“I’m an indoor human,” I joke occasionally. Only thing is—it’s not a joke. I am!

I’m sure this will all change by necessity when I have kids and spend more time outdoors, but I don’t want to react to life, I want to create it, and I don’t like the idea of being an indoor human.

There are problems with being an indoor human.

Being an indoor human is deluding. We forget about the real environment when we’re indoor humans. We don’t look at the stars and stare in amazement, and think about life on our fragile, tiny planet. We don’t wonder about where all the trash we throw away goes. We don’t get valuable sun and fresh air. And typically we don’t get enough activity.

I just spent five days in Mexico being an outdoor human. Of course, I had to apply sunscreen and seek out la sombra to avoid the sun as much as possible, but I was an outdoor human. I got well over 10,000 steps per day. My feet, calves, and legs got plenty of work. I got plenty of fresh air. My whole perspective changed.

If you’re an office worker, you might spend your days in an uninspiring cubicle environment. If you’re a factory worker, you spend your days in an oppressive time- and metric-driven environment. If you’re a truck driver, you’re in your truck, on your butt all day. A teacher? In her classroom. It goes on.

And then, we come home to our castles. We shut ourselves in. Some live in apartments and don’t have any reason to go outside and trim the grass or plant flowers. Many don’t reach out to their neighbors except for an occasional wave as we drive by, indoors, in our cars.

So, we’re indoor humans. So what? Isn’t this just a natural evolution of humanity? Where one day it’ll be all mind-driven and if we trash our environment we’ll just inhabit space as Stephen Hawking is talking about?

I for one hope not.

We need to pull away. Pull away from the lure of the device—the tablet, the smartphone—in your hand, and open your eyes and look at your environment closely. The physical environment. Your body. Your food. Your house. Your neighborhood. Your community. Your office building. The people surrounding you. The amount of trash you’re creating.

Instead of inward oriented, we need to be outward oriented. Instead of indoor humans, we need to be outdoor humans.

I suppose it was inevitable. Years ago, sitting at a Brazilian Steakhouse with friends, I joked that I was busy getting “The Gout” as I shoveled bite after bite of steak into my mouth and washed it down with a mojito and mashed potatoes.

That was before I had a full-blown case of gout. After having had the gout, I can tell you, it’s no joking matter. Although, it is still fun to call it “the gout” instead of just gout. And it seems appropriate, too–gout deserves its own definite article.

The first thing the gout suffer thinks about is probably, “How can I get rid of gout?” The second thing is probably, “How can I make sure I never get gout again?”

In this article, I’m going to detail what I learned about getting gout, what I did to get rid of gout, what I think contributed to my gout, and how I’ve modified my diet to avoid experiencing it again.

The article is the result of research, experience, and PAIN. My attempt here is to provide a framework for making the modifications necessary to eliminate the gout-causing agents in your life.

How You Get Gout

Gout is hereditary. You have a predisposition for it. But you play the vital role to manifest gout in your life—and that means indulgence. So, let’s forget the hereditary part and discuss things that you can actually control.

There are two forms of indulgence which lead to gout. John Tilden describes them well: Rich Man’s Gout (meat and alcohol) or Poor Man’s Gout (pastries and cakes and sugar).

A little honesty and self-awareness will reveal your particular form of gout, unless you’re truly deluded and still in the denial phase. (Some people think they can do no wrong–it is these types which must suffer increasingly painful lessons until they admit, and address, their flaws.)

Most information that I saw about gout left out the role that sugar played. For me, sugar seemed to be everything. After my full-blown gout attack, a sugar over-indulgence sent warning signals to my big toe and persuaded me, gently (thankfully), to quickly reform. In those early cases, I took to fasting for a day after my toe acted up.

Of course, meat and alcohol play their roles, too. For many, the finger can be pointed squarely at those culprits–but don’t discount Poor Man’s Gout. It’s real, and it sucks just as much.

In summary, heredity helps load the gun, but your actions—be they poor man gout or rich man gout actions—pull the trigger.

How Long I Endured the Pain

It took about a month before there was no pain. I would still feel twinges up to about 6 weeks afterwards, and the twinges would be due to transgressions of sugar. The first week was the worst. I had to limp and couldn’t wear my regular shoes. My foot would throb and swell up at night. The weight of sheets on it was sheer agony (I slept with my foot out of the covers). I didn’t take any medication whatsoever, but I did fast for three days eating only cooked apples in the morning, broth during the day, and a very light dinner. John Tilden believes that you need to allow the body to rest from the taxing process of digestion, and in allowing this rest, your body can build back health.

