Ryan Crossfield

You  will always think you suck. That’s good. It’s ok to suck compared to your standards. As you grow, so will your standards. It doesn’t mean you actually suck. — Gabe Helguera

Silence doesn’t erase what you gave — it reveals what the other person can receive.

If someone cannot acknowledge your truth, they cannot be your partner in repair.

The problem with trying to answer the question of how we determine whether something is the truth comes from the fact that we must answer how we determine our definition of truth itself is true. This is why there are about 2,600 ways to parse the verb know, and by the time you finish a degree in philosophy, you can’t help but see a chair as more of a collection of beliefs and ideas than an arrangement of wood and upholstery.

Marketing is just a way to suppress your will to discover the potential you possess to heal and/or thrive, making most of the things you're being sold unnecessary.

Addiction has long been viewed as a war between our dopamine-mediated reward pathways and the executive inhibitory control circuits of the prefrontal cortex of the brain. This theory can be traced all the way back to Plato’s comparison, in Phaedrus, of the soul to a winged chariot pulled by two horses—one noble, representing our intellect and reason, the other ignoble, representing our base impulses and appetites. A better model for viewing addiction, however, is one that incorporates the notion that the most emotionally impactful stimulus in our environment at any given time is what will prevail in terms of our behavior. This stimulus, be it a slice of pizza or a tray of cookies, leads to an infinite regress of feedforward loops and neuronal firings across networks that capture our attention and ultimately create addictive behavior. Salient stimuli can work in the other direction, too. That is, I might be ready to give in and buy that soft-serve ice cream cone I’ve been thinking about from the moment I saw the neighborhood truck, but when my grandchild breaks free from my hand and runs into the busy street, my attention shifts, because there is nothing else around me that will reach that level of emotional salience. Ultimately, with addiction, unless we’re able to change the salience, or draw, of the emotionally impactful stimulus that is ultraformulated food, treatment is bound to fail.

An Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, Frankl was the author of Man’s Search for Meaning. In it, he writes of how the striving for meaning is the most motivating force in humans. What does that have to do with positive regard? Frankl draws parallels between our ability to feel love and find meaning in life. “Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality,” Frankl writes. To comprehend the essence of others, we must love them, and by doing so we are enabled to understand their traits and features, and, most important, their potential. We gain the ability to make them aware of what they can become, and they may do the same for us. It is mutually beneficial and, according to Frankl, the key to unlocking human potential.

@FitFounder Poliquin Principles. Not necessarily for the content but for the path I went down after reading it.

What's a fitness/health book that's changed your life?

Everyone says grounding “fills you with electrons.” It doesn’t. In a living body, free electrons don’t sit and “charge you.” They react instantly. Biology isn’t a bucket for spare charge, it’s a precision voltage system running ion gradients, membrane potentials, and proton flow. Grounding doesn’t power you up. It returns you to Earth’s electrical reference so your signaling stays clean. When you’re insulated, your voltage drifts. Touch the ground → a tiny discharge spike equalizes you, then flow stops. No stream. No drip-feed. No electron buffet. This isn’t mystical. It’s physics: Not energy in. Noise out. Neutral = accuracy. Grounding stabilizes the baseline so your nervous system isn’t guessing. The Earth isn’t a charger its home base. So where did the myth come from? People confused a spark with a system. A TV tube or grounding strap collects electrons because it has: • vacuum • metal target • high voltage pushing a beam Living tissue is none of those things. It’s warm ion-rich water running controlled gradients. Different universe, different rules. They imported electronics metaphors into biology and built a fairy tale. Correct the metaphor, the truth snaps into place. Neutral isn’t empty. Neutral is precision. Grounding is calibration, not fuel.

Top DHA foods for brain + body 🧠💪 Wild salmon (1,000+ mg) Sardines (low mercury, high Ca) Caviar/trout DHA eggs Cod liver oil

With all our medical and technological advances, it is striking that we need to tell people to focus on diet quality. The food industry has been regrettably successful at separating calories from nutrition. I always thought phrases like “empty calories” and “junk food” applied to a side segment of our food supply. Unfortunately, those terms have come to represent an increasing portion of our food intake. The food industry has figured out how to, in the words of Dr. Lydia Alexander of Kaiser Permanente, decouple energy intake from nutrition.

