The Right Amount Is Key

"If you’re not on guard, you’ll find yourself falling victim to the urge for just one more helping, or I’ve earned that treat. But what we are bad at calculating is what kind of person we’re going to feel like after. It’s like with drinking: it might make you friendlier at first, and then a real monster a few hours later. And the next day? Well then you won’t be good for anything."Ryan describes why moderation is so critical on today's Daily Stoic Podcast.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at DailyStoic.com.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  The right amount is key. It may not appear that eating well would be an important part of the philosopher's job, but indeed it is. Antoninus Pius, the adopted stepfather of Marcus Aurelius and a lesser-known, yet incredibly effective, Roman emperor, kept a simple diet so that he could work from dawn to dusk with as few bathroom interruptions as possible, so that he could be at the service of the people for longer. And in one of his famed letters to Lucilius, Seneca wrote that "the better one eats, the less one needs to exercise," which in turn frees up valuable time for reading and thinking. It's clear from the example of these two thinkers that how and what you eat is just as important as how and what you read or choose to fight for. If you're not on guard,

• 1:14Ryan Holiday?

  you'll find yourself falling victim to the urge for just one more helping, or buying the logic of "I've earned this treat." But what we are bad at is calculating what kind of person we're going to feel like after. It's like with drinking. It might make you friendlier at first, and then a real monster a few hours later. And the next day, well then, you won't be good for anything. An Athenian statesman once attended a dinner party put on by Plato. When he met his host again, he was reported to have said to Plato, "Your dinners are enjoyable, not only when one is eating them, but on the morning after as well." Moderation, discipline, knowing your body, these things are important because they help your mind, they help you as a person

• 1:57Ryan Holiday?

  and as a philosopher. We aren't telling you to starve yourself, that you should eat the same thing every day, stripped of any flavors you enjoy, that you can never indulge, that food can't be both fuel and fun. But to eat well is To live well, to eat right is to live rightly. And that is the goal. And that is why temperance is such an essential Stoic virtue. And of course, temperance is one of those four Stoic virtues. Courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. That's why I carry the Daily Stoic Four Virtues Coin around with me as a constant reminder. I've been thinking about getting the four of them tattooed on my left wrist. But for now, the coin does the job on the front. It's got the Daily Stoic seal of the four virtues, the symbols for each one.

• 2:40Ryan Holiday?

  And on the back, we have Marcus's reminder to not exchange these virtues for anything else. So if you want to check that out, it's available in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com.