You may recall that my recent trip to Mexico blew me away. What a country, what people.
And yes, what food.
I’ve had lots of “Mexican” food before: some awesome, some so-so. But nothing prepared me for the breadth and depth of the Mexican food experience. I ate everywhere from people’s homes, to roadside shacks, to decent restaurants, and it was all excellent. I’ll kick off this post with some basic traveller advice on not getting sick while travelling to such places, then just go through the dishes I experienced in order. With photos!
1. Do not drink the tap water. At all, ever. I’d recommend brushing your teeth in filtered water, and hold a mouthful of filtered water in your mouth when having a shower, to prevent you accidentally swallowing anything. Spit it out when you’re done in the shower.
2. Suero. This is a mix of rehydration salts that you can get at any pharmacy. Mix a packet in with a litre of filtered water to rehydrate if you do get sick. Throw away any undrunk mixture after 24 hours.
3. Probiotics. Much of the intestinal distress associated with travelling to Mexico comes from a fight between your existing gut biome, and the bacteria you’re exposed to while you’re there. They are not friends, and those Mexicans fight dirty. So start taking probiotics before you go, and keep taking them while you’re there, whether you feel well or not. I’m quite impressed with the Enterogermina ampoules that I got in Mexico, and with the Probio 7 50+ that I got when I got home.
This is just a glass of mineral water, with lime juice, and salt around the rim of the glass. Putting the salt round the glass like that means you can take as much or as little of it as you want/need. And the lime juice is great for vitamin C and digestion. Honestly, why drink plain water ever again? It's available just about everywhere, and superb for keeping you hydrated- much better than plain water would be. I failed to take a photo of it, sorry.
Enmoladas
My first meal in Mexico was breakfast enmoladas. These were stunningly good. They look like a dessert, but they’re not. They are tortillas stuffed with chicken, in a mole, which is based on cocoa, but is not what most people think of as chocolate. It’s a bit spicy, a bit savoury, a bit umami, a thousand percent delicious. This was served with coffee and carrot juice.
Pozole
This is a traditional Aztec dish, a kind of spicy stew. They have changed one major ingredient though. It used to be made with the flesh of your enemies, but is now made with pork. It’s one of those classic dishes which get fought over- which part of Mexico has the best pozole? I couldn’t possibly say- I had it a couple of times, and they were differently fabulous. Pairs well with a dark Modelo.
Chile en Nogada
This dish is only available for a short time each year, which happens to coincide with Mexican independence day (September 16th). The red, white, and green of the dish represent the colours on the Mexican flag. The large poblano chile is stuffed with meat and fruit, and covered in the white walnut sauce. It’s another somewhat sweet, somewhat umami, utterly divine dish.
Elote
Mexican cuisine is based on corn the way European cuisine is based on wheat. It’s everywhere, and sometimes it’s just on its own, boiled or grilled over charcoal from a roadside cart, late at night, with friends. I had the version with chilli powder and lime. My lips stung for ages, but it was totally worth it.
Barbacoa
This is not barbecue, as in meat grilled over charcoal or smoked. This is meat that it soft and juicy and tender from being roasted in a pit in the ground, much like a Hawaian imu. You can also do it in the oven. I failed to take a picture because I was too busy eating it.
Tetelas con chapulines
This is a Oaxacan delicacy. A tetela is a triangular folded tortilla, stuffed with food. In this case, crickets. They are slightly spicy, quite umami, and delicious. I also had tetelas stuffed with tasajo (a kind of dried meat), and huitlacoche, which is a mushroom that only grows on corn.
I didn’t take pictures of the quesadillas con carnitas, nor the rose-petal flavoured ice-cream. Nor so many other culinary delights. And, let the record state, the only time I did actually get sick was after eating at a place that specialised in American-style food (it was open and close by, no other reason to go there).
