Despite the fact that the data indicates the majority of the country has voted for this decision, it feels as though I am alone in a crowd. It seems everyone I know, everyone I live with, all my friends and many of my family members, voted for Kamala Harris or declined to vote at all, and many saw this as a dire life threatening situation. Truly, life threatening. 

However, despite the discourse, despite what my friends and family have done, I did not vote for Kamala Harris. Nor did I sit this election out in protest. I, as a lifelong leftist, voted for Donald Trump. 

It’s unfortunate for me to say that I genuinely believe that me coming out as a Trump supporter will permanently alter my relationship with many of my friends. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am. Of course, I have to ask myself how much I really want to be close with people who feel this way about me. Who would be so quick to dismiss me after having known me for years, because of a personal choice I’ve made. 

I do not do this in shame or in silence. Rather, I wish I could shout it from the rooftops. However, for certain reasons I don’t think this wise. I think it could have a negative impact on some of my future job opportunities, and developing business relationships. So for this reason, I will be loud where I can.

I may come to regret this. Trump may bomb children in third world countries, start major wars, and block progress that I am desperately hoping for on the health front . However, I have voted not against Kamala Harris but rather for Donald Trump and the things he claims he is going to do. 

I believe that Trump and Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again campaign may be the single most important campaign a presidential candidate has run on in my lifetime, and maybe even my parents lifetime. I believe that as a country, making Americans healthy again should be our number one priority. This will raise a future generation of happy, healthy, adults who can make level headed decisions, thus continuing to run our country as it needs to be run. As it stands now, I think the children of America are headed down a dark path. I am hoping Kennedy can change that. 

Never in history, to my knowledge, have we seen so many democrats changing their tune and joining the republican party in support of Donald Trump, never before has a member of the Kennedy family teamed up with the republican party to endorse a republican candidate. The team up of Robert F Kennedy Jr and Donald Trump is unprecedented and amazing. 

Kennedy is not perfect on every issue. In my mind he’s too pro-isreal, which could easily result in an unnecessary war, however, I can’t think of another man (at least one this mainstream) better suited to fixing the health of the American people. The man has brought the issues of vaccines, flouride in the water, the corruption of Anthony Fauci, the obesity epidemic, the poison in our food, all into the mainstream and I could go on. It is my opinion that he has single handedly made this a priority in the Trump campaign. 

Never before have I seen a candidate who is this intent on prioritizing the health and wellbeing of the American people, in such a genuine and authentic manner. He is a man who will not be suppressed by big pharma, and the powers that be. He is a man who will serve the American people first, who has, seemingly, joined a man who will do the same in his presidency. 

Being for the people means putting the people first even in times when it is not easy, when it may be uncomfortable, and when it may mean teaming up with people whose ideology doesn’t perfectly align with yours. Kennedy and Trump have paved the path for this. 

And then, when we thought it couldn’t get any better, we get Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, and the cherry on top of the Sunday, the last minute endorsement from the man himself, Joe Rogan. 

All of these people are incredibly influential lifelong democrats. None of them are perfect, all have done things I disagree with, and supported policies I would not vote for. However, I think they are united by one very important thing: Putting the American people first. Putting the American people above profits, above the lobbyists, above big business. 

Now, the make America Healthy Campaign is the number one reason I voted for Donald Trump, but not the only reason. 

To set the record straight, Trump has said numerous times that he does not want to instate a national abortion ban. Abortion numbers are actually up since the overturning of Roe v Wade. Additionally, Kamala Harris does not have the power to reinstate Roe V Wade. Lastly, The queen herself, Ruth Bader Ginsburg supported the overturning of Roe V Wade because doing so would put the power back in the hands of people, making it a democratic issue that the people could vote on. 

Additionally, Trump does not have any plans to take rights away from LGBTQ+ people. Trump, like many others, does not support gender reassignment surgery, or hormone blockers, for minors, and guess what? Neither do I. I believe Trump is the candidate who will do the most to protect our children. 

