Introducing Super Health, a newsletter covering the edge of nutrition and wellness

By Sami Reiss, bestselling author of SNAKE

How do you get pretty healthy? Pretty strong? Healthy enough to get through a work or vacation day without feeling beat, strong and resilient enough to find a credenza on the street and carry it home from the train (I’ve done this)? Or bust out a sprint, or join a group workout without trepidation or feel good after a long flight? What about a couple levels higher than that? Humming at a different vibration, like you just finished surfing, housed an affogato, a few oz. of cold steak, stone fruits and a pastry—dark nutrition, they call it… specific foods that when combined right over time render you at peace, light and strong—but on a Tuesday at work… to say nothing of achieving more traditionally superficial markers of health…

Is this… level just for folks with good genes, or who live in the gym? Can this be done without becoming an “I’m into health” person?

It can. Definitely. It is not just for some people. It is possible. Yes. There is a way. You can get there. It is possible because people everywhere do it. It is possible because health is a choice. It is a choice people can make, an inevitability that occurs over time. With literacy, the right decisions and understanding it is inevitable. Experimenting with how you do things, big and small. One hundred small decisions, a few big ones… that after a while become background. And then you feel good and carry furniture home.

At least that’s how I see it, and that’s how it worked for me. This halfway between carrying a credenza down Union Street (it was small) and the Tuesday affogato-steak hum is a level I’ve figured out for myself. Not in an egotistical way… just where I’m at compared to before. I have been writing and reporting about wellness—def. not the right word, but the agreed-upon one; a topic for another newsletter—for a decade, in my other newsletter and, later, for GQ, Ssense and Inverse. I’d read studies and interview smart people, mostly about strength training. This was a main interest of mine for half my life, starting when I began to lift weights in high school so that I could look like the Cro-Mags:

Circa 1986

But this new affogato/sun/pull-ups energy only arrived because I didn’t have any choice. For a while before this I was in pretty bad health. Eight years ago I underwent an emergency spinal surgery which left me unable to walk for two months, and whose serious after-effects lingered for years. After the surgery, my doctors told my girl at the time that I had a more than even chance of living my life out in a wheelchair. But I ended up very lucky, and eventually relearned how to walk—read about it if you want, in my book, or in SNAKE:

Snake America 100

I was left with no nerve damage, but many other lasting effects. For years I couldn’t walk more than 100 feet without hurting. My biomarkers were bad, for several summers I wore long johns to sleep, I lost something like 45 pounds while in recovery, I could not take the stairs, I was somehow now three inches shorter. I was in the clear, technically, and “healthy;” doing better a year out than any of my surgeons predicted. I ate normally, went to PT, did normal workouts and got on with my life. I have been blessed. But for years everything about my health that wasn’t my spine was destroyed.

I can’t go long on the details here, but eventually I got over it. I ate, I lifted, I read. I found real health then—nutrient-dense nutrition, sunlight, tendon strength, hydration, deep sleep—because I looked. It was not in magazines, not on websites and very deeply hidden on Instagram. But as anyone who had spent half their life lifting can tell you, after a while doing this stuff, if you care, then you know how to find things.

Trial and error, let’s call it… digging around. The same impulse that drove me to the edge of eBay pushed me to secret corners of health. Dark nutrition—raw dairy from out-of-state farmers, off cuts, fruit, propolis, good salt, organs, obscure fats, Mexican Coke—helped me get nutrients. Perverse balance workouts, the kind anathema to powerlifting, helped me get back on my feet. Gauzy skincare advice from online—sun titration, red light; this one medicated soap that overnight sold out on Amazon—got my biomarkers back. None of this was crazier to me than, I don’t know, sleeping in long johns.

As my health turned the corner and I got back on my feet, my writing for magazines changed. I shifted from trad lifting to topics more holistic—again, not the right word— interviewing doctors, nutritionists, meme accounts and Bear Grylls… sketching out a new beat. I reported a dark nutrition feature that was the first national magazine piece on that topic. But I couldn’t file as much as I wanted, or go into depth like I did with vintage furniture in my other newsletter I’d built. And I could not provide context.

To discuss health, context is important, since every choice made relates to everything else. Real strength publications get this: they assume that their readers work out regularly, move, eat whole foods, hit their macros. But a magazine, well… everyone reads magazines. And so you can’t get too deep. And these topics, which are more important than jeans or furniture, require nuance and granularity of detail. And findings—and ideas—need to be presented in context.

