I haven't posted in a while but today I decided to begin blogging my new dietary changes, my experiments with food, and some of the research I'll be doing on living a healthy lifestyle.

Going forward I must note that I have several biases that will make this scientifically inaccurate. I expect this to be positive. Based on past experience with intermittent fasting and eating whole foods, I expect to feel good.

I'm not testing this objectively-rigorously. I'm searching for things, have an already formed opinion, and cannot be counted on to be biased to the point of perfection.

But I am generally a non-biased person. I do not lie, to myself or to anyone else.

I say this because I believe that human health is tricky business, and shouldn't be simplified to the point of idiocy. It's hard to know if something is “healthy” when health evolves over a lifespan of decades. There are many factors involved, making it impossible to isolate one ingredient in a complex system (consisting of diet, exercise, stress-reduction, genetics, environmental carcinogens, etc), and saying without a doubt that it is what makes or breaks one's health.

There are no absolutes in medicine but only generalities. This has become my mantra when discussing health in any capacity, be it physical or emotional. I can use smoking as an example of this. 

It is true that smoking cigarettes is generally unhealthy, but saying that “cigarettes kill people” is a ridiculous statement in any scientific context. Saying cigarettes are a cause of cancer is logical and rational, and can be backed up by years of research. Saying cigarettes caused someone's cancer makes less sense when viewed from a whole-health perspective—in which case cigarettes alone do not cause cancer, but are a factor among many factors (even if it is the largest factor), because cancer is dependent on many factors, be they genetic, environmental, and behavioral.

Someone's lung cancer has a lot to do with who they are on a molecular level as well as what they eat. You can expect a higher rate of lung cancer among cigarette smokers who eat processed foods than you can among smokers who eat whole foods—but that doesn't mean that diet alone causes lung cancer either. You have to also consider exercise and stress, two factors that may play as big of roles as genetics, diet, and carcinogen exposure.

Health is infinitely complicated when we look at it in a broad spectrum, and it must be looked at in a broad spectrum to be even remotely accurate. So I'm not going to try to prove anything with this blog, because I lack the tools and the objectivity to factor everything in, and I'm studying myself, over a short amount of time at that. 

I'm doing this mainly for me, and for anyone else interesting in health who would like to read along, get some ideas, or be pointed in a particular direction.

~*~

My most basic guideline for health is simply: “How does it make me feel?”

I've found through experimenting that eating a lot of unhealthy carbs, specifically simple sugars in the form of candy and cakes makes me feel like crap. It tastes great, there's no doubt about that, but I experience more depression, more anxiety, more tiredness, and more strange bodily symptoms when I'm on the Standard American Diet (SAD).

In my experience fasting for about 17 hours each day, or fasting 24 hours every other day, fills me with physical energy, and helps me to feel an astounding peace of mind. I'm less agitated, feel far less depression—none—and experience less anxiety; what anxiety I do feel tends to be less volatile and easy to deal with.

Something I have never tried before is to eat a diet lower in carbs. I'll still eat fruits like bananas, whole grains like oatmeal, and vegetables like sweet potoatoes, but balance these with healthy fats like olive and coconut oil to further lower these foods' glycemic load. How will this make me feel eating a diet containing a higher percentage of fats and proteins (lots of chicken and fish)?

I will find out.

~*~

For the record this diet started on Sunday, May 5, 2013.

It's a dietary blend of whole foods and intermittent fasting. I am not striving for perfection, but a general direction, so I'll likely have cheat meals and perhaps some cheat days once in a while, and If I need it, I'll have some protein powder with water or almond milk (I am bodybuilding).

There are many ways of looking at health. We can live a healthy lifestyle to prolong life, or to avoid future disease, or because it's interesting or fun or a challenge. 

I focus on my health to feel good right now. I am less interested in longevity, or avoiding disease. I do not feel I can control the future.

What I can control, to an extent, is my current body. This is far easier and less worrisome than attempting to live to be one hundred, or getting through life without getting sick.

I am going to die. This is an undeniable fact. It's not something I wish to expend energy to avoid. If living a healthy lifestyle in order to feel good right now leads me to live longer, cool. If it doesn't, what am I going to do?