Lastly, Trump has been time and time again compared to Hitler, called a fascist and a dictator by the democratic party and their supporters. We’ve been told democracy is at stake. However, I am of the opinion that the party who stages a coup to remove the sitting president and usher in their preferred candidate without a vote is more of a threat to democracy. 

I could go on. There are many more points to make, however, again, the biggest reasoning for me is the Make America Healthy Again movement. 

This will not be a perfect presidency. Trump is not a perfect man. There is much work to do and I am desperately hoping that progress will be made in the right direction for a healthier, happier America. 

It is for these reasons that I proudly voted for Donald Trump for president of the United States.

Russell Brand shared his thoughts on the prospect of vaccine passports in a recent video while examining some of the problems with tracking those who are vaccinated.

One of the biggest problems with the vaccine passport is how the vaccine data will be controlled, and who will control it. In the US, we don’t have a universal health care plan, and consequently, we don’t have a database to store information like that. Because of this, big tech has since stepped in with its own ideas for databases to track those who are vaccinated and those who aren’t. To those who pay attention to the track record of big tech, this is extremely concerning. These companies don’t have a history of protecting the best interest of the people.

Additionally, the government itself has a poor track record of keeping its word. With promises that something like a vaccine passport would only be temporary, maybe for a year or so many people are reluctant to trust this based on experiences such as the patriot act following 911.

Related: How To Detoxify and Heal From Vaccinations – For Adults and Children

“Often disasters and times of crisis are used to leverage further power for already powerful entities” 

Vaccine Passports: THIS Is Where It Leads

Of course, not everyone wants or is able to get the vaccine. As Brand says in the video, which you can watch below, the concept of vaccine passports raises fears of a “two-tier society” in which those who are vaccinated get to enjoy everyday things like music and sporting events, traveling, or going to the movie theatre, and those who aren’t vaccinated, are shunned from activities that are considered basic freedoms. This is an even bigger problem in a world where we are already in many ways divided like this. Marginalized communities are likely the ones who would pay the consequences of not getting vaccinated. Rather unwilling or unable, many marginalized communities have good reason to reject the vaccine with a history of being hurt by our government and health care systems.

Being an athlete can take quite a toll on the body, even with a great diet. Over weeks of training I’ve found that even on the best diet, I’m bound to run into injuries and soreness. That being said there are several things that make a big difference in how I feel the next day and rather or not I’m able to train the next day.

Currently, I’m training for a Brazilian Jiu-jitsu competition in May. I’m new, and my workload isn’t nearly that of a seasoned professional athlete, but for the average person, it’s intense.

Every day I do a full body weight lifting workout, yoga, stretching and breath control, 100 bodyweight squats, three sets of push-ups and pull-ups, drilling and training with my dad for about 20 minutes, a mile run, and training at the gym for 3-4 hours a day.

Most injuries I get heal quickly. Since starting Brazilian jiujitsu I’ve suffered jammed toes, a bruised trachea, a pulled quad muscle, and most recently a pulled muscle in my rib area near my spine. Every other injury has been quick to heal, gone in three days at the most. My rib injury took longer to heal. Even after it got better, I spent weeks being sore in that area and having to pay special attention not to reinjure it.

I’ve got a competition soon so extended time off isn’t an option, nor is any sort of pain management that would slow my healing long term. I don’t take pain medication of any sort, nor do I use recreational pain relief like cannabis. Cannabis and over-the-counter pain relief, as well as prescription pain medication all slow down the healing process exponentially for temporary relief.

I view my pain (and many other things in life) like a credit card. Using medication to relieve pain temporarily means dealing with a longer lasting injury, and more pain in the long run. For instance, if I have an injury that hurts at a 6 out of 10, I can smoke some weed or take some other pain medication. But once it wears off that 6 becomes a 7, maybe an 8. And of course, the next dose of pain relief won’t be as effective unless you up the dosage. That’s not my idea of a desirable feedback loop.

