Tag: Health

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Aesthetics Medical

Day 1751 and On Brand with Protestant Renunciations and Wound Care

I really misjudged my healing time on the testosterone pellets even though I pretty much always assume a worst case scenario for myself. I’m not really hurting but I am pretty bruised which is typical for me.

We may have some room for improvement technique with it so I am encouraged if the is as bad as it gets. I am not seeing any benefits from it yet and ugly bruising and a bit of an opening on an incision isn’t so bad.

A lot will depend on how well I recover and how much the hormone actually helps when I’m not healing. I’m also in the luteal horrors phase where my hormones are most ridiculous so I’m curious to see the curve.

The best part of this remains that I have a world class treatment for skin wounds on hand. Hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy’s best research has been in wound management from burns to slow healing diabetics. So if I have to nurse a wound doing it with oxygen at pressure is actually pretty baller.

And to make it even more on theme, I spent most of my time in there writing out a column on skincare and the Great Male Renunciation of Appearances as part of my beauty shopping column and excuse to write about the secret history of appearance and its power.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1750 and The Protestant Work Ethic and Masculine Beauty

I am booting up the more practical aspects of writing to provide value, as opposed to the writing I do here, which is to provide a thinking space for myself, and if I’m lucky occasionally my notes will help someone else.

Setting out to provide utility to others is a much higher bar as I’d want the content to meet my own expectations for value. I don’t have necessarily have expectations for utility here even if it provides it more than I’d expect.

I am enjoying preparing posts with research, and the next post teaches a little about the Protestant Reformation and The Enlightenment’s role in the great “Male Renunciation” of appearance.

Afew short centuries upended thousands of years of cultural norms that showcased the importance of masculine beauty and taste and replaced it with a drab mind first Cartesian split.

If I’m going to put together historical context, I figure it has to help the reader feel freed enough to experiment with their own world and consider that they can regain lost or hidden knowledge that was once foundational. In this case how masculinity communicated power, status and taste through appearance.

If you are aspiring to better yourself, to pursue an aristocracy of the soul, we will start with mastering the basic ingredients you will encounter in a drugstore and how they might build into reclaiming your appearance. We will go from there to Pareto-optimal options for building a habit that helps age well and look its best.

So I am having a bit of fun thinking about appearances. Anything anyone of us can do to free up another human to choose a life that is better for them is worth the time.

Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work Medical

Day 1749 and Some The Worse For Wear

Every time life gets intense I wonder to myself why am I speeding into the turn? And then I look back at the last almost half decade (which is easier than I’d expected as I’ve written every day) and I feel the achingly slow pace at which we tackle the challenges of our lives.

We’ve had really big wins and really glass chewing teeth grinding bloody inch by inch progress that barely feels like a win at all.

It’s easy to focus on the bruises when they aren’t a metaphor like yesterday’s adventures in scalpel driven hormone treatment. But the the wounds that are more emotional are just as easy to spot.

Some pain has given me relief and some has been so heartbreaking it crushes me that it’s beyond my control. Bodies and borders are often beyond the control of mortals.

So I’m just rushing headlong into fun things like shopping columns and biohacking and my portfolio companies and my political engagement and hopefully we find the money and solutions to all the bottlenecks which range from family and pain to visas. And yes the bruise on my butt is literal.

Categories
Biohacking

Day 1748 and Putting Testosterone Pellets In My Butt Cheek

Intrepid biohacker that I am, when I learned that my testosterone levels were concerningly low, I began on a program to raise them.

I started with nutrition and supplementation but I already had a diet and supplement routine that was evidence based for raising testosterone levels in women.

I added in DHEA (Dehydroepiandrosterone) at 25mg. Six months of that brought me up to just about half of the lowest baseline acceptable. I was NOT getting adequate results.

My physician prescribed me a cream from a compound pharmacy which unfortunately didn’t agree with my skin. So we were going to get creative.

I had read a blog post from Cate Hall (whose husband Sasha Chapin had helped me on another entirely different vector of my life) on how testosterone pellets changed her life.

She had had teeny tiny testosterone pellets placed into her subcutaneous fat and had remarkable results in terms of energy and focus. This and that happened, and the summer was a mess, but today was the day I finally followed in her footsteps.

Vials of compounded testosterone

We’re started me with 10mg of estradiol (range 6-25mg with 8-10mg being most common), and 75mg of testosterone (range 50-150mg with the most common being 75-100).

