So, here I am living Evolutionary Fitness for one whole year.  The first few months were full of rapid discoveries.  Months 3-9 seemed to offer unexpected eureka moments as I continued to break through various ceilings of understanding only to discover that I was on the ground floors and had a much higher distance of learning upward to do.  The last 3 months seemed to be settling into a complete lifestyle, still learning but the lessons seemed less surprising and more grin-evoking, often saying to myself, “Of course, that’s is how it is, certainly.  Makes perfect sense”, easily casting off previous closely held notions disspassionately and not being threatened by the “new.”

A quick overview of how it happened.  Early September 2008 I read Brian Appleyard’s article on Arthur De Vany.  It was a link from an Austrian economics site that I very much admire.  At the time, I was working as a consultant overseas, working 12-14 hour days, mismanaging home-work life balance, and the bad tilt of this balance was causing me to sleep less, eat worse, and gain weight.  In July/August 2008 time frame I contracted diverticulitis symptoms, and was having serious pain after eating.  I was on 3 different kinds of prescription medicine, plus avoiding corn, nuts, and trying not to eat heavy.  After reading the Appleyard article, I said to myself, what do I have to lose as obviously I was not living naturally.

On September 14, 2008 the day before I flew to London for a week of business travel, I had a picture taken of me in all of my glory.  It’s funny, because at the time I was sucking it in, posturing to make it look not too bad, and really thought that my contortions allowed a decent picture to turn out.  Jeez, after a few months into EF I realized what a disaster I allowed my body/health to fall into.

I figured that without the distractions of family and long office hours while in London eating hotel and restaurant food I would during that one-week trip give it a go for at least a few weeks.  The first day seemed like the first day in a different country (and it literally was I guess!).  My body was going somewhere where it had never been.  I ate eggs, bacon, eggs for breakfast.  I skipped milk, but had plenty of coffee and juice.  I have since mended my ways with juice, no juice now, if I want orange juice, I eat an orange.  Apple juice?  No, I eat an apple, and so on.

During meetings all day, kind British hosts were filling the table with pastries, sandwiches, and crackers.  I skipped them all, concentrated on the pieces of fruits at the edge of the plates which were only meant to serve as eye decorations, only a test subject like me was actually eating them.  As the plates were emptied, the decorative fruits that weren’t eaten up by me were discarded into the trash.  One of many lightbulbs that went off that day.

In the evening when I just had a meat dish and vegetables, skipped the “chips” (potatoes), I was having heat flashes.  I tossed and turned for a couple of hours when I finally was able to sleep, but then something incredible happened.  I slept like a baby, the care of the world slipped off my shoulders.  The next morning, I was ravenous though I had eaten much the previous first day of EF.  Heat flashes continued.  In between meetings during lunch and in the evening, I rode the waves of sugar/carb/high blood glucose level addiction by walking the cool September streets of London.  During the wee hours of the night, I was reading Art’s blog and came across a few mentions that London was his favorite town to take a nice walk.  I felt then that I was literally walking the right path.

I survived the first week of EF in London.  On the flight back home to Asia, I avoided all of the crap on the plane.  The first few weeks were interesting as I packed my lunch and ate breakfast and dinner at home much differently.  The heat flashes left, but the melting hunger was constant as I felt my weight of ~255 melt everyday despite eating to being full.  The first month was dramatic.  Then, something very unexpected happened.

I was diagnosed with 5 kidney stones.  I had to take an emergency flight from Asia to Germany with a severe kidney infection.  Though I was eating healthy and having daily epiphanies while on EF, the past damage that I had done to my body had caught up to me.  The years of drinking soda, munching on chips, eating processed foods of all kinds, and high acidic grain diet had reaped stones in my system that clogged me up, and the pain from it was so foreign that it wasn’t until I was nearly incapicitated that I realized that it wasn’t a comeback of my diverticulitis symptoms.  You see, the first few weeks of EF allowed me to freely discard my diverticulitis medicine, my gut felt great, my digestion was fine.

I spent 2 weeks in Germany, 2 humbling weeks.  While there I read every blog post that Art had ever done.  If any doubts of getting off of an evolutionary life and diet were going to manifest themselves, those 2 weeks in Germany and the subsequent 5 weeks of surgery and recovery removed any chance of me backsliding to an improper diet and lifestyle again.  I’ll post more on that in detail another time.

I would like to thank Arther De Vany and the Evolutionary Fitness community, along with the great players out there like Cordain, the Eades, and Gary Taubes for the wisdom I’ve obtained, and hope to pass on to my family.  As the months formed this first year of evolutionary living the memory of my former diet and state of health fades.

If I were to explain what led to my “kairos” moment that got me started, I guess it was partly realizing that hitting rock bottom was fast approaching given my health problems in September 2008, and knowing that I would have a week away from family and office to give EF a try.  For those of you that may be reading this who feel like you may want to experience your birthright health and diet, perhaps a humble suggestion would be to stretch out the next 3-day weekend into a 5 or 6-day weekend (take a few days of vacation) and go for it.  You don’t have to, but maybe, like it was the case for me, stepping away from the daily usual fray in your life for a short amount of time would create the atmosphere that you need to take your first steps.

Read the “cannons” in my left menu column for some encouragement, and give it a go.  I have.  And that has made all the difference.