I am going to get sick. This is a fact. It's very likely that I will get cancer one day, or heart disease, or diabetes, or a thousand other nasty things. The older I get, the more likely illness becomes.

One of the reasons why cancer, heart disease, and diabetes rates are so high is because we have an aging population. Over 25% of the population is older than the average life expectancy in 1900! The “fifty and older” crowd has doubled in the last century, and half of that population group are over age sixty-five. 

The rate of disease skyrockets as people get into their sixties, seventies, and eighties, as it should. Disease, often caused by old age (the body's growing inability to heal itself), kills almost everyone eventually. 

All we've managed to do in the twentieth century is push the natural course of disease back a couple of decades, partly through medical technology, and partly through a higher awareness of fitness and diet, but it catches up to us eventually no matter what precautions we take—we cannot put death off forever, nor can we put off disease indefinitely, so long as it is a process of dying.

There's no way to predict my future, but I have a great power over my current health, over how I feel upon waking and how I feel upon going to bed, and the time between. How I feel today is the only thing that I can control, and it is the only thing that matters.

By eating natural plant foods, lean meats, and healthy fats, I can feel better both physically and emotionally because these foods have a complete range of necessary vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. By eating less, and implementing daily periods of fasting, I can limit the ill effects that sugar and other carbs have on the body. By avoiding added chemicals, I can keep my brain and body healthy and working at its best. I can feel alert, energetic, and happy.

But diet is not the only aspect of health. Physical fitness is a as important. Exercising early in the morning grounds me for the rest of the day. I feel more confident and energized on days that I lift weights, ride my bike, and stretch. I stick to a healthy diet more easily, and I have a sense of well-being that lasts late into the evening.

There's also an emotional component to health. Emotional well-being isn't something that is given much attention in our society, but it is at least as important. Taking care of one's emotional health is simply finding a way to stay in-tune with the world around us. Emotional health is a sense that one is “all right.” 

Stress, which if compared to cigarettes and fast food, may be an even deadlier factor for disease. Prolonged stress can rapidly annihilate the body's organs and immune system. Emotional health counteracts stress far better than diet and exercise.

When I do not fulfill these three key factors I feel “off.” I've learned to take care of this feeling quickly, because the longer it's there the harder it seems to be gotten rid of. This is why I focus on the immediate present rather than on the far away future. I can live for tomorrow and very easily miss out on today. I would never want to be old and healthy and not have enjoyed my life, or to only remember things as memories and to not have actually experienced them!

Staying healthy is about making daily, conscious adjustments. It's not just eating the same “health” food over and over again and running on the same treadmill for forty-five years, it's managing myself, figuring out what makes me feel good, and applying it to my daily life. 

My health has become a great experiment in which I try many different things in order to figure out what works for me. I've come to realize that we're all different, which is why the experimentation is necessary for each of us. We don't know what will work until we test it, and anything can work for one person and not for another.

An overall consistency is more important than a rigid constant state of perfection, for to enjoy good health it's necessary to experience some ill health once in a while, or good health itself becomes too normal to be appreciated. 

Falling off the wagon, then, isn't the end of the world. If I trash my body for a weekend on the sofa eating ice cream and pizza, I'll have enjoyed the food and the time off, and when I get back to eating healthy and exercising I will feel like a million bucks. This, to me, is also exercising my emotional health—not punishing myself for my imperfections or cravings.

The contrast is what good health really, truly is. It's a cycle, like everything else in this world. The end of the cycle isn't a tragedy, but spending an entire lifetime trying to escape it is.

Be nice to yourself. What else do we really have to live for?

A few days ago I made it a priority to reach what Zen Buddhists call Satori. My aim was to see if I could “force” myself into this altered state of consciousness. I have experienced it before, and it's a very peaceful place to be, even when things aren't going so hot, but I got there by accident, by chance, by reading or listening to something that shocked me out of my “self.” This time I wanted to find out if I could put myself there.

