I woke up early at 5:35AM, made coffee for my guy, started his Wheatena with ground flax, set up a bowl with frozen Bing cherries to defrost, sprinkled them with walnuts and went back to bed to listen to a podcast. It was Rich Roll on his podcast! He interviewed two women who made “an attempt to complete 5 Ironman-distance triathlons on 5 Hawaiian Islands in under 5 days.” It’s called the EPIC5 Challenge . It was so interesting and then I faded off and fell asleep and then woke up at 6:50AM. He was talking to the two women who are Ultra Athletes,  “thriving on the cutting edge of ultra-endurance.”

I woke up excited about what these women were doing, thinking about the effort they put in and how it paid off. I wanted that too. I went back into the kitchen and made my steel cut oats and thought what else would I like in it. Went to the fridge and grabbed my jar of saved leftover kale cooked the day before, dumped it in, went to the freezer and grabbed two shiitake mushrooms, chopped them up, grabbed a can of fire roasted tomatoes from my pantry and dumped about a quarter of a can in along with one tablespoon of my Dr. Greger’s seasoning mix . Oh yes, a tiny bit of liquid smoke (optional). This is my favorite way to make my oatmeal after spending years of wondering why anyone would eat and like savory oats. Must have been me watching Jane and Anne Esselstyn’s video.

As I see it, since our American doctors were never really trained in NUTRITION, they never gave us the information that we needed to avoid so many illnesses and the chronic diseases of aging. So sad. I know they tried their best, but all they could do was give us pills. I speak from experience having been a little girl who missed lots of days at school due to sickness. I took endless naps due to tiredness and lack of energy. I was eating the SAD, standard American diet, which my mother and father carefully prepared to make sure I was as healthy as possible. Little did they know that their choices were guided by the meat lobbies, dairy lobbies, egg lobbies, sugar lobbies, pharmaceutical lobbies, and medical lobbies. I had numerous doses of antibiotics.

Yes, I was gypped for many years by being deprived of information, but the truth is that now I consider all this experience in the past is now an opportunity! I have chosen to educate myself over the past 8 years in what I have found to be a much more healthful way of living. It was that I was offered a copy of “Forks Over Knives” to watch by a friend. I am very grateful to her. She happened to be a Seventh Day Adventist with the knowledge from one of the Blue Zones  in America, Loma Linda, California. No matter what religion or Humanist  approach you take, the lifestyle that promotes healthful longevity seems desirable to me. So now is the time for those of us, no matter what our age is, to choose a healthy lifestyle by eating a whole foods plant based diet and avoiding all the meat, dairy, eggs, and strongly limit the salt, oil and sugar to which we’d been accustomed. Add onto this way of eating a lifestyle which includes daily exercise and relationships with like-minded people who support our efforts.

This way of living is expanding rapidly while our waistlines are shrinking. Thousands of people are carefully considering how to do this and are finding a better and pleasant improvement in health and happiness. It’s all about educating ourselves. 

Now that you’ve read all this, here’s a little bit of dessert, an Anjou pear from my Farmers’ Market.

Until the next sketch… peace, Heather

*Quotes are from the Rich Roll website mentioned here.