Fall is quickly turning to winter. It typically is already rainy by now.

It was a nice day, so I hopped on the bus and went to the beach to write and get some work done.

Take in the day.

Secured a table right by the window, looking at the sparkling, endless blue.

Planes were drawing contrails in the sky.

I worked all afternoon looking up between flows and noticed that the sky was set for a beautiful sunset.

Back to work. I looked up and there it was.

I immediately left my things and walked to the beach. I climbed over the rocks and took a seat, watching the orange and red descend from the blue towards the edge. A ladybug crawled towards me and onto my finger. I watched the sun dip out of sight and slip into the ocean.

I never thought about what I had left until I returned to the table.

Before, I only remember people mentioning the sunsets I never saw.

What Do You Want For Your Life?

Have you ever spent time thinking about this question? Strictly your own thoughts.

Not what your family wanted for you, but what you really wanted. Life has a way of getting in the way of this question, but it’s an important one to ask.

Here are a couple definitions of what I think longevity means:

Lifespan: how long you live.

Healthspan: the years you live in good health.

Living well: knowing what you value and taking part in it.

I wrote about this in Who Wants to Live Longer If They Can’t Live Well?

Are you building the life you want more time to experience?

A sudden change in your health, or a loved one’s, can change everything.

But living well can remain possible through illness. My autoimmune diagnosis could have derailed me and my career.

I used it to pave a path for me to be much happier.

What Deserves to Stay

A dumpling press, shoes and all the clothes that I bought because they looked great in the dressing room.

The time I spent at work would enable me to have things I could own but not use.

This wasn’t the goal but it became the reality. I would look at them and think, “Not today,” but somehow secretly admire them like they were a favorite. I actually don’t know why I held on to things. Maybe to just justify why I bought them. This didn’t happen every day or week. But it did take attention and time each time I did think about them.

Before we moved to Portugal, I sold or donated everything. I even parted with a shirt I hadn’t worn.

I cut ties with everything but three suitcases and a backpack. It felt amazing.

Letting go meant so much less to carry and look after.

Emotionally, there is a lightness that is difficult to explain unless you have done this exercise.

Choosing what deserves room to stay in your life is an important question.

It goes way past things. It’s people, jobs, relationships, and habits.

Health Helps You Participate Now

Health is an investment in the future you. Delayed gratification.

This concept is often a difficult thing to get over when you first decide to choose your health. The one thing that I’ve noticed is that it does help you participate now.

Here are two examples that I know will pay off in the future but are already paying dividends:

Meditation

Last month, I completed a year of daily meditation. I sit with my thoughts and take 10 minutes to start my day.

On days I travel or have a commitment pop up, I do it later or before I go to bed. I am able to notice when I am slipping into the past or the future and not staying present.

At first it was difficult to just get through the practice, but now I’m having some real breakthroughs. The most recent was this week, standing in line waiting to order. The person in front of me ordered their food and then gave their life story. I started to drift and then became aware that I was creating a narrative of something I couldn’t control.

I started to realize how lucky I was to be out and able to enjoy delicious food.

The brain is like a muscle. I can feel the progress in my mind and emotions.

Strength Training

This began as an investment in my future strength and hedging against muscle deterioration.

What I noticed is that I have more energy, better focus, better sleep, and much improved cardio and balance. I designed the workout for overall strength, not aesthetics. Even though it wasn’t the goal, my clothes fit better and I am looking stronger too.

Sometimes, habits pay twice.

I’ve started to look at the present-day returns when they exist rather than demanding them of every habit.

Nothing Is Ever Complete

Nothing is ever complete. It is finished for the day.

Some deadlines are exact.

You have a meeting with the boss or a presentation to a company president.

Most of the time you can pause before you are finished.

Not every email needs an answer. You don’t need to live at inbox zero.

The sunset shows that enjoyment doesn’t always have to wait until you’ve earned it.

Boundaries aren’t a sign you are doing less. I started to schedule yoga and leave work earlier than usual and everything was fine. I’d also challenge you to look at your meetings and be honest about which ones you need to keep. Sometimes this means you need to look in the mirror. It could be your meeting that everyone thinks is a waste of time.

I used to outwork almost everyone and think I was overperforming. I was just miscalculating my own worth.

Protect your commitments (Here’s how to do it). When something important comes along, move them. Don’t skip them.

I still feel tempted to tweak finished projects, including my writing. Progress is to leave it alone despite the urge.

I used to ask myself how much more I could get done.

Now I’m learning to ask what doing more will cost me.

Another hour of work might improve something, but that hour has to come from somewhere.

Sometimes it comes from the very life I’m working to build.

Control over time varies. I’d invite you to examine the choices available to you. I was the last person to say I had time or could set a boundary. I used to watch everyone else leave work to go home while I stayed to get more done and be more productive.

Only when I started setting boundaries did I see the time was there my whole life.

A Balance You Keep Adjusting

I am still in the process of learning where high standards help and where further optimizations costs too much.

Living well is when you add what enriches your life and reconsider what takes space without giving enough back.

When I returned, the laptop and the work I had started were still there. I could see people in the restaurant, diligent and at work.

Not long ago, I would have been one of them.

Am I creating the life I want to live?

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Live well,
Nathan

^{Educational only, not medical advice. Consult your physician before changing your health, diet, or exercise routine.}

Take me back.

Summer.

Sitting on my papa’s roof in California with a salt shaker.

The tomatoes loved the Cali sunshine as much as I did.

We would admire each for its ripeness and color, while looking for our next victim.

The height of the season.

The perfect balance of sweetness, acidity, aesthetics, temperature and flavor.

A good tomato is a celebration of summer.

A vibe.

The feeling that it can’t be more perfect or nutritious.

Is food actually more nutritious when it is in season?

This is the third article in a four-part series about seasonal eating:

Part 1: Whether fresh, frozen, stored or imported is best.
Part 2: What “in season” means in a global food system.
Part 3: Whether seasonal produce is actually more nutritious. (You’re here.)
Part 4: How much seasonality should influence what we buy and eat.

Part 4 brings it all together.

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More Nutritious Than What?

“More nutritious” only means something when you say: than what?

This article asks a sharper question: is the same spinach more nutritious in winter than in summer?

Spinach likes a cool growing season. Here in Portugal, with our mild winters, it thrives. But does the season change what’s inside it?

In a 2018 study, researchers bought spinach from the same local stores three times every season. They kept this up for one to two years, measuring vitamin C in each purchase.1

The differences were dramatic:

Average vitamin C:
Winter: 43.6 mg per 100 g
Spring: 29.8 mg
Summer/fall: 18.0 mg

The winter spinach contained about 142% more vitamin C than the summer/fall spinach. More revealing, individual samples ranged from 9 to 66 mg per 100g.

A sevenfold difference.

Potatoes from the same study went the opposite direction:

Summer/fall: 15.6 mg vitamin C per 100 g
Winter/spring: 10.6 mg

About 47% higher in summer/fall.

Seasons change nutrients, then? Not quite. The study shows that the numbers we treat as fixed aren’t fixed at all. It can’t show why. “Winter spinach” here means spinach bought in winter. As I wrote in Part 2, that tells you nothing about where it grew or how.

So what actually changes with the season?

Winter and summer spinach are not the same thing. They can differ in variety, sunlight, temperature, and how mature they were when picked. After harvest, the time spent in transport, refrigeration and storage keeps changing them.

Season isn’t one variable. It’s a collection of variables changing at the same time.

Food Isn’t a Formula

Beefsteak, Roma, and cherry tomatoes aren’t merely different shapes, colors, and flavors. They are genetically different and the chemistry can differ too. Genetics are just one piece. The growing environment is another: temperature, light, access to water and stress all shape how the fruit grows and matures.

Food isn’t manufactured to an exact formula.

One plausible reason for higher vitamin C in winter spinach: cold.

In a Japanese study, when the minimum air temperature in the 10 days before harvest dropped below 5°C, spinach vitamin C rose sharply. It went from about 50-70 mg to as high as 175 mg per 100g.2

This is a possible explanation, not proof.

The plant responds to temperature, not the month.

So does winter spinach have more vitamin C? In that market, yes. The why is still a good guess, not a fact.

Ripeness Matters

Then there is when it’s picked.

If only produce stayed on the plant until we were ready. Commercially, it has to survive multiple processes, so there’s pressure to pick early.

As a tomato ripens, its sugars, acids, color, texture, aroma, and vitamin C all change. Tomatoes harvested ripe contain more vitamin C than tomatoes picked green and ripened later.3

Our roof tomato had all of that. It was also probably a different fruit.

Many modern commercial tomatoes have lost flavor compared with older varieties.4

More ripeness doesn’t automatically mean more nutrients.

A summer tomato on my papa’s roof didn’t need to survive a week of logistics. It only needed to survive the trip from the stem to the salt shaker.

In Part 2, I asked whether a tunnel tomato, a South African plum and a field-grown fig were all more nutritious.

The honest answer: I couldn’t find a study that compares them, and the label wouldn’t tell you anyway.

It depends on the variety and how ripe it was when picked. The growing conditions and time since the harvest matter too.

“Tunnel” tells you no more than “winter” did for the spinach.

The season is one clue. It’s not the answer.

Chef’s tip: Let tomatoes finish ripening on the counter at room temperature, and keep them out of the fridge. Cold dulls their flavor and can speed vitamin C loss.

Nutrition isn’t frozen the moment food is picked. Different nutrients change at different speeds. Some fall, some hold steady, and a few can even rise.

We tend to picture nutrient loss like a phone battery draining. It’s closer to a stereo equalizer, with each setting moving on its own.

In Part 1, I looked at what happens after harvest, including why frozen can hold its own against fresh. The short version: time, temperature, and handling keep changing nutrients long after the calendar says “in season.”

Does the Difference Matter?

The study compared its results with a 90 mg daily reference for vitamin C.5 100g of winter spinach gives you roughly half of that. Summer spinach gives you a fifth.

For perspective, the oranges in the same study had more vitamin C on average, in every season, than its winter spinach did.

The difference is real.

But nobody only eats spinach.

And more vitamin C in the food doesn’t prove better health in the person eating it. That would take long-term studies of people who eat seasonally. I couldn’t find any.

Back to Papa’s Roof

The roof had everything.

Sunshine, warmth, and a cooling afternoon breeze.

Picked and eaten the same day.

Sometimes before we got down the ladder.

Those tomatoes were better for ripeness and memories.

We never measured the nutrients.