To promote healing, we do hot-cold compresses switching back and forth to attract blood flow and inflammation for healing. In the end, we use lots of deep tissue oil on the area. Deep tissue repair oil is my number one recommendation for pain relief and healing if you’re only going to use one thing to aid in the healing process. I use it multiple times a day when I feel sore and before or after a workout. Deep tissue oil has menthol crystals, cayenne, wintergreen oil, and other things to promote healing and attract blood flow to the target area.

I also do hot epsom salt baths as often as needed. It’s nothing revolutionary, but epsom salt does help release tension, relax the muscles and prevent soreness.

Many people recommend Boswellia, an herbal extract, to help with inflammation and pain. Although I’ve never used it, you can read more about it and its benefits in this article.

I stretch and do yoga every day to work on flexibility and aid in healing as well. Even if I’m injured to the point of being unable to workout, I still stretch for movement and healing.

Many other athletes have done down similar paths of using natural remedies to help heal, but very few go deep enough to get the full benefits. Acupuncture and chiropractic care are two examples of holistic routes that some people go down, but as great as they are, they’re really only temporary pain relief. Acupuncture and chiropractic work can be great aids for the body in addition to a healthy diet and routine, but they don’t fix any problems on their own.

Diet

Without a healthy diet, I wouldn’t be able to do this every day, but I’ve learned that there’s a difference between fueling my body for everyday life, and my diet when I’m training. When I’m training, I eat a high caloric diet with lots of protein. My main sources of protein are eggs, meat, and cheese. I generally eat less than a pound of meat a week. I have a little bacon in every salad, and between one and three nights a week, we’ll have sausage or bacon in dinner. I also eat homemade beef jerky for protein in between classes.

Eating an anti-inflammatory diet is probably the most important part of my healing process because it goes beyond just healing. My diet is even more strict than it was prior to fighting, although prior to fighting I ate better than almost anyone I knew. I have to eat a diet that not only aids in healing but prevents me from getting injured frequently. With the right diet, you can make your body impervious to injury. I don’t sit around and wait for an injury to start eating a diet that promotes healing.

Every day I eat a large salad with lots of different vegetables. Diversity is an extremely important part of a healthy diet that many people are missing. There are lots of professional athletes who have figured out that a healthy diet allows them to perform radically better, along with recovering faster and overall feeling better. That being said, not many people have figured out that there’s a big difference between eating some kale salad and eating a 10-cup salad with kale, collards, rainbow chard, spinach, lettuce, cabbage, and more. My salads have at least 10 different vegetables and herbs in them. This article goes into how I make my salads and cranberry lemonade.

Three to four times a week I drink my “anti-inflammatory smoothie“. I make it with an abundance of anti-inflammatory foods like ginger, pineapple, cranberries, tart cherries, and turmeric (to name a few). I drink lots of cranberry lemonade to flush out toxins and inflammation, as well as stay hydrated. Lastly, I obviously avoid inflammatory foods. I limit my grains and avoid corn (although occasionally we make homemade tortillas). I don’t even eat oatmeal anymore, because it’s too similar to gluten in the way it digests and causes inflammation.

Many fighters and bodybuilders eat lots of oatmeal as a good source of protein and fuel. For many people, it’s great. But, like most other grains, it’s inflammatory. I feel it when I eat them. I’ll bet if you’re paying attention, you can too. When I’m in need of protein and fuel I stick to things like eggs, homemade beef jerky, walnuts, chia seeds, and raw sheep’s cheese.

It seems like the list of foods I can’t eat is extremely long, but the list of foods I can and do eat is even longer. The guidelines are pretty simple, make everything from scratch, eat tons of raw veggies, eat tons of cooked veggies, and avoid any and all things processed.

Supplements

With a healthy diet the average person shouldn’t need to take supplements everyday when they’re healthy, but someone who’s pushing their body on an athletes level may find that they function better with supplements.

Currently, I take Sf722 every day, generally because I eat a lot of fruit. Sf722 also helps pump my body full of good stuff similar to salads. Without Sf722 my skin can be prone to breaking out from rolls on the mats, and my healing and recovery slows. I also take Abzorb, or other enzymes to help with digestion, especially if I eat pasteurized nuts. I take vitamin D, Vitamin B, and thyroid and/or pituitary glandular supplements to prevent endocrine system crashes.

