Today is my twenty-sixth birthday. Whom I am at age twenty-six is largely a work in progress, continuing on the path I started twelve months ago for my last birthday. I set goals at that time to lose weight and improve my body by Paleo and CrossFit, to improve my professional life by transitioning out of retail into banking, and to set up some momentum such that by age 30 I would be living comfortably in New York City, doing a job that I like, happy, and in a better place. 

I've made so many good changes this past year by following through on the promises I made to myself on my last birthday. I've been fairly strict with my paleo diet and have lost somewhere in the range of 30-45 pounds as a result. I wasn't able to go to CrossFit consistently because I was literally too sad at times to get out of bed, but the therapy skills I've been working on this summer have really gotten me to a place where I'm optimistic about my ability to reliably attend CrossFit three to four times per week. I'm very optimistic about the way my body could look, this time next year, if I can follow through and be consistent with eating healthy and working out. I did not do very much physical activity at all during my college years, so I'm excited to get my body into the best shape that it's been really since my freshman year of high school when I was running a five minute mile. Even my approach to and interpretation of paleo has been different. I started out just making paleo substitutions for normal things, e.g. almond flour based pancakes with heavy dousings of maple syrup: 53g of carbs and sugar per serving. A typical breakfast for me nowadays involves avocado, bananas, and almond milk hot chocolate because I'm that kind of person.

Career life is interesting. I'm working forty hours a week in a bank, but I'm also basically working twenty-five to thirty hours a week in retail at Polo Ralph Lauren. My Ralph Lauren checks go straight to a separate bank account to pay my tuition expenses for Georgetown. I'm working very hard on education and certifications, so I can get to the sectors of the banking and finance industry where you can actually earn horseloads of money, with potentially no ceiling. I spent most of the past year working on my GMAT and on admission to Georgetown, and now I'm working on my CFA, graduate degree, and DALF certification in the French language. I know that my sense of dissatisfaction with my current cirumstances sets me apart from my other coworkers and makes it hard for me to bond with them in probably the way that would be ideal. I really want to put an emphasis, however, on not blaming myself for the aspects of my life that are lackluster. That's one of the lessons I've gleaned from therapy. Believe in yourself, love yourself, and assertively advocate for what you want in life. What I want in life is to reconnect, as much as possible, with the life track that I was born into, that I kind of rebelliously swerved off of when I moved to Utah and converted to Mormonism, and that I'm working very, very hard to get back onto. I don't think lowly of any of my associates, but I do think highly of the life path I know that I've diverged from. That's a very dialectical statement, but it must be true--I want it to be true. I passionately want my life to be different, but that does not mean I have personal disdain toward my present community. 

By age 30, I very well could be living in New York City, if I want to. Or any city. It's really just up to me. I think one thing I struggle with right now is accepting that as hard and as productive as this one year has been, it still will probably take several more years of the same kind of progress--probably accelerated now that therapy is giving me some control over my sadness--before I will have created the kind of life that I really want for myself. Staying in Utah for at least two more years would probably be wise. Two years from now, when I've graduated from my master's program, would be a great opportunity for a clean break from Utah and moving somewhere. I've loosely considered moving to Washington DC for my second year of school, but I don't know that that's anything more than a pipe dream right now. A year is a long, long time, and I'm about to begin another one. 

I have two, potentially three, birthday parties planned for this year, which is a big improvement from last year. So hurray for that.

This is an article about the paleo diet, which is one of the most important principles in my life right now.

I decided to become paleo about one year ago, during summer '16, right before my 25th birthday. It's something that has really changed my life. I have not weighed myself in months, but I know that I have lost about four pant sizes in terms of my waist getting that much smaller. I know that, even without attending CrossFit very consistently, I am very proud of how my body and my abs are looking. I'd like to try and explain and uncover why paleo dieting is so important to me.

The essence of paleo, as I understand it, is to eat in a way that makes logical sense for our bodies. If you were to go into a field and try to grab some grain growing in the field and eat it just like that, the barbs on the exterior skin of the grain would hurt your body and attack your stomach and irritate your insides. Nature designs those grain-barbs as a natural protection for the growing plant, so animals won't come and eat it. The logic of paleo says that if grain is so bad for you in a natural state like that, then it probably is also bad for you in any form, no matter what kind of processing and cooking you do to it to put it in an edible form.

So paleo dieters are avoiding grain, avoiding processed food, and avoiding things that are generally bad for the body. I remember when my CrossFit coach first explained paleo to me. He was like, "Avoid processed food." And I was like, "Isn't cooking a process?" 

