"Choco Papa`s Health Note"

A man my age came into the shop last Tuesday. He stood in front of the protein powders for a long time, then walked over to where I keep the creatine. He picked up a jar, turned it over, put it back down. Then he asked me a question I have been asked maybe four hundred times in the past four years. "Is this stuff safe for someone our age?" He was sixty-two. Retired engineer. Lost some weight last year, said his doctor told him he had lost muscle along with the fat and needed to do something about it. His son had told him to try creatine. He did not trust his son. He was standing in my shop because he wanted a man closer to his own age to tell him the truth. I am going to tell you what I told him. But first I have to tell you something else. I was wrong about creatine for thirty years. I dismissed it for thirty years. The 2025 research made me open the jar. Why I Was Wrong for Thirty Years I played professional baseball in the 1980s and into the 1990s. In that wo...

A customer walked into my shop last month. He was sixty-one, a retired schoolteacher, and he had lost fourteen kilograms in four months on Wegovy. He looked great in his clothes. He also looked tired in a way I recognized — the way men look right before their body sends them an invoice they did not expect. He asked me what supplement he should take to "support" the medication. I asked him a question instead. "How much of the fourteen kilograms was fat?" He paused. He did not know. His doctor had probably said something about it, but it had been wrapped in medical language and surrounded by congratulations, so it had not registered. He had a number on the scale that was lower than it had been in twenty years, and he had stopped asking what kind of number it was. That is the documented truth that nobody puts in an Ozempic commercial. And then, because I have been doing this for four years now and I am tired of watching men our age make the same mistake, I told...

  Last summer, I carried four grocery bags from my car to the kitchen. Two in each hand. Maybe 8 kilograms total. By the time I set them on the counter, my arms were shaking. Not sore. Shaking. Like I'd just finished a workout. Except I hadn't worked out. I'd carried groceries for 30 meters. I stood in my kitchen, staring at my trembling hands, and thought: I used to bench press 100 kilograms. Not a hundred years ago. Not in some distant previous life. In my twenties and thirties, as a professional baseball player, I pressed 100 kilograms for reps. I did lat pulldowns with the full stack. I threw fastballs that required explosive full-body power. My body was a machine built for force. Now that machine couldn't carry groceries without shaking. I went to my doctor the following week and asked for a body composition scan (체성분 검사, cheseongbun geomsa). The results were brutal. At age 57, I had lost approximately 30 percent of the muscle mass I'd had at 30. Thirty percent...