This sudden mining for spiritual gold coincides with an equally sudden interest in a psychologist and lecturer named Richard Alpert—otherwise known as Ram Dass. Ram Dass is an interesting topic in and of himself, but all that needs to be said here is that I am at the right point in my life to get the most out of his teachings. Just as, seven years ago, I was at the right point in my life to get the most out of Alan Watts's teachings and the teachings of Taoism. My intuition is at maximum, I have reached peak receptiveness.

So over the last few days I have meditated, and I have listened to Ram Dass lectures and clips on Youtube, and I have—as well as I can—put myself into a semi-enlightened state. I say “semi” because it is not permanent enlightenment. It is mostly intellectual (as in I “know this to be the case”), but it is yet to be known if I can apply what I'm meditating on to my non-meditative life. Osho calls this semi-enlightenment Little Satori. Big Satori is permanent.

My spirituality must be practical. I have stripped away many concepts. You won't catch me talking in New Age jargon. I don't “believe” in anything I cannot experience first hand. I am very much a minimalist.

I don't believe in deities, souls, spirits, angels, demons, good/evil, etc.

What I believe is straightforward, grounded.

I am not my body. I am not my mind. I am not my senses. I am not that which I sense. I am the experience of all of these things happening at once, in this moment.

Meaning that I am no one thing, but all things. What I seek in life is, above all else, to blend with the experience. To observe it, yes, but to understand that the observer (the “I”) is not the self.

What I am trying to do is to disidentify from the self that fears. To be “no thing.” To embrace the void. The moment.

In order to get through that part of me which “stops” when it comes to doing something normal people find easy, if not outright boring, I must change my state of consciousness. Altering my mind through meditation and Eastern philosophy I can see the world in a different light. Not from the point of view of a human being, but from the point of view of the Cosmos itself.

That is enlightenment. Satori. It can last a millisecond, or for the rest of my life, however long that may be.

Living as the experience (the phenomenon), not the experiencer. Living as the event, not the observer. Then what can hurt me? What use are my old fears? What use is standing still? If I am the experience, then I will experience anything. Joy, sadness, ecstasy, pain, love, loneliness, freedom, even fear.

At the end of all of this is death. The void. But for one who lives and dies in each moment, the death of the body and the final death of the mind is nothing new.

This is the doorway to being a human being again. Walking through it, embracing that enlightened altered state of consciousness, I am free to be both human—with all of my faults, with all of my fears—and at the same time Cosmic—understanding fully that I am not the body, the mind, the senses, but the experience. The phenomena.

This thought gives me great peace. It's a contradiction to all that I've told myself for so many years, gripped by anxiety. It's strangely similar to the feeling I had when I was a six-year-old child, before my adult ego took over. When I was a child I got scared, but I never identified with my fear. It was not “me,” but only what was happening at the moment. When that moment passed I would be happy again, but I never recall identifying with that happiness. As a child, I was enveloped by the moment, every moment.

My phobias exist because I grew up and began to believe that I was my fear. That I was my uncertainty. That I was my anxiety.

When I talk of spontaneity to those hard-set in the ways of Western culture, the door is often slammed in my face. Of course this is no real door, but the door to their minds, because in our culture spontaneity is synonymous with idleness and a life without goals, and many people have already closed their minds to other possibilities.

To let things be what they are, to let come what may come, and to ride the wind conjures visions of bohemians, hippies, gypsies, and bums.

Not someone with goals, with a plan, with motivation, passion and drive to get from point A to point B.

I find myself spending a lot of time refuting this concept of spontaneity. I refute the claim because it's not true. Or, more specifically, it does not have to be true. In fact, spontaneity may lead to even more goals, plans, motivations, passions, and drives—for the right person.

What do I mean by the right person? Some of us go about success in the wrong way. We try to force it. We work very hard, living on our to-do lists, and expecting to get as much out of the system as we put in. When things don't go our way, we end up frustrated and dejected because this way of operation is cold and offers very little satisfaction—it merely turns real life into an assembly line procedure. We continue on with our to-do list, but with less motivation, more than likely losing the spark we began with.

The surest way to avoid this inevitable let-down inherent to our system of “productivity > enjoyment” is to venture from the regular path, to trust that we will fly when we do.