But after 25 years in kitchens, I learned what peak season usually does deliver. Flavor. A tomato picked in July almost always tastes better than one picked green for a winter shelf. Nutrients may be unpredictable, but taste usually isn’t.

On nutrition, here’s where the evidence lands:

• Nutrition numbers are averages, not promises. Spinach from the same stores ranged from 9 to 66 mg of vitamin C.

• The month is a clue, not the cause. Variety, weather, ripeness and time since harvest decide what’s inside.

• A difference on paper isn’t a difference in your health. What matters is your whole plate, not one vegetable’s season.

• The part you control starts at your fridge. Keep greens cold, and eat them within a few days and cook them briefly.

You can’t see any of this on the shelf. So if you can’t shop by nutrient content, what should guide what you buy? That’s Part 4.

What food do you only buy when in season?

Live well,
Nathan

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^{Educational only, not medical advice. Consult your physician before changing your health, diet, or exercise routine.}

SOURCES

A year of meditation every day.

Studying every weekend for two years to get sommelier certifications.

Five years of a morning circuit every day to better my health.

Writing 30 minutes a day is my recent addition.

The ability to show up repeatedly is an interesting habit.

I have been doing this since I was a kid.

There were the mandatory things, like going to school or visiting the grandparents.

I always had activities.

I wasn’t allowed to spend much time watching TV or playing video games. The outside was my place. Where I explored, hung out with friends and spent most of my time. Hitting the geographic lottery of growing up in Southern California made this possible. It felt like at least 300 days a year.

The reason that I went outside was to do what I wanted. Also, it was difficult to pick up another chore when you weren’t in shouting distance.

Then came sports. I started at ten.

Baseball, soccer, shortly followed by basketball and football. I always seemed to be playing something. Practice was a couple days a week plus a game.

Structure.

I enjoyed it, but it was a commitment. Practice wasn’t my favorite, but you had to practice to play the games.

I even played instruments.

Piano, guitar, clarinet, and saxophone. Always practicing or playing.

I enjoyed playing but decided to move on when they didn’t serve me anymore.

A major tenet of my upbringing was to finish what you started. I was supported in anything as long as I saw it through. I started getting better at things, especially sports. I did well in school.

I always made sure to take care of things so that I could do more of what I wanted.

It seemed simple, but I honestly didn’t want to be yelled at or have a conversation about what I didn’t do.

I wanted to be able to go outside and discover. Have my own time.

My life was predictable and had rhythm. It had structure and filled my time with commitments.

Choose One Commitment

Choose something.

This is where to start.

Know what you want to add to your life.

I made sleep my first deliberate commitment after deciding to change my health. After reading a bit on the subject, I decided to start by going to bed and waking up at the same time.

I didn’t wait until I researched the subject exhaustively.

I just started.

I wasn’t perfect, but I made the effort each day to be in bed and wake up at the same time.

These adjustments improved my sleep rhythm.

What is it you want to commit to? Why do you want to do it? What are you waiting for?

Define what it is.

Answer why it matters.

Start.

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Block Your Escape Route

I don’t have any time. I’ll start it when the kids graduate. That’s a hobby for when I retire.

The excuses we make are self-sabotage.

Of course, our intent isn’t to blow up what we want, but sometimes even a simple pattern break turns us back into our old ways. It is imperative to think through our plan and how to navigate it when life happens.

We do this by deciding our X and Y.

If X happens, then I will do Y.1

When my bedtime is nearing, I start to get ready to sleep.

If I have an appointment during my normal writing time, I choose another slot that day.

Build Around Your Commitment

I realized quickly many things influenced the success of sleep consistency.

Screen time, light exposure, when I had dinner, alcohol, and a myriad of life distractions. I adjusted things after I learned to make this first goal consistent.

Build around your commitment to make it sustainable.

The first step is identifying what is making it difficult.

Removing distractions and making it manageable will serve and protect your goal.

Define what success looks like on difficult days.

If I wake up feeling tired, I go on a long walk instead of a heavy lifting day.

Pick one thing that gets in your way and change it.

Once that habit takes hold, eliminate any distractions or obstacles that are in the way of continued success.

Protect It

The first time you get another offer to do something, tell them you are available after.

“I’m available after 2:30.”

Scheduling around it and the mindset that your commitment is immovable is the best way to keep it.

On Saturdays when I started yoga, I would simply tell others I couldn’t do breakfast but could do brunch after.

Well, what if you have an appointment or are traveling? Starting school? Move it.

You should have a default and move it to that without any anxiety.

This is a tricky game, so don’t play it often.

Keep this to an exception rather than a rule.

If you are constantly rescheduling, make sure you find a spot that is more workable and easier for you to keep.

My sister has three kids and starts her day before they get up to keep hers.

Make it important. Hold the spot. Tell them why.

Set an Immediate Return

You won’t be perfect. That’s not a life anyone wants to live.

You do want to be as consistent as you can.

If you miss a session, return at the next possible opportunity. If you work out Monday/Wednesday/Friday and miss Wednesday, make sure you return Friday.

It’s critical to keep momentum and habit.

There is power in consistency.

In my experience, missing more than one session starts to become the beginning of the end.

It can fall apart quickly, and returning becomes much harder. Make a missed session an anomaly, not an excuse you return to.2

You either do something or you don’t.

Review whether the commitment is happening and whether it’s helping. You shouldn’t consider getting rid of it until you have given a consistent effort. There can be time later to distinguish whether what you are doing is useful or something that no longer serves you.

It is good to be honest with yourself. Don’t lie to yourself to get out of something that truly benefits you.

A simple list to ask yourself each week:

• Did I do it?

• What helped or interfered?

• What needs adjusting?

After a few weeks/months:

• Is it producing/starting to produce results?

Reminder: “Starting to” is the right lens, because you won’t have the perfect body or a degree by then.

A 12-Minute Plan for Becoming More Consistent

Make a contract with yourself.

2 minutes: Choose the commitment and write why it matters.

Get a piece of paper and write it out. What it is and why you are committing.

2 minutes: Choose its time or cue.

Find the slot to schedule your new commitment. Make sure you think through the placement so that it gets the best chance to happen.

4 minutes: Identify three likely obstacles and write an X/Y response for each.

Here are a few examples:

• If an appointment conflicts with writing, I will write after lunch.

• If I feel too tired for my usual workout, I will take a long walk.

• If I miss Wednesday’s session, I will return Friday.

There may be more to add later. Start with three.

2 minutes: Define a difficult-day version and your return plan.

Map out the exception with a backup plan to still show up. Like the long walk instead of the weights in the example earlier.

2 minutes: Choose one supporting adjustment and schedule a review.

Choose one thing to prepare or remove that will help you follow through. Set a date to review how it’s going.

12 minutes.

You may need to go back to this. Just take 12 minutes on the first pass. Go with your gut instinct. Be honest with yourself.

You know what gets in the way and what has stopped you before.

Sign it.

Put it on the fridge or in your office.

Wherever you will see it most.

Make It Your Superpower

Focus on one change to put into practice before adding anything else.

Don’t undermine yourself by doing too much.

Find a way to make it fun. Remind your future self why you are doing this.

Look at your contract every day.

Consistency creates freedom. It creates success.

Defend the time on your calendar.

Tell people about it. Let them know when you do it. People may even schedule around it because they know it’s so important.

When that happens, you know you are getting closer.

My wife knows how important the morning circuit is for me, and not only supports it, but encourages it.

I still meditate as a part of it. I’ve added writing. I still study, but now it’s Portuguese.

I schedule social plans around lunch or dinner because I’ve protected my mornings for those commitments.

CONSISTENCY IS MY SUPERPOWER

What is the one commitment you want to protect, and what usually gets in the way?

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Live well,
Nathan

^{Educational only, not medical advice. Consult your physician before changing your health, diet, or exercise routine.}

SOURCES

In California summer, the produce seemed as endless as the sunshine.

The corn and tomatoes showed up, and then all stone fruits.

So many strawberries you wondered how they would ever sell them all.

Every supermarket.

You thought they would have them for months.

Unless you bought it from a farmer’s stand, what you didn’t know is where it was from.

In Portugal, the seasons hit like lightning. Out of nowhere.

Giant imperfect tomatoes. Multiple varieties of plums.

Figs overflow storefronts.

‘Nacional,’ from Portugal.

The smell of

melons hits you before you enter the market.

Each time you eat something here, you wish you had picked up a few more.

If you are lucky, you get one more time to buy them.

As fast as they appear, they vanish like a college friend at a party.

In Portugal, I started noticing fruit varieties and region names I hadn’t paid attention to in California.

Pingo de mel, coração de boi, ameixas, pêssegos, melões, chapéu do bispo.

I made notes for next year’s window.

Maybe the endless summer of fruits and vegetables in California was lengthened by several other regions taking turns.

When we call food seasonal, whose season are we really describing?

In Part 1, I looked at fresh, frozen, stored and imported produce.

This time, I wanted to understand what “in season” actually tells you.

This is the second article in a four-part series about seasonal eating:

Part 1: Whether fresh, frozen, stored or imported is best.
Part 2: What “in season” means in a global food system. (You’re here.)
Part 3: Whether seasonal produce is actually more nutritious.
Part 4: How much seasonality should influence what we buy and eat.

Part 3 tests whether seasonal food actually has more nutrients.

Subscribe free and I’ll send it to you.

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Two Meanings of Seasonal

In 2021, a systematic review by Vargas and colleagues looked at how researchers define seasonal food.

It reviewed 116 articles, 34 of them addressed or referenced seasonality, but only 6 made it central.1

The clearest line I’ve found comes from a 2012 report for DEFRA, the UK’s environmental department.

It was written for Britain, but its terms work anywhere. These definitions are relative to where the food is grown and eaten.

Globally seasonal: grown outdoors in its natural season where it’s produced, but may be shipped and eaten anywhere.

Locally seasonal: grown and eaten in the same climate zone without high-energy climate control or storage.

Adapted from DEFRA (2012), as reproduced in Macdiarmid (2014).2

These are research definitions and not labeling rules themselves.

Both sources come from sustainability research. I’m borrowing their definitions, not the environmental arguments. That's a separate question from the one this series asks.

What we are interested in is where and when the harvest happens.

Ameixa d’Elvas, the DOP protected name for the Rainha Cláudia Verde plum variety, is grown in Southern Portugal.

It is grown in the Évora and Portalegre districts and known locally as ‘abrunho.’ 3

The name and DOP let you know two things. Variety and origin.

