and further into the early morning, sleep through as much of the day as I could, and wake up to find that the pain had been waiting for me the entire time. The cycle compounded. My circadian rhythm became a suggestion I mostly ignored.

I tried melatonin. I tried harder sleep medications. I tried an Alpha-Stim — a device that uses microcurrent stimulation and has some evidence behind it — until I realized that turning it on required lighting up a screen, which shot my melatonin to zero before the device had a chance to do anything. None of it worked reliably. The shortcuts were no substitute for the actual work.

Even when my back improved enough that I could sleep in a bed again, the sleep remained poor. The habits had calcified. The fear of the night had become its own kind of central sensitization.

This is why every protocol I’m about to describe matters as much as it does to me. Some people reading this won’t do any of these things and will still wake up feeling better than I do. I know that and I’m not writing for them. I’m writing for the people who, like me, start from a harder place and need every marginal gain they can find.

Matthew Walker’s book Why We Sleep was the beginning of my real understanding of what sleep actually does and why it responds to specific interventions. If you haven’t read it, it belongs at or near the top of your list.

The Protocols

This is a long list. I’ll tell you upfront: don’t try to do all of them at once. Pick two — ideally from the light section, which is the highest-leverage category — and watch what happens over a few weeks. Then add one more. Then repeat. More on this at the end.

Light — The Highest-Leverage Category

Your circadian system evolved over hundreds of thousands of years with one assumption baked in: darkness follows sunset. Every artificial light source you use after the sun goes down is, to your biology, a lie. Your brain interprets it as daytime and responds accordingly — suppressing melatonin, maintaining alertness, delaying the cascade of hormonal events that prepare you for sleep.

The good news is that correcting this is cheap and immediate.

Blue light blockers at sunset. Put them on the moment the sun goes down and keep them on until you’re in bed. Not phone night mode — more on that in a moment. Not the “blue light blocker” coating on your prescription glasses — most of those filter a negligible percentage of the relevant spectrum. Get actual amber-lens blue light blocking glasses. Harvard researchers found that blue light suppressed melatonin for approximately twice as long as green light of equal brightness and shifted circadian rhythms by twice as much. This is not a minor effect.

This is the brand of bluelight blockers my wife and I use nightly the moment the sun goes down.We’re wearing them in the cover photo of this post. As an additional note, we’ve tried a number of others from Amazon – they simply don’t work the same.

Night mode and dark mode on all screens — all day, not just at night. Set every phone, laptop, and computer to night mode or warm light permanently. One peer-reviewed study measuring melatonin suppression across 64 smartphones found that night mode functions reduced melatonin suppression values by up to 93% compared to default settings. That’s a compelling reason to turn it on and leave it on.

But here’s the honest nuance: a separate study from Brigham Young University, whose findings were much closer to my own experience, found that night mode alone made no measurable difference to actual sleep outcomes compared to using a phone with night mode off. The only group that showed improvement was the one that didn’t use a phone at all before bed. Night mode helps — but it doesn’t make late-night screen use safe. The phone still needs to go away.

Use it as a baseline, not a solution.

For iPhone specifically, go further: Settings → Accessibility → Display & Text Size → Color Filters. Turn on Color Filters, select Color Tint, and drag both the intensity and hue sliders to maximum. This produces a deep red screen that emits essentially no melatonin-suppressing light. It looks alarming the first time you see it. Use it for any phone interaction after sunset — checking the time, a middle-of-the-night alarm, anything. The goal is removing every photon of blue light from your evening environment, not just the obvious sources. As an added benefit, you may just want to use your phone less overall.

Red bulbs after sunset. Research confirms that red light allows melatonin to rebound after initial suppression, while blue light maintains suppression with minimal recovery across the evening.

Replace the bulbs in the rooms you use in the evening with red or very warm bulbs – or find a lamp to move around with you. My wife and I turn out the lights in our home after sunset and use this lamp (which charges and doesn’t require plug in) for everything – for the babies’ nighttime routine, reading, doing late night dishes, brushing teeth and more. It’s the tint you see in the cover photo of this post.

Morning light in your eyes within the first hour of waking. Get outside — even on cloudy days, even for a couple minutes. Early morning light exposure aligns the internal circadian clock, which determines when your brain begins releasing melatonin that evening. You are, in effect, setting a biological timer in the morning for what happens sixteen hours later. This is one of the highest-leverage interventions available and it costs nothing.

Evening light when the sun goes down. The low-angle yellow and orange spectrum of late afternoon and evening sunlight signals the brain that nighttime is approaching. A ten-minute walk outside as the sun sets is doing real work on your circadian rhythm.

Darkness while you sleep. This goes further than most people take it. Blackout shades are the obvious starting point — research has shown that even dim light during sleep impairs cardiometabolic function and increases insulin resistance. But I’ve gone further than blackout shades.

That’s tape and a portion of a piece of mail I received over the green indicator light on a wall socket near my bathroom. It sounds extreme until you think about what happens when you wake at 3am to use the bathroom and your eyes adjust to find that small green dot — your brain is now asking whether morning is coming, and it takes time to settle back down after you return to bed. I removed the ambiguity. Tape and a refi advertisement are essentially free.

Sleep Architecture — The Structural Rules

Consistent timing. This is the most underappreciated protocol on the list. The consistency of when you go to sleep and wake up is close in importance to total sleep duration — and may matter more than most people realize. A recent systematic review across five low-bias cohort studies showed 20–88% higher all-cause mortality for the least regular sleepers, independent of sleep duration and quality.

Your circadian rhythm is a timing system. It works best when it can predict. Varying your sleep schedule by even an hour or two across the week creates what researchers call social jet lag — a chronic misalignment between your biological clock and your actual schedule that compounds quietly over time. Pick a window and protect it.

No food at least two hours before bed, and ideally four. Digestion raises core body temperature. Your body needs to cool — by approximately one to two degrees — to initiate and maintain sleep. Eating close to bedtime is working against that process. Study after study supports the idea that eating close to bed is associated with additional wakings thus increasing the likelihood of suboptimal sleep.

