I just came back from spending midsummer in Finland with my girlfriend out in the heart of the wild woods.  On a weekend when most Finlanders are out getting drunk out of their skulls and drowning out on the lakes, we were stone cold sober and camping out while zeroing out.  In the meantime, we had a great discussion about something as simple as diet.

Point blank, people don’t know what to eat anymore.  As a personal trainer, I try to give my clients the best advice I can using plain old common sense, but the fact is there are a shitload of diverse and adverse pitches out there as to what to eat in order to live right.

Ah, the elusive search for the truth, even in something as rudimentary as diet.  Let’s take a look anyway, even though we are all so paranoid we don’t know who to believe anymore.

HELLOWEEN had the right idea, read the lyrics to this song.

Take the Warrior Diet for example: eating only once a day.  The problem with this dietary approach is that there are no more Roman Legionnaires around who live the traveling foot soldier, marching army lifestyle.  That in itself my friends speaks volumes against anyone in our western world copying the said approach.  If you aren’t marching 12 hours or more a day and fighting a few bloody battles in between then the only person you are fooling following a Warrior Diet is yourself.  If your lifestyle does not complement the warrior way of life for real, complete with body armour and lifelong battle scars, then move on to something more realistic.  (Sorry, playing Dungeons and Dragons doesn’t count for qualification.)

The Paleo Diet cancels out all dairy, beans, legumes, grains and moderates fruit intake based on sugar content.  First of all, who the hell among us were around to ever record how early man prepared his food, and what texts of the like are there to be found of the said period’s food preparation?  I can well understand eliminating processed foods which are stock full of unhealthy fats and manipulated sugars in addition to gluttonously starchy carbs, but I cannot fathom the thinking behind skimming out sugars that stem from fruits that nature produces as such.

Simple reasoning says nature produces all food nutrients and elements for a said purpose, and we are idiots to screw with the universal and natural code – – and it can be argued that we are paying the price with our health and allergies nowadays for doing so, at least in part.  Everything that God has put into the food that nature produces is there for a reason and none of it is bad, period.

BOTTOM LINE: behind every single dietary school of thought there is an entire industry waiting to cash in.  It’s a big scam and it’s making somebody very rich.  It’s time to wake up.

The entire superfood industry has boomed astronomically in the last couple of years, as people are turning out in droves to buy anything from Maca to Chia seeds to plankton and beyond.  Some of this stuff is founded, some of it is clearly filled to the brim with innuendo and heresay.

Who is guaranteeing that your Goji berries are organically grown without artificial fertilizers somewhere out in China?  Who is guaranteeing that your Brazilian beef products haven’t been produced using a little steroid enhancement?  Do you take everything the authorties tell you as absolute truth?  Whose agenda is the “truth” serving?  Just look at politics and I need say no more.

Seriously, who is the all-seeing eye who can guarantee that anything that is on the label holds to be 100% true and accurate?  We all (should) know that the sports supplement industry alone is full of all kinds of bullshit products that promise you the look of Lee Priest but deliver mostly just empty pockets and nervous systems brought to the edge.

http://youtu.be/5qqwsbBZCkk

You wanna become a superman?  Sorry, but sports supplements won’t get you there.

To be honest, I have been an active weight-trainer for 23 years of my life and I have tried all kinds of sports supplements promising the moon.  Most of the stuff I have used, I have to say that I really cannot point out any real benefits from its use.  After 23 years of testing out the market I am finally starting to smarten up, and I have to admit that I am very, very disillusioned.  For every serving of valid and working creatine powder there are a truckload of products that can’t pass laboratory inspection.

Hey, if I had the cash I’d test every single product bought from either a sports supplement center or a food store.  I would love to know what actually IS – – or ISN’T – – in the stuff that we ingest.

When I was a kid, I ate rocks from my back yard and chowed down whatever was put on my plate, and for years upon years I was healthy and without allergies of any kind.  Only once I started trying out different diets and messing with various sports supplements did my body start telling me something was wrong.  Over the past 10 years I have developed lactose-intolerance and negative bodily reactions to certain grains.  I am not sure how much of this is due to the overall “doctoring” of our food industry on a whole, and how much is due to just fucking with nature a tad too much.

We have been lied to, time and time again.  Many God-given basic food products have been demonized to the point that we question where eating bananas will make us fat.  How fucking absurd is THAT?  Show me one single case study of a person who has gotten fat off of eating bananas, I dare you to produce such evidence anywhere!

The rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting foiled, over and over and over again.  I guess it’s like P.T. Barnum so aptly said: “Never give a sucker and even break.”

Maybe we all need to get back to basics.  Maybe we all need to break out our forgotten, dusty Bibles and find some old-school Truth.

The least we could do is start looking.

For the TRUTH, that is.

First, we could start off with me selling you the only thing I have: common sense (a good place to start).

I often stop and contemplate the course of life as I get older.  At 38 now, I am starting to understand many of the things my own father taught me or otherwise held to be true, at which I balked back in the day.  It’s only now that I realize that I was the moron and that my old man was right on the money.

http://youtu.be/4XvFKS067D8

Take fishing for example.  As a youth, I held fishing to be the most boring activity on Earth, right next to golf.  Well, I still hold golf to be boring as hell, but fishing has taken on a whole new dimension for me.  My Dad used to go out fishing once a week regularly, to totally cast off all the baggage and stress of the work he was involved in.  It was his moment to “zone out” and just “be”.