The harvest window comes with the tradition.

Timing of a yearly harvest is affected by: temperature and frost, daylight, rainfall, variety and planting date.

The calendar counts days. Plants respond to temperature.

In one Oregon State example, the same broccoli variety grown in the same place took anywhere from 66 to 103 days to mature, depending on when it was planted.4

A calendar is our guide, not a promise.

The calendar is not wrong. The shifted harvest just means it’s a different year.

Whose Season Is It?

Plum season in South Africa runs from November to May.

The stone fruit peaks in late January to early February.5

A February plum in Lisbon can be fully in season, in South Africa.

Harvests get stitched together to provide a near year-round supply.

I remember this growing up in California.

This is why certain staples almost never disappear from your supermarket.

The Greenhouse Effect

Greenhouses have changed when food is grown.

Here’s a quick breakdown of three greenhouse systems and the produce growing windows:

Greenhouse types:

• A plastic tunnel - shelters plants and nudges the season

• Heated greenhouse - adds energy needed to help grow

• Heated and lit - supplements winter light as well as providing heat

Growing windows:

Regional outdoor window - growing season determined and set by weather

Extended Commercial window - set by structures, energy and demand

A 2020 publication estimated that Portugal has about 3,000 hectares of greenhouses.

Plastic tunnels have been the main choice, and tomatoes the most important greenhouse crop.

These greenhouse “tunnels” move tomato growing undercover and soften the weather’s grip.6

These tomatoes can be labeled Nacional on a shelf in Lisbon and Porto and come from a tunnel.

They’re local, but can be picked outside the outdoor season.

Is this still seasonal?

In 2023, imports accounted for an estimated 88 percent of U.S. greenhouse tomato supply, according to the USDA.7

Imports traditionally helped to fill the American off-season.

Greenhouses are changing that.8 A noticeable change is the availability of tomatoes, especially in the cherry and grape varieties.

In 2023, the USDA estimated almost eighty percent of imported cherry and grape tomatoes are greenhouse grown.

A greenhouse extends more than just the local season. It blurs the global one.

A Mexican greenhouse tomato in July isn’t filling an American off-season. It can compete with American field tomatoes during their growing season.

Then What Is It Called?

You see a Portuguese tomato on the shelf in May.

“Nacional” tells you its country of origin.

It means Portuguese-grown. That’s what I mean by local here, not necessarily grown nearby.

May tells you when you’re buying it.

Neither tells you its growing region or harvest date.

There is no certainty whether it came from an open field, tunnel, or heated greenhouse.

You lack enough information to apply seasonal definitions confidently.

That is something the label doesn’t tell you.

The definitions run out before the tomatoes do.

That isn’t judgement. It’s neutral.

The tomato shows three words, all doing different jobs.

It’s local.

It’s on the shelf.

Its seasonality is unclear.

The tomato isn’t confusing, but the words are.

Standing in front of that tomato, I am really asking three separate questions.

A Nacional fig in late summer is local, seasonal and available.

A South African plum in February is seasonal and available, but not local.

A tunnel tomato in May is local and available but its seasonality is unclear.

I spoke about the long-term storage of apples in Part 1. Apples picked last fall and sold from storage in spring are local and available. By the locally seasonal definition, they aren’t seasonal.

The main issue with all this confusion is the overlapping of usage and inferred definition. For example, “it’s local, so it must be seasonal.”

Availability is the word we see the most but tells us the least. A full display says that you can buy it, not whose growing season produced it.

If none of these three words carry the whole meaning, what would a useful definition need?

What I Mean by In Season

Moving to Portugal didn’t change the fruit as much as it changed my attention.

The Nacional label made me ask where and the short seasons made me notice the when. Seeing the plums come and go didn’t teach me a new season.

They taught me that I never knew what season I was buying.

In season is not a date on the calendar. It also is not a quality guarantee.

It becomes more precise when you can name three things:

Place: where it grew

Harvest window: when it normally matures there

Growing conditions: open field, tunnel, heated greenhouse

A Nacional fig in late summer, a South African plum in February, and a tunnel tomato in May all need these three parts to mean anything.

This is my working interpretation, and not fully settled. A hypothesis that I will continue testing.

Seasonal food is often marketed as healthier or more nutritious.

But “in season” can mean a tunnel tomato, a South African plum or a field-grown fig.

Are they all more nutritious?

What food tells you the season has changed where you live?

Next Part 3: Does seasonal food actually contain more nutrients?

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Live well,
Nathan

^{Educational only, not medical advice. Consult your physician before changing your health, diet, or exercise routine.}

^SOURCES

Super Friday!

The day before vacation.

Nothing feels like it. Two weeks total for the year.

I couldn’t wait.

Upon arrival I check in, get changed and then vacation begins.

Day 2.

I start to feel off.

Day 3.

I am sick.

Every vacation.

My wife would always point it out.

Every real break my body would collapse on cue.

Even my wedding weekend.

I would always tell myself it was bad luck.

The longer I worked, the more I paid attention to how I felt.

I felt inflamed, and sometimes I actually was.

My fatigue was bad enough that the eight espressos a day couldn’t remedy it.

Sore joints from the daily wear.

Dry rashed skin, not from neglect.

My mental health was eroding beneath all of it.

I normalized each of these because my profession normalized them.

The physical and mental feed each other.

Mornings and evenings were the worst.

Either I had the whole day ahead to trudge through, or I had to do this again tomorrow.

Not feeling well made these moments difficult.

I started and finished with a deficit. Working out of a hole.

I did very well at keeping everyone else in good spirits as I neglected my own.

The physical pain mostly took charge of my attention. The thing that I wasn’t able to see was that my mental health was tied to the physical.

There were days when I wondered if I could keep the cycle going.

I felt off but wore my best mask.

Still being able to perform during these bouts made this even more unnerving.

Feeling like I can’t make coffee and then still pulling off a gala for a few thousand.

Then the itching, the rashes, and the sores.

I just work way too much. Of course I don’t feel good.

The things we tell ourselves. This was the common story I would tell myself before I returned to the grind.

I knew something was wrong. I went to all my appointments.

Asked all the questions and never seemed to get anywhere.

I started getting tests.

My GP, my dermatologist, specialists. Blood and allergy tests. Biopsies.

Finally after about 10 years, I went to an oral surgeon for another test.

He looked at my mouth and said, “I bet you have an autoimmune disease,” and then proceeded to remove a piece of the inside of my cheek.

“He was right, the biopsy confirmed I had an autoimmune condition.”

What the Diagnosis Explained

Discovering there was an issue should have been a relief. In a way it was.

Ironically, it added more stress to a stress problem.

It helped explain why I was having such terrible pain in addition to the overall fatigue and mental health challenges.

Mental and physical were interconnected more than I credited.

I believed for years that my stress was a big reason for the diagnosis.

While most studies are observational, and it can’t be proved for one person, there is a conviction that comes from knowing your body.

I couldn’t separate the percentage of my health attributed to disease and stress, I believe that stress was a driver and catalyst for much of the issues I was having.

The surgeon who read my results mentioned that while the information was not certain, stress is a large factor for flare ups and potentially a cause for the condition itself. This is his view, not settled science.

Stress can be useful.

It is an efficient response to an immediate demand.

The trouble is stress that is demanded repeatedly.

Research from one team offers a picture of how that can work. Researchers exposed healthy adults to a cold virus. The people who have lived through a long-term stressor, were more likely to get sick, and their cells responded less to the body’s signal to switch inflammation off.1

It studied colds in healthy people, not autoimmune disease, so I’m not claiming it explains mine.

But it does give a plausible picture of how repeated stress could change the way body handles inflamation.

How I Went After It

The treatments helped numb acute attacks until they subsided.

They never could cure the issue.

Doctors never gave me a plan for preventing the next one.

So I researched the condition on my own and made changes based on the findings, to help minimize my stress and decrease episodes.

I just didn’t know at the time, but that’s where Forever Longevity started.

The biggest thing I discovered was how detrimental poor sleep was.

So I went all in trying to achieve that. I changed my diet and started working out. After reading and hearing it would help, I started fasting.

I made several other changes. I became my own experiment.

In my experience, making all these changes did improve the way the disease manifested.

It even began to shift how I felt despite the work’s intensity.

I started making more time for myself.

The time I took back would be laughable now, but at the time, it was a major step in changing my health. My mental health did improve some, but it wasnt unti I made the move to Portugal that I had time to process all of it and really make significant change.

That move cost me salary, status and the career path I had worked 30 years to build. It also didn’t improve everything immediately. I couldn’t pin-point the one thing to give the credit since I was pulling so many levers.

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I still fast every day and have continued all the additions described above. I added yoga and resistance training too.

My diet has been very consistent and all the changes continue to help me make better choices. The one area that changed the most was my sleep and I did feel better physically because I was getting the rest and effects of consistent sleep.

What You Can Do If You Can’t Leave

One of the universal feelings is being overwhelmed.

For those of you that rarely have this feeling, be grateful. For everyone else, myself included, take a breath.

Many of you carry a job that is hard because of the money and demands of life.

You can’t leave.

Caring for someone else can be an even greater challenge, especially when added on top of the job and money.

There are even times when simple challenges can become crippling. So what can we do?

The first thing to do is be honest and answer some questions.

What Keeps Asking More of Me?

This is often where we need to be honest.

Sometimes the thing asking more of you is you, and sometimes it’s a child, a parent or a mortgage that can’t move.

It is important to learn to be honest and realize that we have more say in it than we admit.

Sometimes not agreeing to something that sounds good is preservation.

Canceling a cyclical commitment when you have a chance to renew might be the needed decision despite the guilt.

What could become smaller, shared or renegotiated?

Take some time and think creatively about your situation.

What are the changes you can make to minimize your stress?

Ask for help or see if the challenge can be shared.

Give something up and make time for yourself or for recovery.

Where can recovery become regular?

Any time that is set aside for you is only beneficial if it is guarded.

You have to build around this new habit, not drop it every time something comes up.

This might be the most important habit to start building.

Changing the conditions you work under can help too.

In one study, 141 organizations first reorganized their work, then moved to a four-day week at full pay. After a 6-month trial, employees reported less burnout and better mental and physical health, and the gains were linked to better sleep, less fatigue and feeling more able to do the job.2

The organizations chose to take part and the results are from employee surveys. I read it as encouraging, not proof.

The Best Way Forward

You may be thinking. I don’t have time and that’s why I am so stressed.

