The System — How I Plan to Take Control of My Health

Hey everyone!

In my first blog post I mentioned what my goal is with all this blogging. To sum it up in a nutshell: healthy life, cranked up to the max.

I've experienced firsthand why it's worth paying attention to yourself. When you're younger, you can still get away with not taking care of yourself — partly because "what could go wrong," and partly because the superhero mentality kicks in. At least that's how it was for me. Then life hits you once or twice, and you quickly realize that not only are you not immortal, but you're actually brutally vulnerable. And on top of that, everything is connected. If you're mentally okay, your body responds accordingly — and the reverse is equally true. Before my surgery, I already had problems with my gut and digestion. My stomach was constantly acting up, cramping, reacting badly to a lot of foods. Looking back now, it was probably connected to the fact that mentally I wasn't at my best during that period — and my body was screaming it at me, I just didn't take it seriously.

Well, that's changed now. Because when would I have ever done something like this before — write a blog? Never. I would have laughed at myself. But times change. I'm taking this so seriously that I've built a pretty serious system for the years ahead — or honestly, possibly for the rest of my life. That might sound strange and absurd, but it's genuinely true. Nothing is impossible, only people who give up.

My plan is to bring my mental and physical health into perfect shape — or at least get as close to perfect as I can. Of course, that's impossible in an absolute sense, because the world isn't set up for people to live the healthiest possible life. Take the food industry: profit takes priority over human wellbeing by a massive margin. Large corporations only start shifting toward "healthier" options when there's enough pressure from people who advocate for a healthier lifestyle. So let's have no illusions — it's not the goal of multinational companies for us to be supremely healthy. What is their goal? Money. That's capitalism for you. But I didn't plan to write an economics lesson here, especially since I'm no expert — I won't pretend to be.

So my plan is to create a complex structure and ecosystem in my life that lets me properly manage different areas — like health, for example. It would take a long time to describe in full detail, but broadly speaking: I'm going to build a web application for my own use, a kind of personal dashboard where I can track my life in real time.

For the health section, I want to build a massive recipe database — taking into account what matters to me personally (for example, no seeds, nothing too spicy) — broken down by food type and cuisine. I don't want it to be only Mediterranean, because while that's an excellent diet, variety is important to me. I want to include an Asian branch as well — I'm thinking Japanese and Korean cuisine first, since Chinese food is too oily for my taste. Korean and Japanese, not so much. We'll see how it works in practice.

All the collected recipes will go into one big database, from which I can generate weekly or monthly meal plans. But it won't just be full recipes — I also plan to create detailed breakdowns of individual ingredients, so there's never a question mark. What do I mean by that? Example: rice can be made a hundred different ways, and it absolutely matters how you do it. What does the average person do? They boil it, scoop it out, done — and that's completely understandable. But there's so much more to know: preparation methods, storage, temperatures, rice varieties, and much more. And that's just one ingredient — the kitchen is full of things like this. So this is going to be a pretty complex database.

With this system, I'll be able to manage this part of my life much more effectively. Of course, this is just the base idea — I'll inevitably make it more complicated and deeper as I go, that's just how I work.

What's my goal with all of this? Partly what I described above: to elevate my own eating to a genuinely high level. And partly — if there's interest — I'd love to share all of this information with the world, in as many formats as possible. First through the blog, then later through videos, or maybe I'll eventually share the entire recipe database publicly.

There are so many people out there in a similar situation to mine, with no time, energy, or resources to work all this out themselves. So I'll do the work — and I'll be happy to pass the knowledge on.

By the way, I love order and systems thinking, because it gives me a sense of calm and stability. That's why I came up with the idea of building this system — to feel more secure, and to manage my own health in a more structured environment. Don't get me wrong: I'm not a control freak or a perfectionist. I just like to keep my life in my own hands.

One last thing to close with: I'm about to move — it's a matter of days — and I want to start building this system in my new place. It's going to be a long, exciting, but challenging journey. I genuinely believe it's worth seeing through to the end.

Have a beautiful day!

Vona