Vital Health in Five Steps

If you read Modernity: Neolithic Trickery 2.0, Educating Ourselves to Thrive, and Wealth Lives attentively, you may have caught some threads that led you to a very different comprehension of health from what you’ve been told by “experts” up to now.Today I’m going to show you how to enjoy vital health in five steps.

When I began to travel and give workshops around the world in 2009, after twenty years of Critical Care Nursing, I often heard people comment, “How cool that you’re a nurse. That’s a skill set you can use anywhere in the world!”

That was not exactly true.I had to re-examine everything I thought I knew, both as a Critical Care Nurse and as a lifetime practitioner of “alternative health methods” to both restore my health and help others do the same.

The last ten years have been an amazing journey toward a coherent comprehension of Life and Health that has finally equipped me to help many people recover vital health in five steps with surprising simplicity, rapidity and effectiveness. You don’t need to “become” a nurse or physician to avail yourself of this understanding and these tools. Many have done brilliant work in order to help us gain a comprehensive view of health and how to support it. I’d like to pass these tools and resources on to you in as simple a manner as possible.

Right now we are experiencing an explosion of neurological, auto-immune and endocrine problems. Whether it’s the explosion of autism, Alzheimer’s disease, attention deficit, hyperactivity, auto-immune disorders and what is now being called “diabesity” the combination of diabetes and obesity, cancer and cardiac disease, most of us somehow believe that this is either our normal state or something “terribly out of control and beyond our control.”

Medical care itself is the third leading cause of death in countries like the United States, according to Dr. Barbara Starfield M.D., one of the most prominent public health physicians today. And that’s without counting medical errors! Discover the big picture of what’s going on in healthcare. Asking for more of this “healthcare” is only going to make things worse, not better.

I never cease to be amazed at how simply I see people reversing lifelong health problems with five easy steps. A number of people have asked me for the information. I’ll give you the steps and some key references for further study, a word that comes from the Latin studium: “application, care.” Let me repeat that: application and care.

Be forewarned, unless you’re keeping up with the latest health information, you may easily read these five steps and get an “impression” of them and then come to some “conclusions” about them. Fine. That’s the purpose of instruction: to train us to always regurgitate the “right answers” according to “the most authoritative source” and not through our own, step-by-step comprehension. Your impressions and conclusions will not do anything beneficial for your health or even coming into a coherent relationship with this information. That takes application and care.

As I’ve written elsewhere, in 2001 and through 2008 I suffered from rapidly degenerating health. I struggled to get my health back and to come to a coherent, practical, functional view of health for all that time. As a critical care nurse of twenty years and having studied Tai Chi, Chi Kung, Five Element Theory and macrobiotics for over thirty years, I had already come across some of these steps long before getting severely ill. I simply dismissed them out of hand, without further examination, all based on my “expertise.”

Like Mark Twain said many years ago,

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

I knew a lot of things for sure. I was an “expert” trained by many other “experts.”  Unfortunately, much of that “expert”  advice was based on a certainty that just ain’t so. All of us, mainstream or “alternative,” have had those “expert certainties” drilled into us.

As I tried to regain my health, I relied on my “expertise” and came to “my own” conclusions often without examining the information that didn’t fit my model. Having an opinion, no matter how much “expert-approval” it seems to have, is not application or care. That requires actually coming to our own coherent grasp of what concerns us, from its actual reality, and not just our ideas.

Today we have all the tools imaginable for doing just that.

We do not get education in Western culture. We get instruction, which is indoctrination, drummed into us under decades-long conditions of extreme ritualization, sense-less-ness and dispossession of will. This effectively destroys the coherent, autonomous, self-led way of coming into a coherent and competent relationship with Life’s Invitation natural to humans. This is as true for the instruction your physician or nurse received as it is for you. Critical thinking is not just criticizing everything and having a critical “attitude” about things. It is a precise art.

The goal of Deep Freedom Now is to provide interested people, still in possession of a glimmer of will, the tools for leading oneself into a Life truly worth Loving and Living.

