What Were We Meant to Be: Part 2

Well I’m on a role regarding this subject because we can really apply it to so many aspects of our existence. But today I’m going to take a different angle on it. I’m going to talk about food and what we were meant to eat. Now this is nothing new and I’m certainly not the first to understand it or write about it. Many have done that. I’m just reiterating it because it’s so important and because I have recently taken in this information and put it to good use. I lost fifty pounds in the process and have embarked on an eating plan which will just become the way I eat as far as I can tell.

Trust me, I have had the same problem as a lot of you out there. I’ve been overweight since I was a young woman and I have lost and gained the same fifty pounds many times over. It’s ridiculous. But it’s the way I am. On May 21st I had to have my gall bladder removed…quickly. It was the first disorder I have had that was related to what I put in my mouth. For those of you who don’t know this, gall bladder disease is at least in part due to fat consumption and I was doing plenty of that. So it was gone and I made a decision to make a change. Problem was I had made that decision before and nothing had ever stuck. A day or two later my husband was listening to talk radio and heard somebody talking about an interesting book, Never Be Fat Again, by Raymond Francis (http://www.amazon.com/Never-Be-Fat-Again-Permanently/dp/0757305318). The title sounds a little gimmicky but it’s a serious book about our food and food sources. Suffice it to say I read the book, followed the plan and in 6 months had lost 50 pounds without starving myself. At no time during the diet did that old thought of looking forward to getting back to eating “regular” food ever insinuate itself into my head as it had with diets past. I really do think I have changed the way I look at food and the way I eat food…for good. I can’t swear to it, but right now, as it stands I think it’s for good.

But the point is that humans were meant to eat a certain way and the sooner we get back to that way of eating the faster we will get back to the way we were meant to be. We were meant to eat whole foods. We were meant to eat mostly fruits and veggies. Think about it. We were hunter gatherers. We picked things up off the ground, off trees and plants. It was a while before we figured out that little animals tasted good and even longer probably before we figured out that cooking them was a tasty thing, thereby beginning to put charred meat in our mouths (which is probably responsible for our high rate of colon cancer). Just like we didn’t appear at the same time soccer fields and snow skis appeared, we didn’t come on the scene at the same time as Hungry Man dinners. We were not ever meant to eat processed foods. There were no buckets of refined sugar and flour for Fred Flintstone. We had to cover large areas on foot in order to find enough food to fill our stomachs. And somewhere along that evolutionary path we developed a most wonderful hormone, insulin. Insulin helped us have a big appetite when food was available and then it helped us store fat and slow down our metabolism in response to eating so we would have a source of stored calories for those periods when food wasn’t as available. Great then. Formula for disaster now when so much food is available and cheap.

So to keep it simple…what would a caveman eat? Fruits and veggies, nuts and whole grains and the occasional squirrel. Keep it whole (whole foods) and whenever possible, keep it organic, because that’s how foods were back then.

And let me remind you of exactly what sugar is. It’s white, brown, beet and cane, turbinado, and confectioner’s. It’s molasses, syrup and honey. It maltodextrin and dextrose, corn syrup and …chocolate.

And let me remind of exactly what refined flour is. It’s bread and rolls and tortillas and wheat bread, corn bread and biscuits, pancakes and…doughnuts.

And it’s all processed and it’s not what cavemen ate and it’s bad. And if you stop it cold turkey in about a month you will no longer even want it. And you will lose weight, even if you can’t exercise because you have bad knees because you did things humans weren’t meant to do.

What Were We Meant to Be

I find myself giving this speech more and more these days. What Were We Meant to Be? What were human beings meant to be? Like when we evolved into Homo sapiens. We didn’t just appear here on earth as creatures with roofs over our heads and transportation and soccer fields, you know. We slowly evolved from animals with no idea of what we were to become. And we walked, and we gathered nuts and berries, and at some point a lowlier animal died at our feet and we ate it and then figured out how to catch some more.

Just think of it in terms of other creatures. Take the earth worm. No one would ever expect anything more than slithering from an earthworm. Like dogs. They’re walking and trotting critters. They run occasionally to catch something to eat, but when we start getting them to jump and catch Frisbees, what happens? They tear their ACLs. Hello. If they accidentally tore their ACLs 150,000 years ago, then hello bigger predator. Rover becomes someone’s dinner and doesn’t get to pass on his genes.

Let’s look at ourselves. Because we were so intelligent, after only a moment of time in the scheme of things, we started protecting ourselves. We invented tools, we got fire, we built roofs over our heads. Our life spans gradually increased because of these protections. We learned how to set a bone and then shield ourselves against predators and the environment while we healed that bone so a tibia fracture wouldn’t result in our death. And pretty soon we got medicines. And then we got C-sections and birth control pills, which were so important for women. We limited the number of children we had and we stopped dying in childbirth. For the most part the female really didn’t consistently outlast the child bearing years until modern times. You had baby after baby until you died, unless you had a really big pelvis or little bitty babies. Then you lived to thirty six and were the old sage of the tribe.

So because we live so long and because we are so healthy and because we have so much time on our hands because we no longer have to build our own homes, grow our own food and prepare it from scratch, and we don’t have to protect ourselves from our environment…we can participate in activities that tear us up. Like football, and basketball, and jogging and motocross and mountain climbing. You name it. It’s out there and we aren’t put together to do it…for long anyway. Because of our brains we cut short the evolutionary cycle that might have given us better knees and shoulders. We don’t select our mates for good ankles or backs. We select them for nice eyes, a good sense of humor, ability to earn a living or get us drugs and other things I don’t need to elucidate right here. Suffice it to say, our knee genes aren’t likely to improve over time.

