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When I first started my health and fitness journey five years ago, I stumbled upon a podcast called The Model Health Show with Shawn Stevenson. He does a wonderful job of teaching the science behind health, fitness, and nutrition among other topics.

One of the most important episodes you can listen to is Immunological Adaptation: Viruses, Immune Cells, & Practical Support. You can listen to it in your favorite podcast player, or you can watch it right here:

8% of our makeup as humans consists of viruses. We have evolved over time with viruses, and they have helped us develop our immune systems. The coronavirus is not the first new virus, and it will not be the last one either.

An estimated 17 million people worldwide have recovered from COVID-19, many of whom didn’t even know they were sick until they got tested because they had no symptoms.

How could this be? We’ve been told that this is a new virus, so we have no innate immunity. We’re relying on the promise of a vaccine to give us immunity.

However, we have this thing called adaptive immunity. Our immune system is sophisticated enough to adapt to new threats and figure out how to effectively fight them off.

But only if our immune system is working properly and is not compromised.

COVID-19 has shown Americans just how unhealthy we are as a whole. 6 in 10 adults have a chronic disease, and 4 in 10 adults have two or more.

How the hell do we live in a country where we find this acceptable???

People with chronic disease are more likely to develop severe symptoms of COVID-19 because their immune systems are suppressed. The top three comorbidities found in this study were hypertension, diabetes, and obesity.

Every single one of these comorbidities is a lifestyle-related disease that comes about from poor nutrition, lack of movement, and too much stress.

Public health officials and the media have told us that we must isolate, socially distance, wear a mask, vigorously wash our hands, and wait for a vaccine to save us.

Why on earth is there not an all-hands-on-deck effort to get our population healthier? Why are we not helping people with their nutrition, movement, and stress management?

We can use pandemic containment measures to protect our most vulnerable, including our older population whose immune systems naturally weaken with age. However, the majority of COVID-19 deaths are preventable if we work to get our population healthier.

Right now, this is not being done by public health officials or any of the experts that you’re listening to. Heck, the U.S. government subsidizes food that makes us sick and makes it more difficult for food stamp recipients to buy healthy food over junk food. The folks we depend on to keep us safe and healthy are doing a terrible job of it right now.

Therefore, it’s up to you to do what you need to do to get yourself and your family healthier. Here’s what you can do to give your immune system the support that it needs to do the job that it knows how to do:

• Eat real, whole foods. Foods that you can easily identify and don’t have a list of ingredients on a package. Mostly fruits and vegetables, with room for your favorite real, whole foods in other categories. Food is not just calories; it’s information. This information talks to your DNA and switches on or off genes that lead to health or disease. We have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years eating mostly plants with some meat and other items in the mix. The food manufacturing age, with GMO’s and other chemicals that have been put in food, has not been kind to us and has left us a nation riddled with chronic disease.
• Move your body. Your body craves movement. You don’t have to punish yourself for hours in the gym or take bootcamp classes. A 30-minute walk is enough to stimulate your immune system and increase production of natural killer cells. Natural killer cells are really good at killing COVID-infected cells. So much so that the FDA has fast-tracked the approval process for a drug that stimulates natural killer cell growth. You can actually skip waiting for the drug to come to market and just take a 30-minute walk!
• Make sure that you’re getting good sleep. Sleep deprivation affects production of your natural killer cells.
• Do what you can to manage stress (which will in turn help you get better sleep). Spend time in nature. Reduce screen time. Reduce time watching the news. Do whatever you need to do to get your stress levels down, because it affects your immune system and your level of natural killer cells. This is another place where our national response to this virus is failing. Do you think that doing nothing but isolating, quarantining, remaining socially distant, wearing masks, constantly washing our hands, and waiting for a vaccine to save us is making us more stressed or less stressed? Do you think the media coverage of this with their constant death-toll ticker and finding “perfectly healthy people who died from COVID-19” to report on is making us more stressed or less stressed?

