Interview with VarianaVolk

On bile, glycine, posture and the metabolic thread that runs through all of it.

In her mid-twenties, VarianaVolk was handed the same prescription by every specialist she saw. Humira, several thousand dollars a month, for the rest of her life. The drug suppresses TNF-alpha, a key signalling molecule in immune defence, and the FDA boxed warning lists the consequences. By coincidence she was working part-time for someone whose mother had died from complications tied directly to that suppression. None of the doctors recommending the drug had asked why her body was doing what it was doing. She refused, despite their warnings that she would be in a wheelchair within five years. After eighteen months of reading, experimenting and getting things wrong before getting them right, she achieved complete remission. That remission has held.

What followed was years of research that pulled her deeper into the territory most medicine refuses to look at as a single system. Mitochondria, bile, thyroid, the steroid cascade, glycine, posture, fascia, the nervous system. The framework she works inside will be familiar to readers here — the body does not make mistakes, symptoms are intelligent responses to insult, and pharmaceutical suppression of those symptoms is what drives acute conditions toward chronic ones. What is less common is the breadth she covers within it, and the precision with which she connects pieces most writers handle separately. She is not anti-pharmaceutical. She is opposed to the system that uses medication as a substitute for understanding.

This interview moves from the foundations she built for herself through the specific mechanisms her readers know her for. The 36.7 morning temperature that tells you whether your metabolism is running. The bile flow that decides how you age. The family photograph that stopped her — her brother in his early forties standing the same height as her father in his late sixties. The reason squeezing your shoulder blades together for years gives you burning between them. The Alexander principle that did more for her body than years of ballet. Throughout, she gives the reader what most writing in this territory does not: practical handles. Numbers to track, foods to add, positions to try, questions to take to a doctor. The aim is not to convert anyone. It is to put the framework in front of someone who already senses something is wrong, and let them test it in their own body.

With thanks to VarianaVolk.

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Q1. You’ve written that your biology was fragile from the start — a childhood of moving constantly, years in the far north with limited food, frequent illness and round after round of antibiotics. When you went to doctors later, no one connected gut, thyroid and hormones. At what point did you decide to figure it out yourself, and what was the first thing you changed?

My childhood set the foundation, and the foundation was uneven. My father’s profession required us to move constantly. One year I would be in a major city. The next year I would be in the far north, where the sun disappears for six months, food supply is limited, and the conditions are objectively hostile to a developing organism. A child who spends critical growth windows in darkness with poor nutrition is laying down a different foundation than one who spends them in sunlight with abundant food.

During my youth I didn’t pay much attention to my health. I had issues here and there with different systems in the body, but youth is resilient, and the body compensates. I was juggling ballet, swimming, and eventually two university degrees in parallel. Crazy times. So obviously any issues and symptoms that came and went were dismissed as the cost of an ambitious life.

The breaking point came in my mid-twenties, after I moved to the United States to do my master’s. The compensations ran out all at once. An autoimmune condition hit me hard. I went to specialist after specialist, and every single one handed me the same prescription, an extremely popular biologic at the time: Humira. Several thousand dollars a month. My insurance at the time was thin, and the financial picture alone made it impossible. But the deeper hesitation was different. By weird coincidence, I was working part-time for someone whose mother had died from complications tied directly to the drug’s immunosuppressive action. Humira works by suppressing TNF-alpha, a key signaling molecule in immune defense, which leaves people open to severe infections their bodies would normally fight off. That risk is serious enough to be part of the FDA boxed warning. So sitting across from doctors who were telling me to take it for the rest of my life, with no investigation of why my immune system was doing what it was doing, the math stopped working. Lifelong drug. Real risk of complications. No curiosity about cause. I refused, despite their warnings that I would be in a wheelchair within five years.

I will tell that story properly in the book. The dismissal. The unprofessionalism. The negligence of doctors and the American health machine. For now, it is enough to say that I started reading and investigating. I went to libraries. The internet was thin on my condition back then, so I read books. Stacks of them. Autoimmunity, metabolism, endocrinology, biochemistry. I studied harder than I had ever studied for any university course. After about a year and a half of suffering, experimenting, getting things wrong, and gradually getting them right, I achieved complete remission without the drug. That remission has held.

After remission, life pushed back in. Graduation. Demanding job and working until two in the morning. I was rarely cooking my own food, and I fell into the trap a lot of recovered people fall into. My diet had become too narrow, I was avoiding entire categories of food I had cut out during recovery, and I had convinced myself that staying restricted was what kept the autoimmune condition away. New problems showed up years later. Severe insomnia. Anxiety that would not let go. The kind of background dread that makes you start considering medications you previously would have refused. I came very close to being put on SSRIs. Looking back, the only thing that stopped me was stubbornness and what I had already learned about asking why before accepting a prescription.

