Food Is The Cure

⬇️down 100+ lbs
Lupus diagnosis ➡️ no sign of Lupus

Not my client, but I did connect her to the right person. Swipe left (here: https://www.instagram.com/p/BxHyu99DtTY/) to see @saracopenhaver07 ‘s very kind words the other day, which was a sobering reminder that there is this ripple effect in lives you end up touching, but also how they end up teaching you far more.

Her trainer, Neil Javener, was one of my best coaching clients and greatest hires of my career. His own journey is such an outrageous case study that people often don’t believe me when I brag about him.
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There is an impact you have on environments and people which extends far out from wherever you are in a moment. And it’s profound how much farther people can take the tools and that impact long after your connection. Just remarkable work on both their parts.

Sara's story is interesting in many respects, the most prominent being how the removal of certain foods makes people with inflammatory diseases completely asymptomatic. I've heard that there are two groups of people living under a rock who still doubt this. One is the pharmaceutical lobby. The other is pharma lackeys.

I joke. But in all honesty, at this point, the only way anyone still says they doubt the role of food on human health is because they are evil or incredibly uneducated, willfully naive, belligerently anti-science, and out of step with basic logic. What we call "food" is a collection of many chemicals. The term "food" is a loaded word. It has no inherent value. All it means is some people at some point ate it and didn't immediately die afterward. Any item we think of as food has no intrinsic capacity to be safe. Fruits, veggies, seeds, nuts, and grains make their own insecticides. Some people tolerate a peanut. Some people die. Some people tolerate penicillin. Some people die. There is no such thing as a non-impacting substance. What we call "food" has no obligation to continue being safe for you for the rest of your life. Our environment, our epigenetics, our microbiome, and our immune programming all change throughout our lives. It only takes one little switch flip and your once-favorite food is now deadly. But even this is too black-and-white simpleton thinking. Some foods which don't immediately kill you are creating a slow damage that accumulates. Some foods which make a child flourish end up contributing to that child's parent's heart disease. Making the pseudoscientific claim that a substance we've labeled as "food" cannot play a critical role in autoimmune disease or any rampant inflammatory condition is such a parochial level of infantile thinking that it barely warrants a response. 

But one of those two doubters may be your medical doctor, a self-avowed scientific thinker, or other authoritative dictator. So we have to spend a minute dismantling their unsupported fiction.

Multiple studies have already shown that fasting resets immune function. Every traditional culture figured out that food avoidance seasonally or yearly improved health. It's beyond debate anymore. People who dismiss food sensitivities or inflammatory response from food don't rise to a level which deserves the dignity of rebuttal. But let's make this really clearcut. To those people:

​Eat poison berries. Other animals do. Drink snake venom. It's just proteins and peptides. Eat mad cow disease. It's just protein. Drink bleach or gasoline. They're just calories. I thought a calorie was just a calorie and a macro is just a macro. Right? That's your argument, right? In fact, pick any "dangerous" chemical and eat or drink it. What makes it "dangerous"? OBJECTIVE RESULT, not expert opinion. If you are unwilling to consider objective results, philosophically refusing to consider food's role in the disease pathology, that's circular dogma, not science.

In the same way that you may not end up flourishing if you drink bleach, some people will not flourish when they eat "foods" you categorize as "safe." No food is inherently safe. That's a logical fallacy with a massive question-begging antecedent. All substances are potentially deadly or destructive. Safety depends on the status of the person ingesting it, not on your personal opinion of the food. You're confusing historical societal acceptance of a food with universal safety. That is irrational and leading you to dismiss the very real subject of individual tolerance. 

It's totally unsurprising, then, that fasting can improve people's health. We just take out the X factor when there's no food. With fasting/anti-inflammatory/elimination diets, if you've never conducted the scientific experiment, just shut up about this subject forever. Among people who CONDUCT science, their findings don't lie. I have had hundreds of clients whose white blood cell counts and rheumatoid markers improved after fasting. No one cares what your suffix is. No one cares where you went to school. No one cares about your fallacy of appeal to authority. The default scientific position isn't that foods "can't be" harmful or pro-inflammatory. Show us the data. Explain the mechanism. And maybe run an actual experiment on fasting, rather than speaking from a place of willful inexperience and ignorance.

​Food, or perhaps lack of it, is the cure.