The best food hack yet?
An excerpt from our 2 February 2018 newsletter:
I’ve been around the block a couple of times. I’ve basked in success. I’ve also felt the cruel lash of failure. The salty sting of tears. My ego got in the way a lot, and caused me (and others) pain. And the harder I pushed, the more pain I felt. Eventually the pain became my teacher, what Eckhart Tolle describes as the pain-body.
Isn’t that exactly like trail running? When we overdo our training, when we try taking shortcuts, when we don’t rest enough, when we don’t train enough and then do races beyond us… we feel pain, we get feedback from the outside world.
And so it is with life in general.
At 50 years young, I have come to think this is a good thing.
The beauty of getting older is that you have so many more reference points than when you were even just a few years younger. The older and wiser can tell us how to live as much as they want, but we’ll mostly disregard them. It seems, as in wars that will be “never again”, we are mostly programmed to make our own mistakes.
Some examples:
Saving money? “Nah, I’m going to die before I retire anyway” or “I’ll wait until I’m 50, then I’ll have enough to save.”
Keeping fit? “Don’t be silly! / Too much effort! / I don’t have the discipline. / No time!”
Eating healthily? “No need! I burn calories, it doesn’t matter what I eat, it’s just energy after all!”
Wednesday 31 Jan would have been my father’s 94th birthday. He was born in 1924 to humble circumstances, survived strafing during combat in World War 2, endured hunger in an American POW camp, and in the Fifties travelled through Africa in a tiny Fiat, eventually to meet my mother in Cape Town and become a parent to yours truly. But poor lifestyle choices proved bigger and badder than all of the others combined.
His death in 1990 was a turning point for me. An awakening about the power of lifestyle. And of living with purpose. Of being more deeply aware of how everything affects everything else.
I’ve shared this story before, so forgive me if you’ve read the details, but it’s worth repeating.
In 2011 I was privileged to run the Himalayan 100 Mile Stage Race in India. I saw the effects of overpopulation, pollution, and my species’ wanton trashing of its environment.
I came back to South Africa changed. One of the first things I did was rethink my eating habits. I could not live with causing harm by using and abusing resources that could not be exploited indefinitely. Fish, eggs, and dairy were replaced with plant foods that provided a wider range of nutrients and lower toxin loads.
The change astounded me, and continues to.
Life is a journey, and we never arrive at our destination. If we’re open to it, we can forever be learning new pathways to greater vitality and happiness. I don’t say that glibly.
My newest food hack: buy quality, for cheap, and eat like royalty. I’ve been buying vegetables fresh and in bulk from Durban’s Fresh Produce Market near the Bluff, where I pay the same low prices as the retailers do. This represents a huge saving on food PLUS it forces me to eat only wholefoods like sweet potato, broccoli, butternut, onions, pineapples, mango. I have to, because I choose to purchase so much of them, and I hate waste! My fridge and freezer get packed with real food, and that’s what I eat, with a smaller amount of dried produce (beans, nuts, seeds) that I buy conventionally. Read the full article.
Earlier issues
Read our 24 January 2018 edition (Rabies and you. AfricanX 2018 training programme. Celebration of Life Day).
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