Liquids finished four hours before bed. Practical arithmetic: waking to urinate at 2am fragments your sleep architecture in ways that are genuinely difficult to recover from within the same night. The math favors front-loading your hydration.

This is the most recent of the listed protocols to be added to my nightly routine. In the three weeks I’ve been doing this, it’s reduced my nighttime urination wakings by ~50%. That sadly means I’ve had to say goodbye to my homemade kombucha wind down glass after putting the twins to bed.

No caffeine within nine hours of sleep, or within the first hour and a half to two hours of waking. This one surprises people. Caffeine doesn’t give you energy — it blocks adenosine, the compound that builds sleep pressure across the day. When caffeine wears off, the adenosine that accumulated while it was blocked arrives all at once. And delaying caffeine in the morning lets your body clear the overnight adenosine naturally before you override the system. I have never had a full cup of coffee in my life, so this one is theoretical for me — but the mechanism is real for anyone it applies to.

Avoid alcohol or cannabis close to sleep. Both suppress REM sleep — alcohol by fragmenting sleep architecture in the second half of the night, cannabis by reducing REM duration and intensity. You may fall asleep faster with either. The quality of what follows is compromised. I don’t drink or use cannabis, but I think it’s important that people are aware.

Room temperature at 65 degrees. A large longitudinal study of older adults using 10,903 person-nights of data showed sleep was more efficient when nighttime ambient temperature ranged between 20–25°C (68–77°F), with a clinically relevant 5–10% drop in sleep efficiency when temperature increased from 25°C to 30°C. Consensus from the National Sleep Foundation, Cleveland Clinic, and Healthline suggests a lower temperature (60–67°F) is even better.

This is because core body temperature needs to drop to initiate sleep. A cool room accelerates that process. This is one of the more reliably supported environmental interventions in the sleep literature.

Bedroom for sleep only. This is a core component of Stimulus Control Therapy, the most evidence-based behavioral treatment for insomnia, which has been validated across hundreds of studies. The mechanism is well-understood: conditioning the brain’s association with the sleep environment.

In other words, every hour you spend in bed on your phone, watching television, or working is training your nervous system that the bed is a place to be alert. You are conditioning an association. Undo it deliberately — the bed is for sleep, and sleep is what happens there.

No naps. Naps reduce sleep pressure — the accumulated drive toward sleep that builds across the day. That pressure is what makes you actually tired at bedtime. Protect it.

Supplementation and Physical Aids

Magnesium glycinate (also called “magnesium bisglycinate”). A double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial found that magnesium supplementation significantly increased sleep time, sleep efficiency, and serum melatonin while reducing cortisol and sleep onset latency. The evidence is most robust in older adults — less conclusive across all populations — but the risk profile is low and the upside is real.

I’ve been taking it (this brand) for two months. My personal proxy for sleep depth is dream recall — vivid, memorable dreams generally indicate you’re reaching the deeper REM stages where the restorative work happens. Since adding magnesium glycinate, my dream recall has increased noticeably. That is an n=1 observation layered on top of existing evidence. I’ll take it.

As a note, magnesium L-threonate has also shown significant promise for sleep, but from my experience is significantly more expensive. My guess is that the premium reflects its additional evidence for cognitive benefits. In short, if you just want the sleep benefits or are tighter on funds, go with magnesium glycinate.

A sound machine. White or brown noise creates a consistent auditory environment that gives your brain’s threat-detection system something predictable to rest on. It’s not just masking noise — it’s preventing the brain from having to monitor for changes, which is one of the things that fragments light sleep into full waking. My wife and I use this one every night.

Mouth tape. I snore. The research on mouth taping is somewhat limited. It has personally reduced my snoring and dry mouth. It has done the same for a number of people I work with too. The downside to trying it is low – this is what I use.

Pillow positioning. This one is specific to managing back pain during sleep and it may be the most practically useful thing in this section for anyone managing a chronic injury. I sleep with pillows beneath my knees when on my back, between my knees when on my side, and under my hips when on my stomach. The goal is keeping the spine in a neutral position that reduces the compression and rotation that would otherwise accumulate across the night. It took years of adjustment to find what works. Start with a pillow between your knees if you sleep on your side — it’s the single highest-leverage positioning change for most people with back pain.

Exercise. Daytime physical activity builds sleep pressure and helps regulate circadian timing. The connection is well-established and the effect is dose-dependent — more movement during the day, better sleep that night.

The Harder Ones — The Protocols That Cost More

The protocols listed above take discipline but don’t require giving anything up. These next three are different.

Sleeping separately from my wife. I want to explain this one carefully because the instinct when you hear it is to read it as distance. It is the opposite.

When she was pregnant, she began snoring. We were waking each other up night after night, accumulating a low-grade resentment that was showing up in our days — in how we spoke to each other, in how much capacity we had left for work and for the rest of life. I suggested we try sleeping apart. She didn’t like the idea. I didn’t either. But I laid out the case: if the bed is truly for sleep, let’s honor that.

It has worked. We are better partners, better parents, better at our jobs. We treat each other with more patience because we are each arriving at the day with more of ourselves intact.

One day we want to sleep in the same bed again. That day is not today, with nightly twin wakings still on the schedule. But it’s on the board.

No pets in the bedroom. During the worst years on the floor, my dog sleeping with me was one of the only good things about those nights. Unfortunately, pets in the bed and room fragment sleep — they move, they adjust, they create micro-awakenings that add up across the night – all supported by this Nature paper. Sammy sleeps outside the room now. It is a real trade-off made because the margin matters.

Airplane mode an hour before bed. Partly the light from the screen. Mostly the psychology. When your phone is accessible and connected, your brain maintains a low-level alert state regardless of whether you touch it. The mere possibility of a notification is enough — your threat-detection system stays partially online. Airplane mode is a commitment device. You are removing the option, not just the intention. There is a meaningful difference.