That second collapse sent me into territory the autoimmune research had not covered. Mitochondria. Bioenergetics. The actual machinery of cellular respiration. How the body produces energy. Why it stops producing enough. What conditions force it to ration. That research went on for years and is still going. Hormones, thyroid, nervous system, gut, even muscle mechanics and a deep dive into anatomy, all of it studied as a whole system, how everything connects. Once I understood the energy question at the cellular level, everything else organized itself around it.

People always want me to point at the first thing that worked. There was no first thing. There are dozens of things layered on top of each other. One system doesn’t function without another. An organ or disease cannot be treated in isolation. Anyone who tells you they fixed themselves with one intervention or one supplement is either selling you something or has not been at it long enough to see it relapse.

Q2. A consistent picture runs through your work — the body doesn’t make mistakes, symptoms are intelligent, and pharmaceutical suppression interrupts the very processes the body is using to restore balance. For the reader who senses something is wrong with the conventional model but still has one foot in it, where would you suggest they begin, and what would they notice first?

Before I answer where to begin, one thing has to be clear because people frequently assume that independent researchers who oppose the mainstream view on medicine are anti-pharmaceutical. I am not. Anyone reading carefully sees that immediately.

Some drugs are extraordinary tools. Aspirin, which is genuinely metabolically protective, anti-inflammatory, lowers serotonin and estrogen and supports mitochondrial function. Drotaverine for an acute spasm. Cytomel for someone with impaired thyroid conversion. Bioidentical hormones when the cascade has been investigated and replacement is actually needed. Antibiotics for real bacterial infections. These are real interventions and they have a real place. I would use any of them in the right circumstance.

What I oppose is the system that uses medication as a substitute for understanding the body. SSRIs handed out for symptoms that often have metabolic, thyroid, inflammatory, gut, hormonal, or nutrient components, with no serious investigation and no exit plan. Hormonal birth control as the default answer to every female complaint from acne to mood. Biologics for autoimmune conditions where nobody bothered to look at the gut, the diet, the chronic infections. Statins given to people whose cholesterol is high because their thyroid is suppressed. The line between a tool and a product is whether it serves the body’s intelligence or overrides it.

Which leads to the harder thing to say: stop trusting the system and the doctors inside it blindly. There are passionate, curious, genuinely skilled doctors out there. They are rare. The default doctor you will encounter cannot help you with a chronic, layered, metabolic problem. Recognizing that is not paranoia or disrespect for the medical profession. It is realism.

Now, where to begin. Begin with the obviously boring things. The things nobody is selling you because nobody profits from them.

Eat real food. Whole, simple, mostly single-ingredient food. If you are buying something with a label and the ingredient list runs longer than three items, put it down and read it carefully.

Get sun on your skin every day. Real sunlight on real skin, not through a window, not through SPF 50. Your hormonal cascade, your mitochondria, your circadian rhythm, your mood, your thyroid all depend on light hitting your eyes and skin in the early part of the day. The wellness industry has done enormous damage by telling people to fear the sun.

Stop fearing carbohydrates. Your brain alone burns roughly one hundred and twenty grams of glucose a day. A body that is not given fuel will manufacture it from your own muscle tissue, at the cost of your thyroid, your hormones, and your sanity. Healthy carbohydrates from fruit, root vegetables, dairy, well-cooked starches, honey, are the cleanest fuel your cells run on.

Get the industrial seed oils out. Soybean, corn, canola, sunflower, safflower, grapeseed. They oxidize inside your cells and damage everything they touch. Cook with butter or coconut oil. This single change reverses an enormous amount of damage over time.

Treat diets as short-term tools. Some diets have a place as therapeutic interventions for a defined period to address a specific problem. None of them are a way to eat for the rest of your life. The body needs variety.

Move in ways that feel right to your body, not the workout someone is selling you. Forced exercise that drains rather than restores raises cortisol and degrades the very system you are trying to repair. Walking, lifting heavy things occasionally, swimming, dancing, gentle stretching, slow strength work. Anything that leaves you feeling more energized than when you started is helping.

Find a rhythm that actually feels right for you. Sleep at consistent times, eat at consistent times, slow down in the evening. The body runs on cycles. The further you push it from those cycles, the more it costs you metabolically.

While you are doing all of that, start observing. Track your morning temperature under the tongue before you get out of bed. Track your resting pulse. Track sleep, energy through the day, mood, digestion, cycle if you have one, what you ate the day before. Do this for a few weeks and patterns surface. You see how a meal affects your energy hours later. How a bad night changes your tolerance for stress the next day. How undereating shows up as anxiety the following morning. The connections are obvious once you look. This is exactly why I am building a metabolic questionnaire that does the pattern detection automatically. Symptoms in, likely upstream drivers out. It is in development now and will be available to subscribers when it is ready.

