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I’ve only met a few of my neighbors. You could describe where I live as rural. Most of my neighbors have snow plow attachments for their pickup trucks. Most of my encounters with neighbors were in years past when they dropped by that first winter to see if I needed a hand with the driveway. I don’t know how long my driveway is, somewhere over 200 feet. I shovel it by hand. Luckily, no one has asked me why, because then they would think I’m even weirder.

I used to have chronic back pain. As I got older, shoveling became an exercise in patience. I would want to get it done as fast as possible, but would end up in pain the following day, and probably stuck in bed recovering. So it was something of an exercise because I would need to do it slowly enough and with many many breaks so that I could clear the snow without hurting myself. So shoveling was also a sort of physical health check. How bad was the pain, how much worse than previous years, and how easily could I clear the snow.

If I managed to shovel the driveway without putting myself in bed for the next 12 hours, then I was rewarded with a major reduction in the chronic pain and just an all out wonderful feeling in my lower back. I don’t know why, it’s just been this way. If I shovel, I feel really good for a few days after and get a serious reduction in the pain. Granted, back pain in the last three or four years had been less frequent after doing a ketogenic diet, so this is less of a motivator than other factors for shoveling my own driveway.

It is also a sort of mental health check because I would let my mind wander and not worry about anything and just see how things are. Where would my thoughts go, and what would I spend time thinking about? It was a useful way to pass the time where I wasn’t feeling stressed by whatever other tasks I needed to get done, as I was physically unable to work on any other task while I did it.

This is the first major snow this year. We’ve had a little here and there, but this is maybe the third time I’ve needed to shovel. I would estimate that I have about a foot to a foot and half for the full length of my driveway and although I have a large shovel, it certainly did take a while to get through it all this morning. Except this year is different. I have had zero back pain. I took frequent breaks in order to get water to drink, but otherwise, I didn’t need a break. I did the entire driveway in less than two hours. I didn’t pay attention to what time I started, but I think it was more like an hour to an hour and a half, but it definitely wasn’t more than two hours.

I was certainly tired by the end of shoveling it, but I didn’t have to pace myself due to pain or injury. I forced myself to take breaks for water just to avoid hydration issues. I probably could have even done without those.

And how is my mental state? Calm. Nothing is bothering me, I’m not ruminating and there’s no perseveration over anything. No anxiety or fixation of any kind. I have a few projects I’m doing, a few things I’m studying, but I’m not stressing over anything.

So why is this year different? Just diet - carnivore for 14 months. I’m truly dumbfounded by the improvements. I don’t want to turn into one of those crazy people you see online talking about it, but I get why they do that now. It’s hard to keep it to yourself, and a lot of people have weird emotional attachments to their diets. I don’t feel that strongly about diet choices in that I don’t really care how others eat, but I do wish I had tried this decades ago. I have yet to find a symptom I had, shared by others, that hasn’t gone away as a result of this diet.

I’m the weird neighbor

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