It’s funny to think that Mexican food outside Mexico is mostly tacos and burritos. Which is like Italian food outside Italy being mostly pizza and pasta. Yes, there’s a lot of both in Italy, but they are just the tip of a gastronomic iceberg. Just so with Mexico. While there is a lot of pork involved, there is also a huge tradition of vegetarian food (such as the tetelas con huitlacoche). And yes there’s a lot of corn there too, but not in the chiles en nogada.
We’ve been in Ipswich for a couple of months, and perhaps the most common question I’ve been asked is “what’s it like” followed in popularity by “Ipswich? Why?” So I thought I’d summarise some of the key points, in the form of a tennis match. Because this is England, and it’s summer. Or at least pretending to be. It's Helsinki to serve, and oh my, it's a scorcher.
Plumbing.
Oh dear god. The Romans got to this island nearly 2000 years ago, and they had better plumbing than the people of Ipswich, and indeed the British Isles, have to put up with. It’s a disgrace, really. The other day, a pipe got loose in the bath, while I was in it, and water escaped from the proper channel. Did it run safely through a drain in the sealed bathroom floor? No, its path of least resistance was through the ceiling light in the kitchen. I offer this video as proof, because my Finnish friends may be incredulous.
And, oddly, while it’s apparently impossible to insulate a house properly over here, and so it’s staggeringly inefficient to heat them, it’s also impossible to get a really cold shower. Which avid readers of this blog will know are part of my normal conditioning. I use shower in the loosest possible sense. The tepid trickle you get here is quite inadequate when compared to the blasts of water I became accustomed to back in civilization Helsinki.
It gets worse. The water here tastes like what I imagine the nervous sweat in Boris Johnson’s shorts would taste like if he was forced to actually state something he truly believed in on a particularly hot day. It’s no doubt perfectly safe, but oh, the water in Helsinki.
Helsinki 15 luv.
Food and drink.The water being quite undrinkable, we are simply forced to purchase large quantities of wine and beer, and drink that instead. And oh, my poor Northern friends, while the prices aren’t quite as good as in Italy, they are about half what we paid in Alko. Especially as there are all sorts of special offers, and services that will supply you with good, low cost wine, delivered to your door for free. We get all sorts of things delivered: bacon of a quality almost unknown in the benighted North (American Pekoni? no, sorry, really not); vegetables direct from the farmer through Growing Places, brought to our door, a tenner for a big box. It’s really incredibly handy having chaps in a van bring our groceries. And still cheaper than walking to K market. So on the matter of food and drink, Ipswich has Helsinki beat hands down. No salmiakki, of course, but that's a blessing, not a curse (though Grace would not agree).
15-all.
The Natives.
What with all this cheap alcohol, is it any wonder that the natives are so friendly? On our first day together in town, Grace (my eldest, age 9, and a Salmiakki-eating Finn at heart) asked “why is everyone talking to us?”. She was perplexed by the way everyone smiled, said good morning in the street though we’d never met, and at school after her first day, she was quite taken aback by the way that every girl in her class spoke to her at least once. In Finland, she said, they’d have left her alone. But she has made friends very quickly, and so have we.
I love my Finnish friends, and I hope they know it. And there are many Finns who are very gregarious, by Finnish standards at least. But making new friends here has been incredibly easy.
Ipswich leads, 30-15.
Bureaucracy.
But then there’s the paperwork. While Finnish bureaucracy is complex, it is at least generally consistent, and, with your personal id number and some photo id you can do just about everything you need to do, from opening a bank account, to renting a house. Here? No, really not. It’s absolutely fucking ridiculous. Proof of address that works for the county council regarding school places for the children is not accepted by the bank as proof of address when opening an account. I could go on, but I’d get very cross and it would ruin my evening. It’s almost as if all the rules were made in the 15th century, and never really updated properly. Oh, no, that’s actually exactly what’s happened.
30-all.
Visitors.
