Bayderlock

I rarely drink water. Believe me when I say that this is peak health. Juice, milk, sweet drinks, clean sparkling sodas, coffee with sugar and milk... it all replaces water for me. This sounds absolutely idiotic, especially if you've followed the mainstream story that anything except plain water is suboptimal. But most plain water is hypotonic, meaning lower mineral concentration than your blood. The body has to actively bring it into balance when it enters in large volumes. Sodium and minerals get pulled from elsewhere, fluid shifts across compartments, and the osmotic load on the kidneys rises. This usually isn't an issue. But two liters of plain water through the day on top of an already undermineralized diet is a problem. Magnesium gets hit hardest here, where extra urine disproportionately causes more magnesium loss, and most modern diets are already running magnesium-deficient. Plain water on top increases this deficiency. With low magnesium, your entire life suffers. Sleep, energy, resilience, cognition... Clinical environments almost never use plain water. Hospital maintenance IVs are dextrose in saline (sugar and salt). The WHO oral rehydration solution for cholera and dehydration is sugar plus salt plus water, because plain water can't restore plasma volume and can worsen conditions. Sports nutrition has honed in on intra-workout carbs and electrolytes, not plain water. Financial incentive probably too, but there's real mechanisms behind it. It's simply what the body actually wants. Sugar carries sodium with it through the gut, and minerals carry water through osmotic balance. Together they restore plasma volume and cellular tonicity in a way pure water cannot. The deeper layer is concerning your liver. Liver glycogen is the buffer that keeps blood sugar steady between meals. When it's full, the body runs on efficient glucose burning, and stress hormones stay low. When the glycogen gets low, cortisol and adrenaline take over. That's borrowed energy. It works, but the cost is catabolism, irritability, blunted metabolism, fragmented sleep. A continuous drip of mineral-rich sweet fluid keeps the glycogen tank topped up. The whole metabolic state runs lower on cortisol as a result. The catch is that this is only for a body that can handle it. A large amount of people can't burn sugar efficiently, whether they're hypothyroid, seed-oil-loaded, have gut dysbiosis, or are insulin-resistant. The same sugar that fuels a healthy body, becomes a stressor in an unhealthy body. In those cases, yes, these sweet drinks can be harmful, but that harm is not universal. Importing the diabetic's advice onto the metabolically healthy is treating a problem they don't have, and creating one (chronic glycogen depletion and elevated stress hormones) in its place. If your basal temperature is low, your hands are cold, and you crash between meals, your machinery probably isn't ready for something like this. Build the machinery first, then drink the fluid the machinery wants. That's why I rarely drink water. The body asking for fluid is asking for what the milk, the juice, and the sparkling water already carry.

Running has to be the worst sport out of all: > not fun at all > destroys joints > no meaningful goal > extremely stressful > makes you low T > ages you fast > gives you skinny fat physique > inefficent to lose weight

What’s the dark side of gym life no one admits?

Some men are reportedly paying to permanently alter their ears to resemble the hardened look often associated with combat sports athletes. According to reports from Russia, demand has grown for cosmetic procedures that recreate the thickened ear shape commonly seen in long-time wrestlers and MMA fighters. The treatment reportedly costs around 6,000 rubles (about $80) per ear and has become increasingly popular among people seeking a tougher or more intimidating appearance. Doctors warn the procedure can still carry serious risks, including infection and lasting cartilage damage that may later require reconstructive surgery. Psychologists have also suggested the trend reflects changing ideas around masculinity and image, noting that experienced fighters are usually recognised more by their discipline and composure than by physical appearance alone. Source: Fike, A. (2026). “Men Are Paying to Give Themselves Cauliflower Ear to Look Like MMA Fighters” Vice.

You do not need to be in the gym six days a week. Doing so will reward you with worse progress, not more. Here's why: Fatigue accumulates. Not just from session to session. From week to week. From month to month. The hard leg session on Monday leaves a tax that has not been fully paid by the time you're back under a bar on Tuesday. Multiply that across six sessions and you are walking into every workout pre-fatigued. The first casualty is your high threshold motor units. The fibres with the most growth potential. The ones recruited only when the muscle is fresh enough to call on them with real load. Train under accumulated fatigue and those fibres never get touched. You're left stimulating the lower threshold fibres you maxed out years ago. Two rest days a week should be the bare minimum for anyone training hard. Three is better. Four sessions of about an hour each is not the maintenance protocol the high-volume crowd will tell you it is. It is the optimal dose for a natural lifter who wants to actually grow. Four hours of lifting a week. Four. That's it. The best physiques in your gym are almost always built on less work than the worst. The volume bros sweat five hours a week for a body the four-hour man built while still having time to read a book. More is not the answer. Recovered is.

Training in a fasted state (lifting) is FAR superior to training after eating… If you train fasted: Your body depletes muscle glycogen, then uses body fat stores for energy; Then when you eat after: The body is primed to store that energy in muscle glycogen rather than fat.