What people notice first varies, but a few things show up consistently. The 3 a.m. wake-up driven by cortisol spikes starts to fade. Hands and feet warm up. Morning anxiety softens. Mood evens out. Sleep gets deeper. Cycle, if you have one, becomes more predictable. Energy stops crashing in the afternoon. The framework that told you “your labs are fine, this is just stress, here is an SSRI” loses its authority because you have proof, in your own body, that the picture was metabolic all along.

From there the path branches based on what each body needs. Thyroid. Gut. Hormones. Posture and nervous system. The order is personal. But that initial proof of concept, the experience of changing one or two simple things and feeling the system respond, is what most people are missing. Once you have it, you stop being a passive recipient of care and start being the person making the decisions.

Q3. You’ve described what you call glycine debt — the idea that what most people accept as ageing is actually the result of dropping the collagen-rich parts of the animal from the diet. The skin, joints, bones and broth went to pet food, and skinless chicken breast took their place. What does someone eat (or stop eating) to start closing the gap, and how long before they notice a difference?

Glycine debt is the silent deficiency running through modern bodies. The irony is that glycine is classified as non-essential because the body can technically synthesize it. Under real-world conditions of stress, inflammation, and modern diets, that label is wrong. The people who need glycine most are exactly the ones whose bodies cannot keep up with demand.

We stopped eating the part of the animal that contained the nutrient. Feet, joints, tendons, cartilage, bones, broth, all of it went to pet food. What enters the modern kitchen is muscle meat, the leanest, driest, most glycine-poor tissue in the animal. Excellent for protein numbers but catastrophic for metabolic balance, because muscle meat is methionine-heavy and methionine increases the body’s demand for glycine. For thousands of years that was balanced because both arrived in the same animal. Strip the collagen away and the equation tilts. Bile thickens, detoxification slows, sleep degrades, skin loses elasticity, inflammation rises. Year after year that debt accumulates and people call it aging.

The reason glycine carries so much weight is that almost every repair process in the body depends on it. Glutathione, your master antioxidant. Bile conjugation, which means estrogen clearance and toxin excretion. Collagen turnover, which means skin, bone, cartilage, gut lining, blood vessels, even mitochondrial membranes. Sleep architecture, because glycine lowers core body temperature and helps the brain enter deep sleep. Nervous system inhibitory tone, the brake that offsets glutamate-driven excitation. Recent research identified glycine as the signaling molecule for a brain receptor tied directly to stress resilience and depression. This is why I keep saying that depression is rarely a pure serotonin issue. It is exhaustion at the cellular level.

What to do. Put the rest of the animal back on your plate. Real broth from bones, joints, feet, knuckles, simmered for seven to eight hours with some vinegar. If it gels in the fridge, you did it right. One to three cups a day. Gelatin is the daily backbone, ten to twenty grams stirred into juice, coffee, desserts. Glycine powder fills the rest, three grams before bed.

What to stop. Stop relying on skinless chicken breast and lean ground beef as the bulk of your protein. That ratio is what creates the debt.

Timeline depends entirely on the person. Someone with a thrashed gut, severe inflammation, or years of high stress will move slower than someone whose foundation is mostly intact. As a rough guide, sleep is usually the first thing to shift, sometimes within days. Digestion follows. Skin, joints, hair, and nails take longer because those tissues turn over slowly. Six months in, you notice a glow in your face you’ve never seen before. It is rehydration, collagen turnover, calmer inflammation. It is the body finally getting the raw material it had been quietly missing.

The Missing Amino Acid Behind Poor Sleep, Rapid Aging, and Emotional Instability

Q4. One thread running through your work is that what looks like a structural problem, posture, weakness, stiffness, is often a metabolic one. What’s the underlying argument? You’ve also mentioned waking temperature and resting pulse as the simplest home markers most people are not tracking. What numbers tell someone their metabolism is the issue, and what changes first when they start addressing it?

Posture is one of the fastest reads on someone’s metabolic state. Spine tall without effort, shoulders wide and low, head poised on top of the neck, easy three-dimensional breathing. The opposite picture, collapsed chest, rounded shoulders, head forward, tight jaw, is what most adults walk around looking like. The usual explanations are age, stress, or bad posture habits. Stress and habits compound the picture, no question. But you cannot fix posture by managing stress or correcting habits if the underlying engine cannot produce enough energy to hold the structure up. Posture is metabolically expensive. Holding the body upright requires a continuous supply of ATP to the deep slow-twitch fibers that work against gravity all day, and T3 directly regulates that energy production. When thyroid function drops, those muscles cannot generate enough energy. They become weak and stiff at the same time, because the SERCA pump that releases each contraction is also thyroid-dependent. The body sags and the breath goes shallow. The conventional orthopedic model has no framework for this, which is why it gets missed. I wrote a long piece on the full mechanism on my Substack, “Your Posture Problem Is a Metabolism Problem,” for anyone who wants to go deeper.

