The Healthy Deviant

A Rule Breaker's Guide to Being Healthy in an Unhealthy World

I’ve been eagerly awaiting for my dear friend Pilar Gerasimo to write a book that captures her wisdom on how to Optimize our lives and give the world all we’ve got. And... The wait is over! Pilar is one of the wisest people I know. Among many other things, she created Experience Life magazine (which currently reaches over 3 million people per year) and is the co-host of the Living Experiment podcast with Dallas Hartwig (co-founder of Whole30). The lead quote for this book perfectly captures the thesis of the book. It’s from Jiddu Krishnamurti. He tells us: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Yep. That’s about right. In a society in which the VAST majority of us are sick and tired and anxious and depressed and, well, blah... IT IS NO MEASURE OF HEALTH TO BE WELL ADJUSTED TO THAT SICK SOCIETY. (Right?) Enter: The Healthy Deviant. This “Rule Breaker’s Guide" is packed with Big Ideas on how we can "Be Healthy in an Unhealthy World.”

Big Ideas

Unhealthy Default Reality

Meet the UDR.
Healthy Deviance

Meet the resistance.
Renegade Rituals

x3: AM + Day + PM. Repeat.
Ditch Your Diet

Focus on QUALITY.
Something Wrong?

Let’s find it right.

“Currently, we live in a culture that produces more unhealthy, unhappy people than healthy, happy ones.

In fact, right now, the unhealthy-to-healthy ratio is arguably running about a hundred to one. … If you are currently a healthy and happy person in today’s United States of America (or in any one of a growing number of countries now following our lead), you represent a tiny and shrinking minority. You are, statistically speaking, an endangered species. …

In my mind these facts raise a rather captivating question: What kind of society makes being healthy and happy so difficult that only a single-digit percentage of its population can hope to pull it off?

The answer is self-evident: A sick society. And within a sick society—one where chronic illness, obesity, drug dependence, anxiety, and depression are rapidly becoming the prevailing norms—what does it mean to be one of the few who buck those unhealthy odds? It means that you have to be prepared to successfully resist your society’s standard way of doing business. You have to oppose its rules and defy its conventions. You have to make all kinds of inconvenient and unpopular choices. You have to become a sort of renegade freak—or at least be willing to think and act like one some of the time.

The great news is that this does not require superhuman willpower, single-digit body-fat percentages, buns of steel, or an endless parade of boneless, skinless chicken breasts. What it does require: A willingness to toss some official-looking rule books out the window, to suspend some self-torpedoing beliefs and assumptions, and to begin doing some things … differently.

That starts with understanding one basic, disturbing fact: If you aren’t breaking the rules, you’re probably breaking yourself.”

~ Pilar Gerasimo from The Healthy Deviant

Welcome to the first Note of 2020.

I’ve been eagerly awaiting for my dear friend Pilar Gerasimo to write a book that captures her wisdom on how to Optimize our lives and give the world all we’ve got. And… The wait is over! :)

As we’ve discussed, Pilar is one of the wisest people I know. Among many other things, she created Experience Life magazine (which currently reaches over 3 million people per year) and is the co-host of the Living Experiment podcast with Dallas Hartwig (co-founder of Whole30).

The lead quote for this book perfectly captures the thesis of the book *and* it happens to be THE wisdom gem I most frequently repeated in our inaugural Heroic Coach class.

It’s from Jiddu Krishnamurti. He tells us: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

Yep. That’s about right. In a society in which the VAST majority of us are sick and tired and anxious and depressed and, well, blah… IT IS NO MEASURE OF HEALTH TO BE WELL ADJUSTED TO THAT SICK SOCIETY. (Right?)

Enter: The Healthy Deviant.

This “Rule Breaker’s Guide to Being Healthy in an Unhealthy World” is, of course, packed with Big Ideas. (Get a copy here.) And, of course, I’m excited to share some of my favorites we can apply to our lives TODAY, so let’s jump straight in!