When you’ve taken antibiotics or medication or done anything to eradicate your gut microbiome, your gut isn’t producing enough vitamin B. This can be one of the last things to correct itself after you’re healthy. Taking vitamin B helps heal your gut and helps the endocrine system by providing your body with vitamins that your gut should be producing.

When you’re overweight, even just a small amount your body has a hard time assimilating vitamin D from the sun. not to mention most of us don’t get enough sunlight anyways. Being overweight also leads to extra stress on the kidneys (and lower back) and the endocrine system.

Sleep

Diet and sleep are equally as important for overall health, and when it comes to how sore I am and my recovery time for an injury. Unfortunately, it can be hard to get a good night’s sleep when my injury is severe enough, but it’s always a top priority.

I always get a minimum of 8 hours of sleep. Regardless of the quality of sleep, I’m in bed trying to sleep for at least 8 hours. Sometimes depending on the workout the day before, or how an injury is healing, I can get more than 10 hours of sleep.

Related: Holistic Guide to Healing the Endocrine System and Balancing Our Hormones

Training

While training anything contact or combat related it’s extremely important than you learn how to protect yourself from injury while drilling and rolling. It took me way too long to learn how to fall properly in jiujitsu, and it’s still a work in progress. Falling down wrong was the number one cause of injury for me while training.

Related: Running Without Knee Pain

That being said, once I learned how to protect myself from injury I found that training was actually extremely important for healing my most recently injury. So, if you can move, move. Staying active and using your body is extremely important for working your muscles and building them back stronger after an injury.

Generally, I use the rule use it or lose it. Broken bones often don’t need casts (and strong healthy bones are harder to break). Staying active is usually your best bet for healing quickly.

Conclusion

Some days I wake up barely able to move! Training this hard has been really intense, but I know that with the way I do things, my recovery time is radically faster than anyone else I know doing the same thing as me.

In my experience the most important thing to do is to be in tune with your body to an extreme. The moment something isn’t right I can tell, and I can feel a difference in the way certain foods fuel my body. I track my sleep and my diet, and when things aren’t working the way they should I back track and examine where I might have gone wrong.

This takes time, and it takes mistakes. I’ve experimented with lots of different foods and routines and I’ve seen how certain things make me feel, and how they effect my performance. Working out and being active is a wonderful thing, but it doesn’t mean much if you’re not healthy enough to sustain it.

It seems more and more common every day that our social time is spent with a device in our hands rather than talking to each other face to face. After a year of Covid-19 it seems our connections are more digital than ever before.

Image credit: Tanya and Addison 2014

Eric Pickersgill, a US photographer recently created a photo series titled “Removed”. The series depicts portraits of people posed with their electronic devices removed from their hands. The series is meant to remind us how strange it is to sit on our devices in the company of others. Take away the devices and what do we look like? The reality is we look disconnected and oftentimes sad.

Recommended: How to Eliminate IBS, IBD, Leaky Gut 

In each portrait, electronic devices have been “edited out” (removed before the photo was taken, from people who’d been using them) so that people stare at their hands, or the empty space between their hands, often ignoring beautiful surroundings or opportunities for human connection. The results are a bit sad and eerie—and a reminder, perhaps, to put our phones away.

Photographer Removes Our Smartphones to Show Our Strange and Lonely New World

Representative Cezar Mcknight (D-South Carolina) has received backlash after his proposal of a new bill. The bill titled the “South Carolina Vulnerable Child Compassion protection Act” bans minors from receiving gender-altering surgery or treatments that prevent/delay puberty. Any medical professional who violates the law would be charged with a felony and sentenced to up to 20 years in prison.

After the bill’s proposal, Mcknight received backlash from both his own party and those further left.

“I would not have ever put this bill forward if I didn’t think the people in my district wouldn’t be receptive, and they are. Pastors, young parents, older parents, they all tell me the same thing: if you want to do this, wait until you’re 18.”