Unfortunately, there is no reliable guidance on dietary supplementation for GLP-1 patients. The supplement industry has seized on this information vacuum by marketing products claiming to fill GLP-1 nutrient gaps. Whether these supplements are safe or efficacious is anyone’s guess. In the United States, the industry operates with little government oversight. The absence of evidence-based recommendations and consumer protections is particularly troubling given that most candidates for GLP-1 therapy have micronutrient deficiencies before they even start the drugs. People with obesity are more likely to be nutrient deficient than the population at large. Metabolic alterations, oxidative stress in fat tissue, and other biochemical changes that occur during major weight loss can increase the body’s demand for micronutrients even further. So can interaction with other medications such as metformin, which is sometimes prescribed with GLP-1 drugs. German nutrition researcher Dr. Antje Damms-Machado and her colleagues studied thirty-two people who followed an 800-calorie-a-day liquid diet for three months and lost, on average, forty-three pounds. The participants were deficient in various vitamins and minerals before they began the regimen and showed no improvement from the diet, even though their meal-replacement formula was suffused with micronutrients at amounts often higher than recommended for the general population. In fact, even more people had low levels of vitamin C, zinc, lycopene, and calcium at the end of the diet.

Don’t expect to lose significant weight through exercise alone; if you were to put on ten pounds of muscle, a significant increase, that would increase your daily caloric needs by only about 60 calories. The primary benefits of exercise are improved overall health, including reduced stress and inflammation, and increased metabolic flexibility, the ability to switch readily between burning fats and carbohydrates in response to the body’s demands.

At a certain point, our bodies are designed to fight against weight loss. And yet no one ever says that. The mantra is simply: eat less, exercise more. Nobody ever offers the more accurate axiom: eat less, exercise more, and your body’s counterregulatory systems will work against your efforts. It follows then that if I continue to eat fewer calories than I burn, my weight will eventually plateau; the body becomes a smaller furnace and burns fewer calories. Put simply, as I eat less, my body will burn less. “Basically what we have is a pair of negative feedback loops such that changes in body weight give rise to compensatory changes in calorie expenditure and appetite that resist changes in body weight,” Dr. Kevin Hall of the NIH explains. “It’s almost like the system is trying to maintain whatever the baseline body weight is before you intervene.” Dr. Hall’s research lab—where he also studied how environment influences people’s eating habits—has built mathematical models to quantify the strength of these feedback loops. He has shown that for every kilogram of body weight loss, our bodies, on average, decrease the amount we burn by 25 calories a day. So, for instance, if a person loses 22 pounds, they will burn 250 fewer calories daily than they burned before that weight loss. And the feedback loop that controls appetite is even stronger. For every kilogram of body weight loss, appetite increases by 95 extra calories per day. As Hall sums it up: “That is a huge feedback control that is resisting maintaining those lifestyle interventions.” This harkens back to Dr. Rosenbaum’s seminal study, in which patients with obesity lost between 10 and 50% of their weight and, as a result, slowed their metabolism, reducing their energy expenditure by 300 to 400 calories a day. At the same time, their appetites increased. The combination of reduced metabolism and increased hunger makes it very easy to regain weight. Consequently, treating the counterregulatory forces—the homeostatic system, our addictive circuitry, and an increase in appetite hormones as well as a decrease in satiety hormones—is our only hope to support sustained weight loss. The telltale signs of these forces winning out include excess hunger and decreased fullness. Any approach to weight loss that does not reduce those two key symptoms will not be effective in the long run. As Dr. Carel le Roux has said, you can always tell if a treatment will be successful if the person who is losing or has lost weight says, “I don’t feel hungry, I feel fuller, and I am not thinking about food all the time.” In addition to a reduced appetite and increased fullness, a shift in food preferences, including a desire for smaller portions and fewer high-fat, high-sugar foods, benefits weight-loss efforts. Therefore, to unlock weight loss and sustain it, we must affect not only the addictive circuits, but also the body’s underlying energy biology. ... from Diet, Drugs, & Dopamine

When you're born you look like your parents, but when you die you look like your decisions.

You're not depressed, you just need a quest.

This is probably the best way to describe the current state of everything... "Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth." — Marcus Aurelius

Strength training just 2x/wk improved insulin sensitivity by 46% in diabetic men In this study, body fat also dropped ~10% despite eating 15% more calories

Hot take: Driven by the human desire for comfort, technology overcomes challenges by prioritizing convenience, often steering us away from natural inputs and amplifying behaviors that disrupt homeostasis, ultimately harming health.