This blogging gig has taken me further than I ever thought I’d go with it. I’m on year eight now and looking back it seems crazy. They say one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it and I have learned so much writing this blog for you. It’s an experience that I would not trade for anything. I’ve learned so much, met so many fantastic people, and have grown so much as a person through this journey.
I don’t know how much longer I will be able to keep this blog up. Work, family, and life are taking up more and more of my time and I find that this site does not give me the same energy that it did years ago. Who knows this could all change, there have certainly been other times when I’ve felt the enthusiasm ebb but have come roaring back to life. However at the same time I do feel that things are changing in my own life to a significant degree.
So I want to do something. I want to lay out everything that I’d want to tell you if I only had a few pages to do so. Now granted this essay will probably stretch a bit farther than a few pages but nevertheless…I want to make it succinct as possible. The way I’m treating it, is if I was about to pass and had a few pages that I could write a note to my sons. Let them know some of the habits and things in life that I think will make the biggest difference for them.
Things that I think could truly change your life. Not that it’ll make your life perfect by any means or that these are the only habits that you need, they’re not. They are just what has made the biggest difference in my life. They have helped and guided me through so much and make me a stronger, wiser, more loving, and happier person in the process.
And after all isn’t that what we’re all after?
I’ve narrowed this down to five key things that I think will make the biggest difference in your life. After over 1,500 articles, countless books, and years spent at this…
This is what it’s been narrowed down too.
Let’s dive in.
If I Only Had A Few Pages – Diet As The Foundation Of Health
If your diet isn’t right then any workouts you do, supplements you take, even sleep you get isn’t going to take you to vibrant and true health. Let food be thy medicine. Diet is the foundation of health, always has been, always will be. Specifically I’d say to eat nose to tail. Boil broths, drink fermented drinks, eat organs. Eat the way that the human animal was designed to eat. Do this and so many maladies, sicknesses, both mental and physical, would clear up.
I think this would be the single best step that a society could take to make its members as strong and health as possible. You need to eat animals. Whole fat too. Eggs, organs, red meat, dairy, all that good stuff. The red and white diet of the Mongols, or at least how it’s commonly understood, is not a bad place to start. Meat and real unprocessed dairy. Don’t just eat ground beef and drink water and think that’s a complete diet.
You need liver, eggs, milk for most people, the bones boiled into broth, fermented drinks, and so on and so forth. There are many movements out there right now that are moving in the right direction on this. Weston A. Price does a decent job of providing the basics of this but then I’d say you need to take it from there and make it your own. See what works for you and how your body responds. Here’s a quick but not comprehensive list of goods to get it.
Organ meats, raw milk, game meats, raw dairy in general, whole eggs, red meats, fish and chicken, properly prepared vegetables, fermented drinks like kombucha, kefir, or the like. Ferments that go on food like sauerkraut. Raw honey. Broths and stocks made from bones, collagen, and other parts. And more.
If I Only Had A Few Pages – Man Must Fight
I think every man should do a combat sport, at least through the formative years. Then take up hiking or something else as they age. But through adolescence I believe that a boy must be molded through controlled violence. He must become familiar with it, understand it, learn to respect it. Hunting is also a good activity to take up later, though it should be done throughout life. But when a boy is young then he should fight. Before I began fighting there were things in my life that just did not work.
Fighting lined up something within my soul that the gym, football, or other sports just never did. I think man must fight, he must be comfortable with violence. And moving a barbell from point A to point B just does not develop the same qualities that getting in the cage/ring/mat does. I’m just speaking what my truth is here, others will think otherwise and they are welcome to do so. But as a lifelong athlete there is something about combat that drills deeper than simply stronger muscles or a more focused mind. Something spiritual.
This relationship with violence is so central to man’s life. A man must learn to control his capacity for it, he must learn to control his emotions, and he must also know how to defend himself and those he cares about. When you have been tested and hardened by the ring there is a quiet confidence that radiates out from you. Something the man who plays with balls or the stick lifter will never understand.
Perhaps I sound a bit arrogant, I don’t mean to be, again I am simply speaking my truth. I think all boys should do combat sports and most men, even the old can work on things, though again if transferring to something like hiking in one’s older age can also be good if one has the foundation of violence that all men need.
I may be wrong here,
But I don’t think I am.
There Will Be More To Come…
Like I said this will likely run more than a few pages. But I will try to keep it succinct. I thank you for reading and will continue with this series next week.
God Bless,
-Charles Sledge