We’ll aim for labs at 4-6 weeks after insertion which would represent peak levels. We will repeat dosing at 3-6 month intervals. We will check levels at 4 months or so, or earlier if I feel the effects waning.

Do be warned that within a paragraph or so, there will be images of needles, scalpels, and some blood. So feel free to not scroll down further.

Part of the difficulty with dosing this stuff is that the pellet doses are wonky and frequently out of stock – estradiol comes in 6mg and 10mg increments so 8mg is impossible.

Naturally, we’ve made surprisingly little progress when it comes to women’s health, particularly as it relates to hormones.

Prepared and ready to go

But as I am happy to be a guinea pig and my luteal phase is a mess of migraines and misery I figured I had little to lose and much to gain. I was the first patient my doctor has done the procedure on so if anyone in Bozeman is interested, you can confidently give it a go with him as I’ve survived it.

These cool tubes don’t actually go inside too far but sort of shoot the pellet into the incisions

I was given a local numbing agent with epinephrine. I needed a surprising amount of it but I was a bit nervous. Once I was just able to feel pressure and no pain it was time to make a small incision with a scalpel and in popped the tiny bit of hormone on the left butt cheek.

No big deal at all.

But if you don’t want to see it going in don’t scroll.

Just giving you space to turn back.

A tiny incision in my goose bumped bum with the little pellets easily tucked in

I am all bandaged up and still riding the cortisone of it all but I feel alright. I’ll be adding in progesterone orally to temper the estrogen as that’s another matter. I’m excited to report back on it as if I have even a fraction of Cate’s experience with it I’ll be quite happy. Also it’s about $70 a month so not cheap but not at all expensive for something that could potentially mitigate some long term issues I’ve struggled with for years.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1747 and Hyper Autistic Protestant Work Ethic Beauty Blog

I spent some time being really “in my special interest” today writing about why I think we should give more, and not less, time to beauty. I’ll post it to my new substack tomorrow as that will remain focused in subject matter.

Appearances clearly matter in every facet of life, but we don’t do much to help develop taste even as we face an onslaught of the hyper visual unrealistic world of short form video.

It’s all dopamine drips and quick hits that make it hard to develop taste of your own. At best you found algorithms that suited some things you could enjoy but sincerely held joy is rare. I’ve been able to experience many times and it’s now one keeps going in a cruel world.

I spent so much of my life beating the drumbeat of more access to the secret knowledge of the world only to discover again and again, that even if you offer up to the world pearls, not everyone will want them.

Or as my mother liked to say her Latin teacher said “I’m throwing pearl’s before swine!”

To appreciate the details is to recognize that layer upon layer of irritation worked to a finished pearlescent sheen which seems too delicate to truly show the process. That’s its beauty.

Each layer of culture is built by people who cares about details. And all kinds of details matter. Sometimes the details are financial. Sometimes aesthetic. Sometimes it’s noticing a very specific signal inside a very particular group and being able to admire the elegances.

I myself didn’t think I ever much went in for subtlety of any kind until I spent more of my time in mass markets. I’ve come to realize I was allowed to live without too much push on my own tastes for so much of my life.

And because I care about details, now I know I a stupid amount about the business of appearances because I worked at its heart.

So naturally I’d like to do more to share that knowledge as I realize it is maybe much rarer than I realized.

I intend to do it as a fun addition to my life as I experience so much of life through professional and personal interest in technologies. I’ve got aspirations for a world where we choice to work to be better. That requires a world where beauty can be cultivated in improving ourselves. so you can be certain I appreciate the angles of how we use the existing culturally technologies at hand to create the new ones.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1746 and Processed Pizza Hangover

Yesterday was my birthday and we celebrated it in grand style and semi- tradition by spending two hours walking every single aisle of Costco.

Now you might think all that walking around would leave your body feeling invigorated, and honestly it did, but we finished our grand tour by eating at the Costco food court. Now there are probably ways to eat healthy there but not how we did it.

We went for the classics including the dollar fifty hot dog and soda combination (a bulwark against inflation that has stood longer than seems possible) a slice of pepperoni pizza, a strawberry smoothie and a chocolate chip cookie. I had the pizza, some of the smoothie and half the cookie while Alex had the hotdog, a root beer, the rest of the smooth and a little bit of the cookie.

Our mutual and biohacker in chief Bryan Johnson gifted me a birthday roast of this meal. Which was not only hilariously funny but absolutely true.

Happy Birthday.

We didn’t feel immediately worse but we woke up today with what I’d qualify as a hangover. We can enjoy the above roasting as we generally don’t eat junk food and when we do it’s in more of the local beef category than the hyper processed and hyper preserved category.