From what I read, the duration of symptoms varied. Some things are out of your control. What you can control is what you’re putting into your mouth and anything that is acid-producing has got to go. The quicker you can do this the faster your body can get rid of the uric acid.

What I Think Contributed to my Gout

In my twenties, I transgressed the laws of health of wellness. I ate poorly, drank too much, and in general had too much meat and not enough vegetables.

For the two years prior to gout, I was exercising too hard. In Ayurvedic medicine, I’m Vata/Pitta, and my Vata nature demands less intense exercise. Some people try to make their body do things it’s really not supposed to. That is why professional athletes typically have shorter life spans—they use their bodies up. I was using too much of my nerve energy and wore myself down. My body type doesn’t like intense exercise.

Then there was the month before the attack. I ate poorly: there was travel with a family reunion (you know how groups of people overeat and indulge in sugar), a big cookie cake at work (which lured me in like I imagine cocaine luring in a coke head), and a marriage celebration. Finally, in that last month, one of the writers at work retired, leaving the full responsibilities of the position on my shoulders. It all added up.

Similarly, if you have gout, you’ll have to look at your life, your past and your recent past, and see what stressors have added up to manifest the gout.

How to Get Rid of Gout and Keep it Away

To get rid of anything, you must first remove the causes. This is obvious, but because so many are looking for shortcuts, it must be stated. There are no shortcuts.

Drinking cherry juice or taking cherry extract will not magically make your gout go away. Taking medication is the coward’s way out. Take the pain like a man. You did it to yourself, feel the pain in its full glory to motivate you to never do what you did to get what you’ve gotten (a nefarious case of the gout). Besides, if you’re taking a medication that treats the symptoms, you’re not addressing the cause. So what are you really accomplishing? You’re neglecting to learn the lesson nature has in store for you.

Here is the approach I followed, based on recommendations primarily from John Tilden.

Acute changes: A three day fast consisting primarily of 2-3 cooked apples in the morning, lots of water, vegetable broth, and a small dinner—no meat.

Long-term changes:

• Only a max of 1 meat meal per day (ideally meat only every other day – tough in America)
• Reduction of sugar
• I wasn’t drinking much at all so no change there
• Modified percentages of meat vs fruit & veggies as outlined below:
  • Winter – meat 1/2 of diet / vegetables & fruit 1/2 of diet
  • Summer – meat 1/4 of diet / vegetables & fruit 3/4 of diet
• cherry juice after the attack for a month or so–pretty religious, but then diet, diet, diet
• I started drinking coffee again*

* An article on the Mayo website discussed how coffee lowered the risk of gout. The article said four cups a day to lower risk by 40%! I do around 2 cups per day and have been symptom free.

A modification of exercise
I realized that I had been exercising quite intensely so I dialed it down a notch. Especially with the endurance stuff that really made my liver work to create energy.

*     *     *

So, if you’re suffering from gout, I think you’ll find quite a few good recommendations in here. The big thing is diet—you either have Poor Man’s Gout or Rich Man’s Gout. Take away the causative factors (pastries and sugar or meat and alcohol). Pay attention to other factors. I view things like this as warning signs—instruction. It’s spiritual. You’re living your life incorrectly and a warning sign has been given to you. Be grateful for the warning—it’s a chance to improve and be a better version of yourself. It’s also a chance to be more conscious about the choices you are making—all good things.

Finally, don’t judge me or others with gout. That’s another spiritual lesson, not judging. I’ve heard people talk about people who’ve gotten gout with a tone of disdain in their voice—“Rich man’s disease.” Well, as you’ve read, it’s not just rich man’s disease. And yes, the person with gout has transgressed. We all have our lessons to learn in our time that we’re here. Moderation is one of the lessons I need to learn. I tend to go to extremes. What lesson is your gout teaching you?

A fresh snow had fallen over the Midwest but I sure as hell wasn’t worried: I’ve been deadlifting.

It’s been six years since I’ve owned an Olympic barbell. What a glorious return of iron to my life. Now that I have a basement, I reckon I’m pretty much unstoppable.

