Stoicism and the Carnivore Diet.

      The last few weeks I have gotten back to my usual reading habits. By usual I mean my reading habits I had pre-army life. I read quite a bit before joining the Army and even in the Army I probably read more than the average person does; averaging a few books a year. (More if audio-books count!) But as of the late I have devoted myself to reading every night before bed as I used to. This has benefited me in several ways: 1) I get tired quickly when I read in my bed and can fall asleep faster. 2) I go to bed earlier as... 3) ... I don't spend as much time on my phone. 4) I am exposed to thoughts and ideas that challenge me to think beyond my normal perspective and exercise some real philosophical filtering muscles. 

     Reading through Viktor Frankl's  A Man's Search for Meaning, I was challenged to see my life in a different way. To realize, perhaps, that a man's greatest satisfaction is living for something other than himself. (By that I mean for more than just simple self gratification portrayed well by so many reality shows on TV today.) By living and sacrificing daily for your family, your God and your work then perhaps you can find satisfaction by changing your perception of how you manage these 3 spheres. While he doesn't implicitly state it, I think that perhaps the underlying theme is a man can only be completely satisfied should he succeed in all three of these spheres and that a lack of spirituality is the cause for much undue dissatisfaction with life. The stories of his experience in the different concentration camps really made me appreciate the simple things in life a lot more as I attempted to mentally put myself in the shoes of the prisoners with him every night. I could almost feel the unrelenting Bavarian winter wind whipping through thin cloth onto my skin as Frankl went through memories of the nightmare he lived. 

      This has given me much to think about as a dive into a second round on the carnivore diet. I'm taking it slow and am going to eat according to the paleo diet for a few days/weeks until I am ready to go full carnivore. As I transitioned back into my normal eating habits I noticed my lack of attention span, energy levels and mental fog taking turns for the worse. My only vice while on the diet will be my morning espresso, americano or non-sugar latte. I invested in a rather pricy espresso machine but I did the math and in a few months it will pay for itself; this is based off my habit of going out for coffee only 3-4 times a week at local coffee shops to order a plain espresso. 

     I am currently finishing up Breakfast With Seneca by David Fideler. I am not new to the concepts and structure of stoicism but I am certainly learning a lot more in depth about the exact tools one can use to practice stoicism in a more practical and rational form. As I was reading through this book I often found myself substituting some phrases such as fate, fortune, destiny, etc with "God" or "Christ" as I think the way stoics and Christians claim to conduct themselves are often parallel in nature. I was thinking to myself of writing an essay for myself comparing the two and answering the question "How can Stoic teachings and practices benefit the Christian in the modern day" only to discover there is a whole book about that. I'm not sure if that is what I will read next but it's on my short list of books to slay. 

Updates

 It has been quite awhile since I have posted an update so here it is.

     It's a 21 May 2022, a saturday, and I had to go to work and make 100 phone calls to earn my way back to the weekend. That's how my life in USAREC is going. Not only mine but literally every person within the United States Army Recruiting Command; mandatory saturday prospecting. Granted I did make contact with plenty of people but nobody locked in an appointment and nobody really was too enthused to talk to me on the weekend with the exception of a retired Army Staff Sergeant who had a pleasant conversation with me about how the next 11 years of my career will fly by. I hope not. Not because I love the Army or because I love what I do, I just hope that my perception of time doesn't speed up as quickly as everyone says it will. I can already feel seasons melding into each other and years passing me by as if it were a freight train gaining speed before me; the end is nowhere in sight but it's inevitable nonetheless. 

     I have once again slipped back into one of my old flings of a hobby: photography. It satisfies my thirst for a creative outlet and for the need to be in an emerging field... mostly. I am not the worlds greatest writer but I dream of telling a story with every picture. Perhaps that could be a book one day, my pictures with the story to match. I have a friend who taught me what I know about photography and helped me get started. He and I had a conversation and he said something I knew to be true but had never paid much attention to or perhaps took for granted: "When you take a picture, you are capturing a historical moment. It will never be replicated again...". this is true of every single picture taken. It was estimated that in 2021, 1.72 Trillion photos were taken which is 54,000 every second. Each one unique and unrepeatable. In a book I am reading called "after Photography" the author explores the benefits and the consequences of photography going from analog to digital. Many good points are made about the ability to make infinite perfect copies of a digital photograph, and thereby diminishing it's value... perhaps. The infinite ability to edit and manipulate a digital photo was apparent even before the book was written in 2009; many examples of the consequences are listed... Regardless, my photos will never be edited to such an extent and I doubt that many copies of my photos will be used or viewed by anyone but a few followers on my Instagram page. For now I am enjoying taking photos when I get the chance and practice most nights while my bigger boys play in the driveway. 

     We have two snakes now. A red corn snake and a pastel hog-nosed snake. My wife bought the red corn snake for our boys and the semi-venomous hog-nose for herself. We enjoy watching them slither and eat the weekly meal we provide. The corn snake is easily handled and has given us many smiles. the hog-nosed snake is new and very temperamental. Often he hisses at me if I look in his cage too closely.

     I recently did a little over a week on the carnivore diet and here is what I found: 1) The diet is extremely simple and made meal times very easy, especially if I cooked a few pounds of burger meat before hand. 2) The monotony of eating only meat, mostly beef, is excruciating. I powered through cravings but it was intense. 3) I lost a lot of water/sugar weight. In the first week I was down almost 10lbs. 4) I had more consistent energy throughout the day and black coffee made me very jittery without carbs to help me absorb some of the caffeine. 5) It sucked overall with the cravings and the initial loss of energy but my body felt pretty good; lean and fast. Will I do it again? Probably, especially if I ever find myself with so much joint pain that it interferes with daily life or that I am gaining too much body fat. 

     That is all for now.