From The Homestead
As featured in The Free Magnolia Volume 19, No. 1
“If you do not make the time for your wellness, you will be forced to make time for your illness”
It occurred to me quite a while ago that if I didn’t get a hold of my health, that I wasn’t going to be of much good to my spouse and my whole family to boot.
A Good Start
Flashback to my early thirties when I was working a full-time production job for a major animation film company. I was relatively young, newly married and enjoying all that life and a promising career had to offer. I was eating whatever I could shove down my gullet without much regard for the quality or the wholesomeness of the food I was ingesting. I figured I was active enough and that anything I ate, I was burning off regardless.
At the time I was big into mountain biking, road cycling and training for my first marathon with my wife. She had already done several marathons. This would be our first one together. Mountain biking took up most of my weekend endeavors, while road cycling occupied my early morning workout on average of 50-60 miles during the week. Add to that a vigorous round of Ultimate Frisbee once or twice a week after work with the guys – I was a non-stop, go-go-go fool.
Looking back, I thought I was fit, at least relatively speaking. I was 6 feet tall, weighed about 165 lbs . I had been slim all of my life, even skinny as a kid and thru my teenage years, I was barely bucking 145 lbs. out of high school. But I lacked the overall performance like I did when I was in my twenties. My recovery times in- between workouts were becoming more and more, prolongably painful.
That Fateful Evening
It all came to a head one evening in a frenzied after work game of Ultimate. A friend of mine I had invited, who was on the opposite team and quite large for his size, body checked me in mid-air. This resulted in driving me forward into the ground before I could adjust, snapping my tibial plateau just below my knee.
There was a loud audible crack as I reeled towards the ground in excruciating pain. I remember thinking as I hit the ground, knowing I was in deep trouble, that, “Man, she(my wife) is going to kill me for ruining our first marathon together!” You see we had just finished our high mileage training and were in the taper off period just before the marathon. She kept telling me I’d get hurt playing Ultimate as I was often coming home with minor injuries and bruised ribs.
The Inevitable Crash
As I lay on a hospital room table waiting for the doctor to come in and examine me, my knee had swollen up to twice it’s size. It was a horrible hospital experience(this is an understatement). My buddy who was instrumental in my demise had accompanied me to the hospital after the ambulance ride. I was freezing cold, in shock and naked except for my running shorts. They wouldn’t give me any water till I had been x-rayed. They put me in a child’s room where the table I was one was only big enough for a small child.
To top that off the doctor came into yell at us both about our wives, who were calling trying to get information about what had happened(this all before smart phones were prevalent). The hospital staff wouldn’t tell them anything about the situation. I won’t mention the name of the hospital here, but I do sincerely hope that since my incident, that this particular hospital has thoroughly burned down to the ground.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I have great respect for those doctors and hospitals that properly care for and serve lots of people every day. This place just wasn’t one of those.
A Lifetime of Health Issues
Well, that fractured tibial plateau started a sequence of health issues that I am still dealing with to this day. After a major surgery, which included three large stainless steel bolts in my knee, I was rewarded with diagnosis of Type 1 Diabetes. It had been a rough weekend of recovery post surgery, where I couldn’t even keep water down, and I told my wife, “You’d better take me to the emergency room.”
There I was back in the hospital(different hospital) hooked up on IVs and all the monitoring devices. I can still see the doctor standing over me saying, “Mr. Wolbert your system took a serious nose-dive, if you hadn’t come in when you did, we don’t think your system would have recovered on its own.” That and, “Oh, and your blood sugars are over 300, do you know that you have Diabetes?” I remember replying, “Diabetes, what’s that?”
My recovery from the first knee surgery took over a year to rehab. I remember my first thoughts were to get back on the bike. It took almost a year to get back on the bike proficiently. Then there was this Diabetes thing. Yeah, I had had all of the regular symptoms for quite a while. The fact of the matter is that I probably had Diabetes for over a decade previous and never knew it. It’s one of the most critical health markers, yet at the time, no one checked for Hemoglobin A1C’s or did fasting blood glucose tests as part of a regular check-up.
