There is a sentence in Latin that has been repeated so many times it has lost its edges: mens sana in corpore sano.
A healthy mind in a healthy body.
People say it the way they believe it, without having tested it.
It sounds reasonable, it has the ring of ancient wisdom, and like most things repeated as wisdom, it is usually not felt.
I felt it, in the direction nobody talks about.
The direction where you eat badly for years: processed food, refined carbohydrates, sugar in everything.
The kind of diet that is simply the background noise of modern life, and you don’t notice the cost because you have never known anything else.
There is no baseline.
There is no contrast.
There is only the state you are in, which you call normal because you have no memory of another.
We can only name darkness when we have seen light.
This is not a metaphor, it’s a problem of calibration.
If you have never experienced what your brain feels like when it is not managing a constant low-grade chemical siege, you have no way to know that what you call your personality.
Your slowness, your fogginess, your restlessness after meals, the flat quality of your afternoons, is not entirely yours.
Some of it is biochemistry, some of it is what you ate.
I know this now because I changed.
Not gradually, not “in a healthier direction.”
I removed sugar, processed food, and refined carbohydrates entirely.
Not as a discipline experiment.
For reasons I’ll write about at length elsewhere, I had to, and the contrast arrived with the kind of bluntness that renders argument pointless.
Energy is too simple a word for what changed.
It was more like a frequency shift.
Thoughts that previously moved through something thicker now moved cleanly.
A calm arrived that was not passivity, it was readiness.
Physical strength followed, not as a side effect but as a natural consequence of a system no longer spending its resources on management.
Then, because life does not maintain perfect conditions, there were days when something processed arrived.
A meal at a table where refusing was complicated, a travel situation with no clean alternative.
The feedback was instantaneous.
Within an hour, a heaviness in the body.
A fog across the mind, the kind that makes reading feel effortful and silence feel oppressive rather than quiet.
A drop in mood that had no narrative justification.
Nothing had happened.
The circumstances of the day were unchanged.
Only the chemistry had shifted.
The soul, if you’ll allow the word, went with it.
That may sound imprecise.
There is a quality of inner life, a readiness, a sense that things are manageable, that effort is worthwhile, that tracks the body’s state more closely than most people suspect.
It dims, not dramatically, just enough to make the ordinary feel heavy.
This is what interests me about it, the mechanism is not mysterious.
When you eat sugar, the brain releases dopamine, and a diet consistently high in sugar overstimulates those reward pathways, progressively reducing control and increasing tolerance.
The spike in blood sugar is followed by a crash, and in that crash comes mental fatigue, poor concentration, and mood instability.
The science is not new, what is difficult to access is the felt knowledge of it, not the information, but the experience of the contrast.
Most people never get that contrast.
They manage the symptoms without ever questioning the baseline.
They drink coffee to compensate for the fog.
They treat the mood as weather, they call it stress.
I’m not writing this as a prescription.
I’m not interested in telling anyone how to eat.
I’m writing it because it is the first thing I’d want someone to know who is trying to understand what their body is capable of, and what has been quietly making it less than that.
The Latin sentence is right, it’s just that most people encounter it as an aspiration rather than a report.
The Last High
Most addiction books want to help you feel understood. This one wants you to feel responsible. The Last High isn't about substance abuse. It's about escape, and the uncomfortable reality that everyone is escaping something. Written from the inside, without sympathy asked or given.
