Libby (@woman_test_kitchen) is a graphic designer and amateur gelatin chef. You can read the original version of this feature here.
Health Gossip with Libby
Chinatown, Manhattan
Cancer/Leo/Cancer
What does health, or being healthy, mean to you?
A process of striving for an abstract ideal, with the understanding that *it* is not necessarily an end to achieve. Like happiness. To me, this process has a lot to do with overcoming neurosis and cultivating a seamless mind-body axis. Ideally, you develop more of an intuitive understanding of your body’s signals over time, and are equipped with the knowledge and means to respond, treat, or properly nourish it. Even when the gap between what you have versus what you need grows too large to manage without, say, institutional intervention, ‘health’ is about having a kind of autonomy distinct from control.
For example, I don’t really buy ‘wellness’ protocols that involve obsessive tracking and management based on quantities of symptoms to be solved or nutrients to be allocated. The more obsessive you are about something, like food, the more it sucks up your energy and runs your life. An “intuitive eater” (an approach that has hardened into its own genre of diet culture, but that’s another story) isn’t obsessed with food, thus finds it easier to nourish themselves without having to measure everything. The self-trust, respect, love, etc. involved in honing this intuition also probably help prepare you to decay and die, which is an important part of wellness, too.
How would you describe your current lifestyle? How do you start and end your days?
I work remotely, so I’m prone to sitting in my apartment all day staring at my computer, which makes me feel evil and not like a human. Using my body to walk around and my eyes to look at things makes me feel human. Knowing this, I try to get outside first thing and get some sun on my skin. On a really good day, I’ll go to yoga or my favorite low-intensity strengthening and mobility-focused barre workout class. Even on bad days, I start the morning with a good homemade breakfast, which is typically some sort of porridge / bowl of slop. My end-of-day routine is more dubious, but often revolves around friends. I love to go to the restaurant where my best friend works and have a nightcap while they close. Sometimes I even help stack chairs or roll up silverware. Then, we walk to my place and watch an episode of Gossip Girl. I go to bed happy and loved.
Do you believe in the concept of self-healing, or that one can heal oneself?
Of course! I think holding that belief is critical in the sense that it means you’re claiming some level of responsibility over your own health. It’s problematic that the idea is pretty absent from conventional medicine, not only self-healing but also just ‘self’ (we could get psychoanalytical and talk about how treatment targets either the body or ego/persona but, really, what does it look like to attend to the ‘self,’ and how does it actively participate?) and ‘healing’ (which implies a deeper more holistic framework than just treating symptoms).
BUT, I think it’s also bad, or not in the service of health, to identify too much with the idea of self-healing. Sure, a lot of doctors glaze over the details that holistic or naturopathic practitioners incorporate into treatment protocols — they’re squeezed through oversaturated, underfunded bureaucratic systems and don’t have the capacity to hold their patients’ unique narratives in their heads. But, if you’re going to do a bunch of research anyway, you might as well hear out what someone who actually went to medical school has to say. We think that because we have the infinite encyclopedia of the internet at our disposal, anything a doctor says equates to information we can pull up on Google. But information is not knowledge, and having access to it doesn’t mean you don’t need help interpreting it. My point is that it’s ideally not just doubling-down on one or another type of care because you think it aligns with your morals. It’s about holding your own agency at the center of your journey while pulling in help from outside. Ideally you form relationships that, through conversation, not only lead to answers but produce compelling questions to ask in the first place. Self-healing makes the most sense to me employing a reverence and curiosity for the mysteries of one's own mind/body, from both normal and surprising perspectives.
Was there a specific moment in life that made you more conscious of your health?
I got curious about “online communities” a few years ago, which ended up impacting my life significantly in a variety of ways, one of the biggest being in how I approach my own physical wellness. In 2020/21, a lot of people like me started doing most of their socializing online for the first time. We found little pockets of subculture whose mores appealed to something latent in ourselves. We found that just being able to talk online about these values illuminated a real desire to embody them. Some people moved to NYC to party, others left to pursue sobriety, some even found God and started going to church, while I enacted diet protocols that I found on men’s health forums (and also moved to NYC to party). The new persona I had started to aspirationally identify with wasn’t a man, but a more chiseled, optimized version of myself, enlightened and liberated from the poisonous trappings of mainstream convenience. Whatever that means, the lifestyle changes I felt motivated to implement became unsustainable after awhile, and likely contributed to the issues I have today, oops. But now, thanks to my experience letting cultural identification drive my decisions on how to nourish myself, I have a better idea of how to discern practical information that helps me understand what my body needs, from propaganda curated to sell me things, or worse — indoctrinate me into an MLM scheme / CULT!?? Now, I mostly just enjoy the amazing spectrum of algorithmic diet culture content across social media for what it is: entertainment.