I don’t say all of this as an expert. I say all of this as person who is tired of living in fear and thankful that I have found resources that have brought me back down to earth. It is highly unlikely that I haven’t already been exposed to COVID-19, and it is highly unlikely that I would have a severe reaction to it because I support my immune system.

In the early months of the pandemic, I was a stress-ridden mess. My PTSD was very triggered. I barely left my apartment. Whenever I’d go out for a walk, I’d have a hard time remaining upright and felt my body try to take me down right in the middle of the street. My allergy symptoms were consistent, and I constantly worried that they were COVID symptoms.

Whenever I went out for a bike ride, I would wipe down my entire bike with Clorox wipes because I was afraid that coronaviruses were raining down on it. I saw someone else had recommended doing that, so I did it too.

If we simply arm ourselves with good information about how our immune systems and viruses work in the real world, we can lower our stress levels, stop living in fear, and get back to living knowing that we will most likely be ok.

People post all the time talking about how 2020 has been an awful year and they can’t wait until next year.

For me, 2020 has been incredibly enlightening. It has shown me exactly who we are, who we’ve been, and where we stand as a country. It has laid it out in plain view.

Who we are becomes harder to hide thanks to the technology available for people to use to show us who we are.

The tale of two Americas

There are two different things at play:

1. Who we are
2. Who we promise to be

They are not the same thing.

Who we promise to be is a beacon of light, hope, and freedom for all so that everyone should live in peace with the ability to be who they are.

Who we are is a country that marginalizes, maims, and kills Black people. We do this through our institutions and systems, and our culture has us defending the oppressors and looking for fault in the Black people that the oppressors marginalize, maim, and kill.

“Why didn’t Jacob Blake (or insert the name of any other Black man here) simply follow the police’s instructions?”

I am aware that there are two categories of people:

1. Those who believe systemic racism and white supremacy are a problem in this country
2. Those who don’t

Those who don’t are much more likely to defend the oppressors.

I understand the people who don’t believe that there’s a problem. I remember my own education growing up.

I knew that many people were racist, but I had no idea the extent of the problem.

I spent my formative years in Richmond, VA, the capital of the Confederacy. In school, we learned that Jim Crow happened, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were signed into law, and then everything was fine.

We took a field trip to the Jefferson Davis house, the White House of the Confederacy, as a mere vehicle to learn about our history and “heritage”.

In my senior lounge in high school, there was a Confederate flag. My buddy who had it in there explained to me that it was about history and “heritage” and not hate. I never saw him treat any Black people with anything but respect. The flag didn’t bother the sole Black person in my class, so I figured it was ok to have it in there and to not make a fuss.

Growing up in this kind of environment and learning what we did in history class, I thought everything was fine. I am old enough to remember Rodney King. And Abner Louima. And Amadou Diallo. And Sean Bell.

I remember all the police acquittals.

I bought the argument of “just a few bad apples”. I hated those bad apples. I didn’t want life made more difficult for anyone.

My participation in Black culture

I loved hip-hop. Starting from when I was ten years old, hip-hop music just lit me up. It started with mainstream, danceable, appealing to white kids in the suburbs stuff, and it eventually evolved into more old school, underground, and music that really told the tales of Black reality in America.

In college, I was a turntable DJ, and most of the music that I played was hip-hop. I immersed myself in the culture. Most of my friends were Black and Latinx. I was so happy that they included me in everything because I loved the music and the culture so much. I have a graffiti-style DJ tattoo on my arm, in case there’s any question about how much I loved it.

I was mesmerized by the story telling and gripped by tales of police brutality, life in the streets, and other Black realities. I still did not know the larger story.

I always thought: “just because someone is Black doesn’t mean they have to live in the hood or be poor. I know there are so many Black people who live in the hood, but there are poor white people too, and their hoods are called trailer parks.”

I thought everyone was equally likely to come from a certain set of circumstances, and that assigning stereotypes to Black folks exclusively was unfair.

I didn’t know about redlining. I didn’t know about Tulsa. I didn’t know about the school-to-prison pipeline. Or the Crime Bill. Or anything else that has perpetuated the conditions that Black folks have been forced to live under since this country’s founding.