The thought to add one more thing is daunting.

It is always easier to say than to implement.

The best way to start this process is to make one small change this week.

Take a walk in the morning when you wake up.

Go get a coffee on Tuesday by yourself.

Make a change you have been thinking about for the last year.

Eliminate something that isn’t serving you. Then leave that space for you.

Start small.

How Stress Has Changed

Every day is a challenge.

It throws itself at you the same way it always has.

The difference for me is my habits and priorities have changed.

Making health a priority brings more benefits than you would ever imagine.

When everything stops, I don’t have the scaries or impending doom.

The answer of how to get here isn’t the one people want to hear.

This has been a process. The difficult days still remain.

My reactions to challenging days are different.

When I get in my head, I know most of it is the narrative I am adding myself.

I give myself the time to process, without immediately focusing on the problems.

Sometimes I go for a walk. Talk it through with my wife or a friend.

I make time to sit with my thoughts and process.

The change is that now I am able to act.

When everything stops now, I don’t collapse the way I used to.

What have you accepted as normal that deserves another look?

If this feels familiar, I write about food, strength, sleep and living well.

I’ll send you the next issue for free.

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Live well,
Nathan

^{Educational only, not medical advice. Consult your physician before changing your health, diet, or exercise routine.}

SOURCES

Chef, can you come have a look at this?

Sure. How am I going to use this? We don’t get anything else until Tuesday and we have a large party tonight with this on the menu.

The dock would call me all the time.

I was crazy about the quality of food that was received. I sent food back so many times the warehouse would check with me to ensure it was the proper quality.

The smell, the touch, the color, the blemishes (some good, some bad), the mold forming on the stem. This is already past the use-by date.

All this scrutiny, and then it is delivered to your restaurant. Or put it in the warehouse cooler to wait for someone to order.

RCV date: the day it was received. The only information you control. That was the day it came into the building. It told me almost nothing that happened before that.

This is the first article in a four-part series about seasonal eating.

Together, we will examine:

Part 1: Whether fresh, frozen, stored or imported is best. (You're here.)
Part 2: What "in season" means in a global food system. (October 22)
Part 3: Whether seasonal produce is actually more nutritious.
Part 4: How much seasonality should influence what we buy and eat.

The goal is not to make shopping more complicated.

It is to separate what seasonality can offer from the claims it cannot support.

Regular essays continue next week. Subscribe free and I’ll send you every one.

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Fresh Gives Us a Feeling

FRESH: Recently made, produced, or harvested; not stale or spoiled.1

A definition that gives you a feeling without giving you any information.

To say that food is fresh can vary based on the factors affecting it before you bought it.

Well, it’s not frozen or canned, so it’s fresh. This isn’t the guarantee anyone, especially a chef, is looking for.

It also doesn’t mean it’s local.

When you go to the grocery store, “fresh” sounds like a timeline.

We picture our produce picked on the field and then driven straight to the shelf or display we select it from. Some apples can remain in remarkable quality for up to ten months after harvest in controlled-atmosphere storage.2

In the United States, federal labeling rules define “fresh” this way: generally it means raw and not frozen, thermally processed or preserved. Refrigeration, waxing, approved post-harvest pesticides, mild washes and limited irradiation do not necessarily prevent the term “fresh” from being used.3

A tomato can be picked green and ripen after the harvest. The appearance tells you something useful about the current condition, but little on how they got there.

Fresh gives us a feeling.

It does not give us any of the food’s history.

What Happens After Harvest?

After it is harvested, does it die?

The truth is your broccoli is alive when it reaches your kitchen.

When it’s picked, the water and nutrient supply is cut off, but the cells keep working. Part of this is done through respiration, literally the plant using its stored sugars as energy and taking in oxygen, while releasing carbon dioxide. Some produce also releases ethylene, a plant hormone that accelerates aging and ripening in sensitive fruits and vegetables. That’s why storage of certain foods together makes them decline quickly.4

At the same time, they can be losing water to evaporation.

How quickly this happens depends on the conditions. Warmth usually speeds it up, cooling usually slows it. Dry air wilts it, and a small cut or bruise can make produce lose water faster and shorten the shelf life.

This does not mean that an older apple is devoid of any nutrition.

Different parts of food change at different rates. Vitamin C is more vulnerable during storage, while minerals and fiber are generally more stable.5

Your food may lose some nutrients, but it will still provide plenty that is useful to eat.

The crop, maturity when picked, storage temperature, time, and any processing all affect the final result.

When we refrigerate it, we buy it time. The clock never stops.

What Freezing Changes

We just received two pallets of frozen vegetables.

Let’s spot-check a few and check the quality. Make sure we rotate the freezer before stocking this.

Frozen vegetables are commonly blanched before they are frozen. This helps slow the enzyme activity before freezing. The heating that comes during blanching can reduce some sensitive nutrients, especially vitamin C.6

Freezing slows down further changes that would happen if refrigerated.

This does not stop all decline. Time, temperature fluctuations, freezer burn and poor packaging still matter.

There is no question that freezing changes food. The real question is how those changes compare to what happens to produce sold as “fresh.”

What the Study Found

In 2015, there was a study conducted comparing vitamins in eight fruits and vegetables.7

It tested different vitamins and the fresh and frozen versions at different points during the storage process.

What was found was that frozen was not universally better but generally comparable.

Vitamin C was the same in five of the foods and higher in the frozen for the other three.

Vitamin E was higher in some of the frozen produce, and beta-carotene was lower in others.

A companion paper tested minerals, fiber and phenolics, and the results were comparable in both the frozen and fresh produce tested.8

The studies were not perfect and had some limitations.

Only eight foods were tested and selected nutrients measured. This can’t cover or represent every farm, supply chain, freezer or household. The Frozen Food Foundation partnered with UC Davis on the research. The Foundation is affiliated with the American Frozen Food Institute, so its interest in the findings is relevant when interpreting the results.9

This is not definitive proof that frozen is better.

It does dismantle the assumption that frozen is automatically worse.

Local, Imported, Stored and Frozen

Local

What could be better in terms of freshness?

There are benefits to the flavor and texture based on the product’s proximity.

The transparency of the local farmer who picks their produce and sells it the same morning. A local distributor selling apples and potatoes held in storage.

Both of them can truthfully be called local.

Yes, the supply chain is shorter and more transparent, but the distance doesn’t tell you the condition the food is in.

Imported

Who doesn’t miss their favorite vegetables and fruits out of season?

Imports can offer access to fruits and vegetables outside of the normal season and for larger parts of the year. Produce can be grown under better conditions. When the produce is of good quality, it can be transported and handled well.

With variety also come limitations.

Some produce may be picked before maturity to survive the travel and arrive in saleable condition. During travel, breaks in temperature control, poor humidity management and rough handling can contribute to deterioration. The more delicate the product, the greater chance the product has of losing both taste and/or texture. Citrus, onions and squash fare much better than herbs, berries and ripe tomatoes.

Distance matters, but the quality of harvest and the ability to keep the produce cold during each leg of transport matter much more.

Stored

Is this an oxymoron? How can fresh be stored?

With foods with a short harvest window and the ability to have continued access to them, storage is an alternative.

Storage also helps with price, supply and demand and helps lower food waste.10

Examples would be apples, cabbage and potatoes.

Not every food is suited for this.

They can change texture and flavor and have some nutrient decline. The other issue is the transparency of this storage to you as the consumer. You probably have no idea this is happening, in part because commercial storage can manage temperature, humidity and atmosphere, slowing the respiration and moisture loss.

Food bought after storage doesn’t mean it is spoiled or lacking all nutrition. All it means is that the time and deterioration have been managed.

Frozen

Frozen after harvest. What could preserve that moment better than that?

Freezing produce can slow deterioration quickly, mitigate waste and make portioning easier.

Freezing does change the texture and taste. It can get ice crystals and freezer burn from improper packaging and freezer quality and temperature fluctuations.

Frozen produce does preserve produce well, but its advantages are dependent on its processing, storage and how you utilize it.

Different Journeys, Not Guaranteed Outcomes

Local apples can be stored for months.

Imported berries can arrive quickly by air.

Frozen peas may be processed right next to the field they were grown in.

A fresh tomato may be picked green, treated and ripened en route.

Neither fresh nor frozen can be declared a winner by themselves.

They describe different parts of the journey but not guaranteed outcomes.

Peak or Frozen?

There is no law about using peak or frozen. Here are considerations to make for which one makes sense to you when deciding.

Buy Fresh:

• The produce smells, feels and looks excellent

• Texture is central to your dish

• You intend to eat it soon

• You know something about where it came from

• It is to be served raw or slightly cooked

Buy Frozen:

• Fresh version looks tired, underripe or inconsistent

• Food will be cooked, blended or pureed

• You only need a small amount of the package

• You need to cook quickly in a pinch

• Frozen makes it easier to include in the meal

So now that you have all this information, which one should you buy?

Three Questions to Ask

1. Is the fresh version good?

Check the quality. Examine the color, the firmness, and texture. Smell it, turn it around and give a total assessment. Each time you do this, you develop your ability to answer these questions better.

2. Does the dish you’re making depend on fresh texture or flavor?

A salad, raw preparation, bowl of berries, or a sliced tomato definitely will. If you are making a soup, puree or smoothie, it may not.

3. Will you use it before its quality declines?

A veggie eaten is better than one left to spend its last days in your fridge. If the answer is no, frozen may preserve more value and create less waste.

If you trust the store you shop at, let them choose for you. Ask for help. Tell them when you are going to eat it. That will change what you take home.

Run Your Own Receiving Dock

If you want to make better decisions, start inspecting produce a little closer. Just because it says it just arrived doesn’t guarantee it was just picked.

Fresh, frozen, stored and imported are not automatic rankings or hierarchies.

Each one gives one definition of the journey. No category always wins.

Use the three questions above to vastly improve your decisions on the best versions for your situation.

Choose fresh when the quality is unmistakable and the dish demands it.

Choose frozen when fresh quality is poor or the preparation suits frozen.

Imported and stored still may be the best option.

Fresh gives you a feeling, not the food’s complete history.

Judge the product itself, not the label exclusively.

The best choice is the one that best fits each ingredient and the meal you are making.

Every time you purchase produce is a chance to run your own receiving dock.

What is one fruit or vegetable you regularly choose frozen instead of fresh?

Live well,

Nathan

^{Educational only — not medical advice. Consult your physician before changing your health, diet, or exercise routine.}

SOURCES

Every day I have the choice of right or left.

