The man in the mirror

In an odd twist, I am a fat guy who is tak­ing advice from a man halfway across the world whom I have never met. It’s curi­ous thing when new ideas can have a pro­found effect on how you think about your own life. It’s even more inter­est­ing to have that per­son actu­ally affect your world. I am about to embark on a jour­ney that I have been on before. Well… Sort of…

I am a movie fanatic with a Net­flix obses­sion. In case you don’t know, Net­flix has a lit­tle of every­thing and can lead you into some great fea­tures after you have rated other movies that you have already seen. It bases the sug­ges­tions on what you like and what you don’t like from your rat­ings. I started my sub­scrip­tion after a His­tory of Doc­u­men­tary class that I had taken in my senior year at the Uni­ver­sity of Wyoming. It was an amaz­ing course and I would rec­om­mend it to anyone.

My taste in doc­u­men­taries has taken an inter­est­ing turn on my Net­flix account. I have most appre­ci­ated the huge num­ber of doc­u­men­taries that high­light nature and anthro­pol­ogy. Recently how­ever, I have leaned more toward doc­u­men­taries about food and health (both phys­i­cal and men­tal). One of my most recent finds has led me to try some­thing that I would have thought to be ridicu­lous in the past. It is a lit­tle extreme for an admit­ted fat guy, but I felt the need to try to improve my health.

Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead, directed by Joe Cross

In the movie, “Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead” the sub­ject and direc­tor, Joe Cross, makes a trip from his home­land of Aus­tralia to Amer­ica for a period of two months. Joe has decided that his health is so poor, that he needed some­thing dra­matic to help him make a pos­i­tive change in his life. He decides to make a trip to the US to talk to peo­ple across the nation about their health and food choices. Our sub­ject is an almost-40 man who is obese and has a chronic skin dis­ease for which he must take oral steroids. He had noticed that his over­all health had rapidly depleted in recent years and he was ready to make what­ever changes were nec­es­sary to improve his fail­ing health. Joe took a dra­matic approach with stu­pen­dous success.

Joe decided to do a fast where he com­pletely cut out all ani­mal prod­ucts in exchange for noth­ing more than fruits and veg­eta­bles, all-day every day. In the doc­u­men­tary he talks about how, for thou­sands of years, we had a cycle that our bod­ies are still pro­grammed for. It is the win­ter fast, when meat was hard to come by and so were fruits or veg­eta­bles of any kind. In these lean times, he explains that we are meant to lose a per­cent­age of our body weight as part of a nor­mal cycle. Cross talks about how with­out this part of the yearly cycle, our body’s rhythms can be dis­turbed and our health can suf­fer because of it. Cross decides that a cleans­ing, or fast, could poten­tially reset his hay-wired bod­ily sys­tems and put him on the right path for a health­ier life in the long-run.

Much of the first sec­tion of the movie explains the idea of a micro-nutrient rich diet ver­sus a macro-nutrient rich diet. Cross goes on to dis­cuss how many nations with weight issues con­sume diets that are high in macro-nutrients. Micro-nutrients are found in plant mat­ter (fruits, veg­eta­bles, nuts, and roots) while macro-nutrients are found in ani­mal prod­ucts (meat, dairy, eggs, and bread).

Our sub­ject pos­tu­lates that by imple­ment­ing this fast­ing cycle into his life, his body will have the abil­ity to fully recover and heal itself from the many years of a macro-nutrient bom­bard­ment it has received. He also believes that if his health sta­bi­lizes, he will be able to wean him­self off of med­ica­tions and will no longer suf­fer from his skin dis­or­der. I thought that it seemed like a bit of a stretch for chang­ing your diet to have an effect on every mal­func­tion­ing body sys­tem, but the proof is there.

Joe sets off for Amer­ica for 60 days to prove that any­one can reju­ve­nate their health by hav­ing a whole foods diet, with­out any processed food. Cross plans on fast­ing by juic­ing large amount of fruits and veg­eta­bles (mostly green). He decides that his jour­ney will have two parts. For the first 30 days he stays in New York City and talks to a wide vari­ety of peo­ple every day about their own health and what kind of foods they eat on a reg­u­lar basis. He also keeps some of his juice mix­tures on-hand for peo­ple to sam­ple when he inter­views them on the street. Largely, peo­ple are not inter­ested in the health juices but some of them give it a taste with mixed reviews in regards to fla­vor. On the sec­ond 30 days, he gath­ers his juicer and heads out on the road. He leaves NYC on a mis­sion to reach the west coast and spread his story to all of those whom he meets on his cross-country jour­ney. In this sec­tion, he meets a mor­bidly obese man with the same chronic skin dis­ease whom he offers to help after a lengthy and friendly conversation.

In the first 30 days Joe makes many com­ments on how he is feel­ing dur­ing each day of his expe­ri­ence and he takes the time to ask seri­ous ques­tions to com­plete strangers. As with any change in diet, his body puts up some resis­tance as he begins his two-month adven­ture. Despite what I had expected, his new diet shows mas­sive results in a short period of time with rel­a­tively lit­tle exer­cise other than walking.

