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It’s Do or Diet Time For Lance Stephenson

by Ian Levy (@IanLevy)

How do you solve a problem like Lance Stephenson?

First of all, kudos to the Pacers for helping him develop his game to the point that the answer to that question isn’t simply encasing him in carbonite and shipping him back to Jabba’s palace. He is chaos incarnate, with all the positives and negatives that implies, but he’s also too valuable to be banished from the league entirely. Even if the Pacers decide they aren’t interested in investing the necessary mental, physical and emotional resources; Stephenson is a problem that someone will need to try to solve.

So how is the chaos to be harnessed? How do you ride the lightning without scorching your nether parts and inner thighs?

The answer of course is a gluten-free diet. Gluten is a protein found in certain grains like wheat and barley. As humankind rapidly shifted to an agricultural diet these grains, and gluten, became a bigger and bigger part of what we ingest. Our diets shifted before our digestive systems did and evolution has been scrambling to catch up ever since.

According to the utterly reputable website, Mind Body Green, here are some of the symptoms of gluten intolerance:

• Fatigue (like the kind that would limit you to about 35.3 minutes of extreme physical activity a day?)
• Swelling in the joints (like the kind that would require regular icing and treatment from a certified professional medical staff?)
• Brain fog (the kind of thing that could make you blow in another man’s ear on national television?)
• Dizziness (the kind of thing that could make you wildly fall over at the slightest contact from an opposing player?)
• Anxiety, depression, mood swings, ADD (Lance Stephenson? Lance Stephenson? Lance Stephenson? Lance Stephenson?)
• Extreme Flatulence (I don’t know, but it would certainly explain some of the crankiness and aggression)

I’m not a medical expert but if the internet has taught me anything it’s that you don’t need to be one to make a serious diagnosis. Lance Stephenson is gluten intolerant, probably severely. And this is the root of his problems.

If a team (the Pacers or whoever sign him this summer) could simply move him onto a gluten-free diet full of brown rice substitutes and steamed green vegetables I guarantee his issues would melt away. It’s difficult to maintain emotional stability when your gut is simultaneously declining to absorb nutrients and swelling with a surplus of methane and hydrogen gases. Decision-making becomes infinitely more complicated when your brain is wrapped up in the hazy mists of malabsorbed proteins and systemic inflammation. You thought Stephenson was just an immature jerk, but the problem is all french toast and pasta.

Going gluten-free is not something to be taken lightly, it is a wholistic lifestyle change and works much better if paired with regular sessions of Reiki, cranio-sacral release and transcendental meditation. Stephenson will need support, physical, emotional, spiritual, nutritional. He will need a spirit animal and daily sage smudge ceremonies. But the disciplines of new age medicine have the solutions for his particular challenges. He can be made whole in mind, body and gut.