The Unhealthy Default Reality

“Research published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings reveals that 97.3 percent of us aren’t managing to maintain even four of the most basic habits required for long-term health. The four habits considered in this research were:

Eating a reasonably balanced, nutritious diet…
Getting ‘adequate’ activity (a weekly total of 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise, as tracked by an accelerometer).
Maintaining a healthy body composition (under 20 percent body fat for men; under 30 percent for women, as measured by a DEXA scan).
Not smoking (confirmed by a blood test).

It’s wild to think that only a single-digit percentage of U.S. adults (2.7 percent!) is managing to do these essential, self-preserving things. But wait, it gets worse, because the research looking at those four supposedly basic health habits did not even begin to consider a number of other lifestyle factors that studies have shown to be equally important (or potentially even more important) to our health. Those factors include:

Getting enough high-quality sleep.
Effectively managing or moderating stress.
Maintaining strong, supportive social connections.

The science is clear: Regardless of how well you eat, even if you exercise regularly, don’t smoke, and maintain a healthy body composition, if you don’t get enough deep sleep, don’t manage stress, and don’t have a supportive community, you are going to be at much higher risk for getting sick and depressed. You are also dramatically more likely to die early.”

So… Yah…

That’s from Part 1: “The Crazy That Passes for Normal,” Chapter 1: “Welcome, Rule Breaker” in which we get introduced to some stats on just how unhealthy our society is.

Get this.

50% of U.S. adults are diagnosed with a chronic illness.

68% are overweight or obese.

70% are taking at least one prescription drug. (For folks over 60, the average is FIVE.)

80% are mentally or emotionally “not flourishing.”

97.3% are not maintaining healthy habits: decent nutrition, adequate exercise, not smoking, healthy body composition.

Which leads us to Pilar’s guess that 99% are not healthy, happy or on track to stay that way.

Which leads us to one big sad face.

Which leads us to what she calls the “Unhealthy Default Reality” of our modern culture.

Which leads us to the need for the book and the subject of our next Big Idea…

Healthy Deviance

“There is, interestingly, a branch of sociology dedicated to studying ‘positive deviance.’ This field of study investigates the bright-spot outliers who succeed in the midst of challenging situations. It attempts to discern how a scrappy few are managing to solve or work around intractable problems in ways that allow them to survive or thrive where most others do not. It explores how creative and resourceful individuals are figuring out solutions that experts, authorities, and large, official organizations have not. It studies and seeks to emulate those who are deviating in good ways, from a not-so-good status quo.

Healthy Deviance is, in essence, a form of conscious, positive deviance. It’s not a failure of social compliance. On the contrary, it’s a badge of nonconformist courage.

If that notion appeals to you, let’s be courageous together.”

Isn’t it cool that there’s a branch of sociology dedicated to studying those outliers who buck the unhealthy norm and succeed in the midst of challenging situations?!

Sociologists call that “positive deviance.” It’s a good thing.

Pilar, of course, calls it “Healthy Deviance.”

Here’s her definition: “A Healthy Deviant is any person who willingly defies unhealthy norms and conventions in order to achieve a high level of vitality, resilience, and autonomy.”

It’s what Krishnamurti was calling for when he reminded us that being so well adjusted to such a sick society WASN’T a sign of health. In fact, BY DEFINITION, to be super-well-adjusted to TODAY’s society, is a great way to be sick.

As I read the intro-rallying cry to healthy nonconformity, I thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In fact, his essay-manifesto on Self-Reliance is a nice complement to Pilar’s book-manifesto. Check out those Note for more.

For now, as we embark on our Healthy Deviant Hero’s Journeys and deliberately challenge society’s norms, know this: “And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity, and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster.”

btw: One of Pilar’s practices is to “Act ‘As If’” you were already the most radiantly alive Healthy Deviant You. She talks about the power of neuroplasticity and encourages us to “consider how you would think and act if you already were a healthy, happy, fully empowered person. How would you stand, sit, and carry yourself? How would you approach eating? How would you care for your body and advocate for your needs? How would you relate to other people? How would you go about your day? Even imagining these scenarios can be powerful, but actually performing them, trying them on in real life, is transformative.”