Where My Sleep Is Today

I still wake up around 3 or 4am most nights. I still spend the next several hours rotating between positions — side to side, briefly on my stomach, a specific arrangement of pillows that keeps my spine in the geometry it needs to tolerate the next few hours. I feel like Bonnie Hunt’s character in Cheaper by the Dozen when she checks into a hotel and asks for twelve pillows because she misses her twelve kids — except I’m not missing anyone, I’m just trying to find a configuration that hurts a little less.

The protocols above have raised my floor substantially. They have not raised it to where a healthy person’s floor is. That’s the context. This is maintenance and management, not a cure. The goal is the best sleep available to this particular body, in this particular life, right now.

I have no doubt the same protocols will raise yours too.

Where You Can Start To Improve Your Sleep

One thing before we get into it: these protocols are meant to become your normal, not your prison.

A week ago two of my closest friends came into town. I was at dinner with them until 9:30pm, stayed up until 11:30pm watching TV, skipped the blue light glasses, ignored the food cutoff, blew past my usual bedtime by two hours. I broke most of what I just described and I’d do it again without hesitation. The system exists to serve your life, not the other way around. Make these your baseline so that when life pulls you off them, you return easily — not so rigidly that you’re watching the clock at dinner with people you love.

I listed 22 protocols. That’s a lot. I know.

With that said, don’t do all of them. Pick two — and if you’re not sure which two, start with the light protocols because they are the highest-leverage interventions available and the changes are cheap and immediate. Get blue light blockers. Tape over the indicator lights. Get outside in the morning.

I work with someone who already sleeps exceptionally well. Nine hours a night, good baseline habits, tracks her sleep on a Garmin Fenix 6S. Her previous best sleep score was 94. We made two changes: blackout shades and a stricter screen cutoff before bed. Now her best sleep score is 98.

Four points sounds modest. But 4% across an eight-hour night is twenty extra minutes of quality sleep. Do that consistently — night after night, compounding — and the effect on how you feel, how you perform, and how long you live is not modest at all.

Start with two. See what moves. Then add one more.

Sleep is the foundation everything else is built on. Fix it first.

— Max

Most of that advice is written for a specific kind of person: someone whose body is basically functioning, looking to optimize from a position of health. That person exists. But they are not the only person who needs help.

This post is for everyone else — and for anyone who has ever looked at the standard health content and thought: that’s not where I’m starting from.

The Framework: Your Body Is a Product

I’ve been thinking about the human body the way product managers think about software, and I think it maps surprisingly well.

Every product has four things:

A spec — what the product is supposed to do. For a smartphone, that’s make calls, run apps, hold a charge. For your body, it’s personal. Mine is: be able to work at full capacity, and be able to play. Those are my two tests. Everything else flows from them.

A battery — the energy required to meet the spec. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: not everyone starts each day at the same charge. Some people wake up at 100%. Others — through injury, illness, chronic pain, or circumstances outside their control — start lower. I start lower. My back, my surgeries, my nervous system — they all mean my battery begins the day at a deficit that I have to actively close before I can function as designed. That is not a character flaw. It is a hardware reality. And denying it doesn’t make it less true.

An MVP threshold — the minimum the product needs to do to function as intended. Below the MVP, the product doesn’t work. Above it, it does. The entire point of what I’ll describe in this post is staying above mine.

A vision — the ideal version the product is iterating toward. The original iPhone didn’t have Face ID, or a 48-megapixel camera, or the processing power to run the applications we use today. It launched with enough to be useful and iterated toward the vision over time. Your body works the same way. MVP is not the destination. It is the launch point.

The Levels: How I Built Mine

I didn’t arrive at my non-negotiables by reading a health optimization book. I arrived at them by climbing back from a body that couldn’t sit down.

There were distinct levels. Each one was defined not by a metric — not by a number on a scale or a resting heart rate — but by a functional test. Can I do the things I care about?

For me, those tests have always been two:

Can I work — and really work? Not just show up. Not just survive a day at a desk. Really work — the kind of focused, high-output work that a consulting career demands. For me, that means being able to sit at a standing desk, moving between sitting and standing throughout the day. It means being able to travel — to fly across time zones, sleep adequately in hotels, maintain my routine in someone else’s city. It means standing in client meetings when I need to, choosing Whole Foods over the restaurant when everyone else uses the per diem for dinner, walking from the hotel to the client site instead of taking an Uber because those 1.5 miles matter. It means finding the exercise snack when the workday runs long — four rounds of a quarter-mile run plus twenty burpees, or a 21-15-9 of dumbbell snatches and burpees — because something is always better than nothing.

The research backs this up more than most people realize. A study published in Nature Medicine found that just three to four minutes of brief vigorous activity per day — in people who did no structured exercise — was associated with a 38–40% reduction in all-cause and cancer mortality risk. Three bouts of one to two minutes each. The bar is lower than the fitness industry wants you to think.

Can I play — and really play? Basketball. Dog Mountain — a hike so relentlessly steep that it’s called that because you’re dog-tired by the end – and I have to do it with a weighted vest or dumbbells in a backpack. Mikko’s Triangle: ten rounds of twenty calories on the rower, twenty calories on the ski erg, twenty calories on the assault bike, each in under a minute, one minute rest between rounds. My (current) record is eight rounds. And Hyrox Pro — I’m not there yet, because plantar fasciitis keeps getting in the way, but it’s on the board. That’s a higher level. I’ll get there.

The methodology for moving between levels was simple and ruthless: try one new thing for one to two weeks. If it moves you up — if the functional test improves — it stays. If it doesn’t, it goes. No sentiment, no sunk cost. Does it work or doesn’t it?

Over years of iteration, a handful of things survived that test every time. Those are my non-negotiables.

The Non-Negotiables: My MVP in Practice

These are the things that keep me above the threshold. Miss them, and I drop below it. I can sit, technically — but I can’t work the way I need to work, and I can’t play the way I want to play. So they happen. Every day. No exceptions.