Joe Cross meets Phil River­stone at a middle-America truckstop

The sec­ond half of the jour­ney sends him on the road to see the coun­try and talk to peo­ple about his quest to con­trol his own health. Halfway thru his jour­ney he meets Phil River­stone. Phil is a trucker who was once a scrawny kid but when he met Joe he tipped the scales at over 400lbs. Phil is a spe­cial case for Joe because he is the only per­son that he has ever met with the same chronic skin dis­ease. After the men have a heart-to-heart, Joe offers his new friend Phil any help that he might be able to con­tribute. They both leave to fin­ish their jour­neys, but Phil will soon play a major role in the film as a sep­a­rate case with even more pro­found effects from Joe’s fast­ing process.

Phil was not the only per­son that found some form of heal­ing from Joe’s meth­ods, but his expe­ri­ence is the most dra­matic. Another woman, who suf­fered from chronic, debil­i­tat­ing, migraine headaches, finds some relief from her symp­toms after a 15-day period with micro-nutrient rich juices. She con­tin­ued to enjoy the juices twice a week after she had fin­ished her ini­tial 15-day fast and she was able to kiss her migraines goodbye.

The story picks up a few months after Joe has returned to Syd­ney, Aus­tralia. Phil decides that he needs help and asks for help from Joe. Joe feels as though he can’t refuse to help some­one that has the same prob­lems that he had. Joe heads back to Amer­ica in an effort to make Phil’s tran­si­tion to a health­ier lifestyle eas­ier. The new friends head to a neu­tral loca­tion where Phil can relax, fol­low the pro­gram, and increase his phys­i­cal activ­ity. Phil jumps in with­out giv­ing it a sec­ond thought and his results show his deter­mi­na­tion to have a health­ier life.

At the end of the film you see, with a fresh eye, two men who have decided to change their lives for the bet­ter and have done so vic­to­ri­ously!

This cinéma vérité style of this film makes the viewer a part of the entire jour­ney that Joe has under­taken. As a mem­ber of the jour­ney, I think that the film has the poten­tial to have a much stronger effect on the audi­ence. I too believe that there is a nat­ural order to our health that has been altered by our envi­ron­ment and our food intake. There­fore, I have decided to try and take a jour­ney of my own to find myself with a bet­ter qual­ity of life then I cur­rently possess.

I am tak­ing steps to change where I cur­rently stand in regards to a proper bal­anced diet. I didn’t think that this change would be all that dif­fi­cult since I enjoy fruit and nearly all veg­eta­bles. I am just get­ting started on my new jour­ney and would like you to come along for the jour­ney too. So please, stop back by — as I will be keep­ing tabs on my jour­ney to bet­ter health over the next 60 days. I am not div­ing in head first into the deep end like Joe and Phil, but instead eas­ing into it from the shal­low end. I fig­ure that eas­ing into it will give me a fighter’s chance at leav­ing my fat­ter days behind me.           Day 1 – 245 lbs

Sui­cide for Dummies

Sui­cide is the answer. Go ahead, what are you wait­ing for? Nobody loves you, you’re all alone and don’t for­get, It’s cold out­side. There is one catch to keep in mind while attempt­ing to escape the mor­tal world, if you fail you go straight to jail (after being dis­charged from the hos­pi­tal of course).

Of all the per­sonal free­doms that we have in this coun­try, sui­cide is not one of them. Chris­t­ian morals have shaped every­thing in our lives, from the words printed on our money to our right of self-elimination. The bible says sui­cide is wrong; so by God we made laws against it. Legally you can com­mit sui­cide if you sac­ri­fice your own life to save some­one else’s. While self-sacrifice is legal and tech­ni­cally eth­i­cal, it is not prac­ti­cal because the oppor­tu­ni­ties are gen­er­ally unpre­dictable and scarce. … Con­tinue Reading

Heads or Tails?

A highly antic­i­pated Super Bowl Sun­day approaches.  A bat­tle of #1 teams, so closely matched, it could be decided by the flip of a coin.

Vis­it­ing
Cap­tain. This is heads and this is tails.  Call it in the air…

TAILS!
(Tails never fails. Tails never fails. Tails never fails. Come on…..) … Con­tinue Reading

Are you get­ting an “STD” from the Internet?

Inter­net brows­ing is a plea­sur­able expe­ri­ence, but mak­ing sure you use pro­tec­tion is often times over­looked. The result? Fre­quent inter­net “STDs.”  Learn what inter­net browser prac­tices “safe sex.”

The euphemism of relat­ing any­thing sweet, inno­cent, or bor­ing to sex is well over-played, but that’s because peo­ple will pay atten­tion.   There­fore, I will use it as well.  The num­ber one prob­lem that com­puter repair per­son­nel deal with (in the excit­ing job of han­dling the freaked-out-person-with-a-computer-problem) is com­puter viruses and mal­ware.  Any­one
that surfs, uses, or fre­quents the net is liable to get it.  But is there a way to pro­tect your self?  Every back­wards geek with zits will say, yes.

We begin our tale with Jane/Joe Gullible Inno­cent.  You are one of those, not-till-we’re-married types of peo­ple in the inter­net world. You only date (no kiss­ing) Google, and your friends with your email, Wikipedia, You Tube, Face­book, Twit­ter, etc.  Yet one day you wake up with crabs, Her­pes, and you’re prob­a­bly HIV pos­i­tive.  What hap­pened? … Con­tinue Reading