Questioning the Food We Eat

This is my personal story of how looking at the food I eat has helped me to improve my health. 

I am a computer animation artist working on movies and living in Los Angeles. I’ve been working pretty much non stop for the last 11 years in 3 different countries. Like most people, I’ve spent most of my time at work and on other “high” priority things in life.  And unfortunately, I wasn’t able to give much attention to my health.

 3 months ago, I finally had time to take a break from work. On my first day from not working in June 2013, my body wanted to get up at 7 AM as usual and get ready to go to work. My brain had to tell my body: “No work to go to today!”. How funny that the body remembers it’s daily routine.

 High Blood Pressure is like this. Our body needs a certain amount of blood. Even if our blood vessels have become narrowed and blocked it will still require the same amount of blood and will push the blood through with more force. This can create a potentially dangerous amount of pressure on our system that could result in a heart attack or stroke. Basically that is what High blood pressure is. Perhaps we know this but we don’t seem to know why the pipes got clogged and narrowed in the first place.

The medicine they give us keeps the blood flowing through our pipes at a lowered pressure to prevent a heart attack or stroke. Which is great. But doesn’t this mean that less blood is being supplied to our organs? How are they to get all blood they require?

Lisinopril

I was thinking when I was little, I did not have any of these problems. Obviously I ate well, food was always on time, not precessed, we rarely had meat and I was much less stressed for sure. I was always running, jumping and playing with friends. Fresh/real food and exercise regularly and non stop laughing.

I’ve been taking the pill for 5 years and yet I’m still taking it because I haven’t done anything about the actual problem. Therefore I’ll have to take the pill forever and will likely have to increase the dosage from time to time because the problem will only get worse. This is why I wanted to try fixing the root of the problem and started looking into my diet as a way to fix this.

My  veggie juice diet 

That is how I started to my new diet: I changed my diet to 90% vegetables, including drinking veggie juice and 10% fish (once every one or two weeks). After 1 month I reduced my pill from 7.5mg to 5 mg a day. During this time I checked my high blood pressure at least 3 times per day. I could clearly see it getting lower and lower slowly.  Then I reduced the pill to 2.5 mg while still monitoring my blood pressure often. Currently I am not taking the pill at all anymore. My blood pressure is now pretty much normal.

Veggie Juice

Sometimes if i eat some cookies or any processed food I can see it go up for sure. But mostly it stays between 110 to 120 and lower pressure is around 70 to 80 ish.

My juice diet is especially great. I am getting more nutrition than ever and it is a perfect way for me to carry on especially when I get busy again.  I found drinking fresh veggie / fruit juice is the best way for me to keep my healthy life style. I make veggie juice for 2 days and drink it 2-3 times per day.  If I am too busy for food, at least I can drink veggie juice to give me some nutrition. After this, I noticed that I feel less desire for fried or precessed food. Surprising my veggie food is giving me a noticeable glow that even other people have noticed.

Atherosclerosis is the usual cause of heart attacks, strokes, and peripheral vascular disease, what together are called “cardiovascular disease.” Cardiovascular disease is the No. 1 killer in America, with more than 800,000 deaths in 2005.

If this is really caused from what we eat then why don’t we eat right?  Some people would rather eat what they want and risk having a shorter life than eating properly to ensure a longer life. After I started on my veggie diet and especially after my 3 day fast, the food I used to eat didn’t taste the same anymore. My tongue doesn’t seem to like them anymore. It definitely changed.

Fresh local veggies taste so good and fruits are so sweet and delicious now.  I feel like I’ve never tasted them before. The more and more veggies I eat the taste seems to get better and better.  So I am not sure that the food we think we are dying for is actually real or not. It seems to me that the cleaner your body gets you can taste the real taste of food much better.

My 3 month journey with food was amazing. In the beginning, because I only ate veggies, I felt weak for a while. After the juice fast, my energy seemed consistence and stronger for sure.

My 3 day fast

This is the note I wrote on Facebook during my 3 day fast:

Now a-days it is very easy to get any food you want and we often eat food which we should really be careful of. I’ve never thought about the consequences of what food I ate. Why do we have to have the right nutrition? How does our body react with them? Apparently our body is a big hospital full of amazing doctors. As long as you put the right ingredients into yourself it will self repair.  What you eat explains everything.

I believe that the cleaner my body is, the wiser and closer to happiness I become.