So people come to see me because they’ve torn up their knees or their ankles or backs. I can help them, but I can’t take it back. The damage has been done and the wheels of arthritis set in motion. But they want to keep doing what they’re doing. They want me to keep them doing what they’re doing. But what they’re doing isn’t what we’re meant to do. We’re hunter gatherers. Well, there are a few Ethiopians out there who are engineered to be long distance runners. The rest of us…fageddaboutit. We’re walkers. And the sooner we realize that, the better. Okay, get it out of your system. There’s no stopping that now. Sports are too huge a part of our culture. So go ahead and get it out of your system. But then, when you’re beat, when you’re torn up, when I tell you that you only have half the cartilage left in your knee and that your next choice will be a total knee replacement, then just think about getting back to the way you were meant to be. Don’t question why you can’t climb rock walls anymore. You’re not a monkey. Stay on the ground. Stay on the flat ground. Lift weights just to maintain your strength. Settle into that because you’re only fifty years old and you may live to be 100 and unless someone is inventing something really amazing right now in a garage, the only choice for you is going to be metal and plastic and even that won’t last forever.

Now I know a lot of people are going to hate me for this. I may even lose some patients who don’t want to hear it. But just think about it. Think about what each animal is meant to do. The only ones who do things other than what they were meant to do are humans and the domesticated animals. Look at the poor horse for example. It’s supposed to be a grass-eating walker, a trotter and only a runner to get away from something that’s trying to eat it. But we make it jump, race other horses, cut cattle and do tricks. Then look at the money we have to spend to keep it doing those things. I have never purchased a horse over the age of five who didn’t have arthritis in his hocks or stifles because of early training and high impact activities. We’re the same way, only at least we have a choice and it’s self-imposed.

The point is that the human creature, as just a creature, wasn’t meant to last as long as we are lasting. The gals died in childbirth and the guys broke their legs and were eaten by some predator. And if that didn’t happen, when you got too old to hang with the tribe, then you were left behind. Animals are the same way. But the difference is that when we get old and beat up, our expectation is that we’re going to be able to keep doing the things we want to do; run marathons, or maybe just the half, sky dive and play basketball with twenty year olds. We let our dogs and our horses take it easy. They get to lay around on a pallet all day or go out to pasture.

So just listen when your doctor tells you to slow down, lose weight and walk, don’t run. They may not be able to take the time to give you this lecture, but the message needs to be heard. Be gentle with your body. And ask yourself…what were you meant to be?

The Gift

If any of you have written fiction before then you might understand how authors get involved with their characters. I certainly got involved with mine. The main characters in Endings evolved as I wrote and many times I have said that at least a few of them were amalgams of the wonderful people I know. Biographical or fictional, they become people and they begin to react to their pretend surroundings with predictable behavior, behavior that is unique to them. Regan doesn’t act like Leslie and Leslie doesn’t act like Doc Hawley. It was a really cool thing to be part of the evolution of this cast.

Over the course of writing Endings I became attached to those people, like they were friends or family members. Sometimes I cried when sad things happened to them. I laughed. I got nervous. And when the end of Endings came along, I was conflicted. It was tempting to drag that story on and on, but it was time. To end. And I miss them. I miss Leslie’s tenacious hold on to her past. I miss good ol’ Doc Hawley and his medical practice. I miss Regan. Period.

So today when I discovered my mystery gift, I was so psyched because I realized that someone else…a reader, missed them too. I read a time travel novel several years ago. I love time travel books and discovering each author’s way of getting their characters back and forth in time. In this particular one, “Time and Again” by Jack Finney, if you set up your environment to look and feel like the time to which you want to travel, it could be so. It’s a lovely story and I recommend it, but the point is that to me and maybe to the mystery gift giver, the items in the gift brought us closer to Endings as a reality.

When I saw the gift bag sitting on my desk I sifted through its contents: a bottle of A&W root beer, a bag of baby carrots and some yogurt. There was also a card addressed to “Leslie.” I didn’t get the connection and assumed someone in my office had accidentally put it on my desk and it was meant for someone else. I fired off an email to my secretary and asked her to try to find the intended recipient. She promptly replied that someone had delivered it to me but she didn’t know who it was. I returned to the bag with renewed interest.
And then it hit me. The significance of those items hit me and I tore into the sealed envelope addressed to “Leslie.” My Dr. Leslie Cohen. It was a letter to Leslie from Regan! And there was no hint whatsoever regarding who might have sent the gift. It was a gift from Regan to Leslie. And for an instant it seemed like the real thing. And I pictured Regan writing the note. And I visualized the items in their fictional places. It was a magical moment.

I have sent out an email, asking that the mystery gift giver turn themselves in or be turned in for a reward (a free signed copy of Endings of course) so for now no hints on the content of the letter. That is how they will identify themselves. And also no hint regarding the significance of the root beer, carrots and yogurt. You’ll have to read Endings for that.

Experimenting with My Computer

Please bear with me as I try to figure out how to put pictures on my blog. Last weekend when I travelled to Seattle with my husband and Matt (see January 21,2008) our pilot flew directly over Mt. Ranier. It was an amazing site to behold. So I was trying to learn how to put those pictures in and only then found out I couldn't delete the whole entry. Now here's my entry and the pictures.