Have you ever observed, when you have a prolonged high fever, even the best food will taste horrible and the best vacation destinations will be unenjoyable. You won’t be able to watch any movie or play any game.

Any kind of relationship will be more irritating than pleasurable. The things you enjoy the most in life, will begin to repulse you

What’s the takeaway? Your capacity to ENJOY ANY PLEASURE OF ANY KIND is COMPLETELY CORRELATED WITH YOUR HEALTH

One of the most common ways you are guilted into ruining your health is through overwork, as if you are doing some holy duty by doing it for the system, or maybe even saving the universe.

Once you are sick because of excessive work, the payment for the same will also have to be borne primarily out of your own pocket when you go to hospitals. 

So, you spent decades trying to get some money, then you ruin your health and give up the same money to try and come back out alive.

Isn’t it better that you relaxed in the first place so that you don’t have to destroy your body prematurely for a system only for the same system to take back all the money in the form of hospital bills, at least not prematurely??

Now, most health books of today go way too much into the technical stuff and talk about the latest studies, whose conclusions keep changing every few years.

They forget the simple solutions, which in fact have the biggest impact for the lowest resources involved, and instead choose to focus on the complicated and unverified, which is not only hard to manage, but will bankrupt an average guy financially. Can’t blame them though, how else are they going to sell books?

In reality though, instead of Supplementation and thousand things to add to your diet to improve your health, what’s far more important and far simpler to track, is what you are REMOVING from your diet, in a sustainable way

My FIRST suggestion is to stay away from all highly addictive and harmful substances that lead to greater pain than the pleasures they give. (Remember – “bad” pleasures are the ones that lead to great future pain) This includes cigarettes, alcohol and all forms of narcotic drugs.

 Again, I am no body to tell you how to lead your life. All I am suggesting is, as long as you are using them, not only are you going to harm your body you are also going to greatly cloud your mind.

 By the way, I forgot to mention the most legal, widespread and insidious harmful drug of them all, one that pretty much the whole world is hooked on. Kids these days are pretty much raised on it.

 It is something I was hooked on for the longest time too and that is “Junk Food”, especially processed Junk Food.

 I belong to the first processed junk food generation of India. Before my generation, while Indians may have had their desserts and all, the processed junk food that the fast-food companies sell wasn’t really available much.

But processed junk food was entering the market as I began to grow up. Slowly but surely, I acquired a taste for them. First it was the Pizza, then burgers and then fried chicken, then lasagne and so on. Before you knew it, I was a certified junk food lover.

In my twenties, all of this did not make much of a difference. But as I began to approach my thirties, and certainly once I crossed it, I started suffering from a host of physical problems and my blood reports started going out of control. On the blood test there were, high cholesterol and triglycerides, high liver values etc.

From a physical perspective, they were Allergies, Acid Reflux leading to throat pain, Gastritis, nerve pain, amongst other things and I was acquiring a new health problem every year for sure.

Initially I associated it with aging but then I realized that while I was not a kid anymore, I was not some wrinkly old dude already either, there was something more to it.

On top of that, it became it extremely hard to manage my weight. While earlier, I could have some junk food and not worry too much about weight, now it seemed it was extremely difficult to control it.

When I finally got my blood reports once again, I saw that my cholesterol and liver values had become even worse and I was acquiring new symptomatic problems regularly. I had already stopped drinking alcohol a few years ago so this was quite surprising. I consulted a doctor who said it was most probably a fatty liver caused by junk food. 

I had never heard of liver damage being caused by something other than alcohol before this was quite surprising.

Every day, the irritating hypochondriac in me (health anxiety that just won’t shut up) told me that my liver was most probably finished already and I should probably write up a will.

But I will credit that hypochondriac for turning my life around, as it was the first time that I swore to myself if it was indeed processed junk food that was damaging my overall health, I would get rid of it one way or the other, despite having consumed it my entire life.

In fact, I will say that giving up junk food was indeed the first step in turning my life around both physically and mentally.

