Fixing the Damage from our First 40 years
Are You Like I Was?
- Way back, I spent decades abusing my body. Not quite like Sly in Rocky but during my years of full-contact karate training, it came pretty close to it:
- * Too many late nights or all-nighters and not sleeping or eating well at other times
- * Too much alcohol, coffee, maybe nicotine, stimulants, narcotics or worse
- * Physical stresses from tough sports and the odd accidents and injuries like a broken collar bone, torn cruciate ligament, dislocated fingers, concussion, bruises and bumps, nitrogen narcosis and extreme hypothermia to name a few incidents
For Me, It Was Because I Felt Like I Would Live Forever
Recently I was asked if it’s possible to undo the damage we inflict on our body throughout our youth. And maybe fix the ongoing damage we cause over our lifetime from nutritional and lifestyle choices.
Many of us partied too long or worked too hard. We were often sleep-deprived (and bragged about it) and were fuelled on fast food and addictive chemicals which might have been a choice of ethanol, caffeine, nicotine or those other ones.
Or perhaps we were addicted to the dopamine, adrenalin or oxytocin rushes from physical experiences and abused our body with extreme sports and resultant accidents. Being in, on or under water; on a rock face or jumping off one; or even in the sack with one-too-many partners (more risky these days than back then) - all normal activities with the occasional lasting impressions.
Even travelling to places where the foods (or the sanitation) challenged our constitutions somewhat and days of diarrhoea and vomiting cleaned out the beneficial gut bugs as well as lesser desirable ones and their toxins. Extended or overuse of antibiotics, other pharmaceuticals and the aforementioned chemicals all took their toll.
Did you know that no pharmaceutical approved in the USA or Australia is ever tested against the possible damage they do to our mitochondria? These cellular organelles contain the biochemical machinery to provide us with energy and also orchestrate the recycling of our cells as they reach their Use-By dates. You'd think that foreign chemicals should be checked for any negative effects to these critical, live-supporting structures.
Our mitochondria are further challenged by magnesium deficiency since the energy molecule they make (ATP), can't move out of the organelle, through the cell's cytoplasm, through the cell wall and out into the body to go where it's needed unless it is bound to a magnesium molecule.
Still. We tend to be able to tough out the mounting damage from all of the youthful activities up until the age of about 40 when slowly the evidence of the self-abuse is laid bare.
Doing the Damage
We notice healing takes longer. There are aches and pains that attract attention and then movement may get harder. Our senses of sight, hearing, taste, reflexes and possibly even our spacial awareness and balance start to lose their edge. Weight gain seems to be the new sport and trying to torture some muscles back onto our frame ends badly with strained joints or torn tendons.
Medically, our blood test results may see the rise in those critical numbers of blood pressure starting to rise, cholesterol moving into the upper range, persistent blood sugars and increasing insulin resistance. Inflammation markers also provide proof of our youthful indiscretions.
In order to wind back the clock and slow the slide down the slippery slope we need to pass the lens over modern foods.
Why is it that even a plant-rich food plan with the occasional red meat meal (for the iron) but otherwise a pescatarian and white land animal meat diet, still ain't doin' it?
The truth is that our foods have changed dramatically and not for the better. Starting some 10,000 years ago we left foraging and hunting food and instead, we chose to cultivate a tiny selection of our wild food options. We had to modify a few of the plants to get more yields, more consistent harvests and more durable plantings. We turned wild variants into new foods not unlike the Wuhan viral variants from alpha to lambda - they are different in some respects, but still all the same basic virus. So too with a plant that is bred or tortured into dozens of forms, it is still the same plant species. They are not vastly different in terms of their phytonutrients which are like tiny superheroes that we get from the plants we eat and which fly around our body fixing, supporting and tuning processes and structures from reactions to organs and everything in between.
It is worth appreciating what these phytonutrients cover since they number in the tens of thousands and can be grouped to include antioxidants, anti-inflammatories, anti-allergens, anti-rogue cell (anti-proliferatives, pro-apopotics, anti-carcinogens, anti-mutagens), immune boosters and cytokine regulators, adaptogens (normalizers), organic acids, organ and organelle protectants (brain, heart, liver, kidney, pancreas, lungs, blood vessels, lymphatics, skin, reproductive organs and the all-important, intra-cellular organelles - our mitochondria), live enzymes and enzyme regulators, good sugars (all sugars apart from sucrose and fructose), soluble and insoluble fibre and bioavailable minerals.
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Restricting or even eliminating these phytonutrients over time was the beginning of the end for our ideal nutrition and instead, created the agricultural factory of Big Farma, the chemically toxic Big Pharma industry and our own enslavement to a 9 to 5 or more in working hours to pay for both. This now leaves us so exhausted that we spend most of our lives sitting down now and this can be added to the other damaging pastimes listed above.
