As the years passed, Trixie found the will from within to apply her growing body of knowledge, and her energy was indeed fueled through being treated like a person who deserved to exist by those around her. Her work environment loved their direction and fine tuning new epiphanies as much as she did.
Trixie became incredibly lean, in a way that perhaps people from Cyber might have ridiculed out of jealousy- but that any medical professional with not just common sense, but means of measurement knew was not objectively underweight. She was not stupid enough to undereat a single day in her life.
Being that Cyber was starting to have an obesity problem before the rush of poverty fell upon it, people with healthy BMIs- especially women- were treated harshly by those who did not understand or care for the path of self investment.
Calorically, it really was not that much work. A simple 1,500-2,000 calories a day, six days a week, one ‘off’ day of no counting, and the results were there- specifically for her shorter height. It would be upward of 2,400 as an average had she been taller. For a man, depending on his height, and because of his extra biological muscle mass, that number could range from 1,800-2,600. There was also the exception of extreme exercise in professional athleticism for higher caloric averages, but that wasn’t really her thing. She had experienced enough to know injury risk was not a key desire of hers.
It was celebrated to take care of one’s body here, and the pressure of eating huge multi serving meals with no regulation that fattened many of the previous generations- that pressure to self sabotage was nonexistent on Gliese.
Trixie found 30 minutes a day of exercise hit the basic metrics for organ and brain health. Changing her mindset from food as an emotional escape to an essential fuel to be calculated helped Trixie haul her entire life force back into herself. It was no different than knowing a mammalian pet should have a measured amount of sustenance, and that giving more than that measurement to said pet would push the pet into an overweight danger zone. Trixie recalled how veterinarians warned of the risks of death for pets far more boldly than the human doctors to their patients. Human doctors hesitated to avoid causing offense when the culture itself was built to turn everyone into a balloon. A pet, being a mammal, like the people of Cyber also were- had quite a bit in common to consider for what actually contributed to health and what didn’t. One could say a mammalian pet would be the ideal centerpiece for teaching the why of healthy portions.
Fine tuning muscle mass, fitness level, and health status was an added direction very much normalized on Gliese. With that, the emphasis of nutrient dialing vs stress and its balancing act came into play. If while in a healthy BMI the stress of dialing in on nutrients outweighed the passion for it, then the inflammatory consequences of stress were not worth overthinking beyond the goal of portions. Slight shifts in muscle to fat ratio did not determine longevity when the stress to maintain such states overruled the excitement, especially if any mammal was already in an ideal weight zone.
Everyone on Gliese knew extreme stress in their evolutionary history offset any longevity hopes or nutrient dialing. The healthiest and most dedicated often died earlier than those chilling with no concept of nutrition, historically- and that came down to cortisol.
The balancing act between preserving daily happiness and dialing in on nutrition however was very much a lifelong investigation among the people of Gliese. It was still new to Trixie how expansive that direction could get in ingredients she had never seen or heard before, even years into it at the age of 27.
Trixie now blended seamlessly into the self care of the world’s inhabitants around her in her newly controlled and supremely fit physical form. The people of Gliese were educated on basic herbal remedies for treating multiple conditions, and fully aware of prescription protocols for extremely difficult chemical imbalances.
The prescription protocols were hardly needed here though. In Gliese, many of the genes that acted up to cause chaos to any unsuspecting person- were deactivated from birth. Miss Mayor had been very clear with Trixie that it took HUNDREDS of years to get to this level of advancement, and that were Cyber around to imitate it, it simply could not happen without time and evolution itself. In some ways that made Trixie feel a bit out of place, having access to things years ahead of her species.
Trixie herself had learned she was made up of a genetic panel of risks with triggers that would or could activate as she aged, but so was Paka and Crip- and probably all of her people. Some of these genetic triggers are exactly why death was inevitable for them. Even centuries before being edited into oblivion on Gliese, these genes had literally evolved out of the gene pool among ALL of Gliese’s inhabitants. That might have been the most painful part to accept. It was not just Planet Gliese’s exceptional intelligence, their normalization of extreme self care, their focus on the survival of all meaning the same as the survival of one.
It was that the hundreds of years of evolution it took to literally evolve out of death itself was something that NO species could press a skip button for.
Cyber would have had to have been around at least 900 more years to start looking like Planet Gliese. It made Trixie sad, seeing that her species- the angels and the demons together, had been genuinely trying to move forward. It seemed to her that the heart of every species was just that, despite all of the conflict. Life itself wanted to go forward. Life wanted to win. It was that same motive that made her decide to survive during a time she was not sure she would ever be cared about. It was the insistence of life, to give and care and be, even if not able to see where that giving and caring and being would go next. The immense weight of life cycles ahead to evolve seemed daunting. Still, Trixie felt incredibly proud of herself. Making every day count, to the best of one’s abilities, is what eventually got Gliese to where it was. She knew that many demons had survived to continue on. Maybe what was left of her species could get there someday too.