Systemic racism did not end with the abolition of segregation. It simply changed forms and became more covert than overt.

If you think 2020 has sucked, it’s because it has held up a giant mirror for us. If you look at it, then you can see what’s really happening and figure out what you’re going to do from here on out.

I feel like I have lived in a lie for 40 years. I see people posting “this isn’t who we are” in response to events that keep happening. It may not be who you are, but it absolutely is who we are.

I have no earth-shattering answers or single solutions. I’m just going to try to do better and be better. My neighborhood in West Philly was reported in 2017 to be 52% white, but the surrounding areas are predominantly Black.

I have a chance to be part of my neighborhood and part of the community. I have a crap-ton of privilege that I can use to benefit my neighborhood and community. I make a great living and have a platform. People listen when I talk, and they take me seriously. Not because I’m special, but because I’m a straight white male in America.

I moved to my neighborhood back in February, and I don’t want to be the person that moves here to take advantage of the restaurant scene and parks and completely ignore the plight of my Black neighbors.

I will do my best, and it will never be enough because I can’t fix this on my own, and that’s ok because it’s my moral obligation to do it anyway. Because I care. Because I believe in human rights. Because I believe that Black lives matter, in a country where they don’t.

I have been obsessed with being the best. It has been a big part of my life, and a big part of American culture in which I partake.

I’ve wanted to be the best at things I’m passionate about. I wanted to be the best DJ in college. I’ve wanted to be the best at nonprofit marketing when I was in that field. I wanted to be the best entrepreneur when I started freelancing.

There certainly has been a cultural influence on me when it comes to my desire to be the best. However, it is primarily driven from the trauma that I experienced in my early childhood years.

That trauma told me that I had to be perfect or else I was going to get hurt or, even worse, die.

If I wasn’t perfect, then I was in huge trouble.

Ultimately, pursuit of being the best and being perfect has left me with a life largely un-lived and in hiding.

Many people have pursued paths and they have successes, failures, experiences, connections, wisdom, and other things to show for it.

I, too, have all of these things, but I also have many many years spent in hiding. Spent starting a project and almost immediately stopping due to fear. Spent in isolation. Spent practicing to get the details right for something that never came to fruition. Spent practicing conversations I wanted to have but never did.

Though I recommend everybody exit the meritocracy, I am exiting it because it exacerbates my trauma that I want to heal.

What do we actually get if we become the best? How do we know that we’re the best? Who’s making that judgment call? Are they qualified to make that call?

Do we actually know who the best are? Or do we only know from a small selection of people that are in front of us? I’ve been a basketball fan for a long time, and there are so many kids who are good enough for the NBA but never make it because not enough exposure, not enough money, not enough you name it.

If we are deemed to be the best, what do we wind up doing? Making the rich richer. Unless we find a way out of that trap and create our own wealth through entrepreneurship. Otherwise, we are busting our butts for years and years to be the best, and once we get there, we are earning a small fraction of what the CEO of our company earns.

I wonder if the concept of meritocracy was set up by the ruling class as way of making themselves richer and keeping us busy making them richer in pursuit of being “the best”.

It doesn’t sound very naturally human to me, and I’m sick of it. I am pursuing a life that I enjoy and don’t need to have the pressure of being the best at anything. The pandemic has presented an excellent opportunity for me to do that (I realize how privileged I am to be able to say that and how the pandemic has completely wrecked the lives of so many).

So far, my life includes:

• A soon-to-be wife that I love spending time with and is a fabulous partner
• A job that doesn’t pressure me to work long hours and hit impossible-to-achieve milestones; it’s fun work that makes a differences in people’s lives with a supportive team
• Picking up cycling since I’m too injured to run, and boy, is it fun (though I still find myself giving myself pressure to hit certain distances and speeds; work in progress)
• Getting back into DJing and mixing Latin music because it gives me a huge amount of joy
• Cooking
• Hanging out with friends, mostly virtually but increasing in-person hangouts with social distance protocols in place
• Writing and sharing my story
• Podcasting and sharing the story of others (taking a pause on the podcast for now since healing is calling very strongly)
• Helping my boxing trainer get his business fully online
• Volunteering for the election this year
• Getting married in a month

I am allowing myself to live more fully, connect more with people, and experience the full range of emotions life has to offer. It’s much easier to do when you make your way out of the meritocracy.