Your Posture Problem Is a Metabolism Problem

This is why the home markers matter. The same cellular state that determines whether your postural muscles can hold you up is what shows on the thermometer in the morning before you get out of bed. Waking temperature, taken under the tongue before standing up, should sit between 36.6 and 36.8 Celsius, rising toward 37.0 after breakfast. Chronic readings below 36.5 in someone who feels cold and tired point at depressed metabolic function regardless of what the TSH says. Resting pulse should sit between 75 and 85 in a metabolically healthy adult. Fitness culture taught everyone that lower is better. That is true for trained endurance athletes. For the average person sitting at 60 with cold hands, missing periods, and constant fatigue, a low pulse is a hibernation signal, not a fitness signal.

Add the rest. Cold extremities. Brittle nails. Constipation. Difficulty losing weight. Hair shedding. Heavy or absent periods. Anxious in the morning, foggy in the afternoon, exhausted in the evening. Any cluster of these alongside a low temperature and low pulse is a metabolic picture and not a coincidence. The same body will be carrying the postural collapse on top.

What changes first depends on the person, but the pattern is similar to what I described earlier. Internal changes usually come first. Sleep usually shifts within weeks (or sometimes days!), body temperature rises, mood evens out, cycles regulate over a couple of months. Structural changes follow because they have to. The chest opens once the diaphragm has the energy to descend. The shoulders settle once the ribcage does. The head stops jutting forward once the deep neck flexors have the ATP to hold it. People around you notice it before you do. The thermometer climbing toward 36.7 is what is happening on the inside of all of that. If your morning temperature is rising, you are moving in the right direction. If it is not, whatever you are doing is not enough.

Q5. You’ve described a steroid cascade that begins with cholesterol and runs through pregnenolone into progesterone, DHEA, testosterone, estrogen, cortisol and aldosterone. When it collapses, women are offered birth control or antidepressants, men are offered TRT. What does the medical model miss, and where would you point someone who wants to start rebuilding the cascade themselves?

What the medical model misses is everything that matters, and I want to be honest about why. Most doctors are not even looking at hormone numbers. They are not running the panels that would show the picture. And when they do glance at a result, they do not understand what the results actually mean. Steroid hormones are not in the medical school curriculum at any meaningful depth. Most doctors cannot tell the difference between a bioidentical hormone and a synthetic patented analog. They treat bioidentical progesterone like it is dangerous and hand out birth control pills without hesitation, never realizing those pills contain synthetic progestins. Meanwhile actual physiologic progesterone, the molecule your body makes, is one of the safest and most stabilizing substances a depleted woman can take. The level of education here is genuinely shocking once you start asking the questions.

The same problem shows up upstream with thyroid. The standard panel most doctors run is TSH, and that is where the investigation ends. TSH is a pituitary signal, not a measurement of thyroid hormone. Free T3 is what your cells actually use. Reverse T3 tells you whether your body is converting thyroid hormone into the inactive metabolite under stress, which is one of the most common reasons people feel hypothyroid with “normal” labs. Free T4, antibodies, ferritin, vitamin D, all of it matters and almost none of it gets tested. So a woman walks in cold, exhausted, gaining weight, losing hair, with a TSH of 2.5, and gets told her thyroid is fine. Her thyroid is not fine. Nobody looked.

The typical interaction goes like this. A woman comes in with PMS, anxiety, broken sleep, irregular cycles. Nobody runs progesterone, or they run it on the wrong day of her cycle and call it normal. Out comes the birth control pill or the SSRI. A man comes in with low drive, no morning erections, no recovery from training. Maybe they run total testosterone, maybe not. Out comes TRT or “you need to manage your stress better.” In neither case did anyone ask why the cascade collapsed. In neither case did anyone investigate the metabolic environment that would tell you whether replacement is even going to work.

Here is what they are missing.

Every steroid hormone in your body is built from cholesterol. Cholesterol is the raw material of life. People with cholesterol below 160 are praised as healthy and they are exactly the people with infertility, low libido, fatigue, and depression. Statins block production at step one. Low-fat diets strip the substrate. The cascade has been sabotaged before it even started.

