How Body Friendly Started

How An Interest In Health Begins...
When you've been on the thin side (55kg, 122lbs) all your adult life and are 40 years old, the last thing you want is to find yourself 85kg (188lbs) and short of breath, aching, with a digestive system that just doesn't play ball any more...

That was the case with me. One year climbing 350m tall transmitter masts for a living, next few running cables for a TV station, and a year later unable to climb a flight of stairs without getting dizzy and gasping like a landed fish, I was constantly plagued with acid indigestion and reflux, bloated, nauseous, and it felt like someone had very unfairly put a 30kg backpack on me. This change, I might add, all occurred within one year.

So What Changed?
In my case, it was a perfect storm of its kind - I'd changed my work situation. Working two jobs, one at the TV station as an installer, the other running an Internet service pretty much alone. In the process of moving between various jobs I'd gone from home cooking to mining town canteen, then home cooking again, and finally, as the pressures of two jobs took their toll, convenience and fast foods. 

(I refer you to the documentary "Supersize Me" for an idea of what happens when one is on a regular diet of convenience foods...)

Next, I was diagnosed with smoking related emphysema, and immediately quit smoking. Then the last straw, a case of glandular fever that had me ill and convalescing for almost a month.

The major change was the change in diet. I ate at a famous fast food burger place three evenings a week at least, a famous chicken outlet three more, and maybe made one dinner or restaurant dinner. Lunches were similarly spread out between burgers, kebabs, or similar - if I managed to find time for lunch at all. And breakfasts were a cup of coffee and a slice of toast, followed hours later by a morning tea of whatever was going at the canteen.

The Tale Continues
This is how one quits smoking, adds another 50% in body weight, and becomes ill, all in one easy step. 

Eat shit food. Repeat. 

I was pretty thick - all these "modern diseases" all appearing within a year of convenience food diet - and I never once connected my change of diet to the diseases, so I kept using convenience foods. To make matters worse, I was now doing two jobs, carrying an extra 30kg of weight, and getting all sorts of stress at work because I was often too ill to work, so convenience foods were just too - well - just too convenient...

The digestive and acid troubles turned out to be a hiatus hernia and fatty liver. The fatty liver was definitely down to the wrong fats in convenience food, the additives, the overpowering amounts of fats sugars and sodium, and so forth. The hernia, that was probably more caused by carrying the extra weight and not being used to my new body's balance point. 

And still I didn't get it...

Finally, I started doing some cooking from scratch. A bit late, and a bit less than required because it was just such an effort, but I'd changed jobs, dropped my second job, and was actually using fresh foods sometimes. I still didn't get the connection...

But the changes those few years had made to my body were going to take a slightly bigger trigger, and a bit more effort to set to rights...

That trigger came in 2005. I was diagnosed with prostate disease. The urologist I was seeing told me that my case would most likely end in prostate cancer, or an enlarged prostate at the best. Both would require surgery, the cancer might also be treated with chemotherapy.

He gave me the start of a diet. Not enough for me to go ahead right away, but enough that I did my research, found out what the key foods and their quantities were, and along the way discovered a lot more about our foods and foodstuffs than I ever wanted to know.

Why I - very much! - preferred to use the diet was that the news on surgical or chemical prostate interventions was pretty grim. Almost certain to become incontinent, and very likely to become impotent, as well. 

I seriously researched and applied that diet! %) I've been using it ever since, since it's less of a diet and more a set of healthy eating guidelines. 

The result for me was that my PSA levels (measure of prostate inflammation, PSA is a blood marker that doctors refer to) went from 4.8 (an extremely high level) to 0.8, which was a level generally associated with men half my age. A change of diet created this profound change in seven months. 

Seven Months To Health
It only took my body seven months to get its act together and begin to repair the damage caused by the toxic foodstuffs. I was reminded of a friend of mine who said "corporations and the general public are fighting a war. Every time they place an advertisement where you can see it, that's an assault on you. Each so called 'free competition' or questionnaire they offer youis only a way to entrap you into another attack on you, on your senses, by them." 

I'm now tempted to add that every time you let them provide your food, you're allowing them to directly physically assault you.

That would have been the end of it for me - I had my notes from my research, my PSA levels were down, and I felt as healthy as a person with emphysema has a right to feel. I'd written up my research results in the form of a diet ebook, and put it online, and then forgot about it.

But then I noticed other things...

An online friend tried the diet and was able to cancel an operation to reduce his enlarged prostate. 

My partner at the time was a Type 2 diabetic with blood pressure and triglyceride problems. After a year, she was able to reduce her medications for these conditions slightly.

My spouse several years later had the same diseases, plus fatty liver and several more. After six months, she was able to reduce her medications for the former three, and her liver function reclaimed a full point. Eighteen months later, she was able to completely stop her diabetes medications, and reduce her blood pressure and triglyceride medications even further.

Several friends who'd tried the diet all reported weight loss, better health, improvement of "modern disease" indicators.

And me, I stopped the diet for almost two years due to personal reasons, and as a result, developed a gallstone that rapidly approached 3.7cm diameter... When it was around 2.7cm in diameter, my personal troubles resolved themselves, I went back on my diet. For four more months the stone kept growing and putting me in hospital with crippling pain. 

I was on the list for surgery to remove my gall bladder, but luckily for me, during an entirely different investigation and some 18 months into resuming my healthy eating habits, the ultrasound technician noted that I appeared to have a "2.2cm gallstone." That's an amazing 1.5cm shrinkage in about a year. 

I stress that it was only the diet that I was using to clear my prostate and to shrink my gallstone. It was only the diet that my partner and later my wife used to reduce their symptoms of modern diseases to the point where their medications had to be reduced or stopped. That is, we used no other medication or remedies to achieve these results. No other therapy of any kind. All we did was change what we ate.

Repeat that to yourself and let it sink in - All one has to do is change one's diet, and watch what one eats, and modern diseases like slow inflammation cancers, diabetes type 2, obesity, cholesterol levels, and most heart diseases just go away and never come back. That's all it takes.

So the diet has been reworked as a healthy eating guide ebook, and several accompanying ebooks, to better deal with each facet of modern diet.

The books are available on their own section of our Ours From The Heart Art website, they're free to download and read and share - as long as you don't alter them or charge money for sharing them - and if they help you, there's a link to a site where you can make a donation so that I can continue writing and researching.