Today I’m going to share powerful tools for revitalizing your health. If you study and then take action you might discover something very surprising and powerfully revitalizing. Making it so is up to you. Do not take any of this as medical or even health advice. My only advice is to pay attention, get curious about LIFE, try things out, become your own authoritative source and edit your own movie. Furthermore, this is not some magical recipe.  We are not machines but living systems which respond variably to varying life conditions, seasons, epochs, etc.  So what is offered here is a beginning and foundational approach for further study of what we are, in LIFE LOGIC.

Education literally means “to lead out;” tools for you to lead yourself out of your current view of health and back into a view of health that actually embraces your cellular, biological reality. This is an invitation for you to lead yourself toward your health goals from a thorough and grounded grasp of your Bio-Logical Design and how to support it.

My intention with this post is to basically offer you my workshop called Change Your Metabolism, Transform Your Life, for free! Do you know why?

If you are healthy, creative, engaged with and nourishing Aliveness, my world will be vastly improved by your presence, even thousands of miles away and anonymously. I want to serve those who are on that Journey to Aliveness, because it calls us from inside and inspires us to respond with care and excellence.

Here are five steps I used to powerfully, rapidly and effectively restore my health, sharpen my intellectual and creative capacities and have seen and assisted many others in doing the same. These are first steps and they are amazing. Each has medical and scientific references for leading yourself to coherent support of your health which we will support in coming articles. Be forewarned, most of these are not what you are hearing from “experts.”

Many of you will read this list of steps, form an immediate opinion and that will be the end of your learning. That was my approach years ago. I get it. I didn’t have the benefit of anyone handing me a list of steps with references. You do. Make something of it, please, because what is happening to our health and intelligence today is beyond anything I can put polite words to.

Here is what I did, with amazing results. I will elaborate on all these steps further, below. What you do is your business.

1. I quit eating ALL cereal grains, especially, but not only, wheat.

2. 70-80% of my calories come from saturated, yes saturated, FATS and high cholesterol, yes, high cholesterol, foods. I have watched everyone who has adopted a high animal fat diet lose weight, gain mental clarity and resolve many long-standing health issues. Coconut oil is saturated and has some very powerful beneficial nutrients. So does lard from organically raised pork, beef fat from grass-fed beef,all of which are high in Omega-3 fatty acids. Confined Animal Feeding Operation meats, however, are full of Omega-6 fatty acids and toxic in the long-term. (I avoid all vegetable oils except organic olive oil, coconut and palm oil.) Small fish, especially sardines, and fish organs, as well as animal organs are wonderful.
   

3. I include home-fermented foods, like fermented sauerkraut (and not sauerkraut made with vinegar), in my daily diet to replenish my intestinal flora. This is very easy to make, delicious and has 20 times the amount of Vitamin C and many other vitamins of the raw vegetables used to make it.

4. I eat large amounts of varied and differently-colored vegetables daily

5. I avoid all sugars, chemical sweeteners and radically reduce fruit intake.

Simple. Let’s review these steps with references.

1. I quit eating ALL cereal grains, especially, but not only, wheat, avoid sugars and minimize fruit. This took me a few years to integrate. At first I didn’t realize that each time I ate wheat I set myself up for another 6 months of inflammation and auto-immune response. I didn’t want to be “fanatical.” “Fanatical” is a word we use to cover-up our surrender to social pressure. Once I cut out all the wheat, what I experienced has had me absolutely off the wheat ever since. Same with the rest of grains. The biggest challenge of coming off of the opiate-like molecules in modern day wheat was to not replace it with a bunch of fruit and sugar. The transition from glucose to fat metabolism is different for different people but almost all of us respond to our hunger with sugar, (often in the form of fruit) rather than the long-lasting energy of saturated and healthy fats.
   

• If you haven’t read Modernity: Neolithic Trickery 2.0 and the relevant articles mentioned in that post, I suggest you start there to really get what’s happening to our health today in a broader and surprising context.

• This article, How to Keep Feces Out of Your Bloodstream by Robb Wolf is a precise explanation of how grains protect themselves from being eaten with toxic proteins and how those proteins cause our intestinal walls to become “leaky,” allowing health-destroying toxins to go from our intestines into our bloodstream and impact our entire body. Read it and you’ll get why auto-immune diseases, diabetes and neurological disorders are exploding.