Ignition is thyroid. Cholesterol cannot turn into hormones on its own. It has to enter the mitochondria, and that requires thyroid signal. Without it, cholesterol just sits in the blood. The lab calls that “high cholesterol” and prescribes a statin. The body is screaming that it cannot make hormones, and the prescription further blocks the substrate. The irony is breathtaking once you see it.

Then there is stress, which under chronic load shunts the precursor pregnenolone into cortisol production at the expense of everything else. Sex hormones get starved. Cycles disappear. Libido flatlines. People run on adrenaline all day and crash at night. Doctors call this “lifestyle stress” and recommend therapy.

And then there is the gut. Inflammation from a damaged gut wall blunts hormone receptors directly, which is why people on full hormone replacement still feel broken. The molecules are there. The cells cannot hear them. Nobody investigates this either.

To rebuild the cascade, the order matters. Restore the raw material first by eating enough animal foods. Eggs, dairy, liver, ruminant meat, shellfish. If your cholesterol is under 160 you almost certainly have a steroid starvation problem. Restore ignition by supporting thyroid through real food, morning light, carbohydrates with protein, and tracking your temperature and pulse rather than relying on TSH alone. Restore the cofactors the enzymes need from real food. Vitamin A from liver and eggs, zinc with copper, magnesium, vitamin C, selenium, B vitamins. Clear the noise from the gut with daily carrot salad and by getting industrial seed oils out of your kitchen. Manage cortisol bias by eating breakfast within an hour of waking and evening carbohydrates to blunt nocturnal stress.

Only after the foundation is in place do I bring in targeted hormone support, and only in physiologic doses. Bioidentical progesterone, micro-doses of DHEA, low-dose pregnenolone, Cytomel when thyroid genuinely needs it. The molecules are real tools. The problem is the dosing culture that floods the system and crashes it. Without a foundation, megadoses amplify dysfunction. If the foundation is restored, tiny physiologic doses feel like magic because the body finally knows what to do with them.

I wrote a piece that goes deeper into all this on Substack called “Steroid Depletion,” with the dosing ranges, the labs that matter, and the order of operations. Anyone interested in reading more about it can find it there.

Q6. You’ve written that bile is the fluid that decides how someone ages, detoxes, and makes hormones. That is not a connection most readers have ever heard. What is bile actually doing, and why does its failure show up as so many things people blame on aging?

Most people do not even know bile exists, and they have no idea how much of their biology runs through it. So many roads lead back to this one fluid. Even the famous estrogen dominance, which gets discussed everywhere as some mysterious balance problem, is almost always a clearance issue at heart, and clearance runs through bile.

Bile is doing three jobs at once, and all three matter for how someone ages.

The first is fat-soluble waste removal. Two exits exist for waste in the body. The kidneys handle water-soluble waste. Bile handles everything fat-soluble. That second category is enormous and getting bigger every year. Plastics, pesticides, flame retardants, cosmetic chemicals, drug residues, mycotoxins, old hormones, all fat-loving molecules. All leaving through bile or not leaving at all. A 2026 study found microplastics in every human bile sample tested, with gallstone patients carrying substantially higher microplastic loads compared to controls. The same study showed those plastics damage the cells lining the bile ducts. Modern life is putting toxins into bile faster than bile can move them out, and the system that moves them is being damaged in the process.

The second job is hormone clearance. About sixty-five percent of estradiol leaves the body through bile. So does most of estrone, plus testosterone metabolites, cortisol metabolites, and every synthetic hormone someone has ever taken. If bile flow is sluggish, those hormones do not actually leave. They get reabsorbed in the gut and sent back to the liver for another round. This is the real mechanism behind what gets called estrogen dominance. The ovaries are rarely making too much. Clearance is broken, and the same pool of estrogen keeps recirculating. Men are not exempt. Aging men with poor bile flow develop the classic pattern of rising estrogen and falling testosterone for the same reason.

The third job is fat absorption, which is also vitamin absorption. Vitamins A, D, E, and K ride into the body on the same system as fat. Without bile flow, they do not enter. Low vitamin D despite supplementation, low vitamin K2 showing up as early arterial calcification, poor night vision from low vitamin A, increased oxidative damage from low vitamin E. These are not separate problems. They are symptoms of one broken absorption system.

And underneath all three jobs sits a loop that traps a lot of people. Bile and thyroid are physiologically locked together. T3 drives the conversion of cholesterol into bile acids. T4 relaxes the gate that lets bile out of the gallbladder. So bad thyroid means sluggish bile. But the relationship runs the other way too. Bile acids activate a receptor called TGR5 in muscle and brown fat that turns inactive T4 into active T3 right there in the tissue. So sluggish bile means less local T3, less mitochondrial energy expenditure, and a further worsening of every metabolic consequence of low thyroid, including the bile itself.