Speaking of people: they actually visit the UK. And we are only an hour from London. So far, in the last two months I have seen more of my international friends than I’ve seen in the last two years in Finland. By the end of this month, I’ll have seen three sets of Americans, one set of Canadians, and two sets of Finns (both of which are over here not just to see us, so count as “foreign friends visiting the UK anyway, and meeting up with us too”). That is a massive win.
with Sean Hayes at the Tower of London.
Ipswich leads, 40-30
Housing.
Now for house prices. Dear god, this island has gone insane. Badly designed, badly insulated houses, with poky little rooms (because proper sized rooms are too expensive to heat even by English standards), with appalling plumbing (see above) and rubbish infrastructure (the bins, don’t get me started), cost twice what the closest equivalent would cost in Finland. It’s insane, and driven entirely by a mania for ‘getting up the property ladder’, that makes the house primarily an investment and only secondarily a home. It’s absurd, and quite revolting. Sure, some of them are draughty and cold because they are truly ancient and therefore very beautiful.
That's a trade I could be persuaded to make. But houses built in the last 80 years just cannot justify their crapness by any claim to a compensating beauty.
Deuce
Culture.
But around these terrible houses, there is so much going on! Theatre, concerts, you name it. Yes, I know that they have stuff like that in Finland, but to be honest most of it is either a) very expensive, b) crap, or c) in Finnish, which Michaela doesn’t understand well enough to enjoy a play in, and, truth be told, neither do I. Honestly, I hate to say it, but the cultural life here in the small town of Ipswich is at least as good, and cheaper, than we got in the capital of Finland. Plus we can and do go up to London for day trips to see things and people.
Advantage Ipswich
Data
How anybody gets anything done on their phones here escapes me. I signed up to the ‘fastest data' in the UK with EE. I am willing to believe that somewhere in the British Isles, there is at least one spot where, when the stars align, and the moon is waxing, and you hold your phone just so, you might actually get a decent 4G connection, for ten whole seconds at a time. In my actual home in Ipswich, not a mile from the centre of town, I barely even get phone coverage, let alone mobile data. And they have the absolute gall to charge through the nose for it! I switched to Three, but that doesn't seem any better (though they do have decent calls to Finland rates, and I can use my phone there too without incurring extra charges. Who knows, in Finland I might actually get a signal). And get this: even when you can get a signal: data is limited! to like 1 or 2 gigs a month! In Finland you can't even buy a limited data plan- you just pay extra for the speed. Though in Finland, you do actually get the promised speeds, at least some of the time. And it costs about half of what we pay here for a reasonable plan, such as 4gb/month.
Mobile telephony came of age in Finland, and the UK is lagging about a decade behind. It's very sad, really.
Deuce.
And dammit, I’m running out of space, and it’s starting to rain. Looks like we’ll have to call it a draw so far, cover the court, open a bottle of wine, and schedule a rematch for later!
I am not a doctor. And even if I was, I’m not your doctor. If you have any kind of medical issue, don’t get your info from the internet, still less from swordsmanship instructors. Do some research, then go talk to your doctor. Clear?
I dropped 10kg from round my waist, almost by accident. Here’s what happened. I’ll go back to the very beginning, so you can see the process.
In the beginning:
In the late nineties, the metabolism I inherited from my father started to kick in, and without my really noticing it, I had to let my belt out, notch by notch. I got this belt from my sister when I was 21, so I’ve had it round my waist for about half my life. It tells a sorry tale…
See the grooves?
Back when I was 21, I wore this belt on its fourth or fifth notch from the end. By the middle of 2000, it was on the third. Then, after coming down from the mountain and deciding to open my school, I started training at dawn every day, on the top of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh (I do love my traditional martial arts training tropes). In about three weeks, I lost 7kg (15 lb), from round my waist. 3 weeks later, the weight was back, but round my shoulders. I had to get a new jacket because my old one was suddenly too tight. I was 26, with all the metabolic advantages that gives.
