The Year I Fell Off the Diet

America’s health consciousness has only began to be jolted back to reality; we as a nation have woken up and found ourselves overweight, out of shape and sick. There are many health professionals that hold tight to the idea that lifestyle choices – other than obvious choices, i.e., smoking, sedentariness, etc., – have very little influence over our overall health, in the long run. This idea is quickly going out of vogue. Rather, science continues to prove that the sicknesses we are enduring are the direct result of lifestyle choices we have collectively made. It is the firm belief here at Know the Cause that each daily decision we make, especially when it comes to the way we feed ourselves, has far-reaching consequences for our overall health.

But again, most people do not think about this on a regular, let alone meal-by-meal, basis.

As writer for the Know the Cause blog, I try to stick reasonably close to the diet I tell other people to stick to. I avoid grains as much as I can same with corn, potatoes, sugar and antibiotics. I try to eat grass fed meat. I do my best to eat organic and get plenty of fresh raw vegetables and a few key fruits. I try to supplement, sleep right and exercise. I try to do this because there is a good deal of research that says fungi and their poisonous by-products are very bad for human health. Much of that research you can find right here on our site in the form of the books Doug Kaufmann has written.

Mycotoxins are known to commonly contaminate our grain supply, and they are a universal contaminant of our corn supply. Animals raised in what has become the conventional way are routinely fed antibiotics, which are transmitted through meat and milk; in fact, upwards 13 million kilograms of antibiotics are sold for animal use every year. “Food Safety News – Breaking News for Everyone’s Consumption.” Most U.S. Antibiotics Go to Animal Agriculture. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Aug. 2012. Animals are routinely fed corn, which is, as stated above, contaminated with mycotoxins. Needless to say, if you are eating a conventional, American diet, you are getting exposed to these byproducts.

That isn’t totally the reason why I eat the way I do, though. I do these things because of the efficacy they’ve proven in my life. But it wasn’t always this way.

From 19 to 20 years old, I ate the way most Americans do. I ate lots of grains in the form of bread on sandwiches and the crust on pizza. I ate fast food regularly; burgers were a particular favorite. I drank alcohol regularly. Alcohol in general is particularly egregious from a mycotoxin perspective – alcohol is itself a mycotoxin, and the grains used to ferment alcohol usually are grains unfit for human consumption. In that year, I put on between 30 and 40 lbs. I was depressed, lethargic and felt like I lived in a constant haze. Finally, something in me clicked, and I knew it was time to change.

I began working out. I immediately changed my diet to a Kaufmann 1 diet. I began taking vitamins every day. There was no revelatory moment; I simply decided that I was sick of living a certain way, and that the temporary satiation of the cravings for unhealthy food I had developed weren’t worth the long term consequences that such a lifestyle yielded.

Within three months, I had lost most of the weight I had put on. The depression I had experienced completely lifted, and the haze that had kept me so unproductive vanished. I felt like myself again.

If you are suffering from health problems of unknown etiology, or if you have simply fallen off your diet for sometime, I would encourage you to try the Kaufmann 1 diet and see if your health doesn’t improve quickly and dramatically.

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