Now look at what gets blamed on aging and tell me how much of it is actually bile. Estrogen dominance and PMS that gets worse year over year. Cold hands. Brain fog after fatty meals. Low energy. Fat-soluble vitamin deficiencies that do not respond to supplementation. Cyclical jawline acne. Belly fat that will not move. Erectile dysfunction in men with rising estrogen. Slower wound healing. Skin that loses its quality. Pale or floating stools. Bloating thirty minutes after eating. The list is long, and most of it has nothing to do with calendar age. It has to do with a fluid that stopped moving.

I know all of this because I struggled with it for years before I understood what was actually going on. I also come from a medical tradition where bile and the gallbladder were treated as central to metabolic health, not as specialty topics. The gallbladder was sometimes called “the conductor of the body,” the organ that orchestrates the rest. In the American system you will not hear bile discussed at any meaningful depth, and the reason is structural. There is no specialty that handles bile as a flowing fluid. Gastroenterology treats gallstones, surgical disease, and structural problems with the bile ducts. But the slow, sluggish bile that drives estrogen recirculation, fat-soluble vitamin deficiency, hormonal chaos, and skin problems sits outside what any specialty owns. It explains too many symptoms at once, which in modern medicine is a reason to ignore something rather than investigate it. There is also no blockbuster drug to market. There is no quick lab marker to bill. The insurance model has no economic interest in a doctor sitting with a patient long enough to connect bile to estrogen, to acne, to fatigue, to cholesterol patterns, to sluggish digestion, all at once. So nobody does it.

I have written extensively on bile on my Substack, including the full protocol for restoring flow, in a piece called “The Fluid That Decides How You Age, Detox, and Make Hormones.” Anyone interested in the mechanism and the sequence can find it there.

The Fluid That Decides How You Age, Detox, and Make Hormones

Q7. Coming back to posture. As someone trained in ballet, what do you make of the standard posture advice everyone gets — pull your shoulders back, squeeze the blades together, engage your core, tuck your chin? You’ve argued this recruits phasic muscles to do a tonic muscle’s job, and people follow it for years and end up with burning between the shoulder blades. What should they be doing instead, and how would they know it’s working?

I find most of the modern postural advice nonsense, and I say that as someone who came out of one of the most rigorous postural training systems in the world.

The whole approach starts from a wrong picture of how the body holds itself up. The body is a tensegrity system. The bones do not stack on each other like blocks. They float inside a continuous network of fascia, muscle, and connective tissue, and the network only holds shape when tension is balanced across the whole web at once. You cannot fix one part by pulling on it. The web responds as a unit. Pull on one piece and the rest of the system compensates somewhere else.

That is the structural reason the cues you mentioned fail. Now the functional reason.

The body has two completely different muscle systems and conventional advice ignores the distinction. Tonic muscles are the deep ones. They sit close to the bone, close to the joint. Slow-twitch, fatigue-resistant, always quietly on. They hold you up below conscious awareness, organized through reflexes, not effort. Phasic muscles are the superficial ones. Fast-twitch, designed for short bursts of force. They fire and shut off. Different fibers, different fuel, different purpose.

When you tell someone to squeeze their shoulder blades together for hours, you are asking phasic muscles to do tonic work. They were never built for that. They fatigue and go into spasm, and that is exactly the burning between the shoulder blades that so many people develop. It is kind of a protest. The muscle is telling you it is being asked to do a job it was not designed to do, while the muscles that should be doing the job have been atrophying for years.

What ballet got right, and what almost no other tradition understands, is that the deep system has to be built through thousands of hours of slow, low-load, sustained movement. The barre work is essentially a tonic muscle training protocol. Most adults will not put in those hours, and they do not have to. The deep system also responds to much simpler inputs if you stop sabotaging it. Walk every day, preferably outside on varied ground. Sit on the floor sometimes. Squat to rest. Hang from a bar for fifteen seconds and let the spine decompress. Switch to nasal breathing and let the breath move sideways and back into the lower ribs, not up into the chest. These are the inputs the deep system was built for. Modern life has stripped almost all of them away, and then sold people exercise corrections to compensate.

The breath piece deserves its own line because almost nobody connects it to posture. The diaphragm is the most important postural muscle in the body, and most people are not using it for either of its jobs. When chest breathing takes over, the muscles in the neck and upper chest do the work, and those same muscles pull the ribcage forward and round the shoulders. The rounded shoulders that everyone is trying to fix by pulling them back are usually a respiratory problem in disguise. Restore the breath and the ribcage settles on its own. The shoulders fall back into place without anyone retracting them.