Anyway, for the past three days I’ve been deadlifting. Two sets of five, one “work” set and another back off set spaced around five minutes apart. True strength work. Five days a week. I started off conservatively at 185 and each session raised the weight five pounds.

Three days.

Of course, I’ve been kettlebelling those six years and done other posterior chain work, but nothing is like the deadlift. I feel like a million bucks. My nervous system is totally excited about this deadlifting and although I was snowblowing and not shoveling, I owned that snowblower when I had to pull it back and maneuver it around without the aid of the wheel drive.

And anyway, when the snowplow inevitably came back to drop off a load at the front of my driveway, I took the shovel to it and hoisted that snow effortlessly. I feared for the shovel. Could it handle my manliness?

An article I read a long time ago talked about humans being rear wheel drive. When you start deadlifting, which develops an incredible strength in all the muscles of your posterior chain (your rear wheel drive muscles), you’ll understand what the author of that article meant: we really are rear wheel drive.

From picking up groceries, to bags of salt pellets, to unruly kids, to avoiding being pulled away by your overeager German shepherd, deadlifts let you deploy the requisite strength—and then some.

And they are one of those exercises where it isn’t too difficult to work up to appreciable weights, either. Start deadlifting (or pulling, to use the vernacular) even just 135 and you’ll be a much better man or woman. Ladies might not like the effect on the hands, but a pumice stone will soften them right up. For men, leave your hands a little rough—most men these days have gotten far too dainty and I dare say it’s a tad pathetic.

Now, although you should always use good form, you should especially use good form when you deadlift. For that reason I recommend the classic book on the subject, Power to the People!. This is the book that got me started—and this is the book that will show you how to deadlift and how to cycle the weights so you can strong intelligently and predictably.

I forgot how great deadlifting made me feel back when I was doing it consistently. It made me feel like I was cheating. I kept wondering how people who had access to Olympic weights could forego this amazing lift. Seriously, you could practice this lift as prescribed in Power to the People and you’d have a pretty darn good physique.

The heavier weight you can use in the deadlift forces your stomach muscles to contract. Your glutes, hamstrings, quads, spinal erectors, lats, biceps, shoulders, traps, and neck all get involved in the action. If you practiced the lift as prescribed in Pavel Tsatsouline’s book, you’d spend less than 10 minutes per day—less than an hour per week—strength training and you’d be stronger than nearly all your peers (unless they were also doing the same thing, of course). Not that being stronger than other people is the be all end all, but it is significant when you consider that by peers I mean people who are wasting their time lifting lighter weights and not feeling the amazing benefits that you will be feeling from deadlifting. (That is, stronger–with less effort.)

Not to mention there is a abhorrent epidemic of men with frail backs. These people go around avoiding heavy things because they have a weak back. The cycle self-perpetuates and these are the people whose grand kids will silently wonder, “Why is grandpa such a wuss?”

And good news about the weights. Chances are you can get a 300 pound Olympic set on Craigslist. Most offers will probably throw in a bench too and it’ll cost you around 300 dollars. Throw in Power to the People! and for a few year’s gym fees (or a few month’s if you go to one of those boutique gyms) you’ll have all the equipment you’ll ever need to forge a rockin’ and fully functional body in a fraction of the time.

In Napoleon Hill’s Law of Success he dedicates an entire chapter to taking action. As Bruce Lee would say, “Running water never grows stale.”

So how do you take action?

Well, Napoleon Hill offered up some daily routines that helped keep him healthy and fit to be able to take action:

1. I drink a cup of hot water when I first get up in the morning, before I have breakfast.
2. My breakfast consists of rolls made of whole wheat and bran, breakfast cereal, fruit, soft boiled eggs once in a while, and coffee. For luncheon I eat vegetables (most any kind) whole-wheat bread and a glass of butter-milk. Supper, a well-cooked steak once or twice a week, vegetables, especially lettuce, and coffee.
3. I walk an average of ten miles a day, five miles into country and five miles back, using this period for meditation and thought. Perhaps the thinking is as valuable as a health builder as the walk.
4. I lie across a straight bottom chair, flat on my back, with most of my weight resting on the small of my back, with my head and arms relaxed completely, until they almost touch the floor. This gives the nervous energy of my body an opportunity to properly balance and distribute itself, and ten minutes in this position will completely relieve all signs of fatigue, no matter how tired I may be.
5. I take an enema at least once every ten days, and more often if I feel the need of it, using water that is a little below blood temperature, with a tablespoonful of salt in it, chest and knee position.
6. I take a hot shower bath, followed immediately by a cold shower, every day, usually in the morning when I first get up.