I leave the door of my house to a street with the slant of a one-sided teeter-totter.

Parks in each direction. Each way the walk is utilized, not wasted.

The destination is a place to take a moment in some green space.

To be present.

To slow everything down.

Eliminate the distractions and focus on observation and thought.

Jotting down thoughts, processing what crazy things appear in my brain.

Time for me.

I walk there with something to think about.

Or not.

Some days I’m just looking to see the changes.

A new building permit.

A new neighbor or an acknowledgement of the one you see each time.

Each direction is about 15 minutes.

No car, just steps.

Nothing but thinking extracted from the habit of moving.

The decision to choose Porto was an easy one.

My wife and I had a goal to live somewhere where we could live without a car.

So we both sold ours before moving here.

I didn’t fully appreciate what that decision would do until we were living it.

I didn’t have to schedule walking. It became the easiest way to get somewhere.

The environment was creating the behavior.

Designed Success

That made me realize you don’t have to move to another country to do the same thing.

You can change your environment even in small ways to make the behavior you want easier to repeat.

For years, my environment had worked in the opposite direction.

The demands of hospitality slowly pushed most of my healthy routines aside.

Yoga was the one healthy habit that survived the demands of my career.

It forced me to go to the class I signed up for and couldn’t cancel.

No phones were allowed. I had to be focused and present.

I got a full-body workout, became more flexible, improved my mental focus, and saw the progression.

Most importantly, I kept showing up.

What I Wanted to Preserve

As I studied how to correct my sleep and diet, I also had a suspicion that something was missing.

I began wondering whether yoga was enough for the future I wanted.

I want to be strong into my 90s. I want to thrive and be capable.

The goals I wrote down were strength, flexibility, lean mass, and physical independence.

I started to think about what I wanted my body to still be able to do decades from now.

Getting off the floor by myself.

Carrying my own things.

Taking the stairs.

Traveling.

Dancing with my wife!

The Missing Piece

The goals I wrote down led me to incorporate strength and resistance training.

I kept reading about muscle loss that can begin in our 30s, for both women and men.

This fact is pretty sobering and made me observe people as they were aging.

The way they carried themselves, their posture, their gait.

It was profound that their strength and activity were playing a major role in their quality of life.

Life quality is the thing I want to preserve and improve.

How do I change the math in my favor each decade?

Resistance training is a huge part of this.

One remarkable study followed men and women for nearly five decades. Different measures of physical capacity peaked at different points between 19 and 36. Decline followed, accelerating after about 40.1

Age-related losses in muscle strength and mass can eventually become sarcopenia, a muscle disorder involving diminished muscle strength, quantity, and physical performance.2

One widely cited estimate places average decline in muscle mass between 3–8% per decade after 30, with losses accelerating after age 60.3

This is not a foregone conclusion.

The people who became more active later in that long-running study were still able to improve their capacity.4

Resistance training gives the body a reason to preserve muscle and, in many instances, build more.5

Losses in muscle strength and physical capacity are associated with falls, disability, and the loss of independence.6

Already 65… start.

35 and never worked out? Start.

It’s not too late.

How I Train

I decided to train two to four times a week plus daily walks.

I break it down into a day each of the upper and lower body.

Then I add a third workout: core and cardio.

If I can add the fourth day, I usually focus on certain muscles and maintenance.

I used this as my original base, and now change it based on how I feel and use the extra workouts for testing new routine additions.

The mind-body connection was the most powerful thought from yoga, and I apply it to my workouts.

When training, I focus on the muscles that I am trying to strengthen. It helps me stay deliberate during each repetition.

Try it.

I don’t focus on my aesthetics. I focus on getting stronger.

The focus is full-body strength and balance.

The intent of this focus is to build for the future I want.

Chasing definition and looks seems shortsighted.

But we all want to look good. Look better.

Me too.

Consistency Is My Superpower

Even one resistance-training session a week can produce benefits.7

More may produce greater results, but one is still more than none.

I saw a problem from a human-nature standpoint.

Something done once a week seems very easy to forget or discontinue.

I always look at ways to stay consistent.

Continually showing up for something over time has a hidden power to it.

Consistency beats a perfect routine every time.

Showing up for yoga classes taught me about the compounding benefits.

When consistency starts to show progress, you become more dedicated.

So I applied this to resistance training.

Walking Still Matters

10,000 steps a day? I just started walking more.

I care less about hitting an exact number than finding reasons to move throughout the day.

Sometimes those reasons can be useful on their own.

A 20-minute walk can reduce the rise in glucose after a meal compared to remaining seated. 8

Most importantly, don’t beat yourself up over a sub-10,000-step day.

Try this exercise.

Watch older people around you. Who do you want to be when you grow up?

I want to be the lady that is more spry than her oldest daughter. The one that gets mistaken for her sister.

The 85-year-old that runs in the park every day.

Walking is natural to life. It just needs to be prioritized and incorporated.

It’s easy. Just put the phone down.

If you can’t do that, listen to something while you do it.

Unless it’s pouring or 90°F+ (32°C+), I’d rather walk than take any other transport.

Find a way to make walking a part of your day. If you don’t think about it, it won’t happen.

Don’t build in an excuse, build a workaround.

Choose Something You Will Keep Doing

Stop thinking and start doing.

Give yourself permission to do less than you think is needed.

Just be consistent.

Walking. Yoga. Lifting. Dancing.

Anything you will keep showing up for. This is the most important part.

Enjoy it and you will continue.

Yoga helped me to inhabit my body, not just use it.

You don’t need to do yoga, but pay attention to how you feel.

Start thinking about it when you are walking. Focus when you lift and see the difference.

Especially when something is not right.

When it isn’t, listen. Don’t push.

For me, resistance training was the missing piece.

It is the down payment on the life I want in the future.

There are not many times in life when you can see the future.

This is one of them.

What kind of movement can you keep showing up for?

Tell me in the comments. If this made you think of someone who has been waiting for permission to start smaller, restack it or send it to them.

Live well,
Nathan

^{Educational only — not medical advice. Consult your physician before changing your health, diet, or exercise routine.}

Sources

Who wants to live longer if they can’t live well?

Most of what makes life possible is easy to ignore while it still works.

When your body fails in any area, your life immediately changes.

All the simple things you take for granted.

Walking your dog in the park.

Checking Machu Picchu off your bucket list.

Carrying your suitcase.

Remembering the great conversations you had at dinner with friends.

Taking the stairs up to your bedroom.

Longevity is not about the future. Longevity is about today, right now.

Forever Longevity is about how to live better longer.

The reason I write is to serve my former self and help whoever feels the way I used to feel.

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I’m Nathan Frost.

I am a chef passionate about food and health.

I worked at the highest level in professional kitchens for 25 years.

I opened more than 30 restaurants across three casino resorts.

I cooked for five U.S. presidents, catered for Olympic athletes, and helped create Bellagio’s Fountain Club for Formula 1.

Developed private in-home food and beverage programs for ultra-high-net-worth clients.

What I realized is that knowing food professionally was not the same as knowing health.

My autoimmune diagnosis exposed this.

Doctors couldn’t relieve the symptoms or even fully explain them.

So I dove in to study and figure out how to get my health back.

I rebuilt how I eat, sleep, train, work and live. One fundamental at a time.

I have now been symptom-free for more than five years.

I am not a doctor. I have no medical credentials.

I am a chef.

I am curious.

I gave up the life I had pursued for 25 years to change my health.

I studied, read and continue to experiment.

This process completely changed my life.

I wanted to feel better.

I want you to feel better.

Life is when good feels normal.

That can only begin when you make yourself a priority.

A few things Forever Longevity will be:

Evidence

Studies will be linked, and the strength of the evidence scrutinized. Whenever possible, articles will be cited and documented so you can trace claims back to the research.

Real Life

The essays will show you how to evaluate life through a different lens. This doesn’t take special equipment. You don’t have to wait for a perfect moment to get started. Health doesn’t need to become a second job.

Fundamentals

Food. Strength. Movement. Sleep. Recovery. Relationships. Purpose. Environment. The most important things in your health are often the most neglected. These basics will repeatedly outperform the exotic.

Curiosity

I am not set on any predetermined philosophy. Sometimes new evidence should change your mind. If something needs correction, truth will be the goal, not being right.

Living Well

Living well means strength, cognition and independence. Meaningful relationships and a childlike curiosity. The energy to enjoy as much life as possible. A purpose that gives your life meaning.

Where to Start

If you are new here, a few good places to start:

If you want to understand what chronic stress can do:
→ I Knew If I Stopped, I’d Get Sick

If you want to see how I approach food:
→ Fresh Is a Feeling, Not a Guarantee

If you want to see how I approach the evidence:
→ I Got the Eight Hours. I Still Woke Up Exhausted.

If you want something practical to use today:
→ A 12-Minute Plan for Becoming More Consistent

New essays arrive every Thursday.

Subscribe for free and they come to you.

Subscribe now

Longer life is not the goal by itself. How well you live is.

That is what I will study, test and share here.

Live well,

Nathan

Stay curious, stay skeptical, follow the evidence, not the enthusiasm.

It can’t be cured.

That’s what I was told.

The physical pain was bad enough. Eating would bring me to tears. The mental health struggle. The fear that came with being told the condition might not go away.

Any medications that I used just helped numb the inflammation and symptoms but never seemed to change the underlying situation.

I kept going to doctors looking for another answer.

But it didn’t seem anything they were doing was having an effect. And when I asked about it, they said that there wasn’t much else known on how to treat it.

So I started researching and trying to grasp for anything that could help.

I talked to some people and read a few places that fasting might help my autoimmune conditions. I chose to do it because the few people I knew that had autoimmune conditions said they were hearing fasting may help too.

My wife had experimented for a while with fasting.

When I was asked to join her, I said, “I am definitely not doing that.”

But now, I was thinking I’ll try anything.

So I swallowed my pride and started to fast.

I was hopeful that this was the direction that would change my health.

The research on fasting and autoimmune conditions is limited and far from complete. 1

What I didn’t realize is that I was wrong about the mechanism.

Fasting was not the answer.

But it was the first domino.

After the first one fell, it really started to accumulate positive results.

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There were three big changes that I noticed after I started fasting.

First came discipline.

After a few weeks of doing it, I realized that I told others I was gonna do it and stuck to it.

It was a struggle for the first few days. But then it just became a part of what I was doing.

Second came agency.

I felt like I was in control of my situation and I was enacting change. I went in with the mindset that I was going to heal myself.

