The Pursuit of Happiness

A Crash Course in Nutrition There are two basic categories of nutrients: micronutrients and macronutrients. Macronutrients include carbohydrates, fats and proteins, all of which can can be broken down into energy. Micronutrients include vitamins, minerals, fibers and phytochemicals. Micronutrients perform a variety of functions, but do not supply the body with energy. Lets take a look at the different kinds of macro and micro nutrients, and what specifically they do. Of the three macronutrients, most of us get most of our energy from carbohydrates. There are two kinds of carbohydrate: simple and complex. Simple carbohydrates are sugars like sucrose and fructose, which are molecules of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Complex c arbohydrates are complex, strung together chains of sugars. The body’s preferred source of fuel is glucose, which is a simple carbohydrate. Naturally-occurring c arbohydrate dense foods include: cereals, grains, and fruits. Fibers are also technically carb...

Part One: Healthy Body Diet I.   Where to begin Everyone wants to be happy, but it’s not always easy to know where to start. For a long time, I thought that the key to being happy was to have some earth-shattering revelation about life, and that everything else would follow from it. As fate would have it, as a young man, I had such a revelation. I pierced the veil of delusion and saw my true nature. For a few hours, I was a living buddha, brimming with wisdom and enraptured in the pure joy of being. Unfortunately, this state was precipitated from eating hallucinogenic mushrooms, and when effects wore off, I found myself even more miserable and confused about life than before. Having anticipated this would happen, while still in the throes of drug-induced satori, I contemplated the best advice to give my sober, unenlightened self. After some contemplation, I settled on this: quit smoking, and remember to meditate, in that order. Unfortunately, I didn’t not fo...

Does the world need another self-help book? When was the last time you were happy? I don’t mean the kind of happy that comes from a belly laugh or a mind-blowing orgasm. I mean the kind of happy that you sink into; the kind of happy that saturates every pore of your body and lingers. I mean the kind of happy where you are one hundred percent at ease, and your lips can’t help but slide into an easy smile. I mean pure pleasure. A few years ago, I had one such experience. I was lying on the grass one summer night in the backyard of my friend’s house, staring at the stars, absolutely enraptured. Overcome by the beauty of the galaxy that lay before me, I had a powerful epiphany: happiness should be my default setting. It occurred to me then that happiness actually  was  the default, and in my day to day life, I was doing damn near everything I could to make myself miserable. Because of my actions, my words, and most fundamentally, because of my beliefs, I was creating a cons...