Nothing complicated here. By the way, Hill lived until he was 87 years old and had an extremely productive life.

Steve Maxwell turned me onto the idea of measuring my morning pulse. He said that if it’s more than 3 beats higher than the weekly average, that I should skip intense training and take it easier. So, I listened and for more than a year, every morning I took my pulse.

What did I learn from this? Well, thankfully I took down some other data when my pulse was high. While my method probably isn’t scientifically valid because there are a ton of variables, some things seemed to have an obvious effect—they increased my heart rate:

• Emotional upsets
• Big dinners
• The onset of gout
• Big decisions (putting an offer in on a house)
• Work stress

Exercise is stress. A good stress in most cases, but not always. By gaining an understanding of when I’m fatigued or stressed, I was able to modify my training or skip it altogether and prevent sickness.
There was a pitfall to this, though.

Over the course of the year I developed a cautious approach. Instead of an approach of building health, my approach became preventing sickness. Clearly, this is a mistake. Looking over the year, I think that I lost too much weight and became too thin. Part of this was due to a fear—yes, I think it was a fear—of overeating and eating the wrong things in general. Any approach where fear is a motivator is probably not going to win out long term.

Back to the heart. It’s clearly an incredibly important organ and listening to what it is telling you, even if you can’t fully interpret it, is a great exercise in and of itself. Living is a pretty wild thing and there are all sorts of factors influencing our decisions, our health, our relationships, and so much of this is going on unconsciously.

Measuring my morning pulse for a year gave me insight into how some life events were affecting my heart and increased my consciousness. This in turn gave me some insight into managing these life events and changing elements of my life to build health (although at the time I considered it avoiding sickness—a mistake I’ve acknowledged).

If you’re interested in trying this, it’s pretty simple—just take your pulse when you wake up. Then record it. Then start noting differences and paying attention to different factors that might have contributed to the difference.

I’m no longer going to track my morning pulse. I did it for a year. Now I can take my pulse and know whether it is high, normal, or low. I think I’ve gained enough insight for now.

But if you haven’t done this, I encourage you to give it a try—pay attention to what your heart is telling you and I guarantee you’ll learn something.

By the way, last year’s average pulse? 53.74861878. (It helps to use a spreadsheet to track this! )

Intensity is the name of the game. Without pressure, there is no necessity to adapt.

There are lots of ways to add intensity. Unfortunately, it’s tempting to just change exercises and experience the illusion of progress under the guise of nervous system adaptations.

Here are some ways you can increase intensity without changing exercises:

• Increase the weight you are using. Assuming your form is good, you can add weight to the particular movement you are performing. Small jumps are best. 2.5 pounds added to a one arm 50 pound military press is a significant amount. Assuming other variables are kept the same (e.g. rest between sets, total number of sets, recovery, etc.) the amount of repetitions you can perform will go down.
• For bodyweight exercises where you can’t add more weight, you can perform more difficult variations:
• The embedded static protocol – this protocol has you stop and hold various portions of the negative for five seconds. It will lower your reps and increase your time under tension. It’s great for building muscle control.
• Advanced / different variations – If you are doing squats, you could learn to do the one-legged squat. If you’re doing a kettlebell military press, you could switch to a bottom up military press which adds a balance, grip, and form component.
• Decrease the time between sets – This challenges your recovery and builds more endurance.
• Pre-fatigue yourself – go for a run prior to training. Not good for strength, but adds more exercise to your life.
• Add reps – simply do more reps, ensuring you maintain good form.
• Close your eyes – be careful, but wearing a blindfold will force you to rely on other balance and feedback mechanisms in your body, making the exercise more intense.
• Switch to a thicker bar – Even if you’re using the same weight, a thicker bar poses more challenge as it limits your gripping capacity. Thick bars are great for strong hands.

Think you’re walking enough? Are you sure? I’ve written before about the importance of tracking and measuring things to make progress. Knowing how much you walk is extremely important knowledge about your activity level.
A great way to track your steps and measure your progress is to get a Fit Bit.

I have the Fit Bit Zip. It’s small, fits easily in my pocket, and tells me how much I’ve walked, how far I’ve walked, when I walked, and how many calories I’ve burned.