But first, let me again examine what had happened so that I can somehow connect the dots. As I have mentioned, I have had processed junk food from probably around the time I was 11 or 12 years old, but you see it was not so easily accessible. You needed to physically go to the store to buy it and you also had to have enough money to be able to buy whatever you wanted.

This actually put limits in terms of how much junk I was actually consuming. As I hit my twenties, the consumption increased somewhat and while I am sure the insidious signs were already appearing, but I still managed my weight somehow.

But see, something started happening around 2018. Not only was my metabolism beginning to slow down, and I also had some disposable income by now. But here is what I consider the final spark in the fire – The sudden appearance of Food Delivery applications.

Before you actually had to go to the store, and me being a lazy guy in general, didn’t actually like going and dining at these food outlets that much. I may have gone once a month maybe. But with the appearance of food delivery applications, a whole new world opened. Any kind of amazingly tasty (and harmful) food was available now at my fingertips.

Not only did I not have to go visit restaurants, I had a huge choice to order from now and the money to buy stuff, please these applications kept sending me so many notifications every single damn day that they were hard to ignore.

I recently read about a CEO from a well-known food delivery company talking about how he lost a lot of weight by disciplining himself and cleaning up his diet. He wrote it to give the rest of us “motivation.” Clearly, he realized the harm of a bad diet for himself, if not for the rest of the population, because his application through its one thousand cellphone notifications a day has probably done more than anyone else in the recent past, to make Indians fat and unhealthy.

Anyway, thanks to the appearance of these apps, what was used to be a once in a month outing, become a twice in a week occurrence. So suddenly I was now eating junk food 7 to 8 times a month. Then Covid happened, and any little physical activity you may have had before stopped, and literally everything started happening via delivery.

And now, a guy who had no processed junk food before the age of ten, infrequently in my teens, a little more frequently in my twenties because of having personal income, and a hell of a lot more frequently in my thirties because of the appearance of all these applications, it was not surprising to me to see where all these health problems “SUDDENLY came from!”

After spending a year on a moderate diet (which was basically about avoiding junk food as far as possible, not adopting ANY extreme fad diet) I had reduced quite a bit of weight and the frequency of my health problems significantly diminished. Even the frequency of long-standing physical health problems like acid reflux absolutely diminished.

Having personally, largely given up junk food, I can ABSOLUTELY and CONFIDENTLY attest to the fact that a cleaner diet will reduce a significant percentage of your health problems, provided you stick to it lifelong and not just for weight loss.  They will COME back if you revert back to junk.

Sure, as you age further, new problems will inevitably come up, but even if your diet can delay them, you are doing yourself a favor and you are not exactly making any sacrifice, because by avoiding/delaying health problems, you have ensured the absence of pain for as long as possible, which according to Epicurus is the real true pleasure.

 Some people will say, life is unpredictable, you could be a super healthy eater and still suddenly develop some serious disease or get hit by a car and die, or die out of old age anyway. So, what’s the point of a healthy diet? My answer is Sure, but at least you would have ensured a minimally painful life until that happened

Now here is a common objection I hear when people doubt that junk food actually ruins their health that much – “But Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger ate junk food all their lives and lived to be 90 plus!”

 Indeed, both Buffett and Munger have often indulged in dietary choices that would make a health enthusiast pale—Buffett with his love for Cherry Coke and hamburgers, and Munger with his penchant for a good steak.

 Some people say Buffett and Munger ate badly, but still lived to be so old so a bad diet isn’t so bad after all. Well Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger were also extremely lucky, and nature was extremely kind to them. That’s why they also became billionaires.

Donald Trump also eats terribly and is going strong as of now. but then he escaped almost unscathed from an assassination attempt that would have killed 99 percent of people. This my friend is LUCK.

 Has life been kind enough to make you a billionaire or lucky enough to survive assassination attempts that would have killed almost anybody else?

NO? Then don’t stretch your luck.