Which reminds me of this little fable Emerson shares in Self-Reliance: “That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact, that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason, and finds himself a true prince.”

In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee wrote: “‘Adjustment’ to a sick and insane environment is of itself not ‘health’ but sickness and insanity.” That is so true, and it sounds a lot like that Jiddu Krishnamurti quote I shared at this book’s outset: It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

Pilar Gerasimo

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot

Renegade Rituals

“The Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott once said, ‘Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.’ And I could not agree more. These rituals, like most rituals, return to you what you put into them. They don’t have to be fancy or complicated. They just need to be taken as matters of importance. Eminently worthwhile in their own right, they become even more so if you regard them as semi-sacred and regularly allocate even a small amount of your time and attention to performing them with consistency and care.

The Renegade Rituals include:

The Morning Minutes: A brief, pleasant morning ritual designed to help you reclaim your waking moments and better manage whatever the world throws your way.
Ultradian Rhythm Breaks (URBs): Short, periodic rest periods that optimize your capacity by supporting your body’s natural energy cycles, self-regulation mechanism, and critical repair processes.
The Nightly Wind-Down Ritual: A calming pre-sleep transition for your body and mind, designed to help you get much-needed rest, marshal essential resources, and create the conditions for next-day resilience and success.

Taken together, these simple practices form the structural backbone of the Healthy Deviant Adventure Program. They also help you develop the figurative ‘backbone’ required to stay your chosen course, and defend yourself against unhealthy influences. Repeated regularly, these practices provide the foundation for healthy autonomy while maximizing vitality and productivity. They also make your life more pleasurable and rewarding—providing whole-person nourishment, recovery, and relief that you’ve probably been missing.”

That’s from Part 3: “The Way of the Healthy Deviant.”

Part 1 gives us an overview of the challenges we face in our “Unhealthy Default Reality” and what it means to be a Healthy Deviant. Part 2 helps us develop insight into our “Healthy Deviant Hero’s Journeys.” Part 3 is all about the practical skills. Then we put those skills in action in Part 4’s 14-day Healthy Deviant Adventure Program.

So… Pilar kicks off Part 3 with “The Nonconformist Competencies.”

There are three: “Amplified Awareness” (or being able to step back far enough from the Unhealthy Default Reality to SEE the bigger picture and its alternative lifestyle choices), “Preemptive Repair” (proactively taking care of yourself *before* you lose your mojo), and “Continuous Growth and Learning (approaching the whole game of life as one big experiment).

The competencies are supported by “Renegade Rituals.” We’ll talk about them a bit more in a moment. For now, I want to chat about the idea of honoring what’s importance to us with RITUALS.

I love the Joseph Campbell quote Pilar shares: “A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. … your consciousness is being re-minded of the wisdom of your life.”

I also love how Tal Ben-Shahar puts it in Happier: “For athletes, being a top performer is a deeply held value, and therefore they create rituals around training; for most people, hygiene is a deeply held value, and therefore they create the ritual of brushing their teeth. If we hold our personal happiness as a value and want to become happier, then we need to form rituals around that, too.”

Pilar’s “Renegade Rituals”?

They (not surprisingly!) mirror our core Carpe Diem rituals.

Start your morning with some pre-input “Morning Minutes” wins. BEFORE you turn on your smartphone, give yourself an opportunity to start with some calm, energized energy. Then, as you move through your day, OSCILLATE with Ultradian Rhythm Breaks! And… Wrap up your day with a nice “Nightly Wind-Down Ritual” to give yourself a shot at a great night of sleep.

Repeat. Voila! Energy is getting more and more Optimized.

