“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.

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.

There was a line.  Not sure if you know what that is, but it’s a phenomenon that hovers inside all government buildings.  As soon as you step through any door a vacuum tube sprouts from the wall and shoots forty people out to stand in front of you.  It’s the only efficient part of government, the ability to always get more people in front of you than seems humanly possible.  Whoosh, whoa, where did all y’all come from?  And why is it that every single one of you has a transaction to accomplish that’s going to require four manuals and a visit from an official embassy representative?

It took about thirty minutes to get through the line, during which time I would occasionally low moo.   Not loudly, didn’t want to be obnoxious.  Sort of a low low, a soft bellow, just a “Mrrrrrr” now and then.  The boy forced to stand next to his mother seemed to enjoy it.  Others kept looking around for the cow that needed it’s license renewed.  Um, remooed?

And, I know it’s just me, because my consciousness has shifted as I lost weight, but, damn, people gotten big!  With a capital “ig.”  We don’t look like the same species anymore.  It’s like everyone got bee stung, and the swelling never went down.  It’s hard to not just shout out, “Okay, enough!  Seriously!  Let’s all agree, no more carbs, all right?  Can we just agree it’s time to kick off these government and corporate-issued fat suits once and for all?  Who’s with me?  Come on, just moo in agreement!”

By which I mean she is standing, letting her three-year-old, a boy (of course, it would be too lesbian the other way), who is looking at the camera and standing on a chair — doing everything except giving a thumbs up — breastfeed.

Nice try, Time.  Trying to get us all wumped up about a natural human process.  I breastfed until I was 34.  Sometimes on Mothers Day I’ll still take a nip.  And, sure, it causes a little murmuring from the anti-nature people at Applebees, but it’s my Mom, and I want to make her feel special on her day.

Besides, I live in Austin, where breastfeeding in public is a law.  You have to do it.  If you try to breastfeed inside your home, hippies come and drag you into the street where we can all watch and applaud the natural way of natural nature.  Austin is currently building a huge set of breasts at the entrance of the city, our St. Louis arch, and children and old people alike will be able to bathe in the free milk of life 24/7.  Our new motto:  Austin Sucks.  In a Good Way,

Oh, Time, Time, Time, ye of so little imagination.  If you really wanted controversy, the Mom should have been breastfeeding from the boy.  While she looks at the camera.  Making a “Whattaya gonna do?” face.

He’s picketing.  Which at 350 is probably the only exercise he’s gotten in the past few years (hey, maybe that’s it, the new Outrage Workout — irritate people, then give them huge protest signs and ankle weights, tell them to get at it).

Sigh.  People.  His big gripe was this was false advertising, and that somebody needs to stand up for the consumer.  No, someone doesn’t.  Consumption mentality — we get as much food as possible for as little money as possible, and if we aren’t satisfied with the sheer volume of the food we get, if the food doesn’t make us feel like a well stuffed with sponges, then we’ve been cheated — is a major driver behind obesity.

And false advertising?  Uh, well, maybe the advertising needs to be more specific.  Instead of All You Can Eat, maybe All a Normal Person Can Eat.  All Someone Should Eat.  All You Can Eat Without Heading for an ICU in two hours.  All You Can Eat if You Never Want to Take Your Shirt Off in Front of Another Human Being Ever Again.

My favorite weight-away pro-duct right now may have to be Sensa, just because, oh, I don’t know, I really enjoy huge, groundless claims that make no sense and yet are backed by hundreds of thousands of dollars of advertising.  It’s like there’s some cabal of well-oiled businessmen who go around collecting anything that’s absolutely weird but just reasonable enough to thin-wedge its way into the brains of people who are now so desperate to escape the obesity pit that they will try, literally, anything.  Anything at all.  You know, anything — like Sensa.

If you don’t know (and I hope you don’t, because if you do, their advertising is working), Sensa is a powder that you shake onto your food — all of your food, no matter what you’re eating — that creates “sensory specific satiety, thus ending hunger and cravings.”  Meaning, it enhances smell, and, somehow, that magically turns off your hunger drive and makes food so delicious.  It just burrows right in there, deep into your monkey brain, every time you shake it on, like food cocaine.

Sensa is of course sodium free, sugar free, and calorie free, but for some reason, even with so much freedom, it costs a lot ($59 a month, which is quite a bit for something that boldly brags that is has no nutritional value).  The patent is pending, apparently because crazy fake dust is hard to patent.  The ads say that “the magic lies in the patent pending formula” (with the important word in here being “lies”; oh, and maybe beware whenever an ad uses the word magic.).

