Readers Summary
- I just wanted to show you some gratitude for sticking with the blog on this journey of understanding. Thanksgiving marks the anniversary of when I had my own rebirth.
- When there seems to be no hope, dare to find some.
- Make a pact with yourself today to not be defined by your past. Sometimes the greatest thing to come out of all of your hard work isn’t what you get for it, but what you become for it.
- We should certainly count our blessings, but we should also make our blessings count.
- The only people with whom you should try to get even are those who have helped you.
In 2004, I decided I needed to make a change in my life for my health. I went to the library to study all I could about how food, health and disease all interacted. I spent close to two years in the medical school library re-educating myself. In 2006, right before Thanksgiving I decided to unleash what I had learned upon myself. At the time I was 6’2″, 357 pounds and not healthy. I stood in front of my family, and I told them that this Thanksgiving I was going to use the tradition of this holiday to be my springboard to a better way of life.
Most of them laughed at me. My wife did not because she saw how much time I had spent studying many areas of science to gain insights that heretofore had eluded me. So you might be asking yourself what did I do? I went back to a simple principle of just eating real food. I also made sure this real food was in season. I won’t bore you with all the details, but most of what I learned was that the fundamental laws of nature built into food dictated what was healthy and what was not. I stopped thinking about food as a metabolic fuel and began to realize food contained hormone information from the environment that I was living in. And that environment was quite toxic considering my weight.
I thought Thanksgiving would be the ideal traditional holiday to unleash my new ideas on me. After all, Thanksgiving is about sharing food from the harvest being prepared in a traditional way. So that year, I went to several farmers’ markets and farms and bought only natural food without any processing. If the food came prepackaged in the grocery store or was altered by mankind’s chemistry tricks, it did not make it into my grocery basket. If a food was not growing in my local area naturally according to what the farmers told me, I would not eat it. For example, in the gulf south right now, you cannot find a banana growing naturally. So therefore our biology says we should not eat it. If you do, the amount of fructose and sugar within it will cause your body to pay a biologic toll. That toll is generally not a good one for wellness. If you continue to make that error chronically over time, that toll becomes a disease. This principle is why food grows in seasons. It contains information from the sun and the local environment that our body and brain pays deep attention to.
I found when I followed these simple rules, my sleep improved dramatically. In fact, I began to go to bed much earlier than I had and slept quite well and more weight came off. Great sleep is vital to wellness (read more about quantum sleep in a recent blog). So you might be wondering how this plan all worked for me, that Thanksgiving in 2006. Well, in three months, I lost 77 pounds, and in one year, I lost 133 pounds. Today, almost a decade later, I am 215 pounds of wellness. It was not an easy journey. I have found, for me, it was the love of the chase for wellness that created the ride of the journey. I want to share that with all of you who are interested in wellness. I believe there are answers to our ills, but we must dig deep for them. Sometimes we have to look in places others do not.
Most people have convinced themselves it is not possible to change so they don’t have to put forth the effort to try.
Belief is the first step to transformation in any aspect of life.
This is why a mind without wisdom from books is like a body without a soul. Your decisions impact tomorrow so much, and every single person you inspire impacts the world more so. When you become involved in your health, you are going to impact at at least one mind, your own. This mind is going to go on to change so many more minds because your friends and family will watch you from a distance. You cannot see the world from somebody else’s point of view and not be changed. It’s a chain reaction and it starts with YOU.
This year, consider using Thanksgiving as your springboard for wellness. Take care of your dreams, or your fears will take care of them for you. Sometimes we focus so much on what we don’t have that we fail to see, appreciate and use what we do possess! God bless you and yours, and I hope you all have a great Thanskgiving.
I did post this on your FB page but perhaps should have posted here? So here it is again.
Jack, if I may be so familiar, I love how beautifully you used these words in your Thanksgiving message,
“it was the love of the chase for wellness that created the ride of the journey.”, and hope I may now borrow it to describe my own journey, peppered with some nuances. So few people feel that passionate about wellness today. I know fear played a part in my desire to be as healthy as I could, having grown up, from 15 months old, with a mother who was ill the rest of her life post contracting polio. I had a life experience in probably about 1990, at age 40ish, when my husband was reading The Zone by Barry Sears. I listened as he told me bits and pieces. I was quite healthy, or so I thought, no weight issues, energetic, never sick. So hearing that Sears brought Stanford University Swimmers to the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, where they won 7 gold medals, intrigued me. I never read the book, under the guidelines he promoted and my husband shared, I ate in his fashion of blocks of protein, fat, and carbs at every meal. It was incredible what happened in two months time. I hadn’t thought then about the weekly use of Sinutab that I needed to address “sinus” headaches. Following it, I replaced my morning breakfast of grape nut flakes with skim milk and a slice of whole wheat toast (which had been promoted as healthy then) with butter with an occasional egg (heaven forbid, I indulge in too many) or cottage cheese and apple and my macadamia nuts. My mid morning snack went from our hospital’s “healthfully” prepared carrot/raisin/bran muffin to small amount of cheese with apple and macadamia, to lunch of protein, veggies, and some sweet potato, dinner about the same. It was the time when pasta became so important and, though I didn’t care for it, I included it in lunch and dinner then. Though I thought I was healthy before, my energy level went out of the roof, my mental clarity was significantly sharpened and acute, my body got even more toned, AND I realized 2 months later that I had no, nada, headaches in those 2 months. I had to start adding a bit more healthy carbs in, as I needed a bit more weight. I was bringing a project to fruition at my hospital (laboratory) and staying till 9 at night, and going strong. That was my ah ha moment that FOOD IS MEDICINE! I wish everyone could experience what it really feels like to feel so awesome that you never want to dampen it with bad food choices. So I then prepared all my meals for work and never varied much from that until Katrina hit us in 2005! To feel that way is worth any extra effort required, but few ever experience, and I am sure my upbringing played a huge part in the efforts i put forth as well. And so I worked on changing the emotional fear part as well, as there are many levels to healing. After K and much loss for us and several family members, I started eating as everyone else and became ill with a parathyroid tumor. So it’s been a bit of journey back in the last few years and the data on how to eat has changed but the journey has been fun and I can thank you, Jack Kruse, for the part you’ve played in it, which has been considerable. We create our future now, in each moment of every day. If we want a good life in 20 plus years and longer, start early, and most likely you will be rewarded.We don’t have control over everything but we can do our best. I feel awesome at 64 and plan to keep it up in case I do live into my 90’s or longer. I hope to live w/o pain and with a good mind. We cannot predict our future nor guarantee that what we do now will pan out as we hope but we can try. But know it is not all about the physical! I felt I was creating my future with every choice I made and 1990 was that moment of such awareness. Sometimes it seems long ago and then only yesterday. So Happy Thanksgiving, Dr. Kruse! Enjoying the ride!