How many people today can just sit there and do nothing?  Nothing at all?  I’m not talking about sitting idly and skimming through messages on your cell phone to kill time, I’m talking about total immersion into nothingness.  I bet you’d have more luck finding a needle in a proverbial haystack than finding serenity of the kind that I’m referring to.

Fishing with my Dad in Ontario, September 2009

This past weekend I spent some time out in a row boat, just casting a line and staring at the water.  It’s therapeutic, I tell you.  I was on a somewhat remote island with my girl, camping out and totally “dropping out” of all the bullshit of modern society for all intents and purposes.  On that lake, I understood my Dad a whole lot better, and how fishing throughout the ages has been a getaway for men from all cultures.  No computers, no TV, no magazines, no traffic, no electronic sounds, no hurry, no stress, no bullshit.

The one thing that I never grow tired of is nostalgia.  I was born in ’73, brought up in the 80’s and I remain an 80’s kid to this day.  My critical development took place in the 80’s.  The 90’s may as well have never happened in my opinion, except for my initiation into the world of pro wrestling as an active talent.  Just like every generation before me, I totally understand those who say that things were better back in their day.  Those who grew up with Elvis will always hold his music to the best there is.  Those who grew up on Metallica will always hold their classic album(s) to be the epitome of music.  Those who now grow up on Katy Perry will come to reminisce of her pop as the best music in the world when they are older too.  For me, I’ll always owe my musical roots to Motley Crue.

I grew up on movie icons like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, and I still watch the first Terminator and Rambo: First Blood with a fond warmth in my heart.  I still hold 80’s pro wrestling, especially from the Crockett era of the NWA and Bill Watts’ UWF to be the best wrestling in the world.  I still warmly recall watching on in rabid fascination as Gino Brito’s International Wrestling from Montreal came to Thunder Bay, Ontario at the Fort William Gardens featuring stars like Dan Kroffat, Steve Strong and Abdullah the Butcher.  I still at times transpose back to a simpler time of Marvel Comic books featuring childhood heroes of mine like The Incredible Hulk and Conan the Barbarian.  As an adult, I have even bought back some of the comics that I used to own as a kid.  Nostalgic?  Hell, yes.

So yeah, as I get older and wiser I learn to appreciate the lessons and truth that my parents taught me.  Not that they were right 100% of the time, but then again who is?  They were right enough of the time, and that is good enough for me.

In closing, I hate to tunnelvision but I recall the words of an elderly man just before his time was up: “Just as you get to understand something about this life, it’s time to leave.”

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately in terms of modern food and the constitution thereof.  It’s no secret that over the course of the past 10 years our world’s food production has undergone a tumultuous change in the face of increasing supply and demand.

Genetically manipulated food production is the norm of the day.  Sadly enough, that means less substance and more volume to fill up your gullet.  When raw food products like vegetables and fruits are made nutritionally deficient, our bodies get fooled and we eat more bulk to make up for the empty feeling.  Going organic means spending a hefty dime more that most people simply cannot afford the luxury of, even though it can be argued that eating organic foods only would most likely equal eating less per serving because you’d get filled up faster with more substance per food article ingested.

I have personally made a life choice to buy organic foods whenever my budget allows a bit of leeway, which believe me is not often.  That said, this past week I bought myself 3kg of pure stock bull meat, 5kg of cow’s intestines including tongue, liver and heart and ground lamb straight off of a rural farm.  Truth be told, if I could buy all of my food produce straight from a farm I would do so.  Sometimes circumstances and one’s budget don’t allow for such, but nonetheless making the choice to do so whenever possible is a step in right direction for one’s overall health.

No bullshit, know what you are putting on your plate!

I am certain that the decline in overall health in the western world is by and in large due to the nutritional deficiencies of our food.  The astounding increase in various diseases over the western hemisphere should have everyone on notice, but for some strange reason most people are willfully ignorant.  A staunch bitchslap upside the head of our society is direly needed to wake the slumbering masses up to the reality that by the time the 30-somethings out there get around to retirement, their spines and innards will be gelatin unless something changes – BIG TIME.

Don’t be duped, if there is one thing that each and every one of us should invest in, it’s our health.  To quote Brad Pitt from the movie Fight Club, “You are not your fucking khakis”.  All of the “stuff” won’t amass to a damn thing if your health goes.  So the smart ones out there will put their health first before they lay any money down for material goods of any kind.

Mind, body, spirit: that is what we are.  No way around it, no denying the facts.

If you want to be well, you must resolve to pay the price.  There ain’t a fucking Camarro in the world that is going to compensate for diabetes or for the loss of a bodily organ.  We can cross the finish line of this race of life as a broken, heaving mass, or as a winner who finishes the race and crosses the finish line at the end with their heads held high.

Me personally, I’d rather resolve to pay the price to be a winner because life is short and as Brad Pitt once again coined in Fight Club, “It’s ending one minute at a time”.