Non-Negotiable #1: The Morning Routine

This happens before anything else. Before email, before the day has a chance to interrupt it. It takes about fifteen minutes and it is the single highest-leverage investment I make in my body every day.

It starts with the world’s greatest stretch — a deep, slow hip opener that begins to undo whatever the night did to my spine and hips. Then four rounds of the following, back to back:

• 30-second front plank

• Straight into a 30-second hollow body hold

Then glute activation — two minutes per side of a side-lying wall drill:

Lie on your side with your bottom knee bent at 90 degrees. Press your top leg’s heel into a wall behind you. Keeping the knee bent, turn your toes slightly downward and push — not hard, just with intention — to engage the glute.

This is not glamorous. It is not the kind of thing anyone posts about. But my glutes are the load-bearing structure that protects my spine during everything that follows, and if I don’t wake them up deliberately, they don’t show up for the day. Ten years of dealing with a back injury have taught me that.

This routine happens on vacation. It happens at 4am before an early hiking start. It happens in hotel rooms, in airport lounges, in the living room while the twins sleep. It is not negotiable because I’ve learned, through exhaustive trial and error, that the days I skip it are so much worse. Every time. Without exception.

Non-Negotiable #2: Three Miles of Walking, Every Day

Split into two walks. I landed on three miles specifically — not two and a half, not four. Two and a half doesn’t feel like enough. Three does.

This is not a coincidence or superstition. The research on walking and back pain is now substantial. A landmark trial published in The Lancet in 2024 found that people with a history of low back pain who walked regularly went nearly twice as long without a recurrence — a median of 208 days versus 112 days in the control group. A 2025 study published in JAMA Network Open, following more than 11,000 people over four years, found that walking more than 100 minutes per day was associated with a 23% lower risk of developing chronic low back pain.

Walking works because it does something no other exercise does in quite the same way: it provides rhythmic, low-compression cyclical loading to the spine, which supports disc nutrition and keeps the surrounding musculature active without demanding recovery. It is movement that restores rather than depletes.

My two walks also serve a second purpose that I talked about in the last post: they give my nervous system a rest from vigilance. No screen, no agenda, just movement and whatever the dog finds interesting. The brain’s background threat level drops. I arrive back at my desk — or back at the day — slightly more intact physically and mentally than when I left.

Non-Negotiable #3: Eight Hours of Sleep

Not seven. Not seven and a half. Eight.

I know this because I’ve tested it. The days after I sleep less than eight hours, my back hurts more. This is not my imagination and it is not psychosomatic — the science on sleep and pain is among the most robust in the field.

Research from UC Berkeley, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found that sleep-deprived subjects experienced a 120% increase in activity in the somatosensory cortex — the region of the brain that processes pain — along with a 60 to 90% drop in activity in the brain regions that normally dampen pain perception. In plain terms: poor sleep turns up the pain signal and turns off the body’s natural pain relief at the same time. It is one of the worst things you can do if you are managing chronic pain, and one of the most overlooked.

Eight hours is my floor. I protect it the way I protect the morning routine — not as a preference but as a physiological requirement.

Non-Negotiable #4: Nothing Processed. No Added Sugar.

This is not a diet. I’m not counting calories or tracking macros. The rule is simpler than that: if it’s processed, I don’t eat it. If it has added sugar, I don’t eat it.

I arrived here through the same iterative process as everything else. Removing processed foods and added sugar moved me to a new level. So they stayed out.

The mechanism is inflammation. Added sugars trigger the release of inflammatory cytokines — signaling molecules that activate immune cells and create a state of low-grade chronic inflammation throughout the body. The Arthritis Foundation summarizes it plainly: this inflammation damages tissues over time, and it is directly linked to chronic pain. A peer-reviewed piece in Frontiers in Immunology concluded that dietary sugars and processed foods may be a key factor in the occurrence and aggravation of inflammatory conditions.

For someone managing a spine that has been fused, replaced, and rebuilt — and everything else that came with it — keeping the systemic inflammatory load as low as possible is not optional. It is the baseline on which everything else sits.

The Vision: Where the Product Is Going

MVP is not the finish line. It’s the foundation.

The iPhone launched in 2007 with a 2-megapixel camera and no App Store. The vision was always something much larger — it just had to ship something functional first and iterate from there. Your body works the same way. You establish the floor, you protect it, and then you build.

My vision has levels too, and those levels map directly onto the functional tests. Right now, I’m working toward Hyrox Pro. I can’t do it yet — the plantar fasciitis is a real constraint and I’m navigating it carefully. But it’s on the board. It’s the next level on the product roadmap. Every day that I hit my non-negotiables, I’m one iteration closer.

The vision is not a fixed destination. It evolves. A year ago, eight rounds of Mikko’s Triangle felt like the ceiling. Now it’s a data point. The ceiling keeps moving when the floor is protected.

And sometimes — if you do the work long enough — you outpace the vision entirely. I remember the first time I deadlifted again, five years after my injury. The weights were light, the bar was elevated on a platform to reduce the range of motion, and I spent twenty to thirty minutes afterward doing core work just to manage the pain that followed. That was the product at its earliest iteration. I couldn’t have imagined then what it would eventually become. I recently pulled more weight than I ever did before I was injured. The version of me lying on the floor of that cubicle in Arizona had no framework for that possibility. Which is exactly why the vision has to stay open — because the ceiling you can see from here is never the actual ceiling.

A Note on Dipping Below MVP

Every product has maintenance windows. Every battery gets run down sometimes by things outside your control.

Right now, I have newborn twins. I am not sleeping eight hours. The morning routine happens — I’ve protected that one because it’s the shortest and the highest-leverage — but the full picture of what I described above is not what my days look like right now.

And I want to name that, because the framework only works if it’s honest. A system that only applies to ideal conditions isn’t a system — it’s an aspiration.

