I'm shocked at how much inflammation I've been dealing with for my entire life. I guess I didn't realize what it was and until recently I didn't really know what was causing it. About two months ago I had enough of the way I was feeling. Overweight was just one part, the pain in my back, neck and joints was so painful. I'd wake up early in the morning and have to get out of bed as I couldn't stand lying in bed, especially when I was sleeping in hotel beds. I thought that the quality of beds was the problem and it was something I just had to deal with. I even bought a new mattress at home because we thought the old one was worn out and not giving proper support. Same thing for my pillows, bought new ones and traveled with my own as I thought my chronic neck pain was caused by poor quality pillows. I was wrong!
What I've come to discover is that inflammation, chronic inflammation to be exact was the cause of the majority of my pain. I'm also dealing with injuries from hockey and a few car accidents over the years but these injuries contrinute about 10% to my pain and these are very muted now. So let's go back a couple of months. I had enough, plain and simple. I knew that If I stayed on this path it was going to shorten my life and deliver a increasingly poor quality of life and I'd reach my limit. But where do I start to fix things? Was it just a matter of exercising more as for most of my life I was preached that I was eating too much (and I admit I was) and all I had to do was eat less, exercise more and my health would improve, um no as this is just part of the solution. Been on this path and this had minimal positives effects of which they never really delivered a solution to inflammation which was my primary area of focus to fix.
At this same time, my wife had a bit of health scare with a pretty serious allergic reaction to something she ate. She was in the emergency room of the hospital for precautions but it was a wakeup call for her becuase the food allergy was hard to nail down but it came from a piece of processed food most likely soya. Some consultation with her doctor and the verdict was to clean up her diet, avoid soya products to start and track her food to see if the reaction would happen again.
This is when we started to do a lot of reading about diet. Not shockingly hard to understand that our western diet is full of processed foods that contain some major allergens and foods that promote inflammation in the body. Refined sugar with high fructose corn syrup and maltodextrin being huge cultprits of imflamation. Next was seed oils such as canola oil, sunflower oil, peanut and grape seed. Finally refined carbs such as wheat flour, soya flour and gluten in general. We looked at our diet and we were eating tons of these ingredients along with fast foods and fried foods. Not a great recipe for health.
The final piece that we looked at was fasting. We've tried this in the past with minimal sucess. I found it difficult to do becuase I was feeling those hunger pains and cravings. What we realized that these "hunger pains" were not caused by us being hungry but from the sugar cravings. We were addicted to sugar! It took almost three weeks to get over the "withdrawal" from sugar. I've never been addicted to anything so understanding what I was going through was key to success here. I needed to stay the course and let the withdrawal happen. After those three weeks things got sooooooo much easier to fast fairly easily. We now stop eating at 6 pm and don't eat our first meal until noon. During this fasting window I only drink water and will have one black espresso in the morning as my need for coffee has decreased dramatically. When it's time to break our fast we are very strategic on what we put in our body and when. Our typical lunch is made up of eggs, avacado, medium to lean animal protein with cheese, roasted salt free almonds and a green smoothie. We've also found that it's important to eat in specific order to minimize a spike in blood sugar, we're not diabetic but eating like one is also key. Eggs, avacado and some cheese is what I eat first, followed with some cheese, animal protein, almonds, fresh cut veggies and whole grain sprouted bread with butter. We've ditched seed oils and all I cook with is ghee, avacado oil and coconut oil. The green smoothie is last as it has a fairly amount of natural sugar from the fruit and veggies I use but is full of micro nutrients and healthy soluable and non soluable fiber. I finish my meal with about a half liter of water with a daily intake of close to three liters.
My body has transformed in so many positive ways that it's even hard to comprehend how I was living like I was. The inflammation in my body is completely gone and I mean completely!!! No more pain in my joints, when I wake up in the morning I have ZERO pain in my back and neck. When I do my stretching and Kung Fu forms my range of motion is 50 to 75% better. My energy levels are through the roof and my mental clarity is amazing. My gut health has completely changed for the better. In the past I was very bloated, gassy and I had IBS at times. No longer is this case, in fact I can eat foods that I wasn't able to in the past such as cream and butter. In the past these foods would have triggered my IBS but in fact my gut was so imflamed and overwhelmed which was the cause. My gut has healed and it's an amazing feeling. My blood pressure was on the higher side @ around the mid 130's the lower 70's. My blood pressure has settled in for weeks in the low 120's to high 170's which is almost spot on perfect. I need to mention that I've not added in a lot of additional exercise because I wanted to see the impact of my diet on my health alone. I've dropped 25 lbs 2"inches and my total fat in my body has decrease by close to 10% in almost two months. I've now added exercise back into my routine with push ups, sit ups, daily walking and Kung Fu forms.
I had no idea how poisoned my body was based solely on my western diet.
I'd wish I had realized years before that what I was eating was having this dramatic impact on my health. However I don't think I was ready mentally to make these changes at the same time. It's kind of like a smoker who knows they should stop smoking. Until they're ready to make that change they'll keep smoking no matter what people tell them, this was me.
Sifu Brinker told my class one day many years ago that black belts are "control freaks", they control or try to control everything they can from how they act, train and eat. I didn't fully understand this lesson until recently. Accepting that I want to continue on this path of health, I'll need to continue to take mindful control. Control over what I'm putting in my body, when I put that food in my body and how I continue to strengthen my mind to become resilient when the times of weakness come up. I've faced a few of those times already and I've overcome them due to how focused on my health I've become.
I don't want to add years to my life, I want to add life to my years.
Ian Repay
