The Comedian PHD Blog

Wildly Healthy:  A Standup Comedy Show About Resetting Human Health

“Wildly Healthy” is my 75-minute, comedy-soaked standup show about all that I learned while losing over 100 pounds during a ten-year span in my life.  I use comedy to explain how I went from being a nearly 300-lb. man in my thirties, to a wildly healthier 175 lb. man in my forties.  Everything in the show is clean, comedy-club level standup comedy, but every piece of comedy is laced with the most useful ideas I gathered for how we can all do powerful things to regain our health.  It’s a 75-minute chomp through a big old comedy and health potpie (which, don’t eat, by the way).

Let me give you an example of one foundational idea that deeply informs this show, as well as my everyday life.

The idea is this:  I don’t believe that we, as a species, were designed to be unhealthy.  I don’t believe disease and early death and weird illness were intended to happen to us.

Just the opposite, really.  We were designed to live healthy from the moment we’re born until the moment we die, with none of these odd diseases – cancer, anyone? – popping up inside of us, usually with no explanation of where they come from.  We were made to be super healthy.

But that isn’t what’s happening.  Not even close.

So, the question pops:  Why?  Why aren’t we healthy?  What’s happening here?  Why is all this disease going on?

To answer that, let’s slow down, go back a bit, and delve a little more slowly.

Start with this:  if you’re into God, a Godder, a Goddist, and believe that God designed us – in his image, no less – you have to believe that he designed us well.  He’s smart, so surely he wouldn’t build us badly.  So we were designed by God to have amazing abilities and to be incredibly healthy.

Or, if you’re into evolution, you have to believe that we evolved within the specific ecology of earth, and that even though we were competing with endless other species, we ended up clearly atop the food chain.  Clearly.  It’s not even close between us and everything else.  Nothing else hunts, attacks, corrals or eats us.  And if it tries to, we lose our minds and decimate entire species (sorry, tigers, et al).  Living on top of the food chain implies we evolved incredibly well.  Which, again, means super healthy.

So then riddle me this, riddler:  why are we all dying of cancer, heart disease, obesity, dementia?  Why do we seem to get so many horrific diseases?  Why does it seem so natural that at some point in their lives something inside everyone goes awry and the body breaks down and gets arthritis, multiple sclerosis, mental illness, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, thyroid issues, sleep disturbance, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s?  Nothing else in nature experiences this.  No other species has these diseases, or dies like we do.  Only us.  The top of the food chain.  God’s chosen.

Does that make sense?  That we’re the most evolved species on the planet, but we die in horrible ways that aren’t natural to any other species?

Nope, it doesn’t.  So, here we are, still on earth, still designed by God or environment, but the plan is going awry.  Something’s messing up the gears.

What’s messing up the gears?  Us.  We are.  We are the cause of our own diseases.

We have to be.  Because everything else stays the same, the only thing that changes is us.  The only thing that makes changes to other things is us.

And changes we have certainly made.  We have changed everything around us.  We don’t live with nature, we remake nature.

So it follows that the reason we are dying is because we are interrupting the natural flow of things.  We are doing things that don’t fit with our original design.  If we can figure out what we’re doing, maybe we can get back to our original presets, and eliminate these particular ways of dying that were not intended for us.

So, how do we find what we’re doing wrong?  Guess?  Listen to people wildly theorize?

No, we don’t have to guess.  It turns out that there are human populations that don’t get these diseases.  Surviving hunter-gatherer tribes that never changed over to modern life – who still live in nature, still eat food that just occurs in nature – don’t get these diseases.  Also, primitive people – who are studied from bones and archeological sites – were taller, stronger, had bigger brains than us, and died from external environment, not internal disease.

So, unlike humans who stayed in full, everyday contact with nature, we modern humans extracted ourselves from nature, thus diseasing ourselves.  By being smart and dumb.  Smart enough to change everything around us, but too dumb to realize all the effects of changing our world and changing our food.  All the sub-effects.  All the internal micro effects that become large, horrific diseases over time.

So now it’s time to get smart enough to look back and see where we’ve outsmarted ourselves.  Or over-dumbed ourselves.  It’s time to look at the past so we can figure out how to live in these bodies again.

So take the first foundational idea — we’re supposed to be healthy – and add to it the second foundational idea – that we can look and see how healthy human populations lived, learn from them, and make changes that will help us reset to our original presets, and voila!

300 lb. guy becomes 175 lb. guy.

Time to listen to your 10,000-year-old nutritionist.

Did you know you can get cankle surgery?  Cankles.  You know, calf-ankles, the condition where women essentially have no “tuck-in” toward their feet, where it’s like a rolled-up rug from thigh to shoe, or worse, it’s like two chubby midgets clinging to their knees.  You can get that lower extremity de-extremed.  Through the modern miracle of credit cards.

Cankles are the best-named cosmetic malady ever.  It’s just fun to say.  Whoever first combined ankle and calf, and quipped off “cankle!” that was a good pull, as I like to say.  Good pull from the linguistic glop.  Nicely extracted.

Apparently, what happens in de-cankling, is that essentially you get lipo, but jussst around your ankle joint.  And sure, now all your extra-juicy sized ankle bracelets will look like hula hoops, but you can once again wear bobby socks without weeping in front of a shoe mirror.

Do you know where cankle surgery was developed?  France.  Because apparently, French women don’t get fat, but they do get cankles.