We already covered the metabolic side earlier in this interview, and that piece is essential. The tonic system needs continuous ATP to do its job, and that supply depends on thyroid function and adequate fuel. Without it, no exercise correction will hold.

When metabolism, deep muscle work, and breathing start working together again, posture stops being something you force. It becomes something your body can afford.

Q8. You’ve called the Alexander Technique the single most effective intervention you’ve encountered, and you say that as someone with years of ballet behind you. Ballet taught you how to hold yourself; Alexander taught you how to stop holding yourself. You’ve also written about specific positions that work mechanically to release held tension. What’s the first principle from Alexander people can practice on their own, and where do those relaxation positions fit in?

The first principle is inhibition.

Inhibition in the Alexander sense has nothing to do with suppression in the psychological sense. It is the practice of pausing before any movement long enough to notice the habitual tension you would normally bring to it and then choosing not to bring it. You are not adding anything. You are subtracting an effort that has become invisible from years of repetition.

Try this. Sit down at your desk and pay attention to what you actually do as you reach for a glass of water. Most people will, completely unconsciously, lift the shoulder, jut the head forward slightly, brace the lower back, hold the breath for a fraction of a second. None of that is required to lift a glass. All of it has been added by habit. Inhibition is the act of pausing before the reach, noticing the about-to-happen brace, and then reaching without it. The glass still gets to your mouth. The body did not need any of the extra effort.

The reason this matters so much is that posture and tension live below conscious awareness. Most people think they can just decide to relax. They cannot. The tension was never under conscious control to begin with. It was installed at the level of the nervous system through years of repetition, and the spindle reflexes that maintain it operate at the spinal cord, not at the brain. Telling someone to “just relax” or “just meditate” does almost nothing because you cannot think your way out of a pattern that was never thought into place.

This is also where the relaxation positions come in, and why they matter alongside the principle of inhibition.

If inhibition is the cognitive entry point, the positions are the mechanical one. They give the body the geometry it needs to release tension that conscious effort cannot reach. When a muscle is held in a supported, lengthened position long enough, the gamma motor system recalibrates and the muscle finally lets go. This usually takes a few minutes, not seconds. The breath deepens on its own because the diaphragm gains room. The insula, which is the part of the brain that builds your felt sense of “how you are doing,” recalculates based on the new sensory input. Anxiety drops without anyone trying to feel less anxious. Nothing changed in your circumstances. The shape of your body changed, and your nervous system followed.

I wrote a long piece on four specific positions that work this way, called “Four Positions That Trick Your Nervous System Into Relaxation.” Anyone can do them on their first try, on any surface, with minimal props. Constructive Rest is one of the four, and it comes directly from the Alexander Technique. Lie on your back, knees bent, feet flat on the floor about hip-width apart, knees falling together so they rest against each other. Five to ten minutes. That is the whole position. The simplicity is deceptive. The geometry forces the psoas to release, the lumbar spine to lengthen, the diaphragm to descend, and the soles of the feet to send a steady “supported, grounded, safe” signal to the brain through the mechanoreceptors in their skin. You do not need to do anything. The position does it for you.

The other three positions in the article work through different doors. Supported pelvic rest with a bolster releases the entire pelvic and lumbar pattern. Legs up the wall triggers the baroreflex through venous return and slows the heart automatically. Supported prone chest rest combines the trigeminal-vagal reflex through pressure on the forehead with diaphragmatic resistance and deep pressure across the body. Different mechanisms, same destination.

Four Positions That Trick Your Nervous System Into Relaxation

Something I want to make explicit here, because it is one of the most misunderstood ideas in this work. Training and relaxation are not opposites. They are partners. The body that has been trained well, with tonic muscles built through slow consistent work, also needs to know how to release. A body that only trains and never releases ends up like the one I had after years of ballet. Strong, capable, organized, but quietly bracing all the time. A body that only relaxes and never trains ends up soft and unstable. Both extremes fail. The full picture is a body that knows how to hold itself up effortlessly when it needs to, and how to let go completely when it does not.

The first principle from Alexander, inhibition, is what teaches you to feel the difference. The positions are how you give the body the conditions to actually do it.

Q9. You’ve written about a recent family photo — your brother in his early forties standing the same height as your father in his late sixties, even though your father was always the taller one. You say the structural changes that cause height loss begin in the thirties. What signs should someone in their thirties or forties be watching for, and what’s the simplest thing they can do now to protect themselves?

Yeah, that photo stuck with me. Nothing dramatic had happened. No illness, no injury. My father had just gradually gotten shorter, and none of us had really noticed until the photograph.

Height loss is treated as something that suddenly happens when you hit old age. In reality the structural changes begin in the thirties. By the time someone notices, the process has been running on the back end for a decade or more. Catching it early is the whole point.