Before you think this is a show of virtue, this preference never did anything for my aesthetics or metabolism, it’s just that it always makes me feel bad.

I am quite sensitive to preservatives and refuse to eat most forms of American bread and most varieties of prepared meal. No matter how good the ingredients are, the preservatives just do not agree with me.

It’s not that I’m a healthy eater naturally so much as hyper palatable foods are often hyper preserved foods and that sends my histamine response soaring into cytokine storms. So it’s no wonder I woke up feeling hungover.

I did real damage to myself as Bryan pointed out. We had a lovely time and I like to think the joy and happiness reduced our cortisol enough to bring us some balance. But it was easy to quit drinking for the same reason as it is easy to quit fast food. You feel like shit afterwards.

One of the most amusing fights I recall my parents having was my father taking my kindergarten class to tour a Carl’s Jr kitchen. They gave us a kid’s meal at the end, and while I turned up my nose at the burger, I did eat the french fried potatoes. My very crunchy and wise mother was not happy. “Now she will have a taste for French Fries!”

And damned if she wasn’t right. I still haven’t ever eaten a fast food hamburger. The idea of it is revolting to me and I’ve no clue how that came to be programmed in me. I may be one of the few people in America who has never eaten a Big Mac. But I love french fries. And good potatoes fried in a decent oil never leaves me feeling awful. But bread that doesn’t go moldy? That gives me a hangover every time.

Categories
Aesthetics Biohacking

Day 1745 and a Very Costco Birthday

Alex and I love a Costco date. The beloved warehouse cooperative sells bulk goods and the luxury surprises to its members at fair prices. It remains a top notch place to enjoy time together in search of treasure. Which is why we choose it for my birthday celebration today.

We got some groceries, walked every single aisle, found surprise and delight, and wracked up a couple thousand steps indoors in rainy weather

A birthday date inside Costco in ok

I don’t know quite how we started on the Costco date. It was probably one of our preparedness habits as we check our stocks and resupply as basics get used up and items expire. But Costco is also about the hunt. This Pendleton throw is a fine birthday present.

The seasonal arrivals for Halloween were still going strong but we saw Christmas ready to go. Thanksgiving hasn’t popped up yet but we did see a turkey order form.

You also learn a lot about the biggest trends in health and wellness as their supplement and beauty aisles are the stuff of legend. Creatine and collagen have hit the big time for men and women and everyone is thinking about hormones.

DHEA is a better mix but adaptogens are good

Now the real coup de grace of a Costco trip is the food court. Which is never the caliber of high quality and healthy that you can get in other areas. But it does make for excellent birthday party food.

I had a slice a pizza, half a strawberry smooth and half a cookie
The famed $1.50 hot dog

Alex got himself the infamous hotdog and turned it into a proper Chicago style dog with onions and relish and mustard. I won’t eat encased meats myself.

Our Twitter friends were following along as we posted pictures from each aisle with comments about commodities pricing, cosmetics merchandising and other sundry topics. And as an added treat Bryan Johnson roasted our birthday meal

Julie, a good learning experience. These 2,050 calories will cause a massive insulin spike followed by a post-meal crash. Increased hunger 3-4 hr later. Your arteries constrict and blood vesselsl stiffen. The nitrites are a group 1 carcinogen (increased colorectal cancer risk). Acute oxidative stress. Impaired endothelial function by 20-40% for several hours. Gut microbiome will shift towards pro-inflammatory Firmicutes, an obesity-like profile. The dopamine spike from fat+sugar+salt mimics an addiction reward pathway. Repeated, will desensitize dopamine receptors causing you to escalate stimulation to achieve the same pleasure.
Happy Birthday.

Contemplating life choices is the perfect way to enjoy the day. Plus how great does this new blanket look on our couch?

Categories
Aesthetics Biohacking

Day 1744 and A Yenta For Your Perfect Look

I am considering doing more writing, but instead of it being an exercise in creating more, I am interested in writing about how to consume well, so meet Nice Packaging, a beauty shopping column with a b side about the business of keeping up appearances.

Background on why I want to do this is below, but if you want to be a part of it getting started, I’m going to offer “founding members” for it live 1:1 time with me to craft your perfect routine. Details here

Background

I get a fair amount of joy out of being the person in my social group who everyone goes to for advice on what to buy in the areas where I am most expert. I sort of wish it just could be just category (cosmetics would probably top the list ) but I’ve developed a wide range of interests as I’ve cultivated my tastes over the years so I’m just as likely to be asked what supplements I take for my biohacking as I am to be asked for skincare and cosmetic recommendations.