When I got to Finland in 2001, what with the stress of starting the school, and lots and lots of training, I ate what I wanted and stayed skinny. On a normal day, I was training for two or three hours and teaching for two or three. I had to eat every three hours or so, or Hungry Guy would appear and make everyone’s life miserable. The closest I have come to murder was probably when I hadn’t eaten for four hours, went to a Thai restaurant for an emergency feed, and the waiter seemed to dilly dally about getting the food on the table.
I (mis)diagnosed the problem as too-low body weight. I was about 73kg at that point. I ate like crazy to try to put the weight on, but was too stressed and training too much to gain an ounce. Then I met Michaela in 2005, and chilled the fuck out. One of the ways I knew she was the One was that within a few months of meeting her, I’d put on the 4kg (9lb) I was looking for. That did help with Hungry Guy, but only up to a point. I still needed to eat every four hours or so. At this point, my weight was up to 77kg, so I instituted a rule: if my weight got up to 80kg, I’d cut out sugar and alcohol until it was back below 78. Then I could eat what I want. This very often (maybe 5 times a week) included an entire 200g bar of chocolate after dinner, ‘shared’ with Michaela (she’d get maybe one row, so, an eighth of it).
What with one thing and another, by April 2014 I was seriously considering adjusting the rule to anything below 80kg is fine, over 82 cut out sugar and alcohol. (Self-indulgent bullshit is a specialty of mine.) I was at 83kg, and my belt was on the penultimate notch. As you can see, it still has the deepest groove; it had been there for a long time. I had already read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories, so I should have known better. But sugar, oh, sugar; sweet heaven.
The Slow Carb diet
Then, on a flight to Melbourne, I read Tim Ferriss’s The Four Hour Body. It was the final straw. There was just no way I could justify the level of sugar I was eating, especially given my family history of high blood pressure, my father’s serious weight problem, and everything I had ever read on the topic of metabolism, nutrition (not counting the junk science rubbish that occasionally made it onto my reading list; I highly recommend Bad Science by Ben Goldacre to help you distinguish the good from the bad), health and longevity.
When I got to Australia, I decided to try the Slow Carb diet. Let me summarise it for you.
1) No fast carbs; no sugar, no starch. No potatoes, no rice, no bread, no biscuits, no pasta, no white food except cauliflower, in other words.
2) Eat the same few meals; perhaps half a dozen different dishes.
3) Don’t drink calories. Avoid alcohol, sweet drinks (especially sodas, obviously, but less obviously also fruit juice).
4) Cheat one day a week. On that day, eat and drink whatever you like, as much as you like. But just one day a week.
You can see the blog post that started it all here.
If you think about it, rule 3 is really just the same as rule 1, and rule 2 is a bit boring, and rule 4 should be optional. What I ended up doing is basically just rule 1, and I was reasonably strict about it.
On the day I arrived in Australia, jetlagged to hell, and about to teach a 4 day intensive seminar, my metabolism was still demanding to eat every 3-4 hours. So obviously, I never went anywhere without back-up chocolate. I arrived on Friday morning and started Slow-carb right away, and taught Saturday-Tuesday, five or six hours a day. Up until this point there was no way I could get through a 6 hour seminar without a sugar hit in the afternoon. I’d crash about 3pm, sugar-up to get me through to the end, then need dinner, large and fast.
On the Monday, after teaching for three days straight, I was digging through my bag for something, and found my chocolate stash. In three days of teaching, in the most energy-demanding situation (jet-lag, long days), I had forgotten to eat in the afternoons. I was astonished.
This was because I was not spiking my blood sugar at any point, and so was not crashing. Cutting out starch and sugar proved to be a complete game-changer, because it evened out my energy demands. Please note though that I was not cutting out carbs, only fast carbs. I was still eating about eight tons of vegetables every day, and a lot of meat (the food in Australia is superb!).