Here’s what I’ve learned about dipping below MVP: the goal isn’t to pretend it isn’t happening. It’s to know your floor clearly enough that you can triage. When resources are constrained, what do you protect first? For me, the answer is the morning routine — fifteen minutes that costs almost nothing and returns more than anything else I do. The walks come second. Sleep comes third, and right now I’m getting what the twins allow, which is not eight hours, and I’m managing.

The framework doesn’t fail when life gets hard. It becomes more useful precisely then because it tells you what to protect first and what can wait.

The vision doesn’t go away during the maintenance window. It just pauses. The twins are worth every interrupted night. I’ll get back to eight hours when they let me.

What’s Your MVP?

The framework is universal but the inputs are yours.

What does your body need to do — what’s your spec? Not what you think it should be able to do, or what someone else’s body does, but what matters to you, specifically, in the life you’re actually living.

What are the one or two things that, if you do them consistently, keep you above your threshold? Not the whole optimization stack — just the load-bearing ones. The things that when you miss them, you feel it.

And what’s your vision? Not as pressure — as direction. The next level you’re working toward, even if you’re not there yet.

You don’t need to have all the answers today. But asking the question is the beginning of building a system that actually fits your life rather than someone else’s.

That’s the work of Step 3 — if you haven't read the framework yet, it lives in the previous post. This newsletter is where I’ll keep sharing mine.

— Max

***A note of gratitude to my lifelong friend Sharla Johnson, whose own navigation of diabetes sparked a conversation in a friend's kitchen about a year ago that planted the seed for key elements of this post. The battery concept specifically — it started there, with her. Thank you, Sharla.

This post is about why that happens, and what to do when it does.

But first, a definition. Pain is a complex, subjective experience whose primary biological function is to protect us from harm. It is simultaneously sensory and emotional, which is why no two people experience the same injury the same way, and why the same person can experience the same injury differently depending on what else is happening in their life. It manifests in different forms — somatic pain in the muscles and skin, visceral pain in the organs, referred pain that shows up somewhere other than its source — but across all of them, the brain is the final arbiter of what you feel and how intensely you feel it.

That last sentence is the foundation of everything that follows.

Over the years I spent navigating my own pain — and in the work I’ve done since helping others navigate theirs — I’ve found that almost every case can be mapped onto a framework of three steps. Not three steps in the sense of a checklist you complete and move on from, but three steps in the sense of a cycle you return to, each pass building on the last.

Step 1: Fix the body.

Step 2: Train the brain.

Step 3: Return to the body — and never stop.

The sequence matters. Each step has a logic that depends on the one before it. And the cycle doesn’t end — it just changes character over time. Here’s what each one actually means.

Step 1: Fix the Body

This is where almost everyone starts, and rightly so. When you’re in pain, the first question is always: is something anatomically wrong, and can it be addressed? Reduce inflammation through food. Build strength and flexibility through movement. Pursue whatever medical interventions are available and appropriate for your specific situation. This step is necessary, and the medical system — for all its limitations — is genuinely well-equipped to support it.

What the medical system struggles with is being honest about what step 1 actually demands.

It demands diligence. The difference between physical therapy that works and physical therapy that doesn’t is often not the protocol but the consistency of the person doing it. The exercises that feel pointless at week two are the ones that matter at week twelve. Step 1 rewards the people who show up for it long after the novelty has worn off.

It demands patience — the kind that is genuinely difficult to sustain when you are in pain every day and can’t see progress in real time. Most meaningful physiological change happens slowly, invisibly, and then all at once. Biology doesn’t care about your timeline.

And it demands resources. Time. Money. Good insurance, or the financial means to work around not having it. Access to the right practitioners, which is itself a function of geography, income and luck. Step 1 is not equally accessible to everyone, and pretending otherwise is one of the quiet ways the conversation about chronic pain fails the people who need it most.

I tried step 1 for years. Physical therapy, acupuncture, red light therapy, water therapy, micro-movement therapy, chiropractic care, iontophoresis, cortisone shots, platelet-rich plasma injections, stem cell injections. A microdiscectomy. A laminectomy. Eventually a spinal fusion and a disc replacement. Each of these represented a genuine attempt at fixing my body — each was worth trying, and I don’t regret any of them. But by the end, the structural picture was clear: the herniated discs that had been pressing on nerves were gone. The bone-on-bone contact that had been generating pain was replaced with metal hardware and a synthetic disc. There was nothing left to fix anatomically.

That moment of clarity — knowing you have genuinely exhausted what step 1 can offer — is both a relief and a particular kind of grief. And it brings with it something nobody warned me about.

The Diminishing Hope Curve

When you first begin treating chronic pain, you approach the standard of care with something close to full hope. Your doctor recommends the first intervention, you try it, and somewhere in you is the belief — reasonable, rational — that this might be the thing that works. Call that starting point 100.

When it doesn’t work, the next treatment begins at a lower baseline. Not because you’ve made a decision to be less hopeful, but because hope is a resource and failed treatments spend it. The third treatment starts lower than the second. The fourth lower than the third. By the time you’re trying your eighth or twelfth or twentieth intervention, you’re not starting from anywhere near 100. You might be starting from 30, or 15, or somewhere you don’t have a number for.

The gap between 100 and wherever you currently are doesn’t stay empty. It fills with fear.

Fear that this one won’t work either. Fear that nothing will. Fear, eventually, that the pain is simply the permanent texture of your life and every treatment is just a way of postponing the moment you have to accept that. And here is the part that matters clinically, not just emotionally: that fear is physiologically active. It raises your nervous system’s threat level. It sensitizes the very pathways that generate your pain response. It can amplify what you’re experiencing in ways that are real and measurable, not imagined.

So by the time most people arrive at the end of step 1, they don’t arrive with a clean slate. They arrive carrying the accumulated weight of every treatment that didn’t work, every hope that was spent, every increment of fear that grew in the gap. That is the actual starting condition for step 2. It’s harder than most frameworks acknowledge — and I think it’s important to say so plainly, because if you’re there right now, the difficulty you’re feeling is not weakness. It’s the predictable result of a process that spent down your resources before asking you to do the hardest part.