P.S. I love Ultradians. In fact, I JUST got back from a 90-minute on, 20-minute off no-tech Ultradian (featuring a little snack, a little kitchen cleaning, a 1k row and a little dabbling with the puzzle Emerson and I are working on! :)

Pilar says: “Ultradian means ‘many times a day.’ Rhythm, refers to the regular oscillating (up-and-down) wave patterns these cycles follow. The primary purpose of ultradian rhythms is to manage the cycles of energy production, output, and recovery that occur in all humans (as well as animals, plants, yeast, and fungi). Basically, ultradian rhythms are like mini-versions of circadian rhythms (our twenty-four-hour cycles of sleep and waking), except that they are much shorter, occurring many times over a single day. Like circadian rhythms, they have a powerful effect on your body, and when they are disrupted or ignored, they can really mess with your health, happiness, and general well-being.”

Ditch your diet

“Interestingly, what does seem to work for most people over the long haul is by far the least tested, least restrictive, and least commercially hyped of all dietary approaches. It is not a diet at all. It’s simply eating mostly real, whole, nutrient-dense foods and avoiding crappy, processed, addictive, inflammatory food-like products high in flours, sugars, oils, salt, and toxic additives. There is some exciting new science to support this. Consider this research, as reported by the New York Times in February 2018:

Anyone who has ever been on a diet knows that the standard prescription for weight loss is to reduce the amount of calories you consume.

But a new study, published Tuesday in JAMA, may turn that advice on its head. It found that people who cut back on added sugar, refined grains and highly processed foods while concentrating on eating plenty of vegetables and whole foods — without worrying about counting calories or limiting portion sizes — lost significant amounts of weight over the course of a year.

The strategy worked for people whether they followed diets that were mostly low in fat or mostly low in carbohydrates. And their success did not appear to be influenced by their genetics or their insulin-response to carbohydrates, a finding that casts doubt on the increasingly popular idea that different diets should be recommended to people based on their DNA makeup or on their tolerance for carbs or fat.

The research lends strong support to the notion that diet quality, not quantity, is what helps people lose and manage their weight most easily in the long run. It also suggests that health authorities should shift away from telling the public to obsess over calories and instead encourage Americans to avoid processed foods that are made with refined starches and added sugar, like bagels, white bread, refined flour and sugary snacks and beverages, said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University.

“This is the road map to reducing the obesity epidemic in the United States,” said Dr. Mozaffarian, who was not involved in the new study. “It’s time for U.S. and other national policies to stop focusing on calories and calorie counting.”

Want the ideal “diet”?

Well… Pilar tells us (adamantly!) to forget about the diet per se and focus on QUALITY. Eat more “real, whole, nutrient-dense foods and avoiding crappy, processed, addictive, inflammatory food-like products high in flours, sugars, oils, salt, and toxic additives.”

Something “wrong”? Find it right

“You know the fastest way to stop spiraling downward? Instead of finding everything unfair and wrong, you can accept it for what it is and find it right. Wha?! Find all this struggle and suffering right? Yes. Perhaps better than right: Perfect. Because even as the UDR [Unhealthy Default Reality] subjects you to all this confusion and humiliation, the UDR is making you stronger. In the process of breaking you down, it is also giving you all the information and training you need to outsmart it, to outmaneuver it, and, eventually, as a once-naive apprentice, to take the pebble from its hand.

You stop losing and start winning in relation to the UDR the moment you decide that this is what is going on, that this is just how it is, and thus precisely how it should be. The brilliant Byron Katie calls this creative, constructive, acceptance-based approach to living ‘loving what is.’ But even if you don’t love how things are right now, you can use this present reality to your advantage to become a bigger, better, more distilled, and extraordinary version of yourself.”

That’s from Day 3 of our 14-Day Healthy Deviant Adventure.

Something “wrong” in your life? What if we could “find it right”? Wouldn’t THAT be empowering? Indeed it is. Pilar goes so far as to tell us that when we do it right we can become “antifragile” a la the Nassim Taleb’s wisdom we come back to so often.

So… Got a challenge (or three) in your life Today? Fantastic. It is what it is. Let’s use it all as antifragile FUEL for our Healthy Heroic Deviant’s journey. TODAY.

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