I feel as though I live a very spontaneous life. I still have goals, but I am not tied down to them. I am free to leave my feet when the spirit takes me, to go headlong into the unknown. If I were simply living life by my to-do list I would not venture. I would stick to the list.

Living a spontaneous life means living in a way that the list, if you have one (and I almost always do), is not the end-all, be-all of reality. It's accepting our human need for creativity and exploration. Yet spontaneity is not completely discarding the old forms.

When we have passion for a thing, it is very easy to spend time with it. I have passion for exercise. I do not need to keep a detailed to-do list when it comes to running. I just run. I do so often when I have passion. Many times in my life I have found that when I try to control how I run, the distance, the time, and the harder I control these things, the less joy I get out of running—and therefore the less I run. Despite detailed goals, I am less motivated. When I just run, I run farther and faster than I would if I approached running as a chore. I still carry a stop-watch with me, and I still try to improve from one run to the next, but I don't grow moody if I don't. I don't make myself. It happens of itself.

Spontaneity increases passion because it does away with our culture's have-to's. With more passion, we do not have to guard our steps. We can trust ourselves to do what we love, because we love doing it, and there are few things we'd rather do otherwise.

The argument against this tends to be “What if I find I don't have the passion, even if I live spontaneously?” My response: “Then why do it?”

We need money to survive in this world. We must eat, clothe, and house ourselves. Yet how we make that money is entirely up to what we enjoy doing. If you don't want to work in a cubicle, don't. If you don't want to be ABC, but would rather do XYZ, do what you must to get to that point. But do so spontaneously. Don't try to out-think life. Don't try to trick the system. Don't do a thing for any other reason than that you find joy in doing it.

When there is joy—joy borne of spontaneity—there is a way, a living, a life.

I don't believe that human beings have control over their destinies. Between free will and determinism, I lean toward determinism. We're products of our environment. We like what we like and enjoy what we enjoy and dream what we dream and do what we do largely because of what we've experienced in the past.

Yet in a world of free will “versus” determinism, I cop out. I believe both play a roll at once. When looking at past and present, it seems impossible to believe in free will, as determinism in the form of human behavior and natural genetics plays such a heavy-handed role in how we behave. But there is a third item to look at.

In the moment is where free will reigns. When I mean “the moment,” I don't mean every moment, but only in those moments that we are fully aware of what we're doing and so are able to make conscious decisions. In this way we can out-dual even our habits. At the ice cream shop we may go in unaware of what we're doing and choose vanilla out of habit (determinism), or we may show patience and see the numerous flavors, and in our awareness, discard our past experiences to choose something not out of habit, but against it.

And so in the moment, with free will, there is no destiny. No one can predict what a conscious being will choose to do, or how he or she will react. We may all be destined for something, greatness or otherwise, but many of us can, with practice, live a life outside of that destiny, even as it unfolds around us.

For some this is a harrowing task, and with so many possibilities, some are unable to choose at all. I am one of those types (I often fall back on habit because choices given to me in life are too daunting, complicated, or confusing). And yet within the moment, out of awareness, free will still reigns. Not directly tied to past or future, choices are made for other reasons than habit and behavior. Choices are made out of awareness.

This post isn't about choosing ice cream flavors, it's about choosing something much more important. In life we face challenges each and every day, and these challenges are toxic, violent, uncomfortable, etc. If we are not aware, we will depend on our past experiences to react to what is happening to us right now. If we were brought up with violence, we may act with violence. If we were brought up with compassion, we may act with compassion. These are generalities, of course. All people are different, and the makeup of one's brain certainly supersedes environment. But it's determinism in the end, and this may lead (even for, or especially for, the compassionate) to a life of frustration, having things happen to us and not understanding why, or why we react the way we do.

But with awareness there is another option. Not to behave as we've always behaved, but to behave in a new way, a way that better suits the situation at hand. To step out of the norm of human behavior and face challenges with a new set of tools, active and purposeful, instead of our former passive habits.

And so I have decided (at least for today) that I have only one real choice in life. I am in control over only one thing. I control how I react—but only if I am consciously aware of the moment.

I must choose anger or acceptance. I must choose fear or joy.