While not explicitly stated, the language of the bill implies a ban on circumcision as well, stating:

…no person shall engage in, counsel, make a referral for, or cause any of the following practices to be performed upon a minor if the practice is performed for the purpose of attempting to alter the appearance of or affirm the minor’s perception of the minor’s gender or sex, if that perception is inconsistent with the minor’s sex as defined in this chapter:

(1)    prescribing, dispensing, administering, or otherwise supplying puberty-blocking medication to stop or delay normal puberty;

(2)    prescribing, dispensing, administering, or otherwise supplying supraphysiologic doses of testosterone or other androgens to females;

(3)    prescribing, dispensing, administering, or otherwise supplying supraphysiologic doses of estrogen to males;

(4)    performing surgeries that sterilize, including castration, vasectomy, hysterectomy, oophorectomy, orchiectomy, and penectomy;

(5)    performing surgeries that artificially construct tissue with the appearance of genitalia that differs from the individual’s sex, including metoidioplasty, phalloplasty, and vaginoplasty; or

(6)    removing any healthy or nondiseased body part or tissue.

To read more about the damages of circumcision check out this article.

The issue of gender reassignment surgery and hormone therapy for adolescents is an extremely nuanced topic. For more information on the issue, Joe Rogan has an excellent podcast episode with Abigail Shrier, author of “The Transgender Craze Seducing our Daughters” which you can listen to here.

A new report by Oxfam has shown that the ten richest men in the world have seen their wealth increase by half a trillion since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic a year ago. Meanwhile, many have lost their jobs with the unemployment rate peaking around 14%. The current unemployment rate is estimated to be 6.2%.

A recent report by Oxfam shows that “the world’s ten richest men have seen their combined wealth increase by half a trillion dollars since the pandemic began.” On the other hand, the majority of people have been ushered into “the worst jobs crisis in over 90 years with hundreds of millions of people now underemployed or out of work.” The report was titled “The Inequality Virus” and was published on the opening day of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) ‘Davos Agenda.’

World’s Ten Richest People See Wealth Increase By Half A Trillion Dollars Since Beginning of COVID

While the coronavirus took jobs and houses from people, Elon Musk surpassed Jeff Bezos as the richest man in the world. Jeff Bezos increased his net worth by 20% thanks to a surge in Amazon sales, and Bill Gates quietly bought up farmland becoming the countries largest farmland owner.

The Richest men in the world have more than enough money to make some of our larger financial problems go away. The housing crisis, world hunger, you name it. To try and comprehend just how much money the richest men in the world have, check out this wealth comparison chart.

Despite warnings about the levels of arsenic in U.S rice potentially increasing cancer risk, a study by Harvard has shown that long term consumption of rice (white or brown) was not associated with a risk of developing cancer.

That being said, the levels of arsenic in brown rice has still been a cause for concern. Do the benefits of brown rice outweigh the risk?

My Daily Dozen recommendation of at least three servings of whole grains a day was associated with a 10 percent lower risk of dying from cancer, a 25 percent lower risk of dying from heart attacks or strokes, and a 17 percent lower risk of dying prematurely across the board, whereas rice consumption in general was not associated with mortality and was not found to be protective against heart disease or stroke.

Do the Pros of Brown Rice Outweigh the Cons of Arsenic?

Related: Stop Eating Like That and Start Eating Like This – Your Guide to Homeostasis Through Diet

Many studies have found brown rice to have benefits. One study showed an improvement in insulin levels after five days of eating brown rice compared to white rice. Another study showed that eating a cup of brown rice a day could reduce weight, BMI, and diastole blood pressure.

You should be prioritizing fresh produce above grains in your diet to be as healthy as possible but you don’t have to completely cut out brown rice. Lundberg Farms, in California, produces brown rice with low levels of arsenic and continues to find ways to lower their arsenic levels further.

Related: Detox Cheap and Easy Without Fasting – Recipes Included