ColdShower #62🥶🚿 Mile 30 meditation, managing stress, and weight loss drugs
Santa also has the ability to rob every house on Earth, without being caught.
Shower thought via Reddit.
The ColdShower: Weekly thoughts for better health, habits, and happiness.
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas:
The space between two thoughts
Strategies to manage stress and anxiety
Can money lead to weight loss?
Recharge
Seeing epiphanies
If you’ve been following along, you know I completed 24 hours (100 miles) of running a few weeks ago (which I’m still paying for).
In the moment, there were few points of clarity. No epiphanies. And no late-night hallucinations. It was a dogfight. A grueling test of will.
Post-race clarity
The lessons I sought have been exposing themselves as the weeks roll on. With more time to reflect, I’ve begun receiving little nuggets of wisdom. One of which takes me back to the most memorable part of my 24 hours.
Mile 30 Meditation
At around mile 30, I popped on my headphones for the first time and pressed play on my “100-song-100-mile” playlist.
The first track: Mid-America Motel - A monologue with an undertone of ephemeral beats.
By this point, I was tired. I had 70 miles to go, an insurmountable distance given that I’d only ever run 50 miles up to that point. The race was “just beginning” when the lyrics hit me like a bus. (Take a look).
To paraphrase, I stood in between my two thoughts, watched them break, and came back into my mind thinking, “I can be anything I want”.
At mile 30, I realized I was in control of my thoughts, and my thoughts would determine the outcome of my race.
I was no longer “running”. This was no longer a footrace. It was a decision not to stop.
—Keep pushing forward.
Refine
Substack writer feature
This week I found Nita Jain’s Substack - Evolving with Nita Jain. As I face my own post-race blues, I found her Strategies to Manage Stress & Anxiety a great read.
Nita gives us an RX for resilience, 3 steps to tackle anxiety, and breaks down the results of studies on float tanks.
Rethink
The link between money and weight loss
Rethink: Could you lose weight with an additional $1,000 per month?
The rise of semaglutide
I’ve been casually following the increased popularity of semaglutide, a traditional diabetes medication that’s been recently approved to treat weight loss.
Disclaimer: I’m not a doctor. I also have a bias towards natural interventions vs. prescription drugs whenever possible.
The fact is obesity is a growing problem in America. 2 in 5 adults are obese, and in 2019 alone the annual medical cost of obesity was 173 billion dollars.
Semaglutide is making its way into this market as a promising approach for treating obesity with effective results.
Cost-benefit analysis and alternatives
The rub: Semaglutide prescriptions currently average over $1000 per month in the US. Our healthcare and insurance system is determining now how to pay for these drugs.
This leads us back to my initial question… What other weight loss strategies could be implemented for $1000 per month?
What’s disturbing is the high level of weight gain that occurs when patients stop taking semaglutide. These drugs are not a cure and there’s no agreed upon timeframe for maintaining their use.
I’m glad I’m not in charge of the US Healthcare system and have to make these tough choices on where to spend money. But I can’t help but think about what other effective weight loss options there are with an additional $1,000 per month — dieticians, personal training, accountability coaching, meal plans, etc.
*Food* for thought
What We're Into This Week
Still On The Toilet?
THANK YOU for making it to the end. Go get em!
When you are not afraid to do it wrong the first time , you will eventually get it right --Fortune cookie