I’d made a contract with myself to get better. And then things that were small became cumulative.

The reward became the foundation.

After a month I started feeling better.

After month two, I started looking better.

I started getting comments like, “you look great chef” and others asking me what I was doing.

I was able to share and told them that I was feeling great.

I never weighed myself except at the doctor. But everyone has the humbling routine of seeing their reflection each day.

When I looked into the mirror, I started seeing a better version of myself. More than the weight.

It felt like I had more control of my destiny and I started feeling better.

I started looking better.

I wanted everything to continue.

Third came attention.

When I found success with something, especially when I was in a darker place, I started wondering if I made one positive change, what could another positive change do?

I started to look at my life and what other things were suffering.

Once one thing started working, I began to ask a different question.

Instead of looking at what was wrong, I started looking for what else I could improve.

The attention to my body began revealing things I had ignored for years.

I started looking at my sleep.

Then I started looking at my diet, most notably that my protein might be lacking.

Here’s what fasting looks like for me now.

I still fast every day.

I feel blessed that I started this practice.

I enjoy the way I feel, so I continue.

My day normally consists of two large meals and I start my first meal around 1pm.

I then eat dinner around 8 pm and am done for the day.

When I am out with friends or socializing, dinner can end up a couple hours later.

When it does I go with it.

Optimizing a fasting window at the expense of connection is a fool’s errand.

Once or twice a year, I do extended fasts for three to four days.

I don’t think of these longer fasts as a cleanse or a cure. I like the mental reset that they give me. I find the experience useful for reflection. Longer fasts are not appropriate for everyone. They can carry different risks than simply delaying breakfast.2

Fasting did not heal the condition, but it created the conditions for everything else to begin.

When something started working, I wanted to believe I had found the thing that did it.

Looking back, I don’t think my improvement worked that way.

Fasting, sleep, protein, movement, leaving the kitchen, and eventually moving to Portugal all had a cumulative effect resulting in health improvement.

Fasting was simply the first domino.

Moving to Portugal changed the routine again.

I no longer consider a late dinner with people I care about a failure of my health routine.

Social isolation and loneliness are associated with higher mortality risk. 3

I’ve learned there is a big difference between solitude and loneliness.

The people I care about are part of my health too.

Rigidity in the name of health that costs you meaningful relationships isn’t health.

Fasting was the beacon when my health was the foggiest.

It wasn’t the cure-all I hoped it would be.

It showed me where to look next.

It allowed me to identify other gaps in my health and more ways to feel better.

First came discipline.

Then agency.

Then attention.

And eventually, the wisdom to know when to be flexible.

What was your first domino?

If this was useful, there’s more to come. Everything stays free to read. Paid subscriptions simply support the work.

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^{Educational only — not medical advice. Consult your physician before changing your health, diet, or exercise routine.}

Sources

A5 wagyu, 60 dollars an ounce with a 4 ounce minimum.

Bring us 12 oz shared for the table.

U-2 shrimp from Nigeria, two to a pound. Make it a scampi for our surf and turf.

Who raises this beef the best and can we buy the whole farm?

Protein was the focus of almost every plate.

Not just type, but where it was from and how expensive it was.

Sometimes the objective was different. The goal was how much we can get for the lowest possible price.

We searched exhaustively for the most delicious versions of things.

How do we procure as much as possible of items limited and rare?

All types of caviar, closest to Beluga without being illegal.

This methodology brings you to a completely different place than health.

The word protein comes from the Greek proteios, meaning ‘primary’ or ‘of the first rank.’

Protein is like our retirement.

How much should you save for retirement?

The real question is, how much should you save for the future you want? We all know we are supposed to save money. Yet 39% of American adults say the largest emergency expense they could cover using only their savings is less than $1,000.1

Protein is the same. Everyone knows it’s important.

Saying that I eat protein is not the same as, am I getting enough to support the body that I want to keep?

The new U.S. Dietary Guidelines recommend a target of 1.2 to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight for adults.2 For some older adults, that would be a substantial change. In a pooled study of adults 55 and older, about 7 out of every 10 adults are not hitting even the low point of 1.2g/kg.3

That recommendation is higher than the longstanding international benchmark around 0.8 g/kg.4 I don’t think a new guideline means everyone should automatically change what they eat.

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Protein is important.

But what does it do for you besides help with muscles?

How about supporting immune function, helping build and repair tissues, providing the amino acids used to make enzymes and hormones, contributing to overall bone health, and helping preserve lean tissue during weight loss.5

Protein also helps us with satiety. Higher protein meals usually leave us feeling fuller than low-protein meals, which can make managing appetite much easier.6

Doing the protein math is easy. Deciding which number to use takes a little bit more thought.

Once you do the quick math and calculate your goals, you don’t need to obsess over the recalculations daily.

Just be consistent.

Protein needs can change as we age, grow, train, become ill, cut calories, or move into other stages of our life.

For women, the equation can change at different stages of life. Pregnancy, low energy availability, and the transition through perimenopause and menopause are times when paying closer attention to nutrition, protein and maintaining muscle become equally important.7

Protein can’t do this job alone.

Resistance training becomes important as we age because keeping muscle requires both raw material and giving the body the reason to use it. Protein supplies the amino acids, but resistance training can supply the stimulus. If you want to maintain strength and function, I would put the two together rather than treating them separately.

Protein quality matters. Protein quantity is imperative.

WHEN THE MATH CHANGED

When I started to look at what protein meant for me, the math started to look different. I looked to change a life full of excess and imbalance. Success was addressed one thing at a time.

I figured out how to get my sleep in line and then really needed to start examining my diet.

My diet revolved around my incredible access to great food but often at the detriment of my health. My job was to know everything that was being served, prepared and how it tasted in every outlet of three hotels totaling 6,926 rooms!

So I broke down each major protein: chicken, pork, beef, lamb, soy (tofu/edamame), fish, shellfish, beans, lentils, dairy, eggs, chickpeas, etc.

Here’s a quick cheat sheet for you -

I like almost anything (except salmon), so this list wasn’t scary and easy to vary. I also knew that I had the skills to make anything delicious. I used the access I had to chefs and gleaned ideas from them too. One of the perks of hospitality.

But I had to make a plan.

So here’s what I did to make it consistent.

I knew a diet or temporary change wasn’t going to work. I needed a number I could build my meals around.

The longstanding international benchmark is around 0.8 g per kilogram, while the new U.S. Dietary Guidelines target 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram. I wasn’t looking for a number simply because a guideline told me to eat it.

I looked at my resistance training, activity, and goal of maintaining muscle as I age. Based on that, I chose 1.4 grams per kilogram. A level within the range supported by research on protein intake and resistance training. At my body weight that came to about 130 grams of protein per day.8

Then I started figuring out how I could reach that goal. I tracked it for the first couple of weeks and then was able to use my chef brain to convert it and just wrote down the total each day to ensure I was getting it. (Recommend to keep track if a chef brain is missing)

Let me illustrate what success looks like:

This did feel like a lot more food at first. But quickly, it felt normal.

When I started to eat more of the food I wanted to prioritize, I realized how many of my previous calories were coming from foods that were empty and not helping me reach my goals.

It was important to get my wife’s buy-in. Getting your household on board makes consistency much easier.

Making meals for my wife and me became easier after building a protein chart. You will be able to get a good measure quickly even when dining out after looking at this chart quickly every day before a meal.

Want a quick reference? Download the FL - Protein Cheat Sheet

Protein Cheat Sheet

3.5MB ∙ PDF file

Download

A simple guide to common protein sources and how much protein they provide. Save it for meal planning, grocery shopping, or a quick reference.

Download

The other thing to note is that if you work out, giving yourself just protein and a diet without carbs and vegetables will really hit your energy levels. Be sure that you balance your diet.

Protein accomplishes plenty, but is not the silver bullet.

HOW TO MAKE IT WORK

I did the math. Now how do I eat all this food? How will I have the time?

Well, the answer is simpler than the execution.

I started the day with a big protein rich breakfast. I recommend prepping all but the eggs the night before.

I meal prepped once a week.

I brought a meal or two to work and then would reheat something for dinner. Food access was a luxury, but I had to figure out how to sustain it when I got my one or two days off that week.

Here is your plan.

You now have your target for protein.

Take the list of proteins from above and circle the ones you like.

Buy some eggs/egg whites or a vegetarian equivalent and use that for breakfast.

Having a consistent breakfast gives you a ritual. You also start the day without the stress of asking what are we going to eat?

You should experiment with adding a different protein every week. It expands your meal possibilities and will create new favorites. Even a different cut of a favorite like chicken creates variety. Swap boneless thighs for the usual white meat. Garbanzos or edamame for lentils.

Live a little.

Add spices to your protein. You can transform your protein without adding many calories. You can use marinades too, but be cautious - this is where you can add lots of calories and sugars quickly.

Your menus and shopping lists can be done easily with your favorite AI app.

Tip: A preheated 400°F (204°C) oven can cook many of the week’s proteins in less than 20 minutes on a sheet tray or two. Equally, rice, beans and lentils can be done quickly, and most likely you have a gadget you can set a button and walk away.

A FEW THINGS TO WATCH

With protein being the focus everywhere, marketing has added it to everything imaginable: cereal, waffles, coffee, chips, pasta, popcorn, soda, and even water.

Protein is emphasized on almost every package.

Protein additions on the label don’t automatically make that product healthier. You should also consider the addition of the item’s calories, added sugars, and saturated fats.

Food quality still matters.

There are a few more pitfalls to consider when incorporating protein into your diet.

Trying to be perfect, not enjoying your food to reach goals, or worrying about the meal is often more counterproductive than the act itself.

Be kind to yourself.

You can also eat too many calories when trying to reach your protein goals for the day. Be honest and also try to make the best choices you can.

Focusing on protein was part of improving my life in several ways:

I started feeling fuller longer and was satisfied after I ate. This was/is helpful when you are around temptations at work.

Second, I noticed my body was changing.

I really felt the difference at the gym. This took a few months, but my sessions improved and the mirror wasn’t something I tried to avoid.

The biggest impact was my focus and overall brain function. I felt sharper and didn’t crash like I had before.

I spent decades knowing exactly where my protein came from.

What grade it was. What it cost. How it tasted.

I just never knew how much I actually needed.

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A comment, a restack, or sharing it with a friend is one of the simplest and most generous ways to support creative work right now. It takes a moment, but it makes a real difference.

