This Diet is Killing Me
2025-10-05
I was over at a friend's house last night. He was having a kickback and I had a good time. The booze of choice was the great Dominican Brugal, a wonderfully spiced rum. Rum has always been my favorite liquor because unlike other liquors that are distilled from disgusting grains, rum is distilled with sugar cane, which makes it actually delicious. As a type II diabetic, a lot of sugar is really bad for me, yes, but I want to keep the sweetness in my life because there are very few things in life that I actually enjoy. Sweets are one of those things.
I've been trying to get more healthy over the last several months and it's been working out okay. I quit smoking (three month mark coming up tomorrow), have been making much needed progress in the gym, and taking supplements that should help with my diabetes (citrulline, multivitamin, etc.). But there's still the main beast that I have yet to fight: my diet. See, as a fat and disgusting American, my palate is extremely desensitized; high levels of sugar, salt, and unhealthy fats take up most of what I eat. The thing with that, though, is that this type of diet is utterly systemic. Our grocery stores are filled pretty much exclusively with slop—even the high end 'health conscious' ones. So with that, maintaining a healthy diet is harder than normal, which is unfortunately just a fact of life here. Moreover, it would be difficult to get my parents and sister to opt into a 'truly healthy' diet because we all have the same desensitized palates. It would be a challenge to ween ourselves off of the shitty foods we eat because of how addicted we are to them. The worst part is that we know it's a problem, but feel trapped by a lack of better options that are more readily available.
I'd like to have a healthier diet, but the 'system' doesn't seem to benefit from that, and so instead I have to contend with slop. I don't know, Chipotle is pretty good. I've eaten at Chipotle literally hundreds of times. I'm not even kidding. I am a die hard Chipotle guy. But I don't think it's healthy at all, really. The problem with being healthy is that there's billions of dollars to be made on the back of misinformation, so it's difficult to discern what is actually true on that front. There's always dissonant signals as well—fitness companies will portray a 'healthy' solution, yet our infrastructure is compelled to do the exact opposite. I mean, fast food restaurants and grocery stores employ subtle psychological tricks to get us to buy and eat more slop. It's ridiculous.
That whole meme of "make them sick so we can sell them our medicine" or whatever is completely real. I feel myself struggling through that same pipeline. I don't really see what I can do to get out of it, though. At this point, I have to realize that it's not something that can be solved in a single day. I also understand that many people will do whatever it takes to stay healthy, yet illness will destroy them too. It's just an unfortunate fact of life at this point.
However, those in antiquity used to think that we had masters and slaves the same we have wind and rain. I have to hope that those who will live tomorrow become better than we who live today.