• Dr. William Davis’ book Wheat Belly is a masterpiece explaining in scientific detail the nature of the devastation caused by wheat and grains in general while also cutting through all of the “scientistic” fraud about low fat, whole grain, low cholesterol diets. This interview of Dr. Davis is a great place to start. Dr. Davis is a cardiologist whose health deteriorated, as did mine, after spending a lifetime following the advice we were all taught to give cardiac patients. So he began to re-examine this advice. What he discovered blew his mind. We have a medical system that is actually promoting, through the medical schools, advice that actually destroys the very health that we are supposed to be protecting. Surprisingly, Dr. Davis restored his health by eliminating grains and increasing his fat intake. His cardiology practice has evolved from doing 8-10 heart catheterizations and stents per day for cardiac patients with recurrent heart attacks to not doing any and no recurrence of heart attacks in patients following his dietary guidelines! What’s more, almost all patients have “other diagnoses” (a very flawed view of health because almost all disturbances in the body are systemic so, of course they have problems in other organ systems). Many of these diagnoses resolved or improved dramatically and rapidly, as well. Please note, the ancient wheat that I talked about in Modernity: Neolithic Trickery 2.0 and which devastated our health until people learned to ferment it for long periods of time was einkorn wheat which has 13 chromosomes. Today’s dwarf varieties of wheat, pioneered by Normal Borlaug in the 1980’s and which give 4-5 times the yield of previous varieties, have 42 chromosomes and produce over 20 different types of toxic proteins that are devastating our health. The rest of commercially produced grains have also been dwarfed to increase production.

• “The food you eat is making you sick and the agencies that are providing you with guidelines on what to eat are giving dangerous advice with devastating health consequences. You can change that today.” Dr. William Davis, M.D. cardiologist
  

• Dr. David Perlmutter is the only doctor in the U.S. who is both a board-certified neurologist and also a fellow of the American College of Nutrition. His book, Grain Brain, documents the devastating effects of the hybrid wheat introduced in the mid-1980’s on neurological health, the epidemic in auto-immune and neurological illness, including Alzheimer’s disease, adult-onset epilepsy, and how to simply restore and optimize neurological function and total health. He has seen countless people with lifelong neurological problems find relief in days and weeks. This book is not only about neurology. Dr. Perlmutter noticed that people with diabetes have a much higher incidence of all kinds of neurological, auto-immune and many other disturbances than non-diabetics. Our entire health is interrelated. What causes illness is, in the vast majority of cases, systemic and not just in one organ group or genetic, as many have led us to believe. The principal cause is inflammation and is profoundly related to the incredible toxicity of what passes for “food” these days. Please read this book. It is a game-changer. Here is what Dr. Perlmutter has to say about grains:

“Our genes determine not just how we process food but, more important, how we respond to the foods we eat. There is little doubt that one of the largest and most wide-reaching events in the ultimate declines of brain health in modern society has been the introduction of wheat grain into the human diet. While it’s true that our Neolithic ancestors consumed miniscule amounts of this grain, what we now call wheat bears little resemblance to the wild einkorn variety that our forebears consumed on rare occasions. With modern hybridization and gene-modifying technology, the 133 pounds of wheat that the average American consumes each year shares almost no genetic, structural, or chemical likeness to what hunter-gatherers might have stumbled upon. And therein lies the problem: We are increasingly challenging our physiology with ingredients for which we are not genetically prepared.

…

Beyond calories, fat, protein, and micronutrients, we now understand that food is a powerful epigenetic modulator – meaning it can change our DNA for better or worse. Indeed, beyond simply serving as a source of calories, protein, and fat, food actually regulates the expression of many of our genes. And we have only just begun to understand the damaging consequences of wheat consumption from this perspective.”

