Commitment. My Healing Path

Please Note: All posts and articles on this blog are not meant to be medical advice, so please contact your medical doctor or qualified practitioner for diagnosis and advice of all medical conditions. 

My commitment to heal continues.

My second appointment with the food doctor was  three weeks after the first.  I was pleased to be back as I was sure that he would find a way to help ease the severe withdrawal symptoms that I had been experiencing.

He asked me how I had been getting on with the stone age eating plan.  I told him that I had found it difficult and at times very uncomfortable, but I was determined to stick with this way of eating until there was no more craving or withdrawal symptoms.

“How often have you cheated?” he asked.

I was amazed that he asked. “Not at all,” I answered.

“Not once?” he queried more intensely. “I can’t remember any of my patients sticking to the plan 100% especially with the elimination of sugar, as it is highly addictive and that’s what makes it so dangerous to health. It not only effects physical health, but is a great persuader in the mind that it’s harmless, because with some people, it takes years before any symptoms can appear, by which time they would not be convinced that sugar was a problem for them." The addicted mind,” he added, “can use every argument and trick you can think of, to satisfy its craving.”

The Power of Commitment.

“Well, I can’t see  the point of embarking on a coarse of treatment and then cheating”, I said, “But I will tell you I have been having hallucinations of smelling cakes baking!” It is like when one sits in Zen meditation, the mind will hallucinate to try and get you to quit the discipline.

I could really identify with what he was saying about the tricks of the mind, because in my teenage years, I had become addicted to smoking and when I finally quit, thoughts would flood to me that one cigarette won’t hurt, as I could quit again tomorrow.  I was very familiar with the power of the mind and imagination, and used it against such tricks, by visualising the next day, that if I had even one draw on a cigarette, I would be buying a full pack before finally quitting again; perhaps next year or maybe never!  However...

I told myself, “why wait? Quit now! Experience the craving. Let it do its worse, for it will definitely pass or nobody would ever quit”.  I would need to experience the craving, because it would only get stronger if I tried to deny it is there. I quit smoking this way and have never started again. But now, it was about my eating, a little different because I was not about to quit eating! But my commitment was established for the next 6 months.

I continued to talk to him for a while about my Zen practice and the ‘commitment interaction’, a process I used with my own clients on their initial appointment with me. I would say..   “If you are not prepared to commit 100%  to the therapy process, then it is not wise to begin, because  you would be effectively reinforcing the habit of procrastinating and giving up.”  I wouldn’t proceed to make another appointment-session with them, until together we had established this sort of high-level commitment to making it work. 

Commitment can really work miracles in this way, and here I was with my food doctor, committing myself in the same way... 100%. I further explained to him that I was committed to give it 6 months as I totally trusted in his past research, and his experience of the  stone-age eating plan, with both his clients and himself.  I learned that he himself, had suffered from bad digestive issues that he had cured with diet.  After  6 months, if I could see positive results with the eating plan, I would permanently integrate it into my daily life, not as a diet, but as a way of eating.

My doctor’s  instructions were to continue with the stone-age diet and see him again within a month to give chance for all withdrawal symptoms to ease further and then we would be testing various foods and substances, to discover more specifically what single foods/family of foods I was sensitive to.  He reminded me that we all respond differently to exclusion diets that were in effect acting like a detox, and that I may still have some symptoms that we would investigate further at my next appointment.

I drove back home with the feeling that I was at last on the right track.  A chance conversation about my ailments had brought me to an unusual healing path that I would never have considered.

Doctors Orders: The Stone Age Diet

My Health and The Stone Age Diet:
My Commitment Established.

My diet began the first day after my visit to  my ‘food doctor’.  I began eating only those foods that would only grow only in their particular seasons in the climate of the UK.  It did not have to be a vegetarian diet as prehistoric man was mainly a hunter and would eat only natural plant foods that would grow on the planes and forests.  When those plants were not available due to the shifting seasons, he would hunt and kill animals in order to survive.  My doctor explained to me that it wasn’t until 10,000 years ago that human beings started planting crops and producing cereals and dairy products like milk and eggs, and all these foods were to be eliminated.

I was puzzled by this and asked why I had to stop eating foods that humanity had been eating for 10,000 years.

I was informed that 10,000 years is nothing in evolutionary terms and that it would take a million or more years for significant changes to occur in the immune systems of a species.  So therefore, to make this diet successful in dealing with my problems, I would need to eliminate all cereal products, and this  included foods that contained all grains, like wheat, corn, rye, barley, cane sugar and others that were part of the grass or grain family.

Tea, coffee, cocoa and sugar (especially sugar!) was also to be off the menu.  These products were only introduced in the UK and other northern countries around 450 years ago, when they were brought back from the newly discovered Americas.  They may have appeared harmless at the time, but slowly through a few decades caused addiction and intolerance. Many individuals  immune systems got overwhelmed producing severe inflammation as a reaction to these foods. This lead to many chronic and apparently incurable health problems that were never really associated with the offending foods at that time.

The Problem with Sugar

I was a little shocked about not eating sugar, as I thought that the human being just had to have sugar. I communicated my scepticism about going totally sugar-free in this way.

The doctor explained  that my body didn’t need sugar to be ingested at all. It would get small traces from vegetables and my body would make adequate glucose for energy and indeed during World War II, he (my doctor) had been involved in research into the health of the nation because the UK was not getting all the supplies of sugar and other substances from overseas. An interesting addition to that,  most were growing their own vegetables.  The results of the research were that people of the nation who were not away fighting in the war, were actually healthier!

The doctor also explained to me that before the discovery of the Americas, the consumption of sugar in this country was zero. Fruits were consumed during a very short season but most soon rotted away before the sugar from over-ripe sugar would overload the system. Also, prehistoric Man didn’t have the knowledge of how to keep fruits fresh all year round. And it should also be noted that even insects can appear aggressive as if ‘drunk’ when overloading on fermenting fruit. So fruit was also off the menu, for the time-being anyway.

It needs to be remembered that my appointment with the doctor was was back in the early 1990s, before it became common knowledge that most people in the country had problems with ingesting sugar. And from what I have experienced it has taken well into the millennium before the sugar-problem has been fully acknowledged, but even today, there is still addiction, and many people still over-indulge believing it to be totally harmless. And it seems that the problem is still ignored by the majority of people I have met and discussed this with.

The other substances were chemicals that were introduced around the time of the industrial revolution, a mere 250 years ago when new discoveries introduced food colouring, flavouring and preservatives.  And air pollution introduced toxic substances into our blood streams through our respiration, fumes from factories and later from the motor car which are still about to this day. There is nothing that I could do about avoiding this, but I could avoid artificial ingredients in foods. All packet and canned food were to be examined for sugar, and artificial ingredients and kept out of the shopping basket.

Teas, coffees and cocoa were also to be avoided and spring or filtered waters to be drunk instead.

Finally there was the matter of potatoes that were also introduced to this country on the discovery of the Americas.  Potatoes were a member of the nightshade family, along with tomatoes, peppers (both red and green), aubergine, cayenne, paprika, pimento, chilli and tobacco was also a member of the nightshade family.

I loved my potatoes, in all forms…  But I went ahead with the commitment. I promised my doctor that I would absolutely NOT eat anything other than the stone age diet described. Armed with a list I left the doctor’s clinic and immediately began to wonder how difficult this was going to be; a subject of which I will address in my next post.

Please note: Posts and articles on this blog are not meant to be medical advice in any way. Please contact your medical doctor or qualified practitioner for all medical conditions.