Rebuilding My Body & Starting Over After Spinal Fusion Surgery

How about this, you guys? We're outside. Outside of the black void. It's like another dimension out here. The sun is shining. It's a beautiful day. And I'm back with another solo episode of the podcast. The first two that I've done have been received with overwhelming positivity. Thank you for that. I'm gonna be doing more of these. When I put the word out that I was looking for questions to answer, thinking I was gonna do an AMA, maybe answer four or five questions. The vast majority of the responses that I got pivoted around my diet and my fitness routine in the wake of spinal fusion surgery as I engage with my recovery and in this sort of rebuilding process. So this AMA is gonna be singularly focused on that because I have a lot to say about this. And in addition to a lifetime of training experience, experience with nutrition, I've also learned a lot over this past year, many things that I think are salient and hopefully helpful and applicable to your life. So diet, training, longevity, reinvention, transformation, let's fucking go. So the way I wanna open this is with a little bit of background because I don't wanna assume that everybody knows my story. I was a swimmer as a young person. I competed at Stanford University in the late 1980s as a butterfly at a pretty high level, kind of a bench warmer on that two time NC two a winning team, but a member of that team nonetheless where I was training every single day with Olympic gold medalist and world record holders and NC two a and American record holders. And I bring that up solely to make the point that I know a lot about training. I've been pushing my body and submitting to voluntary suffering for the better part of my entire life. So that was the eighties. The nineties was a decade of decadence where I pursued my first career as a professional alcoholic. Needless to say, that did not work out so well. At 31, I ended up getting sober. And so I spent, that decade, the decade of my thirties, trying to repair the wreckage of my life, rebuild myself up, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually so that I could become a productive member of society. And during that time, I was very career focused. I wasn't focused on my physical fitness. That fell by the wayside. I ended up gaining about 50 pounds, living this sedentary fast food lifestyle. And that came to a head shortly before I turned 40 when I had a bit of a reckoning, this sort of existential crisis about what I was doing with my life, pursuing this career in corporate law that coincided with a health scare one evening that was an inciting incident that led me to, basically, reinventing my life whole cloth, changing my relationship with food and with nutrition and with physical activity. And that led …