• Note: we have all heard about “gluten sensitivity.” Gluten is only one of more than twenty toxic and/or addictive proteins present in wheat. Study. Lead yourself into comprehending the full picture. Also note: the standard test for gluten sensitivity ordered by most M.D.s is incomplete and often leads to false negatives. Instead of spending a bunch of money on testing, there’s a very simple test you can do: spend a month absolutely off of all forms of wheat and Google the places where wheat products are hidden, like many kinds of soy sauce.
  

• Addictive proteins are only one aspect. The other aspect is amylopectin A which causes more acute blood sugar spikes than table sugar or candy bars. Not only is this hard on the body but so are the insulin spikes that follow, all causing severe, generalized inflammation.

2. I have most of my calories from saturated, yes saturated, animal FATS and high cholesterol, yes, high cholesterol, foods. Coconut oil is also saturated and has some very powerful beneficial nutrients. Fish oil has tremendous benefits as well as fish and meat organs.

• See Drs. Davis and Perlmutter above.

• 

  Our cell membranes are made of saturated fats and cholesterol, both of which “experts” have told us to reduce. Any surprise that our health has been devastated ever since? Notice the diagram of a cell membrane above. Phospholipids are composed of saturated fats as well as whatever oils we take into our body. The introduction of new vegetable oils in recent decades, never before consumed by our species in such quantities, have had profound impacts on the form and function of our cell membranes. Our cell membranes undergo continuous phase changes from a semi-solid, to a gelatinous to a semi-liquid state. The oils that we eat have a profound impact in the quality of our cell membranes.The promotion of new kinds of vegetable oils, like corn, canola, sunflower, and soy, as food, has had a devastating impact on our health. All indigenous peoples have forever prized saturated fats. That’s what our cells are made of. Please do not believe me. Investigate on your own. Research. Learn. Become your authority and you will be the author of your own life!

• Our brains are 60% fat and low, yes low, cholesterol levels are directly linked to depression, neurological disorders, cognitive disorders and decreased life expectancy!  Ketone bodies, generated by saturated fat metabolism, are the ideal nutrients for our brains, to the point that they are our only energy source for the first two months of life during which our brains experience a tremendous growth spurt and we are imbibing huge amounts of saturated fat through breastfeeding. Dietary cholesterol is not what determines our blood cholesterol levels. I know this is not what you have been told by your doctor. Read more… If you study this carefully you will begin to see how profoundly science and medicine have been corrupted. Part of this is the direct consequence of the elimination of the seven liberal arts from education.

• Nutritional expert, Dr. Mary Einig Ph.D. was at the conference where studies were presented fraudulently to promote the low-cholesterol, low-fat recommendations that we have all had drummed into our heads and the high end of cholesterol levels were set, not on the basis of patient well-being, but so that those presenting the findings could receive further research funding. She has spent her life denouncing the fraud. Now major publications have acknowledged the bad science behind these recommendations. I highly recommend reading her work with Sally Fallon, The Oiling of America, available online. You will find tools to support your health in firm, cellular ground.

• Dr. Weston Price’s Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, also available online, is a masterpiece of medical and cultural research based on his travels and studies of human physiology and health before and after the introduction of commodity foods. If you’d like to view a brilliant presentation on Dr. Price’s work, Sally Fallon’s presentation on Nourishing Traditional Diets is a great start. Dr. Price is one of those “modern,” scientifically-trained people who actually opened his literal eyes and recognized the profound wisdom and science at the heart of the Ways of Life or Rooted, Original People world-wide.

2. I include home-fermented foods, like fermented sauerkraut (not commercial sauerkraut cooked in vinegar) in my daily diet to replenish my intestinal flora and, in turn, restore my neurological and immune function, all of which start in the gut.

• See Dr. Price’s work above

• Neurologist Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride helped her child recover from autism which often goes hand-in-hand with gastrointestinal disorders, by restoring his intestinal flora. She coined the term Gut and Physiology Syndrome and implemented the G.A.P.S. diet to restore intestinal and neurological health. You can watch her video HERE or read the transcript HERE.

3. I eat large amounts of varied and differently-colored vegetables daily.

• All of Life is woven out of a Living Language of Proteins, Fats, Water, Minerals, etc. Phytonutrients are what give color to plants and essential ingredients to our cells.