Chronic disease offers very transparent revealed preferences as I do what works best for my health. A a long career in the style industry means I’ve learned a lot and how to apply it as looking good is often a side effect of feeling good.

I have been in wellness my whole career as it’s not just a matter of having clean clear skin and long hair (though I mostly do) but having been inside the corporate sanctums of everywhere from Goop to Equinox. I learned a lot sourcing for my own makeup brand and I’ve applied the depth of knowledge I have in cosmeceuticals to my own healing as naturally we humans pay more for beauty than we do for health. The cosmetics industry is often light years ahead of standard medical practice.

Other topics I will play with may be more esoteric. I oddly well informed on preparedness thanks to our Montana off grid lifestyle. I’m regularly asked about stocking pharmaceuticals and first kits as those wellness worlds overlap with chronic disease, biohacking and family preparedness. Wellness goes hand in hand with fighting for your own life.

I still travel a great deal so I’ve got travel and packing optimization stories and preferences for days. Having once owned a cosmetics brand that specialized in on-the-go makeup, I can tell you now to pack what you need to look good for any scenario from surviving O’Hare with your family to packing black tie makeup that fits through London Heathrow’s quart bag nightmare.

And finally as an avid reader in the go-to gal for science fiction and reading lists which isn’t as likely to go with the rest but I’m shockingly well read in the genre. And no I don’t mean romantasy. I read hard sci-fi from cyperpunk to space opera. Thinking about what will be popular in the future means living on the cutting edge taste of the right now.

I’ll maintain my daily blog here as this is me time or me space or whatever you might like to call it. I enjoy having the space to ramble about continental philosophy, internet cultural subgroups and their fascinating ecosystems, my own emotional work and becoming version of myself that makes me happy and healthiest.

So I’ll be considering what all this looks like, editorial cadences and how I will integrate which portions of those varied interests into what is most likely going to be a style blog.

Get Started with Me

I can also use your help in getting this off the ground, so I’m offering something special – if you join as a “Founding Member” for the first year (for $300), I’ll spend an hour with you, coming up with your perfect skincare or cosmetics routine, and even send you some products to get started with. And btw, this can be just as helpful for men as for women.

One of my greatest pleasures is putting together cosmetic routines for my friends to test and trial to get you exactly what works for them. I’ve done this for billionaires and working class dollar store shoppers so I promise you I know the market.

I typically do an intake session with you with a questionnaire and some one-one time where we yap about your look, your hopes for them and your ambitions. Then I go over all of your preferences, allergies and issues. With that in mind I create a month or so of samples total for us to experiment with.

I’ll prepare your routine from either my personal brand library of travel sizes (which is enormous) or I decant into sample containers creams, serums, lotions and lotions into one perfect routine. Don’t worry I’m a germaphobe autist.

My goal is to make a routine that matches your skin & hair, and bodily needs perfectly with hour preferences. Things like daily simplicity or complete looksmaxxing, your budget from drugstore to luxury, your comfort level with different kinds of return on investment from Pareto optimization to no routine is too much. And then you test it out and we refine it together. I’m like a yenta for your grooming.

Sign Up Here

Categories
Community Politics

Day 1736 and Putting Good Things Back Into The System

I had a few appointments in town today including two doctor appointments. I like to have my husband with me when the medical system is involved just in case I need a backup or level headed second opinion.

Afterwards we were able to catch a late lunch (nearly happy hour) at one of Bozeman’s trendy no seed oil spots. It being an odd hour for dining we could hear the conversations at the bar as the place was mostly empty.

A virgin Huckleberry margarita

There were two couples, one Boomer pair and the other geriatric millennials, who as it turned out both celebrating their anniversaries this weekend. The out of town Boomers had come for a Yellowstone and Tetons visit while the younger couple turned out to be local farmers in the valley and were excited to learn the tourists had something in common with them.

The Boomers had also run a farm in Florida but retired and sold it as it is apparently nigh impossible to grow oranges for juice in Florida anymore. The conversation had turned to everyone’s frustrations with the tariffs and the pressures it put on their work.

No one could remain competitive as cost inputs kept going up. Finding labor for smaller farms was getting more expensive and harder to secure. And land developers increasingly competed to acquire land piece by piece from older larger family farms who struggled to compete. We were full on eavesdropping at this point.

