Meet Your Inner Accountant: The Hidden System That Manages Your Calories

 

One of the most fascinating and overlooked aspects of the human body is that we all carry around an “inner Accountant.” This isn’t a figure of speech for willpower or discipline. It’s a way to describe the body’s finely tuned energy management system, one that quietly tracks every movement you make, from lifting a grocery bag to bending down to pick up a piece of paper. And believe me, this Accountant is more meticulous than the IRS.

Every action is logged. Every choice is weighed against the energy it will cost. Walk across the room? That comes with a price. Carry a water bottle on a hike? That adds a tiny surcharge. The Accountant is always balancing the books, and most of the time it leans toward caution. Better to save those calories for later, it says. The future is uncertain, and energy might be needed in a moment of crisis—whether that means running from danger, lifting something heavy, or simply surviving another day without food.

This bias toward saving rather than spending has been with us for thousands of years. In the past, when food was scarce and famine was a constant threat, those who stored more energy had a better chance of survival. That’s why the Accountant doesn’t simply aim for balance; it actively prefers a surplus. A body carrying extra calories is like a household with a savings account—it’s prepared for emergencies. You can see this principle play out on survival shows like Alone, where contestants who arrive with extra body fat tend to last longer. Their reserves buy them time when food is scarce and tilt the odds in their favor when hunting or fishing doesn’t pan out.

Seen this way, fat isn’t a flaw. It’s a feature. It’s a built-in survival advantage, one that has carried humans through harsh winters, failed harvests, and long migrations. The trouble is that our modern environment has flipped the script. Food is everywhere, and the threats that once justified hoarding calories are mostly gone. Yet the inner Accountant hasn’t updated its methods. It still nudges us toward surplus, even when we’re already well-fed. That’s why we find ourselves constantly snacking, skipping workouts, or avoiding unnecessary movement. It’s not laziness—it’s biology.

This perspective has important consequences for how we think about health. It removes the blame and shame so often attached to body weight. It reframes fat not as personal failure but as the predictable outcome of a system designed for scarcity, suddenly operating in a world of abundance. Recognizing this doesn’t mean we give up on health; it means we approach it with compassion and strategy. Instead of fighting an imagined weakness of will, we’re negotiating with an ancient survival mechanism that is simply doing its job too well.

The inner Accountant is always there, balancing the books, urging caution, leaning toward saving energy rather than spending it. In the past, that default kept us alive. Today, it complicates our relationship with food and movement. But the first step in working with it is to recognize it. To hear the voice behind the hesitation and understand where it comes from. Once we do, health is no longer a battle against ourselves. It becomes a conversation with a system that has always had our survival in mind.

Changing Paths - The Struggle Between Apollo and Dionysus

 

As soon as I graduated high school, my father suddenly expected me to go to college—a word he had never once mentioned before, nor had he ever shown interest in my grades. It wasn’t surprising that I had my own plan: I wanted to become a professional boxer. That dream lasted until the night I met Rocky Graziano and Jake LaMotta. I had fought in the New York Golden Gloves and had been fighting for the past three years. My whole life was fighting. However, spending just one evening with my boxing heroes was enough to show me that boxing would waste my potential. I admired what they had done for Italian Americans, but their words and outlook turned me off. They were tough, yes, but not high-thinking men. Still, I couldn’t help noting how LaMotta lived well into his 90s in excellent shape, body, and mind.

Realizing boxing wasn’t my path left me scrambling for direction. I was finishing high school with poor grades, working at a grocery store, and feeling like my options were shrinking. But as life often does, it opened unexpected doors. I started revisiting my hippie parents’ music—The Rolling Stones, The Doors—just as punk rock was exploding in my neighborhood. At the same time, I experimented with drugs that expanded my consciousness, and once I had rejected boxing, it was as if my mind suddenly became thirsty for everything I had missed as a poor student. I read voraciously, diving into literature, art, and philosophy.

When my friends started at community college, I tagged along. One visit to the art school there hit me like lightning: this was where I belonged. I applied immediately and was accepted the next semester. In art, I discovered the part of myself I had buried while busy fighting. It was my soul yearning for expression, and I dove in without hesitation.

