Oct 27
Wow, this evening I am mega impressed - a lovely lady just emailed me to say she has been following MND strictly for the last month and she has lost 1 stone 6.5 pounds in a month! She feels better, people keep telling her that she looks great, and she is not feeling ‘in denial’ at all.
Exercising the 90/10 rule, she has a ‘treat’ once per week, and she is doing great!
What a SUPER STAR! Keep it up you are doing SO WELL! 🙂
I am trying to understand how much our health is a balance of nutrition, emotional stress, psychological/mental happiness, environmental factors, age and natural hormonal fluctuations, sleep, exercise, hydration and so on.
What do I mean?
Imagine a scenario where a person is eating a great diet, getting plenty of sleep, staying well hydrated, enjoying regular and varied exercise, in an emotionally ‘happy place’ and not working too hard – but living in a place with terrible environmental pollution, dirty air, ceaseless loud horrible noise, dirty water, and so on. That person will likely not be enjoying optimal great health.
I picked up some yummy veggies at the farm shop this week and just had to take a picture of all the gorgeous green and purple goodness.
This picture shows a huge delicious savoy cabbage, purple cauliflower (yummy, sweet tasting, and in my opinion tastes like a sweet cross between broccoli and white cauliflower…yum!), purple kale, leeks and black kale (cavolo nero, also yummy!).
I cooked half this lot for lunch and served it up with slow-roasted lamb and my 3 kids just looked at me like they were saying “Dad, why do you do this to us…?” but with some considerable encouragement from my wife and I, they all ate it.
Delicious and so nutritious!
Too many people forget that a healthy lifestyle is an active lifestyle, and should include a variety of exercise and activities. Think about caveman’s lifestyle compared to ours today. He didn’t have a car, a sofa, an armchair, a soft bed, pillows, cushions, a thick duvet or a padded work chair at his desk. He didn’t work in an office, he didn’t have a desk, he didn’t drive a car or truck for 9 to 10 hours each day, he didn’t sit down all day.
I often think about the work caveman would have had to do. Imagine the running involved in chasing down an animal such as a wild boar. Caveman would have had to chase the animal at pace through woodland for long enough to exhaust the boar, before finally getting close enough to attack his prey, and then fight to the death. Caveman may been armed with a stone-tipped spear, to bring the animal down, but in all eventuality, once wounded, he would have had to go in for the kill, and he probably would have used a ‘knife’ made from a sharpened bone from a previous kill, or a pointed stick, and he would have had to attack, wrestle, and kill the animal by hand. This 200 pound boar with short tusks, hard hooves and strong teeth, would have been fighting for its life. Think about how much work caveman had to do to secure his meal. He had to be a strong middle-distance runner, a careful sprinter (minding hazards on the forest floor – there is no hospital if he broke his ankle), and a tough cage-fighter (no tetanus jab for cuts and scratches).
This week I just wanted to share with you an observation that I have recently cleared up in my own mind. It’s actually really simple and obvious stuff, and I should imagine a lot of clean-living healthy people already know this, or at least they will read this and instantly agree and see that it is all really quite obvious, and most unhealthy people will disagree, call me names and declare that I have no idea what I am writing about. Such is life.
When I was 17, or 18, 19 or 20...and probably up to my early 30’s, I hated catching a cold. Coughs and colds are murder to a smoker, or at least they certainly were to me. For one, as a smoker, your throat is under attack every day because of your smoking, so when it is sore and inflamed with coughs and colds, it is far more sore and dry and painful than the throat of the average non-smoker who has a cough or a cold. Secondly, if the painful throat is bad enough, it will actually stop you from smoking, or at least reduce you down to just a few quick puffs per day – and that is really guaranteed to ruin your day! Few things make you grumpier than being a smoker who can’t smoke!!
So during the many years I smoked, but particularly when I was young, very overweight, very out of shape and a really heavy smoker, I would catch coughs and colds several times each year and I hated them, they were a real misery.
Sinister, deadly 'man-flu'