Slow Carb, Low Carb, and Ketogenic:
Let's take a moment to define a few things:
1) Slow Carb v. Low Carb. They are very different. A classic low-carb diet gives you most of your calories from fat and protein. A slow carb diet gives you a lot of carbohydrates, but all with a low glycaeimic index, so you avoid the blood-sugar spike. I think any diet that tells you to steer clear of vegetables is fundamentally dangerous.
2) Ketogenic versus Low Carb. A ketogenic diet, as the name suggests, is a diet that keeps your body running on fat. It is very high fat, and obviously restricts carbs, but it also restricts protein. This is because protein is easily broken down into glucose, and so your body will switch back to a glucose based energy delivery system, rather than stay in a fat based energy delivery system (a state called ketosis). Ketogenic diets are mostly used medicinally to treat children that have drug-resistant seizures. I personally would not recommend long-term ketosis, because it is very hard to do in the modern world, and there is no evidence that any human population has ever subsisted long-term on a ketogenic diet (the Inuit may be an exception, but probably not). Ketogenic diets should be further subdivided into calorie-restricted (less than 1000 per day) and unrestricted. The best-known proponents of the unrestricted ketosis diet are Dom D’Agostino and Peter Attia (both medical doctors). Their podcasts and websites are well worth a listen/look.
Bye-bye Hungry Guy
What I was doing in Australia was a not-terribly-strict Slow Carb diet; after class, at dinner, I quite often wolfed down a bunch of fast carbs in the form of beer, and chips with my steak, that sort of thing. But breakfast and lunch were fast-carb-free. The difference in my energy levels was enough to sell me on the idea. But when I got home less than three weeks later and trod on the scales, I got a shock. I was down from 83 to 74kg, and had not once, even once, gone hungry. I ate like a pig, just not starch or sugar. I was so pleased with the results I decided to keep it up. I now hover around the 72-73kg mark.
Most incredibly, Hungry Guy has disappeared. To test this, in September 2014 I decided to see what would happen if I missed a meal or two. I had lunch on Monday at about 1pm, taught class on Monday night, ate nothing when I got home, had one cup of coffee instead of breakfast on Tuesday, missed lunch, and ate dinner with the kids at 6pm. So, about 29 hours of not eating anything. And I was completely fine. Not even that hungry. Certainly no dizziness, or feeling of weakness. Nothing associated with low blood sugar problems. It's also why I wrote “avoid sugar” as one of my top 3 stay-sane-and-healthy tips for modern living.
Fasting
This has lead me to do some further research on fasting; it comes in all shapes and sizes. The simplest is just don’t eat for a while. I would not try that without preparation, if I were you. The health benefits of at least occasional ketosis are well-documented; I think of it as a metabolic spring-clean. But you can fast for a couple of days and not get into ketosis because your body breaks down your muscles to produce glucose. So if you don’t want to a) feel too hungry and b) lose muscle mass, it’s a very good idea to get into ketosis before you fast. Here’s how.
1) Be very strict about fast carbs for a week or two. This gets you off any sugar-high rollercoaster. When you fast your blood sugar will probably fall a bit, so make sure that it’s not a dramatic drop.
2) Follow a ketogenic diet for a couple of days. Use pee-sticks to make sure it’s working. Not everyone can handle a ketogenic diet, so if it makes you feel ill, stop. Try step 3 instead.
3) You can dose yourself with exogenous ketones to speed up the process of switching over. Exogenous ketones or ketogenic foods that I have used successfully (as measured by pee-sticks) include medium chain triglyceride (MCT) oil, branch-chain amino acids (BCAAs), and raspberry ketones. When your pee-sticks tell you you are in a moderate state of ketosis, such as about 2-3 mmol/L, then stop eating. See how 24 hours feels. If you get really hungry, or dizzy, or your blood pressure drops, or anything like that, then BREAK YOUR FAST. With breakfast, obviously. But unless there are some odd medical issues, 24 hours should be no big deal. Just remember to drink plenty of water. Tea and coffee are also ok.
