Jul 27, 2026
People ask me about the name. Pretty much from the moment I suggested it, even. “Hey, whaddya think about Slowfit?”
Slowfit. It sounds like the opposite of what a fitness brand should be called. Where’s the intensity? The urgency? The before-and-after? Fitness brands are supposed to promise fast. Six weeks. Twelve moves. One weird trick. No pain, no gain. Push harder. Do more. Sleep when you’re dead.
That’s exactly the problem.
The Slowfit Method® is not slow because it is easy. It is slow because it is deliberate. Because the interventions that actually work are almost always the ones that take time, require consistency, and resist the cultural pressure to turn everything into a shortcut. It is slow the way a sequoia is slow. The way compound interest is slow. The way building a life you don’t need to escape from by eating something or drinking something or doing something to distract you from this moment—is slow.
It is also, quite deliberately, the antidote to a very specific set of forces — forces that are working against your health, your performance, and your quality of life, right now, across every dimension simultaneously.
Here is what the Slowfit Method® is the antidote to. Pillar by pillar. There’s a lot to cover here, folks, so I reckon I’ll split the topic into four parts. This here is Part I. Today we’re going to tackle Big Food, Big Booze and Big Shoe.
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Ultra-processed food.
And I’m not just talking about Doritos. Sixty percent of the American diet is now engineered in laboratories to override your satiety signals and create compulsive, escalating consumption. Dr. Chris van Tulleken spent a month eating 80 percent ultra-processed food and watched his body and brain deteriorate in real time. Robert Lustig has spent decades documenting how the food industry deliberately conflated sugar with food and sold us chronic disease as a lifestyle. Herman Pontzer proved you cannot outrun a bad diet.
The Slowfit antidote: eat real f*cking food. Four words. OK, three if you take out that one I put in there for extra oomph. Bottom line is, if your great-grandparents wouldn’t recognize it as food, it probably isn’t.
EAT REAL FOOD. THE REST IS DETAILS.
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Jul 20
I wore a continuous glucose monitor on the back of my arm, more or less continuously, for nearly three years.
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The Joy Juice.
The alcohol industry has spent decades and billions of dollars convincing you of two things that are not true. First, that moderate alcohol consumption is good for your health — a claim built on deeply flawed observational studies that the industry helped fund and promote. Second, that a fulfilling life — celebration, connection, relaxation, reward — requires their product to be complete.
Neither is true. Both are manipulations.
The U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory in January 2025 declaring alcohol the third leading preventable cause of cancer in the United States. Not a risk factor. The third leading preventable cause. So why would I want to put that into my body? On purpose? The science has been available for years. The wine industry’s Mediterranean diet talking points, the beer commercials that make you believe every meaningful human moment requires a cold one, the social script that frames sobriety as joylessness — all of it is marketing. Great marketing, too. This Bud’s for you! Weekends are made for Michelob! Tastes great, less filling! Stay thirst, my friends! These ad agencies have earned their huge fees. I am as entertained as anyone by the Super Bowl halftime ads. Alas, none of it is medicine. None of it.
But the manipulation goes deeper than the carcinogen. Alcohol is also one of the most effective tools available for avoiding yourself. For numbing the discomfort that is actually information. For suppressing the low-grade anxiety that, if you sat with it, might tell you something important about your life. A drink to take the edge off. Another to get to sleep. A third because the first two didn’t quite do what you needed. The hedonic treadmill running at full speed, tolerance building, the dose escalating to maintain the same effect.
This was a big one for me. Not drinking myself into oblivion. But rather, using a big IPA or two to get my brain to slow down. Guys, there’s a better way. Lots of better ways, actually.
I get it. Learning to be comfortable in your own skin — present, unmedicated, in the actual texture of your life without a chemical buffer — is hard. It is also one of the most important things you can do for yourself. William Porter’s Alcohol Explained is the clearest account I’ve read of why alcohol makes you feel better in the short term and worse in every other dimension. Annie Grace’s This Naked Mind is the best account of how to understand the grip it has and decide for yourself whether to let go of it.
I’ll be four years sober in October. Not because I had a problem by conventional definitions. Because the data was unambiguous — my sleep, my recovery, my HRV, my cortisol, my cognitive clarity all improved materially and measurably. A drink or two on a Friday night was affecting my Tuesday training. The trade was not worth it.