There's not a whole lot else I, as a human being, control. I cannot control what others do or feel. I cannot control the society or culture I am born and raised in. I cannot tell someone “build me an ice cream shop with many flavors” or get ice cream for free (making me a slave in so many ways to so many different things).

But I do control my reaction to the eventful situations life throws my way. This may not be a big deal to others, or for some they may have realized this fact many years ago, but up until this realization I had always struggled to understand a world in which both free will and determinism were possible. How could I fit them together? I have now done that, and it's a breakthrough in many ways.

Past...future...present. One (determinism) controls two of these, and the other (free will) just the one, but all are important in understanding why people do what they do; understanding why I do what I do.

I don't believe in destiny. I do believe in right here and right now. “Destiny” is just another moment in time to me.

I had to end a friendship with a guy I grew up with, who was at one time my best friend. We lost track of each other for years, and I finally tracked him down and connected with him again. I hoped—though I had learned by then that digging up people from my past was a risky proposition—that we could rekindle our former brotherhood.

The beginning of the end started with a comment I had made. It was my misunderstanding. I thought he meant something other than what he really meant, and though I was agreeing with what I thought he meant, I was actually disagreeing with him, since he meant the opposite.

A simple misunderstanding, but also a lethal one, for he was in no mood to forgive and forget, even after I apologized and explained what had happened. Someone really hurt him, he was determined to take it out on me.

He was angry with me, posting obscenity-laced comments about my place in the world. That I had no right to talk to him, that I didn't go through what he went through, that I was ignorant, asinine, and self righteous. He pulled the Kurt Cobain book out and accused me of being fake.

I tried to be diplomatic about it. I apologized, I explained where I was coming from. He got hostile and paranoid. I finally decided that if he wanted “real”, I'd give it to him real. I didn't sugar coat my last message to him, but told him exactly how I felt about his behavior. I told him to grow up, that he was being an asshole about the situation. I told him I don't have a crystal ball, that I would forgive him, and move on, but I didn't need the negativity—the abuse, really. And I said that friendship is a two way street, that friends must give and take equally.

He kept repeating that it was his turn to stand up for himself, that no one could walk over him anymore. I listed the insulting things he had called me and told him, “if you want to stand up for yourself, do it against your enemies, not your friends.” I don't know who hurt him, but in his blind anger, he couldn't understand that I was just caught in the middle, hoping to help.

He didn't want real as much as he thought he did. He defriended me. (To be fair, I asked him to, if he could not respect me.)

His last words were “no regrets”, but he must have been talking about himself, because I'm having major regrets.

He told me to think about what I did, and I have, a lot. It was the last thought before I drifted to sleep, and it was the first thought when I woke up this morning.

My “friend” is a taker. Many of us know the type, but there's more to it than what many might think. He's had a very difficult life, dealing with an abusive stepfather, school bullies, homelessness, drug addiction. Many people who go through events like that learn to take care of themselves first. They're often more self-centered and greedy than people who didn't have to fight to survive. I don't blame him for it, but am very sad I couldn't help him.

I'm also very sad that he saw in me an enemy, someone out to get him. I remember how excited I was when I tracked him down early last year, after 12 years since the last time we spoke. I listened to his story, I tried my best to give him positive vibes. I encouraged him. The only time I wasn't available to him to talk was a few months at the end of 2011, when I had to get offline to take care of my own problems. I wasn't available to anyone.

But sine I've been in touch with him, I do not remember him ever coming to me for anything. Not to ask for advice, not to give me advice, not to tell me about his life, or to ask about mine. Not to chat, whether about life in general, the future, or the fun times we used to have as kids wrecking our neighborhood (we wrecked that neighborhood thoroughly!).

I started all of our conversations. I was the one reaching out. He had no time for me, yet on his way out of my life, his biggest complaint was that I wasn't a real friend.

Now, I don't claim to be the best friend in the world. I don't claim to even be a good friend. It's too much pressure involved in living up to those expectations. I try my best to be nice to people, but I don't always. I have an ideal, but I don't always meet it. But I do try, and I do care, even when I am too pissed off and compulsive to do anything productive.