Educational only — not medical advice. Consult your physician before changing your health, diet, or exercise routine.

SOURCES

These are some of the sources I used to understand the research and make my own decisions.

Maybe this is just what 40 feels like.

There was a morning years into my job that I slept the whole night. Eight hours.

When I woke up, I felt like I was walking through a swamp. I just felt slow, foggy and irritable at everything for no apparent reason.

I remember thinking to myself, how am I tired after just having the best sleep?

I had felt terrible many times before, and always knew the reason. This time I had the hours on my side and still couldn’t figure out why. It wasn’t forty, or at least I didn’t know at the time.

Working in hospitality does not protect your sleep.

You end your shift late. Wired not tired.

You’ve spent the whole time working full speed, making decisions and solving problems. Then you are supposed to go straight to bed.

You do this for a while and then you start finding ways to help with this. So you discover something to take the edge off. Maybe a drink or two after close.1

Most nights… It felt like it was helping. But it definitely wasn’t. Being sedated and having a healthy sleep are not the same thing.

Alcohol seems to get you to sleep faster and also wrecks what happens after. That’s why it can become such a powerful routine. At least the falling asleep part.

That routine continued and I knew that something was wrong when I would get the hours I wanted but after I woke up, I never felt rested.

There’s a big difference between how long you’re asleep and the quality of it once you get there. The time is the same, but there is so much that can differ.

Sleep moves through multiple stages and the order matters. When sleep becomes fragmented (stress, alcohol, etc.) or doesn’t follow the normal pattern, that is when eight hours of sleep can feel very different.

Most people work 8 hours. Sorry, hospitality people. Knowing that someone worked eight hours doesn’t tell you how they actually worked.

Let’s look at two 8-hour shifts.

The first one, you go through your tasks in order. Getting the tougher things done while sharp, and then clock out having something to show for it.

The second, you are interrupted every twenty minutes, take an extra long lunch, and spend half the shift recovering from distractions. You go home having accomplished nothing.

Same eight hours on the punch card. Different shifts.

Now imagine that the second shift started at 4pm Monday, 7pm Tuesday, and 9am Wednesday.

Sound familiar?

The second shift, that’s non-restorative sleep.

One of the biggest disruptors of our sleep is actually something different from stress and alcohol.

It is sleep timing and it interacts with your circadian rhythm.

We constantly bargain with ourselves, promising ourselves more sleep tomorrow or a payback on the weekend.

While a baseline of hours is needed, another important factor is the time we go to bed and when we wake up.

The most irregular sleepers were 26 percent more likely to have a major cardiovascular event. This is observational, so it shows a pattern rather than proving the cause. It also tracked 72,269 people with devices rather than questionnaires, which is unusually good for this kind of study.2

Your body needs consistency. It needs to know that sleep is coming.

Dramatically changing your sleep can be like repeatedly changing your time zone.

I started putting these ideas into practice and my sleep improved.

The minute I started guarding my sleep timing on both sides, the change became noticeable.

I went to bed 90 minutes after work each day and treated that as my bedtime.

I then set the alarm for the same time every day, even on the weekends.

I found that the wake-up consistency was more important than bedtime even though I protected both.

I paired the wake-up with getting outdoor exposure to help sunlight set my circadian clock.

The days that the job interrupted on either side I did my best to stay within 60-90 minutes of my optimal timing.

Once sleep stopped being the afterthought, everything else started arranging itself around it.

When you make things non-negotiable, they become more successful.

I had several things that needed to change.

Sleep was the one I couldn’t run from. It became one of the few things I could control.

Someone once told me, “This is what getting older feels like.”

Looking back, I don’t think it was.

My body spent years trying to sleep on a schedule that rarely stayed the same.

There were even stretches where I got the hours. The problem was I never had the consistency.

The morning I couldn’t explain earlier… It wasn’t that eight hours was the wrong number.

I was sleeping.

My body just never knew when that sleep was coming.

Live well,
Nathan

I write about food, health, and what it actually takes to live well in the second half of life.

New essays every Thursday.

Free to read, free to subscribe.

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I spent much of my career trying to make guests forget the clock. Not in a sinister way. Just in the way that anybody who loves hospitality understands. We want the room to feel right before anyone understands why .

You want the first drink to loosen something slightly. The bread service should arrive before anyone asks for it. Share plates should land in the middle of the table making everyone feel like they already decided they are going to have a good night. The sound of the room changes the way that you talk and interact with each other.

Then the meal becomes something larger than hunger. This is the whole point and was always the whole point.

A great restaurant is designed to make your night feel pleasurable and worth repeating. The night is also orchestrated to make you eat more than you’re meant to.

These two things aren’t in conflict. When you see how the whole thing works, you can stop blaming yourself for what happened while you were there. The hunger you came in with is just a normal signal. A well-designed restaurant meal is anything but.

The food is prepared for you. Every decision about flavor has been tested and perfected. The levels of salt, fat, acid, and sweetness were executed better than most of us will make at home. This isn’t a trap. This is the craft.

Think about what happens before anyone on your table orders the main course. A server will come and ask you if you want to start with drinks. You don’t usually drink, so the server will make you something with fresh-squeezed juice and a house-made shrub. You are convinced it’s something worth having. The warm bread hits the table with butter, spreads, and crunchy salt to enhance it. The bread you will be thinking about the next day.

A good server knows how to make people feel cared for. They’re able to read the mood of the night and make recommendations with confidence. They take all the friction out of deciding. “We have beautiful prawns tonight. They were flown in this morning. I’d recommend you get a few appetizers for the table.“

By the time the entrée arrives, most people have already made a series of decisions in favor of more. They don’t feel like decisions because they feel like a good night getting started.

I spent years tinkering with dishes until they were right. I added a little more crunch, a touch more salt, a few drops of acid. A spoon of butter splashed into a sauce to make the richness come alive. Umami, salt, fat, temperature, and texture were all tuned so that the next bite would feel as good as the first.

The plate itself was warmed just for your steak or chilled for your seafood tower or salad. While these details seem very small, no one notices them when they’re right, but everyone notices them when they’re wrong.

The goal is never to make someone lose control. The goal is to make sure nothing interrupts the pleasure of eating it. Every plate is designed to be memorable.

The dessert menu arrives when everybody is already full. Nobody needs dessert. But then someone asks, “We should at least look, right?”

People stay much longer than they planned. They share crab legs or lobster tails because it felt festive. They ordered desserts because someone else wanted one. They ordered more cocktails to keep tonight alive.

Sometimes it’s simpler than all of this. When is the next time you’re gonna have a night like this? Why not treat yourself the way you want on a real occasion? This is a genuine feeling, not something manufactured.

Most overeating done in restaurants doesn’t happen because someone lacked the discipline. It happens because dinner stopped being about hunger halfway through.

After the appetizers, the reasons to continue felt completely legitimate. That is also when you remember that you ordered the truffled mac and cheese and garlic fries to go with your steak.

This is not an argument for eating with less pleasure. A great restaurant meal is one of the best parts about being alive. I’ve spent 25 years trying to give people more of them.

There is a difference between choosing to continue and not realizing you had a choice.

Once you understand that the experience has been designed to make your enjoyment so easy to continue, you get to decide where enough is for you.

The goal is not to eat any less joyfully. It’s to stop mistaking a beautifully designed meal for a personal failure.

Live well,

Nathan

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Every two weeks I examine the changes that matter most and the evidence behind them.

Further Reading

People tend to eat more with familiar company than alone, though the size of the effect varies with context. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31435639/

The Cochrane authors noted that overeating is usually blamed on lack of self-control and personal characteristics.. Anyone who’s worked in the food industry already knew that. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26368271/

Educational only — not medical advice. Consult your physician before changing your health, diet, or exercise routine.

What is the restaurant moment that always gets you? Leave it below, I read every one.

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Part 3 of 3

New here? Start with Part 1: I Spent 25 Years in Food. I Missed What Was Happening in My Own Body.

People started telling me I looked happier.

Not in the polite way people usually say it. They were trying to solve a puzzle.

What changed? For five years I’d worked on my health: better food, more exercise, better sleep. All of it mattered. What surprised me was how quickly things improved once I stopped working against myself.

The first thing a major life change gives you isn't something new. It's what disappears.

I started noticing how many habits and obligations quietly accumulated over the years. They had accumulated slowly enough that I barely noticed them.

For years I went to Europe to relax because I couldn’t get called into work even if they needed me. I moved there because I wanted a different way to live. When I arrived, there was finally space for myself, space to create. For the first time in years, my mind felt clear. I was present. I wasn’t cramming in a yoga session just to disconnect. I started noticing the world around me again. I heard a dog barking, a couple of people laughing, and noticed how good the breeze felt. The dog was just happy to be running free in the park.

Years in high-pressure environments made stress feel normal. Then slowly it started leaving my body before I fully noticed it. I started sleeping better and waking up with more energy. The symptoms I’d spent years trying to manage started easing with far less effort.

Now my mornings look like this.

I wake up without an alarm. I get my mind ready for the day rather than it being taken from me before it started. Then I have a little ritual where I make coffee. My coffee got smaller because I no longer needed it the same way. This moment is for me to enjoy. Coffee is no longer a bridge carrying my tired body to more intensity.

Sometimes it’s a social moment shared with friends. Either way, we take our time. No more rushing. No more to-go cups. Understanding this difference was enormous.

It’s something that I didn’t know until I lived it. I stopped reaching for my phone every time it buzzed. The constant feeling that something needed me began to fade. I was no longer trying to compress a week into a single day off.

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The same shift happened with food. I had spent 25 years working with exceptional ingredients. I understood sourcing, the seasonality of foods, and how to choose the best quality. This was my profession. Living it is completely different.

Portugal has a very different relationship with food. You buy what’s in season because that’s what’s available and that’s what’s good. You visit the market run by the next generation of the same family that’s operated it for years. You build meals around what looks good that day instead of forcing ingredients into a plan that you already created. Sometimes dinner changes because you walk past something too good to leave behind.

That way of eating changes more than the meal itself.

After eating, I simply feel good here. That sounds obvious until you realize how many years I spent eating things that immediately made me feel worse. I had become used to eating standing up, missing a meal because of a meeting, or having Uber deliver food to my house after work so I could call it breakfast. Here, meals are something I make time to savor.

I changed too much at once to know what did the work. What I know is that here, the things I was already trying to do stopped requiring effort.

Your environment decides how much effort your health costs you.

Some environments make healthy choices feel like another job. Others make them feel like the normal way you live.