The Bridge: Hurt Is Not the Same as Harm

Before moving to step 2, one distinction that I think is both practically and psychologically essential.

There is a difference between hurt and harm.

Hurt is the subjective experience of pain. Harm is actual damage occurring in the body. For most of the time you spend in step 1, these two things are closely correlated — the pain signal is telling you something real about a real structural problem, and respecting that signal is correct and important. Your body is trying to protect you. Let it.

But once you have done everything physiologically available to you — ideally with the sign-off of a physician who can confirm you are not causing further structural damage — the relationship between hurt and harm begins to change. The pain may remain. It may be entirely real and present and significant. But it is no longer a reliable indicator that damage is occurring. The alarm is sounding in the absence of a fire.

That is the moment you can begin step 2 without guilt, without the fear that you’re being reckless with your body, without the sense that pushing forward means giving up on the structural work. You’re not dismissing your pain. You’re recontextualizing what it means. You’re not pushing through harm. You’re learning to reinterpret hurt.

That reframing is not easy. But it is the door.

Step 2: Train the Brain

Here is something the medical establishment knows but doesn’t communicate clearly enough: the brain is central to pain. Many of the most commonly prescribed medications for chronic pain — antidepressants, anticonvulsants, cardiovascular drugs — were never originally developed to treat pain at all. They work on the brain and nervous system, not on the site of injury.

The pharmacological fingerprints are all over the brain. Medicine already knows the psychological dimension of pain is real. It’s embedded in the standard of care whether or not anyone explains it to the patient. I find it remarkable, and a little maddening, that this isn’t part of the conversation people have with their doctors earlier.

To be fair to the physicians on the other side of this conversation — and I say this having had it explained to me by a doctor — there are structural reasons this doesn’t come up earlier. Many patients arrive in a clinical setting looking for the medical establishment to fix them. Telling someone that the next step requires their own sustained mental work, offers no quick relief, and may take months to show results is a genuine patient dissatisfier in a customer service industry operating under significant time pressure. The incentives don’t make it easy to say what needs to be said.

None of that makes it less frustrating to be the patient on the other side of it. But it’s worth understanding why the gap exists — because closing it is, at least in part, on us.

The neuroscience behind pain is worth understanding in plain terms too. After prolonged chronic pain, the nervous system undergoes a process called central sensitization — it literally rewires itself, lowering the threshold for what triggers a pain response, expanding the range of stimuli that register as threatening, amplifying signals that would previously have been filtered out. It is not a character flaw. It is not weakness or hypochondria. It is neuroplasticity — the brain’s extraordinary capacity to learn — working against you. The brain ran thousands of repetitions of a particular experience and drew the logical conclusion: this thing is dangerous. It kept that conclusion even after the original danger was resolved.

The work of step 2 is, in the most literal sense, updating the model.

What that looks like in practice varies considerably by person, context, and what the brain has learned. Let me give you three examples.

The first is my own. Most people picture exposure therapy in dramatic terms — I’m afraid of heights, so I throw myself out of a plane. But that’s not how it has to work, and for those of us in chronic pain, it probably shouldn’t.

Think of it as a dial, not a switch. Exercise is exposure therapy — you’re asking your body to tolerate slightly more physical demand than it could yesterday, and over time it adapts. Sunlight works the same way: moderate, consistent exposure builds resilience; the goal is never to overwhelm the system. It’s the next manageable increment, repeated until the nervous system updates its threat assessment.

After my fusion and disc replacement, I was still in agony despite having nothing structurally left to fix. On the advice of a framework I encountered through a podcast — a story about a woman with amplified pain syndrome whose nervous system had been retrained through controlled re-exposure — I began practicing sitting. Five minutes per hour at first. Then ten, then fifteen, adding five minutes each day until I was sitting for fifty minutes of every waking hour.

In the beginning I was white-knuckling the armrests. It was, in its own way, harder than the cold plunges I do today. I stared at the timer counting down every second until I could lie back down and let my spine decompress. But I was not harming myself — the structural work was done, the surgeon had confirmed it. The pain was real; the danger was not. I was doing exposure therapy on my own nervous system, presenting it with controlled doses of the thing it had categorized as a threat, until it stopped categorizing it that way.

Weeks passed. My grip on the armrests loosened. I stopped watching the timer. I stopped needing to set one.

The second example involves a friend who had struggled for years with gut pain. She had eaten meticulously — elimination diets, anti-inflammatory protocols, everything the physiological step had to offer. Nothing resolved it. What became clear over time was that the physiological work was genuinely exhausted, and what remained was a fear response: her mind had learned to anticipate pain every time she ate, and that anticipation was now part of what was generating the experience. The trigger had become psychological even as the sensation remained physical.

The work in a case like this is essentially cognitive behavioral therapy applied to the body — tracing the thought pattern that precedes the pain, identifying the moment the fear arises, and systematically exposing the nervous system to the trigger in a controlled way until the association weakens. It is painstaking. It is not a quick fix. But it is the right tool for the right step.

The third example is a woman I met at a pain rehab clinic who had dealt with serious neck pain for years. Her disc issues had been addressed surgically, but her pain hadn’t improved — it had gotten worse in her later years, not better. When we talked through the timeline together, a pattern emerged: the escalation in pain mapped almost exactly onto the period of her divorce. The nervous system had found a psychological anchor. It had linked her physical experience to an emotional one, and no surgery was going to untangle that. What remained was grief work, not physical therapy. That was step 2 for her.

I want to say something honest about my own tools for this step, because I think the standard advice — meditate, do breathwork, practice mindfulness — is fine advice that simply doesn’t describe how I actually live.

I’m motivated by efficiency. I don’t have a formal meditation practice. What I have is time outdoors, walking my dog, getting natural light, moving through space in a way that supports my back and quiets my nervous system without demanding my full attention. The brain gets a rest from vigilance. That’s the functional goal, and there are many paths to it.

