Health as Dynamic Equilibrium.

Biohacking as physical calculus not prescription.

I heard that women were supposed to “expire” and “hit the wall.” I constantly hear that “it will all be over when I hit 30,” but my age rounds to a higher decade than that already and here I am in the best shape of my life.

What now, anon?

Maybe it’s “luck” or maybe I know what I’m doing. I’m not a trainer by profession and I don’t have a course to sell. I am simply a “biohacker” in a female body who has been honing my techniques for most of my life.

I’m a former world-ranked athlete and an Ivy League trained biochemist. I also dropped out of med school (for the plot).

At some point I realized that the landscape and trajectory of American medicine would be too limiting for me. And women don’t get much support from the medical establishment, anyway. Most research in the US excluded women and every woman you know has a horror story of being dismissed by health care providers to their frustration or actual peril.¹

As an athlete, there’s a focus on performance at almost any cost, over health even. At some point, I realized I would need to figure out myself.

Here are the top 3 things I’ve learned about health in their briefest form:

1. Exercise: It should never feel like punishment. Breaking a sweat in some way most days has a lot of benefits but beyond that, it’s just never that serious. As you get older, the most important features of your strength will be how well your muscles stabilize your joints as you move followed by how well your body can maintain your posture against gravity with enough flexibility to move freely. You’d be surprised but a lot of the rest follows (or doesn’t) from there.
   
   Lifting the heaviest weight or doing intense trends/challenges is only good if it’s fun for you. Finding something that you like and can do regularly will take you a lot further than being really hardcore for a short period of time. It’s also less likely to lead you to burnout and/or injury.
   

2. Consistency is key. That is, your habits matter more than any one action you can take. Ultimately, your body is keeping track of everything and maintaining dynamic equilibrium with input and outputs. As far as your metabolism, nothing you do really matters but everything you do matters a little. What are you doing most of the time? Your defaults should fall in line with the state of health you’d like to inhabit. Some luck is always involved which is why you should focus on what you can actually control.
   

3. Focus on yourself. Health is very personal. No one food, diet, workout, or prescription is a magic bullet. Nothing you hate is sustainable. Nothing that makes your quality of life worse instead of better is sustainable. You will inhabit your body your entire life, there’s no point in pursuing strategies that make living miserable.
   
   There is a new trend every few months but humans have been on earth for a very long time. Your best odds come from working knowledge applied to your specific circumstances on a continual basis. Sure, this takes a level of constant attention, but the cost of prematurely losing your health or sanity seems more severe.

But what do I know? I’m just a middle-aged drop out with a supermodel bod and a bad attitude.

xx,

I.S.

1. Paradoxically, the way that most physicians are trained and forced to operate in the United States is in direct opposition to the Hippocratic oath we all took when we got our white coats, not to mention physically at odds with a healthy and sane physician. But I digress (for now) from the failscape of american healthcare…