#51: Sami Reiss
"This stuff is so cyclical, it’s best to be out of time."
Today’s guest is Sami Reiss (@samireiss), who writes about health and wellness for places like GQ, Highsnobiety, and SSENSE (read his piece on Happier Grocery here). He also runs the cult-favorite design and furniture newsletter, SNAKE, and its nutrition-oriented companion, SNAKE SUPER HEALTH. He is our fourth male guest.
Health Gossip with Sami Reiss
Responses logged April 13, 2025
New York, NY
What does health, or being healthy, mean to you?
Being healthy is non-negotiable for me because of a surgery I went through years ago. I gotta be pretty on the ball about it.
I’d define health ideally as including strength and resiliency, energy… mobility… function… more than that. Explosiveness? Good biomarkers… basically a vibrant definition based slightly on strength but not entirely and which creates, well, health down the line. To be sure, that’s my definition and I wouldn’t foist it on anyone else.
I think when you keep up with the health industry — doctors, gyms, food, whatever — it skews you into some sort of unreality or extreme, but to me it’s just something normal and accessible that can be reached and is a birthright for everyone (nothing wrong with doing more, though).
How would you describe your current lifestyle?
Pretty normal. I live in Brooklyn and work at a desk a few days a week, which is a 20 minute walk... I work out hard a couple days a week, I work out normal a couple days a week, I move around a lot, swim now and then, prepare most of what I eat, I don’t drink but I stay up late. Some vices, some good habits, some work constraints… pretty normal. I see this lifestyle lasting but I am sure there will be changes.
How do you start and end your days?
I wake up, stay off my phone the best I can, eat a carrot, have some salt water, walk a bit on the grass in my building courtyard, do some dead hangs and move a bit, pray then meditate, have a couple eggs and a coffee and go work out, or work.
Nights: if I’m home alone, I have the red light on on my phone, no work after like 10 PM (it’ll keep me up), maybe tea, but usually a book in bed. I find if I don’t move/walk a lot and if I work or eat late that’s what jacks up my sleep… otherwise I try to keep it very low maintenance.
HG: Was there a specific moment when your relationship to your health changed?
SR: Maybe in high school. I was very into hardcore music and wanted to look like my favorite bands (like Youth of Today and the Cro-Mags), I wanted to be strong and in shape. I read some bodybuilding books, but was vegan then and trying to put on muscle was a challenge.
I don’t think I’ve ever taken more than six months off from the gym since; since my surgery, health has been completely number one — I was in really rough shape for a while — but now as my diet has become more sustainable, health is just a high priority that goes on in the background. It’s definitely non-negotiable now but it’s quiet. It probably took me a good two decades of lifting and eating to have my health be this invisible. Who knows.
What's your relationship to self-healing?
To be frank, my approach is less about curing a symptom than a very thorough approach to prevention — diet, lifestyle, habits that sort of raise the body’s immune capabilities, vitality, and so on. (The scientific explanation is, speaking generally, the right food will give your body more zinc and fat-soluble vitamins which translates into a stronger immune system and so on.) There’s a big book of methodical (if anecdotal) knowledge about ways to stave off sickness… Eastern medicine, Slav shit… it’s not enough to solve every problem in every case, but an apple a day is more right than not.
Where do you look to for information or advice?
For health I try and read everything, lots of old stuff — books from 100 years ago, like Alan Calvert’s Super Strength, or the Weston A. Price books — whatever research is coming out, whatever is in the news. I like the sort of hidden discussion pathways lifters have, too — bullshitting on Twitter/X and podcasts, where not really rigorous discussions get spitballed out… It’s less advice there for me than a suggestion: maybe I’ll try something, maybe I’ll tweak the self experiments these folks are doing for something that might work better for me.
For true information I like stories about the Baba Sali and so on — very grounding. Health is such a massive topic with so many byways and little scenes in opposition to each other (hundreds of different lifting philosophies, yogic people, animal-based, plant-based, science-based and non-…) that I try to read widely and outside the zone of things I do. I’ve been into this stuff long enough to see that what seems like a leakproof health movement often just ends up a three-year flash in the pan. This stuff is so cyclical, it’s best to be out of time.
What practices do you rely on when feeling ungrounded, unsettled, or ‘unhealthy,’ per your definition above?
If I feel like I’m in a funk, then I kinda just check the basics. Unless there’s something external/wild going on in my life, the symptoms you describe tend to show up only if I’m:
static or not moving for hours
looking at a screen for too long, without human interaction or fresh air/sun
eating really poorly
etc.
If so, I’ll eat, walk, make a coffee, do some jumping jacks. Sometimes it’s from soreness or fascia funkiness from working out, so I’ll do some myofascial release (laying on a lacrosse ball can really help with mood), or if it’s been months since I hit the beach or a banya, I’ll do that. Other things that help: hanging out with friends, watching a movie, talking to my parents, playing music, walking, working out.
Everything works.