It syncs with new iOS devices and also comes with a USB device that grabs the data from your Fit Bit and uploads it to your Fit Bit account when you’re at your computer. Once your data is synced, you can go to your Fit Bit account and view your activity details from the day.

You can also enter other information if you want, such as other activities you might have performed and what you ate that day. I track those things separately–my main concern as an office worker is to make sure I walk enough.

When you look at your activity on the bar graph for the course of the day, you can see when you got up and moved around. It gives you a pretty good insite into your day. Any time when there are no steps, that probably means you’re sitting around (or maybe you’re doing pull ups–in that case, it’s all good!).

Since being active is so important and walking is a crucial activity (not to mention a crucial skill) it makes good sense to get some intelligent data to help you ensure you’re walking enough. Sticking a small device in your pocket that gives helpful bar graphs and records your walking activity is a great way to be intelligent about your activity.

What I do is I place my Fit Bit near my keys and wallet and grab it when I head out the door. The Fit Bit does the rest.

I’m very pleased with this thing and I think you will be too! Get the Fitbit Zip Wireless Activity Tracker now!

If you turn on a lot of applications on your computer, it will slow down. If you are running complicated operations in the background, other tasks will take longer to complete. You can eventually try to do too much and the computer crashes. If you turn too many appliances on that are on the same circuit, the circuit breaker flips. If you throw too big of a log on a fire, the fire goes out.

Your body is similar. It performs work. You can keep adding more and more work to it and it will adapt. Eventually, when the demand for work outpaces the supply of available energy, it crashes, it breaks down, and you go down.

When you become clear on which things consume vital force, and which things create it, then you can learn (and only you can learn for yourself) how to create real health for yourself.

The body wants to heal. You can cut yourself and see this healing principle at work. The life principle wants to maintain life—at all costs—and does so, even when we damage our bodies through improper eating, improper drinking, improper thinking, and poor behavior in general.

But it can only take so much.

The question you need to ask yourself is how do you feel? Do you have plenty of health and energy—or not? If not, why not? Are you sucking up all your energy overeating, drinking, gossiping, smoking, and bad choices?

What does a successful day at the office look like?

The Commute

You arrive to the office refreshed. You got a great night’s sleep and gave yourself plenty of time to get ready in the morning and to drive into work so you didn’t feel hurried at all. It was all smooth sailing!

The Arrival

You park your car far away, so you get a good walk in before you get to your desk and sit down. If you have a breakfast to eat, you eat your breakfast before logging in to your computer—you don’t eat and check emails.
In fact, you wait to check emails until later—you have a plan for the day and you don’t want email to sidetrack you.

Getting Into the Swing of Things

After 50 minutes, you get up. You’ve been drinking water so you go to the bathroom. You take a short little walk, thinking about what is next and you return to your desk with the vigor to tackle the task.

If you drink coffee, you limit yourself to one—maybe two—and not a supersize, either. You don’t add sugar or fake creamer, you take it black or you use a real creamer like a real man (or woman).

If someone brings in donuts, you run the other way, remembering that you can’t outrun a donut (i.e. it’s infeasible to attempt to exercise off the calories consumed from one donut).

Lunch Time

At lunch time, you don’t go out to lunch with buddies—hardly ever. You know that when you do that you overeat and get lower quality food. You do bring in a reasonably portioned lunch that you enjoy eating slowly and chewing thoroughly. If you do have a big lunch, your dinner is small. After eating lunch, you take another walk, 15 to 30 minutes.

The Afternoon

In the afternoon, you have a no-snacking policy so you avoid those sugary treats that people typically eat when their circadian rhythms lull. If you can’t avoid snacking, you bring in some trail mix or a healthier snack that cannot be found in the vending machines or the cafeteria.

You continue to get up frequently—every 50-55 minutes or so, or any time you’re starting to feel fatigued. When fatigue sets in, mistakes creep in, too, so avoiding sitting and slumping at your desk helps your output.

Closing Up Shop

Before shutting down for the day, you give yourself a pat on the back for a day at the office well-executed from not just a work perspective, but also from a health and fitness perspective. Write down what you need to do the following morning and expect success. Now scoot out the side door—you’ve been so productive and focused that you can leave a little early!

Want more?

Go to this page and read about the importance of posture. Keep clicking and you’ll find the page that gives you some drills you can do at your desk!