marcus antebi, goodsugar, nutrition

Living For Health

Living For Health 

I’ve read hundreds (perhaps thousands) of emails during my short career as a juice peddler.

I am an educated consumer (although I don’t have a college degree) and I am a streetfighter. By that I mean that I fight for practical, common knowledge pertaining to survival. I have a persuasive way of speaking about supplements, medicines, and a holistic approach to taking care of the body.

I have one of the greatest mentors on the planet; his name is Fred Bisci. He’s 90 years old and has been 100% raw vegan with incredible food integrity in his diet for many years. He has been my primary food and science mentor for 10 years; during that time hasn’t said anything to me that was questionable or disreputable.

My other primary mentor has been Jeffrey Mechanick, and he’s unquestionably a genius. He has a PhD and works for one of the most prestigious hospitals in New York. He wrote a book on molecular nutrition, and he has so many accreditations and accolades posted below his name in email and other correspondence that they take up an entire page. He’s not only an incredible scholar but a great teacher.

Now, passing knowledge along is up to me and me alone. When I’m asked a question, I speak the truth and I tell people things with the intention of guiding them. I don’t diagnose or treat people. Doing so would be going against my code of ethics and would be against the law as well.

The first thing that I learned from these two very different experts is that nutrition plays an enormous role in the success or the failure of your body’s ability to function properly. This makes perfect sense and should be obvious, but somehow most people don’t acknowledge it.

The following might be a helpful metaphor. Think of yourself as a racecar driver driving an extremely powerful, delicate prototype car in an endurance race that may last for 100 years.

The fuel you put in the car is as important as the tires and all of the other moving parts. How you drive the car is another critical factor. Some of the decisions that you make during that race come from your intuition as a driver, and other decisions that you make come from scientific facts that you know.

The most important thing that you can do is bring your diet to an A+ standard. Don’t make any excuses—don’t tell yourself that an A- dietary standard is acceptable. We all understand how difficult it is to let go of a few foods and beverages because it feels so good to take them. For example, if you’re a heavy wine drinker, the idea of letting that go may be too difficult. But drinking a lot of wine is just not optimal for your chemistry.

Unhealthy food and drink will adversely impact our organs. But we use that food because there’s a pleasant mental and emotional connection with it. We can only be in optimal health if we acknowledge our limitations in both our lifestyles and our diets and then surrender them.

Seemingly, we are all struggling—there seem to be very, very few masters of the disciplines of maintaining healthy dietary and physical lifestyles. But self-mastery is bliss, and getting it requires hard work. If you’re reading this you’re probably already on this path. But you need to look for strangers like me who will encourage you on your journey.

I’m not here to judge you. I can only tell you the methods I’ve used in my life to liberate myself from my own suffering. I started from nothing. I had a mother who carried me in her stomach for 10 months and I had a father who bought me my first sports car when I was 16. But those things are of no value regarding pursuit of higher journeys. It takes time to mentally prepare yourself to move to the higher journeys that you can be taking while you’re in your physical body. (I have no idea what happens after time spent in the physical body—perhaps nothing. I don’t spend my time thinking about that.)

Your paradise can be on this earth and your vehicle to move around in it is a physical body. You must treat the physical body like it’s a pristine sports car. Doing this requires the ability to be honest and truly look at the things that you’re doing and see them from the right perspective. And your time will come when you can surrender to the truth.

As I attempt to put these things into words I don’t want to sound preachy. I don’t even know who you are, so I don’t see your face in my mind when I’m speaking. I’m writing to myself so I can remember; I may need to read this one day for that purpose.

The first and most important action regarding your diet is to think about the animals that have to suffer and be ripped away from their freedom. If you’re not ready to face this, put the thought aside and just concentrate on your physiology.

You are absolutely 100% designed to be an optimal plant eater. In the plant eating state of mind, you become one with nature over time. You are not walking around dragging carcasses behind you and living your life supported by a sea of blood.

I’ve thought about these words carefully for 10 years of my life and I never gave myself permission to see them, because I didn’t want to sound like a preacher or an angry person. But I care for the suffering of my brothers and sisters, including animals.

The next thing to consider regarding your diet is that processed food is an endocrine disruptor—some mildly so, others severely. So we have to remove these things from our eating patterns. You can take a decade if you wish to do it, or you can take one day. For every dietary mistake that you remove from your diet there will be immediate improvement in your body chemistry; these are the most epic words that were ever said to me, and I constantly remember them.

Ideally, you shouldn’t try to get your nutrients from a pill or a dietary supplement. Your entire diet is technically a supplement; in the process of eating, you’re supplementing nutrients that you are lacking. If you ate a perfect diet from nature—which is what we should live on every moment—every single nutrient you need would be available in the plant kingdom. If it’s not available in the plant kingdom, it’s something your body doesn’t need.

But of course we don’t live in that condition; we’re not superhuman. So supplements can help us on our journey. Just as medicines can help us with healing, supplements can help us on our ongoing journey to good health. But they must be produced with integrity—they must be all-natural.

Take the supplements that your body is asking you for. And believe in them. Hold them in your hand, look at them and say, “Please work in my body.” Then take them and believe that they work. Believe in the practice of opening the bottle, and believe in the practice of taking the tablet or the capsule with water. Believe it—there’s power in positive thinking as you progress on your journey to better health.

The body and the mind interact in such powerful ways that the things you believe have an absolute positive effect on your body chemistry. This is a scientific fact that can be proven. If doctors stated these facts in writing, their peers would review them and give them their stamps of approval.

I actually have a love for the vitamin industry, although I have disdain for some aspects of it. It so happens that the ancient words for medicine and poison are the same. Today we’ve separated the word medicine from the word poison. But the truth is that if you don’t take medicine correctly then it actually is poison.

This begs several questions: What is the medicine? What is its source? What are the risk-to-reward ratios of taking it? What are the things that you can do holistically, considering homeopathic solutions as well, while you’re taking medicines?

Also, who is your doctor? Your doctors are like elders. You have to understand their educational experiences and press them for answers to difficult questions. The best doctors are constantly reading and researching in the course of their practices. They’re reading things about yoga, probiotics, and breathing exercises, as well as reports on the latest drugs to treat the most common and persistent ailments. They attend conferences, they lecture, and they write books.

In addition to radically changing your diet, you have to get yourself into a positive mental attitude. I’ve written extensively on this, as have myriads of others. I believe strongly in the teachings of Yoga, the philosophies of Buddha, and any other beliefs that encourage gratitude and compassion.

I hope to meet you on your journey.

 

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