Which is why I’ve gone long on myself. The context here is not that I’m some jacked bodybuilder, or that I am showing off what I did. Or even that the specifics that got me here are “right” or replicable… the context is research, adjustments and work. Nailing down big things and then nailing down the specifics. That is the blueprint, whether or not you have gone under the knife:

And there are so many specifics: what is dark nutrition, what is raw milk, whether supplements help, whether people with credentials are full of shit, whether margarine is poison*, and so on and so on—not to mention, for many readers, gaining a functional literacy and getting answers to questions on topics like movement, nutrition, sleep and light.

And if there are a million questions then there are 2 million answers. No one—except for Chris at HEAVIES, and a couple of blogspot powerlifters—is addressing them regularly in writing.

And so I’m going to write about these things. Regularly. In this new newsletter. At a free and paid ($8/month) tier.

If you’re familiar with my body of work then expect Snake, but for health… otherwise, it’ll break down like this:

Free subscribers can expect:

1. Explainers on specifics that form the edge of health—roughly this Venn diagram. Health, skin, nutrition, working out, movement, sleep, energy…. red light, red meat, raw dairy, collagen, anti-nutrients, postural movement, cold plunges, glute bridges, cortisol… a final word/an introduction…

2. Essays/features about general ideas and structural issues in health and wellness. The way that it works.

   1. How did we all miss seed oils? • Why is being healthy in America extremely not chill? • How did veganism become for rich people? • Why is ClassPass so beat? (Why are gyms so abhorrent?) • What’s with three-hour morning routines? • Is Huberman unswag? • Why did we get it wrong with sugar? • Why does that raw steak chick on Instagram speak in a whisper?

3. News posts that round up the sicko crap in the health and wellness world (and which is kind of usually right…), with context so you don’t have to follow turn notifications on for Carnivore MD, the ankle health guy, and that whispering steak chick.

4. Interviews, videos, archival shit, whatever else comes up which smart readers might like…

Paying subscribers will get it all:

1. The writing above and also specifics on how to implement whatever changes you see fit. Or… the road to the credenza, and feeling like affogato and steak.  

2. Specifics. an explainer about raw milk is great, understanding how to test the waters on RM is better. What kind to buy, how to start even if you’re lactose intolerant (yes there’s a way, I did it), my list of best farms that deliver to New York City, best LA groceries, best places in other states… real information that is not out there in plain English for normal people, reading material... (And so on for collagen, red meat, red light, any supplement, pull-ups, any topic about which a paying subscriber can suggest and is interested.)

3. Actual no-bullshit product recommendations. Look, everyone buys stuff, even experts and objective journalists. Why not buy the right thing? You think I don’t have a shower filter? Everything from those to supps to equipment to cookware to lightbulbs to whatever else. 

4. Resources and hacks: Look, I’ll be straight here with you: getting healthy is mostly, on most days, pretty boring, and really just involves a few simple things done consistently over time. (I’m not reinventing the wheel. I didn’t invent any of this, and there are no secrets.) But there are hacks out there that people pick up which make these habits easy to stick to. Need back of the envelope math on how to avoid seed oils? Hit macros? Improve your sleep environment? Find fun cardio? Find nutrient dense foods? Work out on vacation? Bulk up or cut down? Got you. 

5. The real psycho stuff I frankly can’t write about for a general audience, and would not dream of discussing in my introductory newsletter. The stuff that needs lots of context but is low key as true as it gets, but which is only “right” in very narrow and specific contexts. OK, one hint: a diet for skin health (yes this exists; it’s insane that this is even controversial and isn’t completely out there). If you do this you can throw out half of your creams. 

The breakdown is this: Free subscribers get writing on health, with nuance and detail. Paying subscribers get it all, with info they can use in the real world, should they decide to, specifics, and dispatches from the extreme edge.

Probably better for you than a protein shake

I am excited about this. Look. (Nearly) everyone is either wrong about health, or they’re cutting corners. But there is a real way. The path to health is not gendered or strict. It does not involve told you so’s. The ideas behind it are plasmatic, and depend on the person. Health is not lifting like a psycho an hour a day, or having a three-hour morning routine, avoiding everything on a grocery store shelf, cold plunging each morning, or even completely eschewing McDonald’s. It is more wavey than that. It is an inevitability. We all have to eat and move every day and work out a few times a week, and we all pick our bedtimes and habits. The choices that lead to super health, and away from it, will be explained here, over time.

THANK YOU

SAMI REISS

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(*) Point-form answers: (1) for nutrient-dense, easily digestible foods,Slav or French adjacent, mucho red meat; (2) basically manna from heaven, though titrate if you’re lactose intolerant, and watch out since it’s calorie dense; has a perception problem since it is very different from “milk;” hard to find; (3) Nailing light, sleep and diet, nature and movement take you farther what’s in a bottle… with a couple exceptions; (4) let’s say an apple a day keeps the doctor away, taken to its logical conclusion (5) ya.