We might also notice that the wicked ways of our youth was yet another way of missing out on phytonutrients with the wrong dietary choices and the added toxic load of chemicals.
Fixing the Damage
To summarize our options in damage repair I am presuming that we reduce further additions to the shopping list of threats to our health. Now comes the regenerative healing:
1. Eat more. Note; I don’t mean more of any particular food as there is no silver bullet or single superfood. We need to expand the range of what we eat, especially adding wild and near-wild foods which are infinitely superior to cultivated produce in their phytonutrient content. Forage, find heirloom produce, wild-caught seafood and field-shot game animals. Avoid farmed seafood unless it is naturally fed and not given chook food or other pelletized chemicals instead of real food. Avoid farmed emus because they are fed such artificial diets that even their oil is no longer medicinal as it is in wild birds which still have access to insects, wild fruits and seeds. Replace domestic animal meats with older breeds such as auroch which is an ancient cow or source feral goat meat, roo, wallaby and possibly possum (from New Zealand perhaps). Note that these days, while most non-indigenous Australians might have 40 to 80 different food species on an annual shopping list, this compares with Indigenous Australians living long and healthy lives pre-invasion eating from 150 to 650 different food species annually (depending on geography).
2. Eliminate or drastically reduce our consumption of starchy vegetables as they do nothing for us apart from raise our blood sugars, feed and promote the wrong gut bug populations, make us hungry, never satisfy that hunger, soak up fat used to cook them and make us pack on the weight. What is even worse is that their high content of bad sugars (sucrose and fructose) which we also get from modern fruits plus their low fibre content means we end up with high levels of the end products from fructose metabolism. These make us more like bears, snakes or insects which hibernate through winters. For example, bears love high fructose berries which are super-sweet from their fructose content. Eat lots and bears lay on the fat until the fat tissues signal their brain to stop eating and sleep. They then hibernate and live off the fat until other metabolic signals (falling uric acid levels) get them to wake up, rinse and repeat
3. Eat bears. No. Hang on. I mean hibernate. Well that’s not really practical for us these days. What we should do is follow Point #1 in order to get sufficient phytonutrients (amounts and range) so that we are not constantly driven (by brain signals as well as by our gut bugs) to eat more food in a pointless search for the missing phytonutrients.
However, if we do get sufficient phytonutrients we end up eating more like a hunter-forager which is 1 to 2 meals a day with a daily period of fasting lasting 14 to 18 hours. We do not get hungry and our senses are sharpened. Physically and mentally our energy levels rise too. No need for that afternoon ‘Nanna nap’ or to sleep weekends away in a vain attempt to catch up. We experience a new level of normal – energized.
4. Lastly, we need to exercise like a hunter. Anthropologist, Peter McAllister, studied footprints preserved in rock-hard mud. He measured the pace of a group of hunters running around what were once, the soft edges of a lake. The 5 hunters were probably chasing a roo or emu that one had speared. The runner on the outside paced it out to 45kph as he kept up to his mates. To put this into perspective, Jamaican sprinter, Usain Bolt, touched 42kph when he peaked at the 60m mark of his Olympic world-record setting 100m dash. Given that the hunters caught up with their prey, they would then have had to carry a dead weight of up to 90kg back to the family campsite. What does this mean for us today? High Intensity Functional Training or HIFT is on the mark for ideal fitness. I recommend working out on:
- * an indoor rowing machine with medium high resistance or
- * a climber device or least preferable,
- * a stationary bicycle, standing on the pedals and with medium resistance or cadence.
All that is needed is 3 minutes flat out repeated every 2 or 3 days. If done right, talking should not be possible on completion and for at least 30 to 40 seconds afterwards. Just gasping for air.
Then to mimic carrying that kargaroo carcass, in each hand, pick up a dumbbell that comes close to 75% of your maximum lift. Be sure that your elbows are bent as straightening them will damage the joints.
Variable hand weights are ideal but you can even fill heavy-duty or doubled up shopping carry bags with a mix of sand and bluemetal and tape plastic tubes on the straps as handles. Walk around your house and up and down stairs until you just have to put the weight down. Rest 30 secs and repeat twice. That’s it.
I guess the hardest part of the preceding recommendations is finding the appropriate sources of wild foods.
Luckily for us in Australia there are some of the foods of the World’s longest living culture still available and The LIFE Plan which is based on a wide range of wild food ingredients is perfect for the task. There is no such thing as a silver bullet when it comes to undoing any youthful damage from our dim, dark past but the collection of whole foods in The LIFE Plan is just what any knowledgeable doctor would recommend, if only they knew. Check it out and note that our unconditional offer removes any risk to you. Try The LIFE Plan and if you are unhappy in any way over the performance and efficacy of any components or the whole shebang, just let us know and we will refund your product cost.