Into the Fridge 😏

Sami Reiss on hard boiled eggs and finding purpose

he’s just like me

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Sami Reiss 😏

Sami Reiss is a NYC-based writer originally from Ottawa, Ontario. He writes the SNAKE SUPER HEALTH and SNAKE newsletters, covering dark nutrition/health, and design, respectively. His book, Sheer Drift: The Snake USA newsletters, is available from Shining Life Press. If you don’t know Sami, I won’t give anything away, but just know — you’re in for a treat today.

What is your fridge philosophy? 

For me? If you don’t have a full fridge you are fucked.

Your fridge is always always always stocked with ____.

Raw dairy, hard boiled pasture raised eggs, kimchi, orange juice, cranberry juice, mineral water, red Coke, greek yogurt, butter, coconut water, some sort of milk chocolate, ideally red meat, broth.

Eggs are a snack and the dairy is for working out and the drinks and kimchi are for life.

he’s a billionaire, apparently

Top condiment picks, go.

• Well, since salt is a condiment then salt. The good kind and lots of it. Lately I got some Peruvian sea salt and it’s nice and flaky… I mostly put it in water but salt my Jerusalem salad, etc.

• Then zhug—they don’t sell the kind I like by me but I found a comparable one at Damascus Cafe. And my barber said he has a hookup.

• Salsa, El Yucateco hot sauce (any, I put it on hard boiled eggs; black is good),

• yellow mustard (I like it more than dijon/others),

• and marmalade.

Fine, I’ll open it up to pantry too. Let’s hear your favorite snacks / pantry staples: 

• Some spices (hawaijj from Sahadi’s, kebab spice and sumac, regular sea salt and potassium sea salt, as well as dulse powder)

• honey and bee pollen and maple syrup, kombu and fish sauce…

• rice, blackstrap molasses.

For snacks:

• Uncle Jerry’s pretzels (great, just wheat and salt really)

• Tate’s cookies now and then (unfortunately made with fortified iron flour, but no vegetable oils; half decent for a widely-available brand)

• Soom tahini chocolate spread (also no seed oils which is wild)

• and now and then that Lesser Evil popcorn.

I really just snack on fruits, eggs, chocolate bars.

everyone knows Tate’s are essential

A meal that’s on heavy rotation these days:

Most nights I eat what my friend Nino calls a dog bowl: ground beef, sometimes with a couple oz. of organ meats, browned and with garlic, hawaij, and salt, maybe some grape tomatoes, reduced in tomato paste and water—a chili. With rice and a big bowl of Jerusalem salad or, if I’m in a rush, kimchi or salsa. If I’m home, it’s dinner.

I want to talk about what looks like an insane record collection

Let’s go a little deeper… 

What’s the mantra you keep coming back to?

Two: one is “Big things first.” We get really up on potions and powders and vitamins and even RM and so on, narratively speaking, but the real non-storyline truth of health, and what I try to orient my newsletter to, is that the big things do 90% of the work—eating normal foods, moving, getting light, moving weight, sleeping decent, breaking a sweat, having purpose/people in your life. All the powders and creams and even red light machines in the world can’t catch you up to not having that stuff organized. Period.

It gets grayer as we get deeper and healthier and want more additional benefits, and there certainly are ways to go over the top dialing in the small things but the narrative really should be that the big, non-meritocratic, boring, grocery-based stuff can be overhauled by more people (not just men) and that you really, really have to know what you’re doing to get a lot out of supplements.

What products / practices are part of your regular mental wellness habits? 

So to me, mental wellness means having perspective, feeling decent, focused, calm, energized… I find the stuff that puts me most in a funk/outside that zone is either running on empty or just staring at a screen for too long, and so the products come from that and go back to my full fridge thing above, and, I don’t know, shoes.

Coffee, sugar, fats, carbs… fruits, bread, meat, whatever for a quick normalizing snack or going for a walk and reading a book, getting sun. Then things become good.

Practices: I pray and I meditate every day and also work out regularly. Work is also important, either newsletter and paying work (I like what I do for a living, so it feels good to work) and my own work projects, which raise the wellness bar from feeling fine to having purpose and feeling propelled about what my life is really about. As well as the regular things — staying in touch with friends and family, and so on.

Even if you do these to, like, hack feeling better, I think they will eventually become worthy in their own right.

And your physical?