What a friend is and should do is different for many people. We all have different expectations. I don't feel that my expectations are too high. I keep my friendships loose. I've learned that friends are not always there for me, whether they want to be or not, and I'm not always there for them, whether I want to be or not.

I've walked away from many friendships, sometimes because they were negative forces in my life (as this one quickly turned out to be), other times because I or they moved (a product of being an Army brat), and still other times for no good reason at all. People grow apart. We change. I see friendships as living things. We must nurture each other to grow, but even then we sometimes grow bored of others. There's always someone new waiting to replace the old. I think this is an immensely positive thing, because it allows us to recycle ourselves and others. Why attach ourselves to old friends, when we each can be of better use for other people?

I'm sad that this friendship ended like it did, but I'm not down and out. I'm not going to pack my bags and quit on the human experience. I'm not going to be bitter about it. I have a lot to look forward to. So I don't get along with one person? I know of many who would give me the benefit of the doubt, who would try to mend the broken bridge. That's harder for people who have had a difficult life and don't yet have their head above water.

I take people in stride. I seek to understand them, what motivates them, why they react to what they do, and the way they react to it, if only so some day I can stop being the central character in my own drama. I've had a lot of friends in my life, and I've learned something from each of them, but I've learned the most from the ones who many wouldn't consider good at all.

I have a small audience as far as blogs go, but even if one of you reads the following and can relate or feel a passion about Steve Cooksey's story, this will have been worth sharing.

Steve is a diabetic. His doctors and nurses told him to continue eating many of the same foods that had given him diabetes in the first place, and he bucked their advice in order to eat a new way. He has since all but cured his diabetes. He takes no insulin and no medication. He eats a low-carb diet. Pass the meat, hold the potatoes.

At first, I was skeptical of Steve's diet, but as I got to know him I realized his diet works for him. It has even changed my approach to food, and now I don't feel guilty about the occasional hamburger.

Despite our very different approaches to the dinner table (he is a carnivore, and I am a flexitarian) I feel like we both live a healthier lifestyle than the norm. Meat and fruit aside, you won't find any Lays chips in our cupboards. We eat a minimum of processed foods, we fast on a near-daily basis, and we exercise a lot.

Now Steve has a blog, with a disclaimer that he's not a health professional. He discusses diet with diabetics and others, and he hands out common-sense advice.

And now the Big Bad Government is investigating him.

[Below is a video on his investigation, and three articles for further reading.]

http://freetheanimal.com/2012/01/menace-to-society-north-carolina-board-of-dieteticsnutrition-ncbdn.html

http://www.diabetes-warrior.net/2012/01/28/this-site-free-speech-are-being-investigated/
This site belongs to Steve himself.

 http://www.kriskris.com/dietetic-board-battles/

There's a lot of information here on Steve and diabetes.

I found this extremely unsettling. I understand the sentiment behind the government protecting citizens from fly-by-night-drug-cocktail-pushers (not to be confused with pharmacists, apparently), but how can the government shut down the free speech of someone with proven results? How can anyone stop anyone else from sharing what works?

Steve has opened my eyes to a pressing matter, how ill-informed diabetics and others are about diabetes. This isn't by accident. There is a lot of government corruption in our nation, and believe it or not, most of that corruption comes from the food industry, in all its forms. Whether it's Monsanto, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Pfizer, the meat and dairy industry (Steve may disagree with me on that), and others, the companies pouring the most money into Washington D.C. are those companies putting food on our tables.

These companies aren't just in government either, but are even manipulating scientific research and charities.

Does it make sense that the fast food and soft drink industries help to fund cancer and diabetes research? To me it does. And it's no surprise to me that in fifty years we still don't have a medical cure for cancer or diabetes, though there is most definitely a dietary cure. Both types of diseases have even been passed off as “genetical” by many in the health field, as if nothing we can do will prevent or cure our ills.

The dietary cure/prevention isn't going to come from a foil package or a wrapper with a big “M” stamped on the front of it. That's basically what Steve is telling people, and for his compassion he's getting a shakedown with people who jingle when they walk, and get a buttache when they sit down to eat.