It’s great to hear that you’ve overcome the common excuses for not living a healthy lifestyle. Once you make the effort and experience the benefits, the incentive becomes much more obvious and it’s easier to stay committed and say no to unhealthy temptations. keep up the great work!

Of course I don’t mind. In fact, I appreciate it. Thank you! Posting the article on Twitter and Facebook helps to spread the message about the value of healthy and inspired living.

Stephen – Yes, family resistance is definitely tough and can be one of the most difficult aspects. This ties in especially well with your comment about taking things gradually. Not only is this a good idea for anyone taking on change, but also in regard to the expectations they have of their family.

Jen – I had no idea that Weston Price’s book is online. Thanks for sharing that! It sounds like you and your husband are doing great. Keep it up! I’ve experienced the same thing as what you described about the fair food. Once you get used to a clean diet and the benefits that it provides, it’s much easier to notice unfavorable reactions to food. I think it’s a great idea to bring healthy food with you on your visit to extended family! Maybe you’ll convert some of them!

Ægil – You’re absolutely right! If you obsess over healthy habits, it will be an unnecessary source of stress and defeat the purpose. It can be tough in the beginning to have the focus needed to implement new habits without stressing about it, but it’s certainly possible and definitely becomes easier with experience.

Don – Great point! I agree that most people want to be healthy. The problem is their interpretation of what being healthy means. As you said, it’s easy be influenced by the fast pace of modern life and succumb to convenience based habits. Unfortunately, this has become so common that it makes it much harder for people to realize what’s healthy and what’s not.

Keeping the schedule aside and actually focusing on the strategy and progress keeps you actually more focused, so I believe it is a mistake to hold the schedule too tightly. Or you can choose to not make a schedule at all! I can if the progress bar reaches 80% in the course of say, 3 years I will say it was worth it!

So, I love following the 80/20 rule to keep obsession away and it keeps you focused on the progress.

In a graph this is what I feel progress looks like: bad habits diminishing at a certain rate at the same time good habits increasing at a certain rate. In other words It is like the bad color fading and good color getting more saturated at the same time.

For traveling it depends on your location, and if you like the local food (it can be a nice try!). For example in Malaysia places that serve whole foods are frequent, as often the case in Asia. They even allow no MSG but the cookware is likely to have it contaminated. Again use the power of acceptance and keep your obsession away!

The no obsession trick is making me happier, Vin. cheers!

http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library/price/pricetoc.html

Great post! My family has been slowly transitioning our diet/lifestyle since last fall. There are still things I need to work on (more sleep!), but I’m proud of our progress so far. My husband tells me all the time how great he feels.

We went to the county fair last night, and one of the things we always loved in the past are certain “fair foods”. Well after eating just ONE of our old favorites, we were done with fair food! In fact, we couldn’t even finish eating. We both felt terrible, and still feel the effects today. Lesson learned! Next year we will be taking our own healthy food from home to eat picnic style. It’s true that your body adapts to healthy, whole foods, and rejects any future imposters.

We have overcome most of the difficulties you listed above. I worry a bit about our next visit to see extended family, since they definitely still eat the SAD. I’ll probably bring a few items, such as pastured eggs, raw milk, etc. It’s important to me that my 19 month old son has these foods, even when we travel. It helps that I’ve always been know as being a little “out there” to my family. They will probably just shake their heads and say, “You know Jen, she’s always had her own ideas about things”. That’s fine with me. I’ll probably even offer to cook a thing or two with healthy, quality ingredients, so maybe they will see for themselves how wonderful it is to eat real food.

I’ve found that very gradual change worked best for me. I didn’t go cold turkey. I just made incremental changes over time so at no time did my diet differ that much from the week before. Over a few months I was able to completely change with little suffering or diet shock.

You could learn more about Weston Price and his work by visiting the Weston A Price Foundation’s website. If you really want to dig in, you should read Price’s book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration in which he discusses in detail his research of primitive cultures.

Regarding modern health care, Price says that many of these cultures didn’t have doctors or dentists because they didn’t need them. I haven’t finished Price’s book yet and don’t know what they did for traumatic injuries or infections. I don’t know what the average lifespan was either, but it was common to find people who lived as long or longer than the average person today, but in much better health and with much more capacity. Besides, considering that most people today are already half dead and living a significantly compromised life by their 50s or 60s, or even earlier in some cases, the fact that modern medicine can extend the longevity of such individuals makes lifespan a bit misleading.

I’m glad you’re enjoying the site! Your site looks pretty interesting as well and I look forward to checking it out in more detail. I recently ordered a book about aging that you might enjoy. I haven’t read it yet, but it sounds interesting and seems to be directly related to what we’re discussing here. It’s called Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime.

Meatlessmama – Yes! That’s a perfect synopsis of what I’m trying to say! Thank you for sharing that!

You are right, healthy habits will extend life and open the door for new ways for the body to decline and die. Unfortunately we won’t know what they are until we solve the problems that affect people’s health today such as heart disease, cancer, and the like. I wonder if those primitive cultures living in modern times have access to modern healthcare. Do you know? I wonder what their life spans are. I will have to research Price.

I actually recently read The Blue Zones where the author, Dan Buettner, interviews countless centenarians from poor areas of the world (Loma Linda excluding) and he found that extended life was caused primarily due to diet, sense of purpose, and activity levels, among many other case specific factors. The point however was that the elderly still die of one thing or another. Hearts give out and cancer develops in old age… of course the older you get the more likely you are to die of an accident or illness. Maybe that explains some of the disagreement between our perspectives. Of course, I might have just proved your point inadvertently right there.

I apologize for not knowing anything about Weston Price, I will make sure to Google him and read up on some of his work. Keep writing; I’m new to your blog and enjoying your perspective.