The other thing I do — and I’d encourage anyone in step 2 to try this deliberately — is collect moments where I forget that I’m in pain, and then notice that I forgot.

A few months ago, two of my closest friends and I crammed ourselves into a cold plunge barrel that was genuinely not designed for three people. We were stacked on top of each other, freezing, laughing in the way that you only laugh with people you’ve known for a long time. Somewhere in it, I stopped doing the calculus I do every day — the running background assessment of where the pain is, how bad it is, what it might mean. I wasn’t thinking about it. And then afterward, I noticed that I hadn’t been.

That noticing matters. It is evidence — concrete, experiential, undeniable — that the threat the brain has been monitoring is not constant. That there are conditions under which the alarm doesn’t sound. I present that evidence to myself deliberately, the way you’d present evidence in an argument you’re trying to win. Because in some sense, that’s exactly what it is.

Step 3: Return to the Body — and Never Stop

Once the pain is no longer driving, a different kind of work begins.

This is the step that gets left out of most frameworks, because most frameworks are oriented around fixing the problem rather than building the life that comes after. But I think it’s the most important step for long-term health and function — and it’s the one I’m most interested in writing about going forward.

Step 3 is not recovery. Recovery implies a destination, a point at which you’re done. Step 3 is practice — the ongoing, permanent, unglamorous work of maintaining a rebuilt body. Exercise, nutrition, and sleep not as therapeutic interventions but as the architecture of how you live. You do them not because you’re trying to get somewhere but because this is where you are and this is what it takes to stay here.

And it turns out the cycle feeds itself in both directions. Better physiological health — stronger muscles supporting a compromised spine, lower inflammatory load from food, deeper and more consistent sleep — reduces the brain’s background threat level. A calmer nervous system makes physical training more effective and recovery faster. Step 2 and step 3 aren’t fully sequential at this point; they run in parallel, each making the other more possible.

What I plan to write about in this newsletter going forward — training protocols, nutrition, sleep, the specific interventions I’ve found to actually work — lives here in step 3. That’s the terrain. This framework is the map.

Where Are You in the Cycle?

I want to leave you with three questions, not as a quiz but as a genuine diagnostic — a way of locating yourself in the framework so you know what the work actually is.

Have you genuinely exhausted step 1? Not just grown frustrated with it, but actually done the work with the diligence and patience it demands — ideally with professional guidance on what’s structurally addressable in your specific case?

Have you acknowledged that step 2 exists? That the brain is part of the body, that the psychological dimension of pain is not a character flaw or a form of surrender, but a biological reality that medicine has already accepted — it just hasn’t told you clearly enough?

Have you started thinking about step 3 not as the end of recovery but as the beginning of the rest of your life?

You don’t need to have answers yet. But knowing which step you’re in is the beginning of knowing what to do next.

That’s the only map I’ve found that actually works. I’ll spend the rest of this newsletter exploring the territory.

— Max

***My gratitude to Lori Charlish and Zareth Irwin — a counselor and an ER physician, respectively — who generously vetted the ideas here. Any errors that remain are entirely my own.

That’s me in 2015. I was twenty years old, 6’5”, 210 pounds, working out five days a week with a crew — the kind of group that meets at 6am and makes you feel invincible for the rest of the day. I was strong. I was healthy. I had not yet been introduced to the other version of myself.

I’d been dealing with a nagging knee injury and had been showing up to the workout crew’s early morning sessions to do physical therapy instead of the full workouts. The leader of the group — a professor at our school — pulled me aside and told me I needed to actually do the workouts if I wanted to stay part of the team. I was young. I listened. I tried.

With the knee issue, I was deadlifting with a stability asymmetry. I felt something go in my back almost immediately.

I thought a couple of weeks would heal it.

It didn’t.

What followed is genuinely difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t lived inside chronic pain, so I’ll try to be specific rather than dramatic. Specificity is the only thing that gets close to the truth of it.

First, sleeping on a mattress became too uncomfortable — the plushness somehow made it worse — so I moved to the floor. Then sitting in chairs became unbearable, so I began standing to eat my meals. People had to drive me places lying in the backs of cars, because sitting itself had become impossible.

Then standing became its own kind of agony, so I would lie down. My days settled into a rhythm I didn’t choose: roughly fifteen minutes upright, forty-five minutes horizontal, every hour, without exception. The nights offered no relief. I’d wake repeatedly to pain, my mind racing with a specific and terrible fear — not just that this hurt, but that it might never stop while I still had breath in my lungs.

The diagnosis was two severe disc herniations and two essentially dead discs.

I dropped out of school for a semester and gave myself entirely to finding something that would work. I tried physical therapy, acupuncture, red light therapy, water therapy, micro-movement therapy, chiropractic care, iontophoresis, cortisone shots. I tried platelet-rich plasma injections and stem cell injections. I had a microdiscectomy. Then a laminectomy. Eventually a spinal fusion and a disc replacement.

Nothing seemed to help. And the back injury, as though it needed company, kept generating new ones: asymmetry upon asymmetry upon asymmetry wreaking havoc all the way down.

I tore a portion of my left meniscus bending down — with a perfectly straight back — to plug a phone charger into the wall. A knife fell out of our dishwasher and severed the extensor tendon on the top of my right foot, because I had front-loaded the dishwasher too much since I couldn’t bend far enough to reach the back rack. The resulting crutches led to a torn supraspinatus in my right shoulder. Each injury arrived not through recklessness but through the thousand small negotiations a person makes when their body has become an obstacle course.

I tried to find a new normal, but finding a new normal would quickly prove to be untenable.

I was 30 pounds lighter. My resting heart rate was up 25 points and I was now hypertensive.

I remember finishing my college degree lying on the floor for lectures and exams. On graduation day, the girl standing behind me in the procession was worried they might call my name when she walked, because I’d had to lie down backstage until the exact moment they called me to walk across. I wasn’t able to sit with everyone else on the bleachers.

I remember taking far too many opiates so I could be present for my sister’s wedding.