Just to test this, last Thursday I skipped breakfast, and ate lunch at about 2pm. At 11am I had a ketone level at or close to 0. Lunch was a small salad, with a tin of smoked mackerel in oil, and two teaspoons of MCT oil, and a splash of olive oil. I also took 2 125mg capsules of rasperry ketones (Hi-tech Pharmaceuticals brand) and a 6.33g dose of BCAA's (USPlabs “ModernBCAA+” brand). At 4pm my peesticks told me that I was in ketosis at a level of 4mmol/L. Easy enough!
I am currently about 73kg, stronger than I was in April 2014, and my belt is wearing a new groove at notch 5. If I fasten it at the deeply-worn second notch, there is enough room under my belt now for two bottles of wine.
Further thoughts on fasting:
1) I got all of my weight-loss done without fasting. It’s not necessary for that purpose, but there is a ton of evidence to suggest that it is good for you to fast occasionally. Here are a couple of articles on it: one very pro: Mercola and one from the UK National Health Service, specifically about 5:2 intermittent fasting, which I don't do, which is more measured: NHS.)Whether the benefits come from being in ketosis (which can be achieved without fasting), or from the short-term calorie restriction, or some other mechanism, is not clear yet. But it is abundantly clear that throughout human history, we have had to be able to function for short periods without food, and indeed many traditional cultures (including Christianity’s Lent and Islam’s Ramadan) incorporate longer fasts into their yearly calendar.
2) There is nothing inherently virtuous in not eating. It’s just a training tool, like push-ups and meditation. Do it because it generates specific benefits.
3) Don’t overdo it. Fasting gets much easier with practice. These days, I routinely fast for 24 hours with no preparation, about once a week. It does wonders for re-setting my metabolism. After Christmas I was so full I didn’t eat for 48 hours. No biggy. I’m planning a 5 day fast for later in the year; it takes planning because eating meals with the children is a big part of family life. If you don’t have kids, then it’s probably much easier.
5) For me, the point of fasting is to reap the metabolic benefits and to test that my diet allows me to be free of the need to eat for 24 hours or so. I never feel deprived when fasting, so I don’t feel any need to ‘make up for it’ with a stupid blow-out. I do stupid blow-outs every now and then just because I like them, and because my habits seem to be good, I can get away with the occasional splurge.
6) I think that as a martial artist I just jolly well ought to be able to work fine without food for a short time. Not eat for a day or two, and still fight. In feels simply unmartial to me to be slavishly dependent on a totally reliable food source for my effectiveness. An army marches on its stomach, yes. But I don't think there has ever been an army in combat that didn't go hungry at least occasionally.
Some further thoughts:
If you are trying to control your weight, try changing one thing a time. The first big thing I would is add vegetables. A decent serving of green vegetables at every meal will do wonders all by itself to make up for any dietary deficiencies, and fill you up a bit, which will reduce the amount of other stuff you eat. Also, the fibre in the vegetables will slow down sugar absorption, at least up to a point.
Then, the next thing to try is to cut out fast carbs. Cheat once a week if you must, but make sure you are always eating lots and lots of vegetables, and some decent high-quality fat. So fry your vegetables in organic butter 🙂 If this is too hard, then do it for just one meal a day, ideally breakfast.
The scales are a very blunt instrument. You might drop a bunch of weight, and actually be getting fatter, if you are losing muscle mass instead of the lard. I would take waist measurement over weight as an indicator of progress (see that belt?). I would also take all measurements at the same time of day, on the same day, once a week and not more often. This is much more reliable and less depressing than watching your weight fluctuate from morning to night (as it invariably does).
Systems are better than goals (as Scott Adams says in his interesting How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big). If you are trying to get your weight down to a certain point, every day that you are not at your target weight, you are a failure. This is not good. Better to try a different system (such as replacing your starch intake with extra vegetables) and just see what happens. Systems are sustainable. Goals are less so, because when you reach them, then what?