I’m not telling you to move to Portugal. I’m telling you to stop treating your environment as something separate from your health.

You don’t have to move countries to test this. Start with the parts of your day that constantly feel rushed or harder than they need to be.

No supplement I ever took made healthy living feel this easy. Changing my environment did.

Live well,

Nathan

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Start at the beginning:
Part 1 → I Spent 25 Years in Food. I Missed What Was Happening in My Own Body.
Part 2 → Endurance Is Not Health

Educational only — not medical advice. Consult your physician before changing your health, diet, or exercise routine.

What in your environment is quietly working against you and what would it take to change it?

There is a version of eating that looks healthy from the outside.

I was surrounded by food I intimately understood. I spent decades learning what makes it work. I tasted and moved constantly. I knew more about what was on that plate than almost anyone.

I spent a career inside that version and I was wrong about something fundamental the entire time. The belief I carried through all the openings, private dinners, and menu changes was that if you move enough, the food stops mattering as much.

It wasn’t just me. Most of the industry holds this thought and most still do.

Early in my career I ate the way kitchens eat. Cold staff meals in a hallway or dry storage closet. Food devoured behind the line between service. A steak burrito was eaten at midnight in a few bites on the way out. Eating was an afterthought to a life that was always too full to stop.

Later, I was the one sitting in the dining room approving menu changes. Selling new dishes to senior executives over a proper tasting. From the outside it looked like I had figured something out but that was often the first thing I had eaten all day. I was still running on cortisol and espresso lattes. The setting had changed even though the body was the same.

High stress and a few hours of sleep. Mainlining espresso to fill in where energy should have been. A stomach that complained regularly and got ignored every time. I told myself all the movement cancelled it out. That the physical intensity of a kitchen shift bought me something metabolically. It seemed like a good story but I never looked too hard at whether it was true.

Then I went to Europe. Several times, over several years.

The food was different but what mattered more were the things I barely noticed at the time.

The thirty minutes of company before you ordered. The two hour meals. The sharing of multiple dishes in the center of the table. The long walk home afterwards.

My weight started coming down and the inflammation had settled. The stomach that had been complaining for years suddenly went quiet and my skin looked much better. When I looked in the mirror I looked younger and I felt good before noon and coffee.

After the first trip I slipped straight back into old patterns. All the symptoms returned quickly and I was too busy to stop and address it. That pattern repeated itself across multiple trips before I was willing to accept what it was telling me.

The body was speaking clearly every time. I just did not have the bandwidth to hear it.

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When I finally accepted what Europe had been showing me, I stopped looking for a better diet and started changing how I ate.

I brought food to work instead of waiting until I was starving. I stopped eating late at night. I gave my body long stretches without food. None of it felt dramatic at the time. The alcohol was the last thing I looked at and the first thing that made a measurable difference when I pulled back. I am not saying I stopped. I am saying I stopped using it the way I had been using espresso. What surprised me was how quickly my body responded. My sleep changed first then I started waking up differently. I felt good before coffee.

I felt better tired. I even ordered a smaller chef coat.

That distinction was worth paying attention to. Exhaustion is often the cost of a full life. But exhaustion that comes with brain fog, broken sleep, digestive issues, and a body that feels like it is working against you usually has a cause. For me, the cause wasn’t how much I was doing. It was how I was eating around all of it.

The question worth sitting with is not what you are eating.

It is whether eating is a deliberate act or just another consequence of your schedule.

Live well,

Nathan

If you've made a change like this yourself, I'd like to hear what shifted first.

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Educational only — not medical advice. Consult your physician before changing your health, diet, or exercise routine.

Go deeper

The personal change came first. The science gave me language for what I had been noticing.

If this topic interests you, these are three pieces worth exploring.

• Later meals, worse metabolic health.
  A 2023 review found that eating later in the day is linked to more metabolic disorders, while an earlier breakfast and earlier dinner improve blood sugar control.
  BaHammam & Pirzada, Clocks & Sleep, 2023 → https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10528427/

• Later meals, worse sleep.
  A 2024 study of over 7,000 adults found that eating later in the day — and eating more often — were both linked to measurably worse sleep quality.
  Yan et al., PLOS ONE, 2024 → https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0308172

• Meal timing shapes weight and metabolism.
  A 2025 review found that eating earlier in the day supports better insulin sensitivity, while late-night eating is linked to impaired glucose control and more fat storage.
  Reytor-González et al., Nutrients, 2025 → https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/17/13/2135

Founder’s Story • Part 2 of 3

New here? Part 1 is where it started: I Spent 25 Years in Food. I Missed What Was Happening in My Own Body.

Go home. That’s why you have a team.

My wife said it more than anyone. My boss, team and my friends said it. I usually heard it from people who hadn’t gone home either.

That’s the first thing that nobody tells you about the industry. The advice I was given and the behavior that I saw were completely separate universes. I learned very quickly that what gets rewarded isn’t balance or time with your family.

It’s your presence.

Things ran better when I was in the building. I knew it, my team knew it, so I stayed. Eight hours was a half day. Nobody made me do it, but the culture rewarded it. Somewhere along the way I started measuring my value by how much of myself I could give to it.

I got in early most days to get ahead or stay prepared. Then when I was about to go home, someone took an early out, a VIP walked in, or a banquet doubled in size. And somehow I was always the person expected to save the day. Every day offered a different reason to stay. Especially if I had plans.

One night, my wife and I had hockey tickets and planned to grab something to eat before the game. I was supposed to leave work and meet her. Something came up, then something else did. I kept telling myself I just needed a little more time.

I never left.

The tickets went unused, and she went home without me. At the time, I treated it like another night when work had to come first. Looking back, that was the pattern. There was always a reason to stay, and the people I cared about were usually the ones expected to understand.

I worked six days a week for months at a time. My body was screaming at me that it needed rest. I started snapping at people who were nice to me and my fifth coffee at 4pm wasn’t working anymore. I couldn’t handle one more problem. My day off came, and it wasn’t rest. I needed to check in with a friend, pay my bills, or visit a doctor. Instead, I was still reading emails and making sure I had staffing for tomorrow’s service.

Then, another successful hotel opening, a five-star rating, a promotion with a larger bonus. Friends in the industry told me I was doing something great. I took it as proof I was doing the right thing. I used that to convince myself the cost was worth it. If the approach was wrong, why did it keep getting rewarded?

Endurance and health are two separate things.

I confused one for the other for most of my career. Fatigue that didn’t resolve after a night’s sleep or a day off. Joint pain from being on my feet all day. Gut issues I wrote off as stress at the time. I forgot what calm felt like, even when I appeared to be calm.

Hospitality is built on a particular kind of pride. The ability to make people remember how they felt. Spinning a plate as you finished garnishing the food for a VIP. Surprising your team by showing up on a holiday you had off and being the person in the room that everyone depends on. That type of pride produces genuinely extraordinary work. That work overshadows your ability to hear your body. Hearing your body means admitting limitations. In a culture built around performance and presence, limitation feels like weakness.

No one around me was talking about what chronic stress does to the body over time.

I can’t say the work caused it. But I know it wasn’t helping, and I know I kept ignoring what my body was trying to tell me.

I thought exhaustion was the cost of doing something meaningful.

The knowledge existed. It just was not part of my conversation.

I did not understand yet that the work would take more than I had to give.

Continue the story → Part 3: What Portugal Taught Me That Supplements Never Could

Live well,

Nathan

Educational only — not medical advice. Consult your physician before changing your health, diet, or exercise routine.

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Founder’s Story • Part 1 of 3

I spent 25 years inside the food industry, including as Executive Chef of the Bellagio, working at a level where you learn things most people never see. Not just cooking techniques, but how food is sourced, processed, marketed, and scaled. I understood supply chains and what “from the source” actually meant. I could read a menu and tell you what the chef cared about and what they were trying to cover up.

What I could not do was apply that knowledge to myself.

The diagnosis came slowly, then all at once.

Something had felt off for years. I interpreted the signals as the cost of doing business.

My fatigue was dedication. My poor sleep was ambition.

I was on my feet 10 plus hours a day. I treated stress like an occupational hazard. For years I believed that this was simply how life felt when you worked hard enough.

Then came the diagnosis. I had an autoimmune condition.

My first reaction was relief. At least I knew what this is, but that feeling was short-lived. A doctor had identified an autoimmune condition and offered a treatment pathway. The treatment was designed to manage it, not resolve it.

When I asked if I needed to worry, the answer was direct. My doctor explained that the condition carried a risk of cancer and would need ongoing monitoring.

I’m not here to criticize. For many autoimmune conditions, the goal isn’t to eliminate the disease. It’s to manage it well enough that it doesn’t take over your life. I was told the condition would never go away. But the more I learned, the more interested I became in addressing the gap between managing my symptoms and understanding what was driving it.

I still get regular medical follow-up. The lifestyle changes sit alongside that care, not in place of it.

So I started reading.

Not wellness content or social media health advice. I read peer-reviewed research on inflammation, autoimmune disease, and studies from some of the top medical institutions in the world. What I found changed the direction of my life. I started realizing the stress I was living under wasn’t abstract. My body was responding to it constantly.

My situation is not yours but there were a few things that changed my health more than anything else. The first was sleep quality, not quantity. Nine hours of fragmented sleep did less for me than seven hours of genuinely restorative sleep. I stopped treating sleep as recovery time left over after work was done and started treating it as the foundation everything else rested on.

The second was reducing the load instead of fighting symptoms. I started paying attention to what was constantly putting my body under stress. The question became: what in my life keeps adding fuel to the embers?

That’s when things really started to change.

The third was actually changing the pace of my life. I had tried adding massage and meditation to a lifestyle that was exhausting me.

Sometimes adding good things to what you’re already doing makes everything worse.

The hardest part was realizing how disconnected I had become from what healthy even felt like. Once I started paying closer attention, there was far more room for improvement than I had imagined.

It wasn’t perfection that changed things. It was paying attention consistently and asking better questions.

That’s what this is.

Searching for answers after you’ve been told there aren’t any.

Live well,

Nathan

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Continue the story → Part 2: Endurance is not Health

^{Educational only — not medical advice. Consult your physician before changing your health, diet, or exercise routine.}

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Chronic psychological stress appears to interfere with the body's ability to switch off an inflammatory response. That doesn't mean stress caused my condition, or that reducing it cured anything. It meant the way I was living wasn't biologically neutral.
Cohen et al., PNAS, 2012