Sensa is made, basically of maltrodexin (a common starch derivative, a sweetener), and tricalcium phosphate, which, is, I quote:   “a mineral often used as a dietary supplement or electrolyte replacement agent. It increases serum calcium by directly affecting bones, the kidneys and the gastrointestinal tract, and it also reduces mineral release and collagen breakdown in bone. This ingredient may cause unpleasant side effects, such as headache, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, rash, dizziness, a mild decrease in blood pressure, an increase in urination and joint pain.”

Sign me up!

I want to start “the first day of my new life, my Sensa life!”

I want to experience that “diets are hard, but Sensa is easy.”

I also want to “Shake My Sensa” with 40 women wearing white bikinis on the beach.  (Or maybe that’s the hallucination you have when you use this stuff for a few months?)

And, yes, I would very much enjoy standing at an odd angle, with one foot forward, then throwing my hands in the air and saying, “I lost 60 lbs., and I feel great!”  (I would even wear a one-piece bathing suit, with a scarf tied around my waist, the way all the women do for some reason in weight loss ads)

And, sure, homelessians must eat like all of us, but, well, it’s just, I don’t know, if anyone could walk to a store to get their own pizza, it’s the person who walks everywhere.  Seems to me.  In fact, in this instance, many things seemed to me.  Seemed to me weird that she would have a cell phone she could use to call Papa Johns.  Weird that she had to give directions to her intersection.  Weird to see the kid in the Papa John’s car not get out, but just hand the box to her, get his money, and drive off.  Weird to wonder, “Did she tip?”  Weird to wonder if it’s weird that I’m wondering about the homeless life in this detail.

I think the reason it fascinated me was to see that our crazy/easy food supplying even applies to people who really aren’t — at least in theory — able to access the easy life anymore.  What’s next, a lion calls up Caribou Hut, “Yeah, I want, uh, hold on — honey, how many in the pride?  Wait, we have to feed your cousin, too?  — Okay, yeah, I want two large caribou, hold the savanna dust on one, and — do you want a side of zebra?  Zebra.  I said ‘Zebra!’  Can you not hear anymore? — and a quarter of a zebra.  Young zebra, per-adolescent.   Yeah, we’re in Kenya.  I don’t know the address, we’re under a tree, it’s hot.  Okay, thirty minutes.”

Monterrey is an industrial town about 85 miles from the US border, known for a broom factory, an oil refinery and its historic role as one of the first places baseball was played in Mexico.  Oh, and for having 49 headless bodies laying around on the highway.  Well, at least they have plenty of brooms.

Authorities (again, a little loose with that word, maybe call them “survivors”) stress that this is gang warfare, and none of the bodies were civilians.  So don’t cancel those vacation plans unless you were planning on mule-ing in some drugs without giving the Zetas their cut.

49 headless bodies.  Spread out on the highway.  They take their speeding seriously in Mexico.

And that native American in the commercial, upset about seeing garbage on an American highway?  Whole new reason to cry.

Great question.  Have a nine-second sit, I’ll explain.

You see, the way to continue on to “stuffed,” is to switch away from meat and fresh water, and begin shoving carbohydrates and flavored drinks into your pie-chamber.  It turns out, bread and pasta and Cokes and sugars and yeehaw do not ever make you feel full.  In fact, you can eat them until the walls of your stomach bloat up, and then you know, “Wow, I’m nearing a limit here.  Maybe only nine more mouth-shovels.”  This is what we know as stuffed, and it has nothing to do with full, because full comes from your brain recognizing there is enough food — meat! — in your stomach, but stuffed comes from your stomach stretching and begging you to stop.  And that only happens with these non-foods that we’ve turned into foods, which we call carbohydrates.

So, thanks for stopping by for today’s lesson in what full feels like.  And if you don’t like it, feel free to get stuffed.

Watching Obama “announce” that he supported gay marriage was like watching someone admit that maybe, maybe, they had dabbled in homosexuality back in college, for five or six years.  It took him two minutes of back-peddling, hemming and hawing, avoiding the issue, and generally spreading manure to say, “Yeah, gay people should have the same rights across the board as everyone else.  It’s America.  Don’t be fucking idiots.  That’s the purpose of the country, fools.  Even people you don’t like get the same stuff you do.  Jesus.”

Imagine hundreds of journalists hanging around your work to see if they can catch you saying something fucked up.  What would it take for them to catch something, five minutes?  Half this country would get hanged for what they say before noon.

“My position on gay marriage has evolved.”  No, it hasn’t.  Unless your position has been living in the wild and competing for sex and food with other positions, positions don’t “evolve.”  Your decision to keep lying or to put up with political crotch-kicking has shifted.  Say it, dude.  Sayyyyyy it.  You got elected by people who don’t need the tip-toe.  Play to your base, fire them up, and quit worrying that the little old racist in Florida is going to vote you out because you treated her like an adult.  People will step up if you step up.

Probably.