So, that’s how I lost 10kg without really trying. Will it work for you? I’ve no idea. But you can try it without risk, because all it requires you to do is eat lots of vegetables and cut out one type of food that you don’t really need: fast carbs.
And let me reiterate: I'm not your doctor. I believe in trying things out sensibly, and building healthy habits. This worked for me; we have a lot of DNA in common, so it's probably at least worth trying for you. I wouldn't put it more strongly than that.
One of the great advantages of being a professional swordsman in the 21st century is that nobody can reasonably expect you to be normal. As you might imagine, I engage in all sorts of odd behaviour, in the name of good physical and mental health, above and beyond simply swinging swords around in a historical and martial manner. Of course I do meditation and breathing exercises, nothing unusual there. And all sorts of physical jerks, push-ups and whatnot. That’s not odd, really: million of people do those. But these three habits are the ones that our current culture is most skewed against, and so by that standard count as weird.
My top three bizarro practices, from a 21st century perspective, are:
1) Avoid sugar.
Reading up on the effects of refined sugar has lead me to believe that after smoking, our addiction to the sugar high is probably the worst thing we do to ourselves. Why is it that we can control and tax alcohol and tobacco as legal luxury drugs, and not do the same to sugar?* Since cutting the sugar high out of my daily routine and relegating it to occasional treat status, I have tightened my belt by two notches, and most importantly, have stopped crashing in the afternoons. It used to be such that when teaching all day, I would have to dose up on sugar in mid-afternoon to function. Now that does not happen; nor do I need a sugar fix to teach in the evenings. We just got through the week-long Fiore Extravaganza, the most exhausting seminar of the year, and I went from start to finish without ever getting seriously physically tired. That’s absence of sugar for you. It was my one most serious cause of chronic fatigue. And it’s in everything! Read the labels on your food; maltodextrin is one of the very few chemicals with a higher glycaemic index than glucose; high fructose corn syrup does not belong in the human body at all; sucrose, dextrose anything with -ose on the end, it’s all poisonous shit.
And starch is sugar too, sort of.
About 5 years ago I found out that I am allergic to wheat, which lead me to naturally cut out a lot of starch; (until I found all these excellent wheat free breads, beers, pastas etc.). It is very hard to eliminate wheat from the modern diet; our entire economy has been based on wheat for three thousand years or so (much like the USA’s is based on corn). Simply cutting wheat did wonders for me, if not for the ease with which I can find food I can eat. Cutting out all other starch sources (pasta, rice, potatoes etc.) has also been hugely helpful; I don’t avoid them the way I have to with wheat, I just don’t eat them that often; about once a week or so. Starch breaks down very quickly into glucose, and thus behaves much like ordinary sugar. I eat enormous amounts of proper vegetables instead, usually fried in olive oil and garlic, often with bacon…
Squatting on a rock. Note, not actually having a crap.
Really it’s astonishing when you think about it; about half of all my beginners cannot squat on their haunches. In other words, can’t take a dump properly. For millennia, mankind have crapped in the woods and fields, and squatted down to do it. Now we enthrone ourselves in porcelain splendour, and grunt and strain to do what should be easy.
Squatting should be a natural rest position. The human body is built to stand, lie down, and squat. I often squat down to play with my kids, read a book, wait for a bus, whatever. Any time my legs or back are tired, I squat. People look at me funny. I don’t care. Chairs are a recent, very welcome and excellent in their place, invention; but healthy they ain’t. Inability to squat is a modern phenomenon, with hard-to-measure consequences. But I always find a bin or a block to prop my feet up on when having a crap; it puts my legs in a much more natural position. One of the advantages of having little kids is that there are standing blocks in our bathroom anyway, so the kids can reach the tap; these do double duty as footstools in the bog.