A Complex Journey
I would not wish Type 1 diabetes on my worst enemy. It is a formidable pathology, the direct result of exogenous sugar intake orally . Once contracted , the islets in the pancreas are destroyed from making insulin – an important hormone necessary for daily life functions.
This condition is encouraged by our ever damaging American diet and everything the medical community continues to foster with it’s lies and deceptions to make a dollar. How do I know? Well, I’ve tried everything the medical community ever suggested to no avail. The food pyramid – a complete lie. Eat organic whole foods – no good still, if it’s the wrong foods. It was rather quickly that my wife and I realized that these doctors and the general medical communities were full of it.
I was the last person to ever consider traditional medical practices at the time. Back then it was called alternative medicine, how ironic. Naturopathy, herbs, homeopathic remedies, etc. But where else was there to go? The modern medicine had failed, the doctors offered no better advice except to increase the insulin intake and get on blood pressure and cholesterol meds.
Understanding Your Body
It probably took me over 25 years later to really start understanding how the human body works. I’m still learning, but I have discovered this— a proper human diet fixes 99.99% of everything that ails you. Yep, you heard me—99.99%. Granted, some things like Type 1 diabetes can’t be reversed, but they can be greatly mitigated.
If we Southerners are to take back our states’ sovereignty and readopt to local economies, regaining the control over our health and well-being should be at the top of the list.
I won’t dwell on the issue of how messed up our medical care in this country and the world is. The cost of going to the general physician, medical insurance (mostly a scam), prescription drug costs, medical supplies and hardware – the list goes on and on. Not to mention that I believe the medical community in general, is trying to eliminate everybody by the general population reduction protocols.
Regaining Our Independence
To regain our independence, we must begin with ourselves. To be the healthiest you, you have to get control over your body , and what you decide to put in it on a daily basis is the key to success.
Am I talking about a specific diet ? Possibly. But it’s more like a way of life. It extends beyond the kitchen and refrigerator into the immediate landscape. It involves an express way of understanding how our bodies are designed to intake food for energy to keep us thriving and surviving. This then translates into our immediate surroundings and environment and what we are doing to sustain it to sustain us.
Take our small homestead, which I plan to make the center of this column titled “From the Homestead”, which comprises 11 acres of flat soil in the south of Alabama. Not much to look at given first glance, but there is more than meets the eye going on here.
The Proper Human Diet
So what’s a proper human diet you say? Scientifically, it’s how the human body is designed to fuel itself for energy production for bodily functions and work. Very simply, it’s a zero carbohydrate, all animal product and associated fat intake. It’s the highest nutrient dense food on the planet, perfect for the human digestion not only for energy production, but for healing as well.
It’s economically feasible, especially if you are eating one meal a day (OMAD—one meal a day). Typically, since you are ingesting higher density nutrients, you tend to eat less since. Satiation levels are reached quicker once you are adapted over. Since you’re not buying all of the typical crap that’s in the grocery stores, all made up of processed ingredients and carbohydrate products, you’ll save 50%-75% on your grocery bill. More to go towards chuck eye steaks, ground beef and seafood in season!
Here’s a quick run-down of our family’s weekly food schedule (1-2 meals/day):
- Beef and wild game products comprising steaks, roasts, cured meats and ground meats throughout the week.
- Chicken—once a week
- Pork—once a week
- Seafood—once a week.
A Recommendation for You and Your Family
Let me be clear, this is something I highly recommend and it has worked for myself and my family in spades. I would personally recommended it to every human being on the planet. Most who come to discover this way of living, typically have had some major health issues that they’ve been trying to address for some time with minimal to no results. Is this for you and your family? I’ll let you be the judge of that. There’s no right or wrong way to pursue this lifestyle. Everyone is different. The general rule—do what works for you.
My wife and the kids have been doing this for over a year now and it has transformed the way we eat and view food.
We’ve also stopped growing greens and vegetables in the garden for human consumption . More to come on this topic . Everything on the farm is geared towards the production of animal products for the home. And what we grow in the fields is for the animals.
I hope I have whet your appetite and piqued your curiosity. I encourage you to follow us on our journey as it unfolds as we build a stronger South by building stronger bodies and communities. Stayed tuned for more to come on “From the Homestead”
~ Jason Wolbert – Web designer & administrator for The Southern Nationalist League