Beauty products? Honestly nothing. I was joking on Dewy Dudes that I’m basically the 3-in-1 bodywash/shampoo guy but like dark nutrition. Kinda true, for me it’s more about omission: no fragrances for cleaners and soaps, more neutral pH soaps as well… good skin and hair to me comes like 99% from diet (and genetics). And it’s really hard to find a shampoo/conditioner or suite of hair products that don’t even have vegetable oils in them. I understand the tallow impulse.

My pull-up bar is prob the only routine product — I swing or dead hang from it every day.

That said — a lacrosse ball for MFR, a gua sha stone and jade roller are all clutch and get regular use, and I take them on trips. Red light chicken lamp too, but even less routine.

just hangin ✌️

What do you think is the most underrated part of wellness? 

Light environment, as in blue light and screens after dark. It’s discussed in demon health circles, but not to the extent food or skincare is mentioned and is barely addressed in meritocratic/mainstream health coverage. (Makes sense; it’s hard to double blind.)

It’s hard to truly isolate one factor but this one is a major one… effectively an unregulated blue light environment, which is natural in our lifestyle, may really degrade sleep quality (probably way more than caffeine or alcohol) and bad sleep cannot be outrun.

That said, fixing it doesn’t really involve money and can make a big difference. It’s not worth stressing about but it is worth looking into if you’ve hit a wall doing “everything else.” A couple of improvements will, over a year, put you in a much different place.

And overrated?

Any and all supplements, anything in a tube or a box. These are either cherry on top or very advanced measures, they do not create health for most people and the most advanced supplement administration cannot outrun a bad diet. In some cases they can actually make things worse, i.e. take you from 85% to 80%, because it requires serious levels of expertise to administer. Compare that to diet which is frankly more intuitive and simpler on a general scale.

Again, individuals can solve 90% of their “health problems” in an analog—food, sun, muscle and sleep—way. To be sure, some nutrients and vitamins you can only get through pills, and I know a couple of digital health people (stack manipulators) who have really figured it out, but for the most part, even the skincare/makeup press, which has an incentive towards promoting products, are seeing that it’s food first.

wellness is free, fr

Picture this: you wake up one morning and feel like shit. What’s your next move: 

• Feeling like shit to me means either being sore and stiff or rotten digestively. If it’s the first, I’ll move around, do some world’s greatest stretch and cossacks, walk around barefoot in my courtyard (I do that every day, honestly) and maybe a waiter or suitcase carry around the apartment, dead hangs, twists, MFR, toe walks, and if I have time, an epsom bath. Without the bath this is 15 mes.

• If I wdigestively then I’ll look at what I ate or drank the couple days before, and will eat to fix that — some carrots, a kiwi mineral water with salt, maple syrup, lemon, cup of tea, cottage cheese, toast and marmalade… but honestly I do abbreviated versions of both these protocols to start most days, and I’m lucky that I feel pretty good in the morning now.

Give us your ride or die wellness products:

THE SUN, my legs, Brighton Beach, raw dairy, any apple, mineral water, any ground beef, OJ, pull-up bar, any shoe, aleppo soap, orange juice, black tea.

Tomatoes/cucumbers, eggs, black seed oil.

photosynthesis

One thing you do everyday that makes you the most YOU version of yourself: 

Honestly thought about this and the answer is my own writing projects (longer project I’m working on outside of my Substack) which more or less cements my place/purpose as a human being. As much as I love the health stuff and how intellectually rewarding it is to explain these concepts, to research them etc., I got this deep into health because I had a brutal surgery I needed to recover from. I’m pushing it still, but It’s not why I get up in the morning, they’re just habits I do in order to… literally physically get out of bed in the morning.

Whose taste inspires you?! 

My friend Brad is a good dresser. My friends Charlie and Mark are very liberal and knowledgeable and demanding music consumers, and I love following their lead and checking new records out. Kaitlin Phillips has great taste in literature and restaurants and so on, and so I like checking in and seeing what she’s consuming. I don’t know, not a lot of people? I try and find things myself because I like doing the work.

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Big thanks to Sami for sharing a taste of his life with us; I always have a ton of fun reading what he has to say. For more of his writing, subscribe to him at SNAKE SUPER HEALTH and/or SNAKE or grab his book, Sheer Drift: The Snake USA newsletters. You can find his fridge favorites and more here.

Feel free to leave a comment or respond to this email with questions you want asked, people you want featured, or anything else that’s on your mind. Don’t be shy, I love hearing from you.