• If you haven’t watched Dr. Terry Wahls’ presentation on how she achieved significant improvement of her Multiple Sclerosis, I suggest you check it out HERE.

5. I avoid all sugars, chemical sweeteners and radically minimize fruit intake.

• When I started getting ill and feeling poorly back in 2001, one of the first abnormal lab values that showed up was elevated uric acid. I also started having arthritis in my knees, which surprised me since, by that time, I had already been practicing Tai Chi daily for over 12 years. My physician diagnosed me with gout and, as a nurse, I already knew to eat “low-purine” foods, which I did. My uric acid stayed high and my arthritis only worsened, along with the rest of my health. It was only once I radically eliminated all carbohydrates that all of that resolved in just a few weeks. But it would take ten years before I understood how high uric acid is directly related to high carbohydrate consumption and the high insulin levels and insulin resistance that result, not eating purines. THIS ARTICLE was a tremendous contribution to that understanding. Had I come across it back in 2001, my health troubles would have been short-lived. I developed everything associated with high-fructose consumption in this article, not only the high uric acid, but the high blood pressure and kidney problems, all of which are treated as “totally separate problems” by a medical system devoid of a coherent appreciation of how all of our health works, or fails, together.

What I have outlined for you constitutes a powerful starting place for gaining a grounded, Bio-Logical (Life-Logical) grasp of health and for achieving vital health in five steps. If you study the sources outlined and then pursue their sources, you should be able to find surprising keys to a coherent appreciation of the Wisdom that Your Life Unfolds in, cellularly, and how to support it. You have a workshop in one article. To study means to bring application and care to what one seeks to learn. Learning plus action are required to restore health.

Be forewarned, the propaganda that you have heard from many so-called “authoritative” sources, such as myself as a Critical Care Nurse counseling patients for over twenty years with unexamined notions I learned in nursing school and from medical colleagues, who learned them in turn from unexamined, yet “official” and “approved” sources is very different from what is outlined above.

We are at a very critical juncture as a human species. Our culture is not designed to serve us. It is designed to serve those who design the culture and to have the bulk of the population “hooked” into lifelong drug dependency.

The New England Journal of Medicine is one of the world’s most prestigious, peer-reviewed medical journals. Dr. Marcia Angell M.D. was its editor for over twenty years as well as the author of the New York Times article Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption. She is not some “alternative medical theorist,” but someone who has been at the heart of mainstream medicine for a lifetime. Her words highlight the challenge we face to gain knowledge and comprehension on our own, if we would gain health.

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”

“No one knows the total amount provided by drug companies to physicians, but I estimate from the annual reports of the top 9 U.S.-based drug companies that it comes to tens of billions of dollars a year in North America alone. By such means, the pharmaceutical industry has gained enormous control over how doctors evaluate and use its own products. Its extensive ties to physicians, particularly senior faculty at prestigious medical schools, affect the results of research, the way medicine is practiced, and even the definition of what constitutes a disease.” Dr. Marcia Angell M.D. – former twenty-year editor of The New England Journal of Medicine

I go deeper into the context of medicine in Putting Health in Context which provides keys for understanding how human health and nutrition arise from a connection to place.

None of this should be taken as medical or health advice but is only offered for educational purposes.

Talking about diet is a sensitive topic. Almost all modern people eat industrialized foods that their great-grandmothers wouldn’t even have recognized. We no longer know how to eat but most of us subscribe to all kinds of theories about “what we should eat.”

Recently I shared these steps with a dear friend in his seventies who has always had a very curious mind and connected deeply with different kinds of people, spent many decades meditating, running, growing his own food. I said, “Look at this as you would look at anything else that may or may not do you good. Try it, with awareness. Give it one month, take notes, and see if you notice any changes.” Another close friend in his seventies recently lost 35 lbs in one month by simply following these 5 steps and was delighted to find his joint pain gone and his mental sharpness and memory much-improved.

Gather Seeds of Wisdom

That We May Make Our Way

To Living the Life we Love

And Loving the Aliveness that We Live In and As.

Make it Be So!