Where do you look to for information and guidance?
As a friend pointed out to me once, after I pulled out a random book I’d found on the sidewalk to read on the beach, a lot of things I do are largely driven by contingency. Rather than going and looking for things, I feel like I just kind of float through rivers of information and down rabbitholes by chance, with the vague idea that choices I’ve made in the past are what lead me there. But I’m also always consulting and comparing notes with others. My mom, who used to run a restaurant and is now a professional baker, keeps me updated on recipes she’s testing. I learn a lot from my friends, for example Tiff (@areyoucomingoverfordinner) whose Chinatown apartment is a beacon of hormone-healing fine gastronomy, or Olivia, who knows a lot about nootropics because of all of the concussions she’s had, or William, who I met on Discord and seems to have thoroughly researched and administered every esoteric health hack I’ve ever heard of, accumulating an encyclopedic knowledge that might rival a real doctor in volume and scope. When it comes to research, I’m still a huge fan of reddit — you really can’t beat the good old testimonial format for vetting out products and services, and the online forum enables this kind of “folk knowledge” to actually scale alongside the product-and-service market itself.
When do you feel the most at home in your body? The most nourished?
After a beautiful run, maybe. Honestly though, I don’t remember the last time I really felt “at home in my body.” That feels like something to strive for in the long run — in fact, maybe THAT is the best definition for my mental model of “health” you asked about above. Health is feeling (or ultimately actually being?) at home in your body, and I’m definitely not there yet! But I probably feel the most nourished after 7 hours of traveling to visit my family in Albuquerque when I finally arrive to a vat of beef bourguignon or carne adovada my dad made or an assortment of baked goods by my pastry chef mother waiting for me to taste-test.
Fuck, marry, kill: three health trends of your choice.
Fuck: Ray Peat, marry: "mushrooms" (?), kill: anything hyper-restrictive, from vegan to carnivore (put down the stick of butter for a second and take a deep breath, girl).
What’s your palette like? What meals do you find yourself returning to?
I’ll fixate on a specific ingredient, and have so much fun experimenting with it for a few weeks or months. Apples, lamb, beets, cabbage, masa harina, persimmons, gelatin, coconuts, sheep’s yogurt, fennel, potatoes, sardines, cod liver, dates… I love finding off-label uses for the food, for example gelatin: if you let it bloom in an equal volume of high-fat milk, it becomes like ricotta cheese! Or sometimes the fixation will emerge incidentally from something I try for “medicinal” purposes, like chia seeds. I rediscovered how fun of a texture those can be after learning that they can help with estrogen production (?). Recently I became obsessed with oats: as homemade milk, savory eggy oatmeal (whip them together over for a custard experience), carrot cake muesli, overnight chia pudding… everything I touch turns to gruel. I love porridge.
Anyway, my newest obsession is EGGS. I realized that if you stir whipped eggs over low heat for a really long time you end up with the inside of a French omelette. And then I learned about how you can steam them with concentrated bone broth and end up with a silky gelatinous pudding, so I’ve been doing that a LOT. Because I'm also trying to get more choline, an important nutrient for brain health.
What do you think is the most pressing health issue of our time?
Maybe this isn’t necessarily the most pressing “health issue,” but I think a lot about how terribly the average person’s brain chemistry seems to respond to modernity, because of my own clear attention problems, dopamine addiction, and decision fatigue given the millions of options available to us via products and services re-packaging basic parts of life (like socialization, exercise, cooking). Not to sound “trad,” but I personally feel like parts of my brain are extinct, which makes me feel mentally ill. Related: to me, the scariest tradeoff with what Charles Taylor calls “instrumental reason” is empathy, both inter- and intra-personal. Where people are statistics, disembodied text messages, whatever, there not only seems to be a collapse in attention on a societal level (for example, dysfunctional healthcare systems) but also on an individual level (having no idea what to do with your own body or mind).
What advice would you give to your past self?
Start mewing at age 5. Do NOT ever take the birth control pill.
What advice would you give to the person reading this?
Try to love yourself. Try not to be obsessed with anything, except maybe eggs. Also, if you’re a girl, don’t follow men’s health protocols.
I know this is a million years old but I love this post so much and come back to it often- the response re self healing is so intelligent and well written and reasoned. Love this, love Libby, love HG!