I remember the moment after standing as best man for one of my closest friends — slipping away from the reception to break down somewhere private, undone by what the day had cost me physically, in a way I couldn’t explain to anyone who hadn’t been there.

I remember calling my parents six weeks into my first post-college job at the Arizona Attorney General’s office to tell them that the pain was simply too great for me to keep going. Even lying in my cubicle in my suit, laptop strapped above my face, my body kept getting worse.

I remember my parents beginning to plan how they might build out a portion of their home for me. A small apartment attached to theirs, so I could live there for the rest of my life.

I remember my girlfriend at the time, now my wife – who knew me only as the version of myself I’ve just described – making a call on whether she wanted to stay with me even if I stayed that version of myself for the rest of my life. (I don’t know how to properly account for what that meant to me and still means to me now).

I remember a doctor telling me at age 23 that I needed to accept a sedentary life taking daily low-grade narcotics.

Nobody tells you about the specific loneliness of chronic pain. Not the loneliness of being alone — I had people around me, people who loved me and showed up in ways I’ll never stop being grateful for. I mean the loneliness of being the only person in any room who knows what your body is actually doing. Of performing normalcy at a wedding while privately doing the math on how many more hours you can stay upright. Of watching the people around you exist in their bodies without thinking about it — standing, sitting, laughing, dancing — while you are negotiating every minute of your day around a central fact that no one else can see or feel or fully understand. That kind of loneliness is its own injury. And underneath it, always, was a question I didn’t know how to ask out loud: is this worth it? Not in a dramatic sense. Just the quiet, daily calculus of whether the life available to me — this diminished, painful, logistically impossible life — was one I could bear to keep building. I didn’t have an answer for a long time. Learning to sit in a chair was, in some ways, the least of it.

Then I heard a podcast.

NPR’s Invisibilia ran a story about a young woman with something called amplified pain syndrome. She had woken up one day in inexplicable pain that grew steadily worse, with no traceable physiological cause. Doctors couldn’t find anything wrong. Eventually the sensation of air blown from a fan across her skin was enough to send her body into crisis. What finally helped her was a treatment program that worked by doing the thing that sounds most counterintuitive: forcing her to experience that pain again and again, in a controlled environment, until her nervous system stopped treating it as a catastrophe.

Two things from that episode caught me.

The first was an analogy: if you’re sitting on a couch with a broken foot and you try to stand on it, the pain will be severe. But if a hungry tiger appears on that couch beside you, the pain you experience standing up to escape will be dramatically, measurably less. The brain, it turns out, is not a passive recorder of what the body sends it. It is an editor. It decides, based on context and threat and a hundred other variables, how much of the signal actually gets through.

The second was a finding from research: a significant portion of adults walk around with herniated discs, visible on imaging, traceable on scans — but only a small subset of them experience pain that can be attributed to those discs. The structural problem and the pain experience are not the same thing. They’re related, but they’re not identical.

I had spent years trying to fix the structure. And the surgeries had helped — something had shifted, something had been addressed. But I was still in agony. What if the structure was no longer the whole problem? What if some meaningful portion of what I was experiencing had migrated, over years of constant suffering, into the way my nervous system had learned to interpret every signal my body sent?

What if part of the work left to do was in my brain?

So I started practicing sitting.

Five minutes per hour, at first. Then ten. Then fifteen, adding five minutes each day until I was sitting for fifty minutes of every waking hour. In the beginning I was white-knuckling the armrests — it was worse, in its own way, than the forty-degree cold plunges I do today. I would stare at the timer on my phone, counting down every second until I could feel the relief of lying back down and letting my spine decompress. The practice felt less like exercise and more like exposure therapy, which I suppose is exactly what it was.

Then, over weeks and months, something began to change. My grip on the armrests loosened. I stopped watching the timer. I stopped needing to set one. I began, slowly and imperfectly, to live inside a body I had been at war with for years.

As I learned to sit again, I started finding safe ways to reacclimate my body to training. I found Tom and Dan at Cortho-X and began horizontal myoadapting work — rebuilding movement from the ground up, in ways that my particular spine could tolerate. I took serious control of what I ate to reduce inflammatory markers. Cut out all bread. Cut out seed oils. The list goes on. I began making it my life’s mission to get 8 hours of sleep per night –finally treating sleep like the intervention it actually is.

None of this happened quickly. None of it was linear. There were setbacks that felt like starting over, and there were days when the distance between where I was and where I wanted to be seemed too large to cross.

Here is where I am now.

I recently deadlifted 405 pounds for three reps. My resting heart rate is 52, down from 78. My blood pressure is right where it should be. I’m forty pounds of muscle heavier than I was after my last surgery. I built a garage gym and I use it. I have a life that is, by almost any measure, a full one (one made fuller by the recent birth of my twins).

I still live in constant pain. That part hasn’t changed and I have made my peace with the possibility that it never will. But there is an enormous difference between pain that drives the car and pain that rides in the passenger seat. For a long time, it drove. I was just along for it.

It doesn’t drive anymore.

I started this newsletter because I believe that what I found shouldn’t require what I went through to find it. The framework, the system, the long and unglamorous practice of rebuilding a body that has stopped cooperating: none of that should have to be discovered alone with a laptop strapped above your face.

What I have — and what no certification program has ever given anyone — is that I’ve sat with the genuine possibility that my life might never get better, asked whether it was still worth fighting for, and found my way to yes. Not once, but over and over again, on the bad days that kept coming even after the good ones started arriving too. I know what it feels like to do the calculus. I know what it feels like when the math doesn’t obviously work in your favor. And I know, from the inside, what it takes to keep going anyway — not because the pain stopped, but because you slowly, stubbornly, rebuild a relationship with a version of yourself you didn’t choose and didn’t want, until one day that version feels, against all odds, like yours.

That’s what I want to bring to this. Not a program. Not a protocol. A person who has been where you are and found something worth finding.

If you’ve been told what you can’t do — this is for you.

Welcome to Find a Way.

— Max