The husband in the young farmer pair was dressed just like Alex. He could have been Alex for how closely their styles matched. When he left for the bathroom, his wife said to the older couple how hard it has been recently.

Land he’d worked for years on a lease had just recently been sold to developers at an enormous markup. They understood the demand for housing but how could anyone continue to farm and make a living?

Between tariffs, labor costs and ravenous unmet demand for housing that could only be financed by large scale real estate developers the era of the family farm felt over. Only the big dogs could afford the costs and regulatory overhead.

We were finishing up our meal as we nodded along. Alex said to me “ok I know we don’t do this very often but I think we should pick up the meal for the younger couple.” Being on the verge of tearing up myself I couldn’t have agreed more.

I waved over the waitress and asked if this was possible. She seemed a little surprised “the whole meal?!” But it wasn’t a crazy amount. It was about $100. We sneakily paid our tab and theirs as quickly as we could. We didn’t want to make a thing of it. We just wanted to make their day a little better.

We got up and said to both couples that we couldn’t help overhearing it was both their anniversary weekends coming up and we wanted to wish them many more happy years together.

We thanked them both for keeping America fed and tried to casually saunter out before anyone noticed what we’d done. Hopefully this added a little cheer to their day. In a system as big and opaque and impersonal as America it can feel like there is nothing any of us can do.

So when you can do something even if it’s a small thing like picking up a meal we should do so. America is an idea but we are also a people and we stick together even if our elites make stupid decisions.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1734 and Oink Oink Slop Slop Piggie Piggie

It’s seems a tad unfair to use our porcine friends as comic stands in whenever we wish to mock trough consumers of remixed refuse. Pigs are intelligent animals whose biological closeness to human may allow us to use their organs in a pinch. We insult ourselves when we insult pigs.

And yet every time some new form of processed artificial intelligence content drops, we call it slop. Sooie!

Neither pigs nor humans deserve that kind of diet, even if we are both omnivores willing to consume just about anything. Staying alive sometimes requires a bit less discretion in diet.

Presumably so does staying spiritually healthy as well. If there is no Mozart to be had, I’ll take Moby. If there is no Melville then we take a pithy viral tweet. Where is the event horizon of art?

Michael Pollen called it the omnivores dilemma in our food system. When it comes to our art, it doesn’t seem like much of a dilemma. More creation and more tools for creativity are a social good but when it becomes regurgitation and re-ingestion does it not seem liable to make us soul sick?

And yet the industrialization of food has inspired the industrialization of all forms of content. Scale has indeed become the standard way we’ve come to feed our bodies and mind. It was Gut with Gutenberg but where are the limits? Do we even know?

Facebook and OpenAI both released new content creation tools this week that were widely derided as slop factories in my circles.

Of course, I spend my time on the written web amongst producers of the tools that produce the slop. We think we know better and can use these tools wisely. We know what’s in it, or at least we have the know how that programs the machines extrude it. Some of us have some sense of the original material but precious few.

The engineers who built the Doritos factory probably enjoy a cheesy corn chip too even if they can afford aged cheddar thanks to pay which came with popularity of their creation. Imagine how a medieval peasant would have felt encountering that much extreme nacho cheesiness.

The intelligentsia of the written web like Substack, Twitter and Reddit (admittedly that being an intelligentsia is a funny conceit) presumes the unwashed TikTok, Reels and Shorts masses have no taste and will consume anything and without end.

Video? How gauche! But isn’t it just so funny when our elders can’t tell the video of the lady breaking the bridge with a rock isn’t real. Ha ha! Stupid oldsters. We don’t realize soon we won’t be able to tell either. Walter Benjamin knew it was coming. He aura farmed too.

My brother told me recently that our grandmother worked in a hotdog factory and refused to eat processed meat for the rest of her life. I also won’t eat hot dogs or sausages so maybe the sense memory runs deep.

I admit that I feel the same way about encased meats as I do about short form video content. No amount of condiments or “answering to a higher authority” will entice me into consuming the stuff. ConAgra owns Hebrew National now and they answer to the stock market not God.

Even if there are artisanal varietals of processed meats (and processed content), I struggle with the ease with which it bypasses my satiety filters. We have peptides for overconsumption of food but not yet overconsumption of dopamine.

It’s fine if we crave whole meats and whole books. Or at least a long form essay. Something can be created with the finest ingredients carefully sourced and prepared by caring hands. And yet we know man cannot live on tweets and sausage alone. Pigs probably shouldn’t either. Sooie!!!!