The lesson I took away from this was the importance of courage. In America today, we glorify Special Forces as the ultimate symbol of courage. At the same time, we’ve systematically devalued artists—sometimes justly, given the excesses of the music industry, but often unfairly. Life is always a tug-of-war between two broad paths: Apollo, the god of order, structure, discipline, and Dionysus, the god of chaos, art, and intoxication. For years, the rock star—Dionysus—was the cultural ideal, until the decadence, drugs, and self-destruction of that image pushed society to swing back toward Apollo: military fitness, warrior order, discipline. That swing isn’t necessarily bad, but America has a habit of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

When times got rough in my own life, I, too, threw myself into Apollo’s camp, becoming a warrior. But eventually I realized that path was intellectually and creatively narrow. My soul kept calling me back to Dionysus. Like many people, I carry both within me—maybe too much of both—and reconciling them isn’t easy.

The punk rock movement was crucial for me. At a time when high school graduation forces you into choices, punk declared that all choices were meaningless, a liberating starting point. From there, I built a framework of meaning by looking to evolution and primitive cultures. What mattered to early humans—art, hunting, family, fighting—must be inherently human. That became my criteria for value. This perspective led me into woodcarving, tai chi, meditation, martial arts, cooking, and nutrition. These became the foundations of the life I’ve built—simple, rooted, and guided through the modern cacophony.

Society often seeks placeholders for meaning. For many, religion fills that role. In America, college has become another placeholder: a socially approved symbol that reassures others you are on the “right path.” Many people don’t want to wrestle with what’s truly valuable—they just want the security of what society values in the moment, and they project that onto you.

But ultimately, life is about balancing expectations: your own and those of others. To survive, you must demonstrate value to those who hold resources, whether in services or goods. Sometimes that’s noble, sometimes it bends toward vice. Either way, the challenge is to carve your own path between Apollo and Dionysus, between survival and expression, between order and chaos. That’s what I learned when I changed paths.

A Conversation With a Taos Pueblo Member That Changed Everything

 

When I first moved to Taos, I thought I was just moving closer to the mountains. I hadn’t grown up camping or hunting—city life had kept me far away from those things. I loved the outdoors, but when it came to animals, I had always drawn a hard line. Killing them? Absolutely not. Eating them? Well, that was different.

At least, I thought it was.

On a construction site in Taos, I worked under a site supervisor from Taos Pueblo. We often talked while we worked—about life, about the land, about traditions. One day, our talk turned to killing animals. I argued fiercely against it, but he didn’t let me off easy. He confronted me directly, "If you were starving and you saw a rabbit, would you kill it?" I said, "No".

“You eat meat, don’t you?” he asked.

The question hung heavy in the air. In that moment, I knew he had me cornered. Either I stopped eating meat altogether or I admitted that I was benefitting from something I didn’t have the stomach to face.

That conversation never left me.

Not long after, in Canada, I found myself with a group of hunters. They handed me a shotgun and welcomed me into their world. When one of them shot a deer and it still moved on the ground, instinct—or maybe courage—pushed me forward. I took out a knife and cut its throat. The others nodded in respect. Then came the ritual: slicing open the chest, taking a bite of the heart. That was my initiation. Read the full story here.

From then on, I understood hunting as more than just pulling a trigger. It was navigation, patience, teamwork, carrying heavy loads, and—most of all—respect for the animal that gave its life. I hunted a bit in Mississippi, got lost in the woods once, and discovered firsthand how steep the learning curve really was.

But whether or not I hunted often, I found my place with hunters. Around the fire, cutting up meat, cooking it, sharing stories—I felt at home. Hunters, I discovered, are grounded people. Skilled, resourceful, and bound together by something old and primal.

For me, hunting became more than a hobby. It became a way of reconnecting with something my DNA seemed to remember—a way of life older than cities, older than stress, older than all the anxieties of modern life. In the act of hunting and cooking, I felt healed, as though I had finally stepped back into rhythm with the world.

And to think, it all started with one conversation, thirty-five years ago, with a man from Taos Pueblo who probably never knew he changed the course of my life.