Health Kick
It started, to the extent that these things could be said to start, when he found out that his deodorant was making his dick shrink. It might sound crazy—it sounded crazy to him, too. It is crazy. Basically, his old, reliable, brand-name deodorant was packed to the gills with synthetic, estrogen-mimicking compounds. Xenoestrogens, they’re called. Just one of a host of endocrine disrupting chemicals, Xenoestrogens functionally mimic the estrogen that a body naturally produces, binding to the body’s estrogen receptors for their similarity to human sex hormone 17β-estradiol (E2). Which, this binding, permitted all sorts of interactions with the body’s estrogen receptors, leading to all sorts of hormonal malfunctions that, at least in humans and mice, adversely affected penis development. Meaning, in layman’s terms, that there was a non-zero chance that the deodorant he dutifully rolled under his arms every morning, three-four-five swipes, just so, was actively loading up his body with man-made estrogen and making his dick wither away.
It’s not as if it was so hard for him to find a new stick of deodorant. As a matter of fact, he found one that same night. That was the thing he’d come to realize in his time probing the depths of just how deeply modern society poisoned its inhabitants: nearly everything we consumed was toxic, but that which could not be eliminated could be replaced. He knew he would come across his fair share of snake oil salesmen. He was, at this point, well acquainted with the fitness internet. He knew that the red, bulging men selling him supplements did not get that red and that bulging off the strength of their supplements alone. But he didn’t care whether the man hawking capsules of freeze-dried beef liver was secretly taking steroids; what he cared about was that the things he bought worked.
And that’s the thing: they did work. Nearly every radical change he had made to his life made him feel healthier, stronger, more aligned. When he started scanning ingredient lists for seed oils after learning how polyunsaturated fats formed into a sort of anti-metabolic sludge once inside the body, his recalcitrant gut receded. He started eating meat for nearly every meal and his veins began to bulge. After jamming his tongue into the roof of his mouth for enough excruciating hours in a row, his jaw muscles actually did begin to show. He knew how insane he looked smearing eucalyptus, raw egg, and coconut oil underneath his armpits; he also knew that every guy in the gym locker room eyeing his paleo-Bateman routine wished that they could look like him.
I guess it’s unfair to say it started that way. It started, God’s honest truth, with the basics. The realizations that anybody who has spent five minutes thinking about these things would consider incontrovertible truths. Things like: calories are units of energy, and if you expend more energy than you consume, you enter a caloric deficit and lose weight. Like: if you lift progressively heavier weights, your repeatedly tear and rebuild your muscles, causing them to grow. Like: it is probably not a good idea to eat at McDonald’s all the time. Nobody batted an eye when he began to incorporate what he had learned into his daily routine. If anything, people celebrated him. It was when he got into the deeper shit, so to speak, that the edges turned a bit rougher.
At first, he was embarrassed to take seriously the notion that modern society wanted him weak, withering, and dependent. It was the type of histrionic nonsense that he used to laugh about with his friends. Pick up artists, anti-vaxxers, the forum-poisoned freaks. Then he stopped drinking alcohol and started drinking raw milk and his friends began to depress and then disgust him and he wished, more than anything, that he’d never let that experimental pharmaslop into his bloodstream. People did not like to hear that beer was full of phytoestrogens. It was common knowledge that congress was bought and sold; to suggest that the Food and Drug Administration was, too, was another thing altogether.
Every revelation was both a moment of empowerment and an occasion for grieving. Learning how to be the man he was meant to be required ruing every moment that he allowed himself to be poisoned by a sickly cabal. When he reddened during his daily sun exposure, he knew it was his fault, the fault of all the years he had spent slathering himself in sunscreen, convinced slavishly that a disgusting white paste was preventing, rather than rapidly accelerating, cancerous basal cells.
He had not transformed so much as uncovered himself. He knew that he had grown less sick than the people around him, but the knowledge of his own sickness sat lumplike upon his diaphragm. He knew this wasn’t good—that the stress choking him triggered cortisol production in his adrenal glands, spiking his blood pressure, inflaming his joints, thinning his prematurely precarious head of hair. Daily ice baths helped with this until he realized that his city’s tap water was swimming with endocrine disruptors, heavy metals, and pharmaceutical backwash. He was confronted daily by his fundamental impurity.
He was going to make a change. He couldn’t do it anymore—destroying his eyesight and posture as an office drone, bombarding himself with destructive blue light, buying pesticide-sprayed, plastic-wrapped produce at his local mega-store, weaving through sputtering cars on his daily walks, watching polyester shorts bleed microplastics into the anemic, hollow-eyed gym-goers to his left and right. He couldn’t keep meeting women at dingy, low-vibrational bars and learning that they either intended to poison themselves with birth control or poison him with plastic condoms. He wanted to live off the earth, in the sun, barefoot, surrounded by those who knew that they had been born into a sick time and a sick world.
He arrived one day at the coast. He walked in the sand, felt the sun beat on his skin. The surf washed his feet and receded with a roar, as if God were addressing him directly. He felt, for the first time in as long as he could remember, that he was where he should be. He walked into the local butcher shop on his path back to the bungalow, his sandy feet met with a welcoming smile. Here was a man who knew intimately the cows he slaughtered, who could vouch wholeheartedly that his meat was untainted by chemicals, pesticides, and hormones. Here was a man that this world had tried to destroy; one he could look in the eye.
He ordered two pounds of ground beef, which he would prepare raw with a glug of olive oil and a handful of pasture-raised eggs. The butcher rang him up and handed him a receipt. The thermal, bisphenol A-coated, Xenoestrogenic plastic sheet crinkled gently in the afternoon breeze. He withdrew with a shiver.