Introducing HEAVIES, a Modern Newsletter About Health and Wellness

By writer and longtime GQ editor Chris Gayomali.

Two quick stories pertinent to how I think about health. (The second one is way cooler):  

1.

On a Thursday afternoon at work about six years ago, I received a cryptic voicemail from my doctor.

“Hey, Chris. We just got your results for your blood work back from the lab and something’s pretty off. We need to get you in for more testing. Call me back as soon as you can.” 

I was 33, mind you, and this was first time I’d gone to the doctor for a regular check up in like seven years. Until that point I’d been operating under the puerile assumption that if I felt pretty good and nothing seemed amiss, no news was good news. Fingers in ears, la la la la la.

When I finally got him on the line in between his other patients, he calmly explained that my white blood cell count was “abnormal” while my red blood cell count was “unusually low.” In tandem, these could be markers for leukemia—a nasty cancer that’s gotten a few people in my family—so the best course of action was to come back in right away so I could get tested again.

I canceled the rest of my meetings and hightailed it over to his office in Chinatown, which sat above a busy supermarket on Mott Street. During our first appointment, he was funny and gregarious in a grouchy sort of way. (We mostly talked about how bad the Knicks were.) He seemed eager to make a good first impression on a new patient.

This time, though? His demeanor was downtempo, and he went through his mental flowchart stone-faced, with a stoicism that felt practiced. That’s all to say the vibes were very bad.

He drew a few vials of blood and told me that he should have results in two business days, meaning Monday. In the meantime, he said, I should try to take it easy over the weekend… which, obviously, is an extremely difficult thing to do when you are 33 and could be dying. 

(You know who else died at 33…)

I spent the next three days deep in the mortality weeds, trying to isolate where I might have veered off course. Smoking? (I’d quit a few years earlier.) Drinking? (Yeah, sure—but a totally normal amount.) Drugs? (I got sleepy after a single bong rip.) Maybe I was too sedentary? (I played full-court basketball with friends a few times a week.) Maybe it was bad eating habits? (Buddy, I had a SWEETGREEN REWARDS+ account.)

I am very much not the type of person who ever really “spirals,” but I spent the next 72 hours feeling like total piece of shit, floating in the swirly doom water of an existential toilet that my mind had created. I felt paralyzed reading WebMD and every other SEO-bait website that had colonized the first four pages of Google results, and was certain that this fragile container that was my body was going in the ground soon. I thought about what song would be funniest to have played at my funeral. (Saves the Day - At Your Funeral.) I remember joking to my fiancee, now wife, that I would do my best to not haunt her as a ghost whenever she was ready to find love again. (A regular talking point in our home: Why do all ghosts wear period dress like trad weirdos? Why aren’t any ghosts wearing like FBI: Female Body Inspector shirts? Didn’t people die in the ‘90s?) 

It was a rough three days. I barely slept. Then, Monday morning before work, I got a call around 8 a.m. from the doctor, who cheerily said that that my new results were in and I was perfectly in range for someone of my age and station. I was fine, he said. The first test must have been a fluke.

The feeling upon hearing that news was unlike any I’ve experienced before. It was… elation—clean and distilled. A flood of feelgood hormones. It was like peaking on molly during a New Year’s Eve countdown with a girl you like during a Skrillex drop. I felt… not just alive… but alivest. Present. Whole. Real.

Admittedly, I was a little traumatized by the whole experience and didn’t go back to the doctor for a long time after that. But I did decide, for the first time in my life, to be way more intentional about my health.

2. 

A year later in 2019, on my birthday, I took a last-minute flight to Berlin to report a story for GQ on Errolson Hugh, the designer behind Acronym, a cult clothing brand I love. The story remains maybe the best thing I’ve ever written.

For our preplanned “activity”—a scene in the piece ostensibly designed to reveal the subject’s motivations and desires—we decided that we’d hit pads together at Chimosa, this kickboxing gym he frequents, with his martial arts friends. The thinking was: Errolson did karate as a kid, I did karate as a kid, and it was an opportunity to observe how Acronym clothes articulated and moved, how the fabric sounded when it snapped in the air. 

From left: Eskindir Tesfaye, me, Errolson Hugh, and Yichy Chen at Chimosa in Berlin.

After what felt like a two-hour warmup (14 minutes, according to my recorder’s timestamp) we started to hit pads, and the sound of smacking leather-covered foam, the feedback you feel vibrating through your bones when a punch lands flush, rattled something loose in my skull, something that’d long been dormant. That feeling was a revelation.

A month later, when the story was filed and my homegirl Alma accosted me on the dancefloor at my wedding about joining her Muay Thai gym, I drunkenly agreed to come through and took it as a cosmic sign that my looming midlife crisis should involve hand-to-hand combat.

The transformation didn’t happen immediately, but eventually I became the kind of person who feels a real sense of joy in going to the gym four to six times a week. Eventually, at the ripe old age of 38, I ended up competing and plan do to more of that.

(photo by Walt Zink)

Which is how I’ve arrived here, with HEAVIES, which I’m envisioning as the health and wellness publication I’ve always wanted: conversational, winking, unshrouded in corny mysticism and Chicken Soup for the Soul meathead shit.

The name is what I once heard someone call the big kettlebells at the gym, which was funny. But what I love about HEAVIES—after spending way too much time thinking about it—is that the word obliquely acknowledges a sense of burden, the loads we’re all carrying. Life is a gift, often a heavy one, and at some mostly undetermined point it ends. At your funeral I will sing the requiem. 

But health, at least as how I’ve come to understand it, isn’t all that complicated: You do something that’s a little bit hard in order to feel good later. It’s introducing intentional friction into your life. In a practical sense, health is about fostering resilience and vulnerability and imagination within yourself to ultimately live a vibrant life that’s full of gratitude and agency.

HEAVIES, if I had to drum up a tagline, is health and fitness for curious people who like to read fiction and wear cool clothes.

Now, if that sounds like something you’d be interested in, well, you’re in the right place. I’ll be writing about everything from quasi-Huberman-y protocols to weird augmentative surgeries to GOATED affordable massages in New York City to cutting-edge recovery practices to interviewing cool people about their eating and workout habits.

Like personal health, this project is going to be iterative, a work in progress. The bulk of this work will be free and accessible for everyone, but please consider subscribing…

…for the monthly cost of a single dirty iced-chai latte so that I can carve out more time doing this rather than an email job with performative Zoom meetings. (Just kidding. I love working!)

That’s all to say…. Welcome to HEAVIES. I’m stoked—and very grateful—to have the opportunity to go on this ride with you :)