The Slowfit antidote: honesty. Not prohibition — agency. Look at what alcohol is actually doing to your body and your mind, strip away the marketing, and make a real choice. Your own choice. Not one foisted upon you by Madison Avenue. A fulfilling life does not require poisoning yourself with a known carcinogen while bowing to television advertisements. It just doesn’t.
Reflections Upon Three Years of Sobriety
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November 5, 2025
“First a man takes a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes the man.”
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Chronic cardio.
So far we’ve got Big Food, Big Booze & now, Big Shoe. You’re likely familiar with the hedonic treadmill? On this point here, I’m referring to the treadmill treadmill. Mark Sisson has written compellingly about what he calls “chronic cardio” — the kind of punishing, high-volume endurance training that grinds the body into a cortisol-flooded state of permanent, low-grade stress. Long-distance running done at the wrong intensities, day after day, without adequate recovery, doesn’t make you fitter. It makes you sick, injured, and inflamed.
All aided by the shoe companies who have propagandized us for years with overly-cushioned shoes featuring narrow toe boxes and raised heels. Shoe coffins.
Been there, done that. I remember running my first marathon—don’t get too excited, I only did a few of them. The Boston Marathon in 1995 or maybe 1996. (No, I didn’t qualify for this one—I had a buddy with some graphic design bona fides and morals as bent as mine whip up a counterfeit race bib, but that is another story altogether). I trained in “motion control” shoes through regular bouts of shin splints that left my lower legs painful to the touch. In an incredibly dumb bout of pre-race exuberance, I ran a race-pace 8 miles a couple days before the marathon itself.
I also remember being deep into training for my first Ironman-distance triathlon (again, not a humble brag, I didn’t do many of these), while running a 6-week jury trial as an overly ambitious young litigator, just 2 weeks before getting married. In what world is any of that a good idea?
Thankfully, I know better now (because…science).
The Slowfit antidote? Smart dosing. Zone 2 for your aerobic base. Brief, intense efforts for VO2 max. Strength work twice a week. And recovery treated as part of the training — not what happens when you’re too tired to train. A viable longevity strategy should involve regular walking, rather than running yourself into the ground. Oh, and ditch the shoe coffins. Gradually, like any other big change. But get thee some shoes that reflect what our feet are designed to do—toe-splay, perceive the ground, no high heels.
The Most Underrated Longevity Drug Costs Nothing and You Already Know How to Do It
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Jun 8
There is a thing you already know how to do — have known since you were about a year old — that is one of the most evidence-backed longevity interventions available to you, costs absolutely nothing, requires no equipment, no gym membership, no coach, and can be done anywhere on earth.
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OK, that’s probably enough to digest for today. That’s the Slowfit Method®—well, Part I of it. It’s not a program. Not a protocol. It’s a framework for making the better choice, pillar by pillar, day by day, for as long as you’re here.
Slow. Deliberate. Yours.
I’ll publish Part II in a few days, so please stay tuned for that.
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There’s an App for that! Want to dive deeper into nutrition, breathing, movement, or any of the other Slowfit pillars? I built an app for that. The Slowfit Method® app puts Coach Keir AI in your pocket — trained on all ten pillars and with an ever-growing knowledge base—the whole sh-bang. Ask it anything about managing your health and happiness. More than one hundred people have already downloaded this app without a dime spent on marketing, and I’ve got nine 5-star reviews on the App Store. Check it out!
Call Me. Curious about 1:1 coaching? I’ve added an easy way to book a free 30-minute introductory call with me to learn more about the Slowfit Method® and/or my AI Coach app, to discuss your training goals, or to explore what a private coaching relationship might look like. Don’t be intimidated by this stuff; be curious. No pressure, no pitch — just a conversation.
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Stick around.
Best,
Keir
Keir J. Beadling is a human performance coach, founder of Foghorn Fitness, and creator of the Slowfit Method®. He coaches athletes and everyday humans in San Francisco and worldwide. More information is available at foghornfitness.com.
P.S. A heartfelt thank you to the folks who have already donated to this year’s Napa Ride to Defeat ALS—Donna, Ryan, Beth, Morley, Jeffrey, David, Jeremy, and Doug. Thanks to these fine people, I’m halfway to my fundraising goal. The ride happens in September. If you’d like to add your support, you can do that here.
The Lemonade Chronicles 