The early signs are subtle. Your stride gets shorter without you choosing to shorten it. You start leaning slightly forward when you walk. Morning stiffness that used to clear in a couple of minutes now takes longer. Sitting for an hour becomes uncomfortable in a way it never used to be. Your face in photos starts to look closer to your shoulders.

Underneath, three processes are running in parallel, and they all share metabolic roots (yeah, we are at it again). The intervertebral discs are losing water because chronic high blood glucose, insulin resistance, and inflammation degrade the molecules that hold fluid inside them. The vertebrae are losing density because chronic cortisol and low thyroid suppress osteoblast activity, and for women, progesterone deficiency does the same thing years before menopause is on anyone’s radar. The deep paraspinal muscles that hold the spine upright begin to atrophy because they are slow-twitch oxidative muscles that depend on continuous mitochondrial energy, and a body running on chronic stress and low thyroid cannot sustain that energy demand.

So there is no single fix. The discs, bones, and muscles share the same foundation, and improving that foundation slows all three at once. Adequate protein, glycine through gelatin and broth, because disc matrix and bone collagen are built primarily from it. Calcium, magnesium, vitamin D3 with K2, and boron. Enough carbohydrate to support thyroid function. Seven to nine hours of sleep so the body has time to do its overnight repair work.

If you want a single physical practice, hang from a bar. Twenty to sixty seconds a day. Hanging removes axial load, lets the discs rehydrate, and provides an immediate counter to the compression that builds across the day. It is the simplest, cheapest, most effective spinal intervention that exists. Add loaded carries, squats, and deadlifts a few times a week because vertebrae respond to mechanical load above a threshold that walking does not provide.

I went into the full mechanism and the protocol on my Substack in a piece called “You Are Getting Shorter,” for anyone who wants to go deeper. The thirties is when the runway is widest. Most people do not realize this is something they can influence at all, let alone influence this much. They scramble in their sixties trying to manage what could have been prevented in their forties.

You Are Getting Shorter

The relative who quietly gets a little smaller each year is showing you the biology. They are also showing you a path you do not have to follow.

Q10. What are you working on now, and where can readers follow your writing?

A few things, in parallel, the way most of my work happens.

The writing keeps pulling me deeper. I keep reading the latest research, connecting the dots across fields, and experimenting on myself before I write about anything. New articles in the pipeline cover fascia release, visceral self-massage, the nervous system connections I have been touching on across other pieces, and several others I am still developing. Another direction I want to take the writing is the intersection of psychology and biology. What gets called personality is more physical than people realize. Resilience, warmth, the kind of stress that breaks you, the way you show up to other people, all of it has a metabolic and hormonal substrate. Shift the substrate and the person shifts. That is why so many people on SSRIs for years discover that what they really had was a thyroid or a gut problem. The mind is not separate from the body. Treating them as separate is one of the central errors of modern medicine.

The same metabolic thread runs through territory most people would not connect to it. Autism. Persistent behavioral patterns that get pathologized or treated as fixed identity. The deeper you research, the more you find metabolic, hormonal, and developmental signatures sitting underneath what is usually framed as something else entirely. I find it genuinely fascinating, and I am excited to research it further and put my hypotheses out there.

Some people probably wonder why I cover so much ground. Posture, hormones, bile, nutrition, breath, height, mitochondria, energy, nervous system. Most writers stay in one lane. I refuse to, because the body refuses to. These are not separate topics. They are different views of one system. The mainstream model fragments the body into specialties because that is how it gets paid, not because that is how the body actually works. The reason most people stay sick for years is that nobody is allowed to look across all of it. So I do, and the writing reflects that.

The book is the larger project. It is the story of how I managed my fragile biology, what I went through with conventional medicine and how I learned to refuse what was being offered without investigation, and how relentless study and self-respect built the agency that brought me here. Every year I get older. But every year I feel better. So can you.

The work lives in two places, and they serve different purposes for me. My Substack is where the long-form work is published, and where I genuinely love engaging with readers. The conversations there go deeper. Comments turn into real exchanges. Questions get answered with the depth they deserve. Paid subscribers also get access to specific protocols I publish on the website.

Sometimes I post on X but it’s mostly for shorter content. Quick notes, micro-protocols, fun, jokes, and the occasional social commentary.

What I am most passionate about is for people to develop agency, get genuinely curious about the way their body works, and to stop outsourcing it to a soulless machine and to people who either do not care or are not equipped to help them in any meaningful way. Most people have never been told that the picture is this connected. That single shift in framing changes everything that follows. Thank you for reading, and thank you for having me, Unbekoming.