Transformation from illness to robust health, a personal journey
This blog is primarily about Outdoor Adventure and building health using Ancestral Principles so we can feel amazing and recover from illness. Many people are choosing to rethink their work and home environments and sometimes even living in a tent and/or a vehicle to avoid things like EMFs, Mold, and Indoor Toxins. This is also what lead me to inventing the amazing natural fiber non-toxic outdoor gear at Lucky Sheep.
I share about my knowledge of diet and nutrition because we need our body to work well in order to go in nature. My philosophy is the body is the first GEAR when it comes to outdoor gear. I realize diet and other topics such as spirituality, beliefs, politics, lifestyle can offend some people. There are so many paths and ideas to choose from out there and there isn’t anything which doesn’t have a controversy. Nonetheless…I am going to share my own story, experiences and ideas because I have helped myself as well as many people who have followed my journey.
The quest for health has been for many of us frustrating, futile, and unrewarding. In a world full of toxins and stress, EMFs and circadian killing blue light, it is a challenge to get to a place of normal wellness and homeostasis. Here I will explain my own health journey that started with sickness and ended in robust health and wellness.
When I was 14 I was an award winning athlete. I was the fastest runner in my class, setting a school record (in a small town). I then moved to a medium sized city during the beginning days of the skateboarding revolution. I became a kick ass skateboarder sought out by people all over town in Lawrence, Kansas.
But when I was 17 years old I developed some strange symptoms which were alarming and sent me to explore diet and nutrition. It started with a health condition that seemed like seizures in my sleep or upon waking. Now I am convinced it was mercury poisoning from the amalgams I had two years previous to when it started.
At that time the only nutrition advice I found pointed toward veganism and Macrobiotics. I spent the next two decades on a downward spiral of health. No-one knew what was wrong. For two decades (17 years old to 38 years old) I experienced dwindling energy and health.
But the details aren’t important here as you will find out later. The fact is, I was not well and as I went into my 20’s and 30’s most people I know had health problems as well. It seemed really crazy to me but people seemed to think this was just the normal plight of being human.
I tried desperately to build my health with diet…believing the macrobiotic and vegan approach was the key. I was also trying desperately to be an athlete and spent those twenty years practicing long distance biking and trail running. This only made matters worse as I could not get my scrawny 119 lb. and 5’7” body to put on any weight.
I was in what seemed like a futile battle to figure it out and get better. I spent thousands of dollars on things like Chinese Medicine, Macrobiotics, Chiropractic Treatments, Energy Work and Various Raw Vegan Diets that brought little to no relief. So many things promised to be the answer but one by one they each failed. You have to remember…this was before the Internet and the Ancestral Health, Paleo, and Biohacking movements. This was before widespread knowledge and information about the toxicity of mercury amalgams and even about the chemicals in our water supply and the rest of our surroundings.
About the time I was about to resign myself to this depressing plight of what seemed like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Multiple Chemical Sensitivities that no person I knew had overcome–I found the answer. I started this new system that was reported to be the native diet of our species or –The Primal Diet– and all my symptoms started clearing up simultaneously. Within two weeks I put on 20 pounds of lean muscle, and broke my previous mountain biking record on a familiar trail I had been riding for years.
The idea was this: The reason for the epidemic of illness and disease in modern civilization was that we got off our native diet. And that the true native diet now called the Ancestral Diet did indeed exist. And these New Age ideas of no animal foods (veganism) were not backed by Science nor Archaeology/Paleontology. These no-animal-product-diets, in combination with an increasingly toxic world, were causing the body to be malnourished and demineralized. These diets do not have adequate vitamins, minerals, enzymes, fats and proteins to give us what we need to maintain and sustain quality health, to build adequate immunity, thyroid function, tissue repair and more.
When I first started the Primal Diet in the year 2000, it was following a twenty year search for how to get well. I had been one of the early adopters of the vegan and Macrobiotic diets and I was obviously to other people not getting well and getting worse. Since I had spent so long making a mistake…or let’s say trying what became a failed experiment….I had no credibility whatsoever. I had been fishing in the wrong pond (oops bad pun), missing the boat, way out in left field, not even in the ballpark, barking up the wrong tree–whatever you want to call it. Now that I saw my mistake and discovered Primal, I was not about to go out and start telling people to do this.
But now it has been over 20 years and this diet has stood the test of time. It is now time for me to come out and share my results.
Because how I feel now, is the goal of many people along the same path looking for the same thing: vibrant, radiant, robust health, rapid recovery from illness and autoimmune dysfunction, the perfect body weight and composition, unbelievably amazing sleep, and freedom from aches and pains. As I was on my journey climbing the ladder out of the depths of chronic illness, many people doing similar things did not achieve the results I did.
I attribute my success to the fact that I mixed ideologies and modalities, studying the works of various health and wellness luminaries and synthesizing the ideas into my own system. Somehow, some WAY the combination of things I did worked and it worked big time. I didn’t merely become functional again–I actually became completely transformed. My body and mind became resilient, robust and sometimes indomitable. I was able to re-enter the world and start life over again with a whole new set of possibilities before me.
Stay tuned for Part Two where I will continue to explain my wellness journey and how you can apply the knowledge that helped me.
Disclaimer: Non of the information in this post is meant to diagnose, treat, cure any disease. All this is for educational purposes only and each of us need to apply our inner guidance, intuition and consult our trusted health care professionals before making any changes to our daily routines and lifestyles.