Could you see yourself throwing away all the food in your kitchen? That’s what we did.

Let me tell you the story about what happened when we radically changed our diet, literally overnight, about 10 years ago.

And I’ll ask you to share your story below too.

People often ask me what set me on this journey to start a farm and provide healthy meat from happy animals direct to consumers. This one experience stands out as one of the three or four events that led me down this path.

Spurred into action

Unknown by me, my wife had already purchased Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions cookbook when she talked me into attending a lecture on nutrition by Dr. Thomas Cowan.  Dr. Cowan structured that lecture around three main pillars:

1. Weston A Price’s findings
2. Rudolf Steiner’s statement “The heart is not a pump”
3. Pottenger’s Cats study

These are all topics for another post, but let me just say that my eyes were opened.  Up to that point, I had not realized how connected our health was to the food we ate. 

And more specifically, I had not realized how processes as straight forward as applying heat to food (e.g. pasturizing), or high pressure (e.g. extrusion to make the shapes of our favorite breakfast cereals), or using other processing agents (e.g. solvents to extract oil from canola seeds), were causing our food to make us sick.

That Friday evening my wife and I got home after work and proceeded to throw away every bit of processed food we could find in our kitchen, pantry and freezer and the journey had begun. 

We threw away

Obvious stuff like:

• frozen pizzas
• frozen chicken nuggets
• soda

Not such obvious stuff like:

• boxes of “healthy nutritious” breakfast cereal
• pasteurized milk
• vegetable oil
• hamburger patties and boneless skinless chicken breasts from the grocery store
• vegetables from the grocery store (obviously not fresh)
• jars of pickles, relish, ketchup, mustard and all kinds of other little jars of stuff
• whole-grain bread
• bottles of salad dressings, all containing canola oil among other things

That seems awfully wasteful!

We offered some of it to neighbors but lots of it ended up in the dumpster.  Yeah, I know, it seems wasteful looking back on it.  But that’s what we did.

Saturday morning

The very next morning we went to the San Francisco Ferry Building farmers’ market and restocked.  We found

• grass-fed beef and beef bones
• pasture-raised chickens and eggs
• vegetables that were picked the day before
• fresh cucumbers for pickles and cabbage for sauerkraut
• sour dough bread with only three ingredients (flour, water, salt)
• raw almonds

We stopped at the natural foods store on the way home and purchased

• raw milk, butter, and cream (we’re lucky in that California allows raw milk in stores)
• coconut oil and coconut milk
• cold-pressed virgin olive oil
• raw milk cheese
• cod liver oil and high-vitamin butter oil
• fermented (not brined in vinegar) dill pickles

When we got home mid-day Saturday we proceeded to make our first jar of salad dressing, start our first batches of fermented sauerkraut and dill pickles, and spent the rest of the day feasting on the best tasting vegetable salads, meats and bread and butter that we had ever had.

Day #2

On Sunday we continued to eat well, feasting on all of the foods we’d acquired the day before.  We spent most of that day in the kitchen too, making beet kvaas, mayonaise, and a pot each of beef and chicken stock.

Less sleep and more hours in the day

This is the part that sticks in my mind most vividly, here today, about 10 years later. 

Up to that point in time I always required about 9 hours sleep to feel rested, and even then, I valued my cup of coffee in the morning to get me going.  And at my desk in the afternoon, I’d feel like I’d run smack into a brick wall, low on energy, and reaching for some caffeinated beverage to get me through the rest of the work day. 

But on this Monday morning, only two days after eliminating processed foods, I found myself walking to work to my office in San Francisco with more energy than I could ever remember having and on less sleep than I was used to!  I felt like I was 20 years old again!

Wow, imagine that!  Sleeping less and feeling rested would mean more hours in my day!  And more energy?  That meant I could do more during those hours than I was used to!  Imagine becoming more efficient and having more hours in the day. 

We began to notice over the next few weeks

That energy and reduced need for sleep stayed with me.  And I began to notice some other changes.

My five-year-old son had battled ear infections through his childhood, one after the other, for years, treated with antibiotics as prescribed by our physician.  He never experienced another ear infection after we eliminated processed foods.

My skin began to clear up.  The dry flaky skin on my face and forehead disappeared.  (It came back again gradually but elimination of wheat from my diet a few years later cured that problem once and for all.  That’s another story)

Irritability subsided in our house.  It seems that even our emotional well being was positively affected by all of this.  I used to be a pain to be around (as my wife can attest) when I missed a meal or didn’t get fed on my schedule.  It was an obvious pattern in my behavior that my wife knew how to deal with.  If I started being hard to be around, acting irritated or unsettled, she’d just feed me.  And I’d settle down and again become that man she married.

Each person in our family used to catch colds at least a couple times a year.  With our kids being in school, it seemed someone in our house was always fighting a sore throat, stuffy nose, or some other annoying ailment.  

We don’t catch colds any more!  Once in a while we can feel the beginnings of a sore throat coming on, but it goes away within twelve hours before it turns into anything as our bodies now have the ability to fight it off. 

About 7 years later

My knees used to really hurt if I would try to stand up from a crouched position.  And my joints (elbows, knees) in general would ache from time to time.  Minor, but noticeable. 

I was only in my mid-thirties!  How could I be having achy joints?

It took about seven years of being off of processed foods, but I noticed my joint aches had gone away.  And have stayed away. 

And also at about 7 years I noticed my hay fever allergies became less severe.  And each year since then they’ve gotten better with this year, the 10th year off of processed foods, being almost symptom free!  

Processed foods were making us sick

Looking back, our change in diet is the only lifestyle change that we made.  We still live in the same house, work the same job, and have the same social lives.  Oh, and we’ve also started a farm.  

We haven’t had much any need for doctors or medicines during these past 10 years. And our health has improved dramatically.  It’s obvious to us, processed foods were making us sick.

Tell your story

Have you experienced a change of health as a result of changing the foods you eat?  Please share your story below.  Someone else might benefit from your experience.

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