Welcome to my personal knowledge base on health and wellbeing.
Why does this exist?
At the start of 2025, I decided my diet was crap. Throughout my life (in simple terms) I have consumed utter shit. As a result, I felt like utter shit. My mood was dysregulated, snappy, low energy and short tempered. Cycles of low points in my life were exacerbated by poor diet, not that I knew it at the time. The only healthy thing I did was regular exercise from the age of about 16 upwards. That’s likely the only thing that prevented me from suffering some real health issues such as obesity, diabetes (my sugar intake was beyond reason). In my teenage years, I would quite literally sit and a double packet of Jaffa cakes, a can of 35p custard followed by an entire packet of bourbon biscuits dunked in a cup of tea with 5 sugars. Granted, I grew out of that form of food extremism, but until late teens/early 20’s, I was still consuming pure junk and had no real Idea how to cook. This was through no fault of my parents or upbringing, my parents routinely made relatively healthy meals for me and my 4 siblings every night for tea. It was down to the fact that cheap sugary foods were/are the norm on supermarket shelves. I know this well, because I worked in supermarket retail for 4 years, earning low wage and struggling through uni. I’d start a shift, morning break I’d need something consumable in 15 minutes that fulfilled the following: A: Didn’t cost a fortune, less than £2 ideally (I earned £8 an hour and was a student running a car, rent and bills) B: Gave me an immediate energy boost (I woke up at 4am for my sat/sun shifts and unloaded lorries, which was more physical than the average Tesco role ) C: Satisfied my already existing craving for sweetness D: Quick, easy and non-messy to eat in the time I had E: TASTED GOOD !
So what would I buy to fit this elaborate criteria…? Two giant slabs of ‘fresh’ Millionaire Caramel shortbread. That’s what. The size of a smartphone each and like god to the taste buds. Every shift. For weeks. Until it would change to something else like some brownies or chilled pre-made trifle. This was just for morning break. At lunch I would push the boat out, be a bit ‘healthier’, telling my self I needed something ‘a bit more substantial’. At which point I’d buy £3.50 meal deal. A big chock of processed bread with ‘pulled pork’ & ‘Mayo’ in the middle, washed down with a 300ml shot of ‘smoothie’ and some cheese and onion crisps. Wow. Food for champions right there. Upon home time at 2PM I would be hungry again, so I’d then spend 20 minutes marching around the store to buy more snacks to take home with me. Clearly, money became no object when I was THAT hungry, probably spending an additional £10. So in a day where I’ve earned about 7x8= 56 quid, I’d have spent almost £20…
As I finished uni and moved to my first career job, things did begin to improve, at a snails pace. Being free from a supermarket’s clutches forced me to plan meals more. All of a sudden I couldn’t just walk 10 meters to buy some food. I began eating things like bagels and more soup. I made friends with a colleague who introduced me to Brazilian food. A whole new realm of food opened up and that’s when I began my journey of ‘how to cook’. I started making more meals at home, albeit basic like very bland chicken and rice. Although, I was still eating easy rubbish like a can of oiled Tuna smothered in baked beans and microwaved for 60 seconds. Sprinkled with cheese of course, I’m no caveman. Two years passed and not much had changed, I had only kind of learned what seasoning was. Although, I had developed mentally/matured a tremendous amount during this period. I was smarter, more vocal and more self aware and beginning my ‘glow up’ phase.
I then left that job and started a new role. At this point I had just turned 24, I continued the ‘glow up’ phase by going through a large self improvement process. I realised I needed to start getting my life together. Not just with diet, but with dating too. I began hunting for something casual, I didn’t want attachment at that time. A few dates later and stumbled into my life was the definition of perfection, in the form of a girl named Tamzin. I didn’t know it then, but she was about to be the reason my life did a complete 180 degree flip. Of course, when it came to diet, I quickly realised Tamzin was the polar opposite of me. While I would happily sit and eat an entire XL caramel chocolate bar for lunch, Tamzin would be gulping down spoonful’s of Olive paste as a snack. It’s almost as if God (if he exists) was sat there thinking ‘right this moron needs some assistance, let me just drop in this mega hot girl who just so happens to be his worst nightmare in the kitchen, that’ll fuck with him’. Soon enough I began falling for Tamzin, despite the ‘casualness’ of the relationship. We mutually agreed a full time relationship was basically what we were already doing and to just label it as such. As time went on, she began introducing me to new foods and I continued on my self-improvement. I was educating myself a lot on new topics, politics and sciences through podcasts and internet sources. But the relationship with Tamzin was moving fast and I quickly came to the realisation she deserved someone who was: A: A lot less picky B: A lot more healthy C: A lot less annoying
To fulfil this, I changed my usual educational podcasts out for more health oriented ones. Listening on the way to work. Then one momentous day, I discovered an app that allowed me to scan food and beauty products to find out what additives were added during the manufacturing process. I found that around 90% of my diet was just full, for lack of better term, of poison. I of course knew of UPF’s before, but seeing the proof with cited sources and the big red indicator on the yoghurt I just scanned was a shock to the system. I began scanning everything, from cereal to shampoo, the whole consumable spectrum was under fire. I quickly cut out the worst of it, the heavy carcinogenic additives , and began purchasing alternatives. This stuff was not only carcinogenic (cancer causing) , but also disruptive to the endocrine system (the glands that control hormone release) and severely detrimental to gut health (I could go on, the list is endless). My logic was, ‘If this stuff exists in the food, and it also exists in the soap, and it also exists in the washing powder, and the moisturizer, the ‘medicines’, the shampoo, the toothpaste, the cereal, the off the shelf smoothies, the cheese, the clothes, the deodorant even the GODAMN MILK!’ , and I’m then consuming all of these every single day in various forms. Then surely the compound effects over lets say 10-30 years are no longer just words on a cited research paper, but my reality. What happens when I consume ye’olde ‘bovaer’ for 10 years? Something recently added to the feed for EU cows (on the gracious behest of Bill Gates), subsequently present in the milk, known to absolutely kill testosterone levels in men. I then couple that with 20 years of previously eating foods covered in pesticides and filled with vegetable oils, both of which also known to cause gut inflammation and consequently dunk your testosterone through the floor. By the time I want to have kids, what’s the chances that I’ll even be remotely fertile? Let alone produce sperm without numerous defects resulting in a kid that’s potentially physically, mentally or emotionally disabled from the day they were born. Not to mention the common known effects of low quality semen during pregnancy that my partner could suffer with such as pre-eclampsia, morning sickness or even miscarriages. We need to do better than broken kids and chronically ill adults.
All of this means I am currently collecting large amounts of information, and I simply cannot remember it all. Hence, this thing was born. A place I can dump all of that information in an easy to navigate and networked location. Everything added here is tied to each other in some way. The ‘Graph View’ on the right hand side shows which areas are linked to others, so if cancer has 20 things tied to it, then you know what to avoid and what to supplement if you have such an ailment.
📚 Categories # yet to finish
Feel free to navigate using the graph or search to explore related concepts.