It's funny becuase in a way that's true. Cooking is a process, especially when you do things like add a lot of excess sugar to food or extract sugar from the fiber in fruit or things like that. I guess paleo is not this absolutely ideological pure return to nature and eating food purely as it is found in nature. If you want and are into that kind of thing, there are blogs on the internet about how to be paleo in terms of making your own shampoo or soap or toothpaste from natural materials instead of buying it from the store, but that's not an extreme that I am ready to go to--not now or not probably ever. I take pleasure most especially in avoiding grain and avoiding added sugar, the two main nutritional culprits that I feel contribute to the epidemic of American obesity.

Something that I feel is cool about paleo and that I feel is only stated implicitly, but never explicitly, on paleo blogs, is that from the standpoint of this paradigm, not only are a lot of people overweight, but even people who have what you would call a normal or healthy weight are still also visibly suffering from the effects of grain-induced inflammation. It's like if you were to eat something that was outright spoiled or poisonous, your face and your body would obviously swell up and stuff right, as your bod tries to fight off the toxins. Well that is what grain and sugar do to you on a minor level. Think about it: when you look at people who are really, really athletic and fit with low body fat, their faces are super chiseled. The rest of us are on a gradient of different levels of inflammation compared to that. 

I feel like being paleo successfully is probably my biggest success of the past year. That, or getting into Georgetown and passing the GMAT. I've heard it said that ninety percent or more of diets fail. I guess I've gotten really lucky that I have found a diet that works for me, then. A diet that makes so much sense. Something I take a lot of pleasure in right now is cooking recipes out of the cookbook "Paleo Takeout." I don't recommend this book for beginners but only for intermediate or advanced level paleo people. The author is kind of a non-traditional, cavalier paleo guy. He eats rice, etc. So you will want to get a feel for the diet yourself first and know what your personal boundaries and non-negotiable limits are as far as what you will and will not eat. Then you can go forward and interpret what he says as you will.

So, yeah. Hi. I think it's a good idea for me to have a blog and to write things. 

I read a New Yorker article recently about the end of the era of the online personal essay. The premise of the essaay was that during the Obama years, it was really common for people to write these long, indulgent articles about themselves online. About their personal struggles, about their journeys, about their nuances, whatever. In many ways these articles were the logical culmination of the LiveJournal/ Xanga/ Tumblr fads of the 2000s. But now, during the Trump era, when people are so focused on the serious and often problematic events in the news, the personal essay has mostly faded into obscurity. Websites like Thought Catalog, BuzzFeed.com, and LongReads are becoming less popular. Gawker is an example of a personal essay website that has altogether died out. 

I agree with the thesis of that article. I myself am a product of the online personal essay era. I had a Xanga. I had a LiveJournal. I had a Tumblr. I loved reading longreads articles on lazy Sundays when I was in college.  I thought it was normal and okay to share so much about yourself online. It was reflecting on the repercussions of the end of that era that led me to start this website. I wrote a lot of personal essays on the internet during the past five years or so, and I feel like they are outdated both in their form, i.e. the literary form of the online personal essay, as well as in their content, i.e. conflicted attempts to carve out a nonconformist position within Mormonism. The culmination of that was probably 2013, when this guy at Harvard wrote his undergraduate journalism thesis on me, about my life. I thought it as so cool at the time--like, wow, a guy at Harvard is writing about me!--but now I feel so humiliated and embarassed. I think my Mormon self was really ugly, while in some ways I'm sure I was just as confused as lots of kids at BYU, it's a shame that my struggles in particular are public fodder  for mass consumption on the internet.

When I look at my online landmark, my digital signature, well, 90 to 95% of what you find about me on the internet involves some sort of discussion of race, gender, and/or sexuality within Mormon culture. I no longer identify as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I've come to identify as bisexual rather than gay, I'm pursuiing a career in finance now rather than art history, and I've been doing the paleo diet and have been the member of a CrossFit box for almost a full year now. It's kind of uncomfortable for me to see a digital version of myself, enshrined on Google from four or five years ago, that no longer reflects the person whom I am in the present.  I wish I could just snap my fingers and instantly create a digital footprint that actively reflects who I am in 2017, but I know I can't just snap my fingers and do that right away. So this website is a modest investment in the idea that I can one day reclaim my digital signature and build the online identity that actually reflects myself and who I am.