On August 29th, I turn 40. Most people consider it a milestone birthday. I guess I do too.

I’ve been having lots of thoughts lately on what I’ve learned over the last four decades. The funny thing is, what I’ve learned over the last five years contradicts much of what I learned in the previous 35 years.

The greatest thing that I have ever done for myself, ever in life, has nothing to do with sustained hard work. Or motivation. Or ambition. Or consistency. Or being better than yesterday. Or any of that other stuff that people tell you is so important and is the key to happiness and success.

Nope, none of that.

The greatest thing that I have ever done for myself is become curious about my pain.

I started meditating five years ago. Why? Because I wanted to become a successful entrepreneur, and the entrepreneurs that I looked up to had meditation as part of their toolkit.

I wanted to be them, so I did it too.

During my first month of meditating after my father died, I started becoming more conscious of things. The meditation practice had me focus on my breath. My mind would wander every single time.

The first few times, I didn’t notice my mind wandering and I forgot about the breath about 20 seconds in. Then, I achieved a huge victory. I noticed when my mind wandered, and I brought it right back to the breath. Then I noticed it again and brought it right back again.

This noticing extended into other areas of my life. I noticed that frequently, I would expect a negative reaction from people if I asked them for something. It could be asking them for a favor, or it could be asking them if they wanted to go out to dinner.

I started noticing that happening and digging deeper into why that was happening. It took me quite some time to get to the source of it, but in the immediate time, I questioned whether or not it was true. I decided that it wasn’t.

Every time I automatically made an assumption that someone would react negatively to me, I decided that it wasn’t true. So, little by little, I started asking for things with the fear still inside of me.

Surprise surprise: I never got a single negative reaction. Even if it was just a friendly “no”.

This started my journey of becoming more and more curious about my pain. Curious about my triggers. Curious about why things were happening the way they were.

I had just gotten divorced, so I had plenty of time and space to explore.

It eventually led me to see a trauma therapist and get into a loving relationship with my soon-to-be wife Kristin, both of which have allowed me an immense amount of healing. I have never felt this good in my life. I have never felt this safe in my life. It just keeps getting better and better.

I have an undergraduate degree and an MBA. I was inducted into an academic honors society by finishing my MBA with a 4.0. I got two project management certifications. I have run several half-marathons and one full marathon. I received the top tenor score in my entire school district when trying out for district chorus in high school. Several times on the honor roll. Several speaker slots at tech meetups and conferences.

While all of them served their purpose in building me up, none of them made me feel nearly as good as I feel today. None of them made me feel safe. None of them allowed me to unload the pain that I’ve been carrying for a very, very long time so that my past doesn’t have to get in the way of my present.

As I enter my 40’s and mid-life, I do not want to base my self-worth on what our capitalist society and culture dictates. My self-worth is not based on my productivity. It is not based on my job title. It is not based on my salary. It is not based on my accomplishments.

It is not based on how fast I can run. It is not based on how far I can bike. It is not based on how much I weigh. It is not based on how much I can fill my time with activities.

It is not based on me “hitting my marks.”

Nope. My self-worth is based on the fact that I exist. I am worthy because I exist. I do not have to earn my worth.

How did I come to this conclusion? By becoming curious about my pain. The work led me down the path of believing that I am worthy as I am.

And you are worthy as you are. You don’t have to accomplish to be worthy. You can get curious about your pain and wounds and work to heal them. Work to give yourself exactly what you need, even if it isn’t what the people you follow on social media need.

Get curious about your pain and give yourself exactly what you need. You’re the only one who knows what you need, so you’re the only one who can do something about it.