I had been really struggling with diet over the last few years, 68 years old with dodgy legs I couldn’t move around enough and years of infection and strong antibiotics, painkillers, stomach and blood pressure meds had really taken their toll.

I have been vegetarian for over 40 years don’t smoke or drink and still practiced Tai Chi and meditation every day so I was in a reasonable place to clean my act up a bit more. I gave up all soft drinks and sugary food and that helped a bit and started to research.

Intermittent fasting was fairly easy for my disciplined mind and I started with a 16hr fast each day and my weight started to drop, I increased that to a 20 hour fast and it dropped faster, I lost 2 stone (around 12kgs) in 4 weeks and then it plateaued, so I researched further.

Humans were originally wandering ‘hunter gatherers’ so would pick the food in the area that they were in from the surface and plants and trees and hunt and ate animals. The further we moved away from that lifestyle, the more obesity and bad health has troubled us, medicine has negated some of those problems but now we have reached a crisis point.

When agriculture started we grew starchy foods underground and wheat and maize and that quickly became our easily stored and ‘go to’ foods. This was also fed to the ‘farmed’ animals changing them radically into nothing more than bloody plant and seed holders. Politicians  and business very quickly took charge of this way of rooting, ‘enslaving’ and taxing people so instead of being relatively healthy and independent people living in small tribes they became ‘working slaves’ to feed the rich and powerful. Add religion and nationality into the mix to bind people into huge cultural and national ‘tribes’ and you can see the build up to the mess we’re in today.

Being vegetarian there was no way I could start eating meat so I looked at the alternative ways to reduce my starch, hidden sugar and general carbo hydrate levels to a more healthier mix.

A friend in Scotland Karim Belgacem out of the blue kindly sent me the book ‘Sapiens’ that helped fill in the societal gaps and I read about ketogenics and paleo dieting and they were on the same path as me, I watched the film ‘The Magic Pill’ on Netflix and that gave me a clearer outline to my thinking and studies, I re-arranged my diet to continue my fasting, now more on a 19 hour fast with a good vegetarian carb lite ketogenic style meal midday and something light a 5pm and my weight has started to drop again and I feel much healthier and cleaner inside.

I realised that I still had cultural ‘blind assumptions’ that I didn’t have the perspective to see before, that I still had to resolve my emotional attachment to food, whenever I saw food my anticipatory mind was already preparing me eat it, so watching my mind became far more intense.  I also learned from friends with a far healthier attitude to food than me.

And the biggest lessons are:
You’re never too old to learn;
Whenever our problems seem big, it means our mind is too small and we need to change our perspective.

Links:
Sapiens book
Vegetarian Ketogenic Diet info
Magic Pill film on Netflix