Fuel the Journey

Some of us look at “higher work” the way a child imagines picking up a violin for the first time.

We want to prance through Paganini, not bore ourselves with Hot Cross Buns.

Diet isn’t moral purity. It’s not aesthetic discipline. It’s not your personality. Diet is the operating conditions of the body, the only vessel that houses every thought you’ve ever had, every thought you will ever create.

So if you seek clarity, resilience, equanimity, prayerful attention, deep contemplation, or anything that smells like “spirit,” you should probably stop treating food like an afterthought. As though your body is one thing and the internal you is another.

Across traditions that disagree about many a thing, there is an oddly consistent concession: the mind cannot reliably outrun the body.

In the Christian Bible, Paul says it in the blunt language of stewardship: “Your bodies are temples… therefore honor God with your bodies,” (1 Cor 6:19-20)

The Qur’an says it as a constraint on excess: “Eat and drink, but do not waste,” (Surah Al-A’raf 31).

The Bhagavad Gita also mentions volume. “Those who eat too much or too little… cannot attain success in Yog,” (Sri Krishna 6:16). But we go further into right choices, not just amounts. “Persons in the mode of goodness prefer foods that promote life span, and increase virtue, strength, health, happiness, and satisfaction,” (Sri Krishna 17:8).

And Buddhism, famously uninterested in metaphysical persuasion, still drops this near the center of the Dhammapada: “Health is the greatest gift,” (v. 204).

Different metaphysical lenses. Same concession. The body is upstream.

This matters because “spirituality” has a documented bad past in practice. A habit of becoming tribalism hiding in cosplay. Insiders are refined, outsiders are… contaminated. It’s an old song and dance and one we can begin to transcend.

Ethical diet talk is not “virtue signaling” if and when it’s actually ethics: the choices you normalize, the appetites you cultivate, the way you treat a body in this life (especially your own).

Your food can be a practice of harmony, peace, clarity. Or a practice of, well, dissociation.

Refuse the ornamentation.

There are no sacred phrases that compensate for our bodies’ insulin volatility, micronutrient poverty, protein debt, or the cognitive drag of ultra-processed food. If you’re trying to build attention on top of an infrastructure which is just physiological noise, you’re building your cathedral on wet sand.

And yes, of course you can do meaningful inner work while sick, poor, exhausted, traumatized, or constrained. Humans are adaptive monsters. The point is not to find perfection before taking the first step.

The point is honesty about prerequisites.

No ideology required. No identity either. Just variables.

For seven days, run a single experiment: reduce your body’s noise floor.

Rule 1: Cut the obvious sabotage.
For one week, remove only these:

Don’t try to replace them with purity; a step serves better than a leap here. Replace them with the boringly adequate: water, actual meals, stable timing.

Rule 2: Anchor with a simple meal structure.
Two meals per day is fine, three is fine—pick what your life can sustain. Each meal should contain:

* We know there is some dietary guidance suggesting dietary fiber isn’t required, or perhaps even counterproductive to our health. If studies catch up to this claim we are comfortable, as with all things, reevaluating and changing our own stance with the science. For now, we conform to the research in such studies as The role of short-chain fatty acids in the interplay between gut microbiota and diet in cardio-metabolic health (Nogal et al, 2021) and Short chain fatty acids in human gut and metabolic health (Blaak et al, 2020).

Rule 3: Log outcomes, not virtue.
Each day, track:

If changed inputs shift your behaviors, those were never your “identity.” Just your operating conditions.

Some of you follow it, and it belongs here with a caution label.

There’s a widely-circulated “Ayurvedic proverb” that goes: “When diet is wrong, medicine is of no use. When diet is correct, medicine is of no need.”

I can’t responsibly attribute this to any specific classical text I could find. It’s urban legend for all I know. Still, the principle is consistent with Ayurvedic emphasis on food as foundational to balance. But be warned that the broad food combinations stated in this philosophy await proof. We know certain combinations increase harmony (vitamin C with non-heme iron, calcium with oxalate-heavy foods) but evidence currently supports our evolution as mixed-meal eaters. See Similar weight loss with low-energy food combining or balanced diet (Golay et al, 2000), What is Food Combining? (Schupp, 2019), and Your Digestive System & How it Works (NIDDK, 2017).

If you’re pursuing prayer, meditation, contemplation, self-mastery… or really anything that requires stable attention, then diet is not a scenic route. It’s Main Street.

What would you like to see in a future issue? Among myriad other topics we could, for example, talk about different ways that “inner work” can be counterfeited, how diet and specifically deprivation are often used as status signals rather than as tools.

Subscribe for the next audit. Keep only what works. Transmute the noise.