On a related note, I have played around with flat-soled shoes for years; heeled shoes are needed for riding with open stirrups and not otherwise. Though they can be gorgeous, modern heeled shoes are simply bad for most peoples' back, legs and feet. Barefoot is better. And on a recent trip to Verona to see my friends fight in the Tourneo del Cigno Bianco, I tried out my medieval shoes in the medieval town, and found them to be a perfect compromise between the ghastly modern barefoot shoes, and decent leather ones. With thin flexible leather soles, they are now my normal footwear in all non-freezing weather. I have yet to find a good flat-soled winter boot, and this being Finland, WINTER IS COMING. Any advice?
3) Unplug.
Outside. You can't beat it.
When I was working as a cabinet maker, and more so now as a hobbyist, I use machines to do the grunt work, and hand tools for the interesting and enjoyable stuff. Machines get the job done; tools make the work a pleasure. For some people, using an electric drill is a step too far towards mechanisation (see Tom Fidgen, for example); for others, they love the roar as the planer starts up. I am making the distinction not on the grounds of the machine itself, but on the user’s relationship with it. Machines to save labour, tools to enhance it. Can you imagine a woodworker who allowed remote access to his table saw? To allow his customers, or friends even, to determine when it’s on and when it’s ok to turn it off? No, me neither. So why do we feel that our friends, co-workers, or clients should have any say in when our own personal pocket phones are to be on or off? Or how often we should check our emails? It’s madness! When I feel like my phone is a tool, a pleasure to use and a thing that is making it easier for me to achieve my ends, I have it on. Otherwise, I turn it off. I check my email when I feel like it; every hour or so when I am eagerly awaiting a message from an old friend about something I care about; every day or so just to check in on whatever things other people might want from me. But sometimes not for a few days, or even a week. And you know what? As nobody’s life depends on my work, nobody has yet died for want of an email from me. Your situation may be different, but ask yourself this: what's the worst that could happen?
There are some people for whom I am always on call. My wife, my kids, my siblings and parents, and maybe five or six close friends. They can demand my immediate attention at any hour, though with the exception of my kids they wield this power with commendable restraint. The rest of the world, even those lovely people who buy my books, come to my classes, those on whom my livelihood depends, of which group I assume you, as a reader of my blog, are likely a member? Nope. Sorry. There is nothing truly urgent in the world of swordsmanship. By all means contact me, I'm happy to hear from you. Just don't expect me to reply immediately.
Recommended reading: none. Go outside and play instead. Or pick up a real book.
So, there are my top three. Bear in mind though, that these are habits, not laws. I don't expect hosts at a dinner party to cut sugar for me; I do sometimes wear my utterly fab and lovely heeled shoes; my favourite armchair has an imprint of my arse deeply worn into it. And I have been known to check email when I should not. Part of my approach to life is the idea that habits have deeper consequences than one-off or rare occurrences; in swordsmanship training, in health matters, and in general. One cigarette won't kill you, but smoking probably will. I never follow any training routine religiously. For some people, whatever behavioural changes they try need to be thought of as laws, or they find they slip back into bad habits too easily. Do what works for you, and let healthy habits be their own reward. I don't know who's reading this, but I'm pretty sure you're a decent person who deserves to be healthy.
You can’t make a living by cutting sugar, squatting, and turning off your phone. You can just make your life much, much healthier. Which makes for a better living.
So, what are your top stay-sane-and-healthy tips?
*In Finland, sugar in candies is taxed as a luxury, but not in doughnuts, cookies etc. And taxed at the point of sale, not at the point where the food companies buy it. I'd like to see sugar-containing food of any kind sold separately, and all taxed like single malt or cigars. It would be too damned expensive for food manufacturers to get us hooked with the white stuff. We'd all be healthier for it. And the taxes would pay for the insulin, cardiac resuscitations, cancer wards and other medical expenses that our illnesses from our sugar fixation require. Let sugar be the new nicotine!
