Editorial source note
What I Ate This Week (09/11-09/20)
A ten-day meal tour from a triple-meat Whataburger to repeated Frito pie, framed by Joe's argument that undisciplined days belong in the rotation alongside clean ones.
Related principles
An editorial summary of views Joe expresses in the linked video. The original recording remains the primary source for his full words and context.
Detailed notes
A closer look at the ideas, examples, and reasoning Joe presents in this recording.
A week of plates and an argument for the dark side
Recorded while bracing for a tropical storm in September 2020, this meal tour walks through everything Joe ate across ten days — and opens with the argument that justifies its range. Your dark side is just as needed as your light side, he says: the days of eating whatever is available, even ordinary American junk, belong in the rotation alongside the disciplined days. He warns that food purists who hold a rigid dietary tangent for months often derail into allergies or health conditions from shocking their bodies — a causal claim that is his own, offered without evidence in the recording. His one piece of decor, a black obsidian cylinder, serves the same lesson: everything has a negative, and knowing your imperfections and limits beats pretending to perfection.
The plates themselves
The week runs from a triple-meat Whataburger with bananas and a few honey-roasted almonds, through vegetable-medley rice bowls seasoned with broth, to white beans cooked with mushrooms and chopped turkey sausage. The recurring star is Frito pie: beans of any kind simmered with chili powder and tomato sauce, poured hot over corn chips, with nutritional yeast standing in for cheese. Joe calls a version of it his best consistently eaten healthy meal and says he does not miss the meat in chili at all. There is also a work-supplied burrito plate, fish patties with fries and chocolate almond milk, and one restaurant dinner of chicken-fried steak with queso and sweet tea that he estimates at roughly 2,400 to 2,500 calories. His standing rule appears throughout: fruit and fresh juice come first, on an empty stomach, before the substantial part of the plate.
The claims that travel with the food
Several health assertions ride along with the meals, and all of them are Joe's. He credits almonds with resetting the body and helping sluggish thyroid and autoimmune trouble, calls almond milk better than cow's milk, and describes a Sunday ritual of a single shot of sake on the claim that rice wine in small quantities is one of the most powerful ways to rid the intestinal tract of parasites — the only alcohol he drinks. Goji berries appear as a longevity food he has learned to tolerate rather than enjoy. None of these mechanisms is established in the video; they are his nutritional beliefs stated in passing.
What the tour documents best is flexibility inside a fixed container. The contents swing from fast food to nearly vegan, meat stays deliberately minimal, and no two plates repeat exactly — because, as Joe puts it, he understands flow. The structure holds still while the food moves.