Are What You Eat

“You are what you eat” is mostly literal. Our bodies regenerate every seven to ten years. When I started yoga, my diet had mostly descended to what I called “the triumvirate of happiness”. If completely literal, I would have become the love child of a mango juice, white magnum ice-cream, and a microwave Tikka Chicken Masala curry from the local Little Sainsbury’s by the Lower Richmond Rd petrol station. I was living by myself and this was my default “because you are working hard” treat to myself. 

When I got into the habit of going straight from work to yoga, my diet also improved because I would have some yogi soup after the class. The magnum ice cream was replaced with an oat cookie, and the juice with some tea. Learning to cook is not unlike learning a language, and often needs someone to show you. You can get CEOs who don’t know how to fry an egg, because they have never prioritised being competent at life. Either because they were well supported, or they allowed their body to fall apart. It is not unusual for someone not to know how to make mash potatoes, or even have tried various vegetables. 

Our palates change over time. There are tricks to expand your repertoire. If you are trying to shift towards a more plant-based diet, you need to learn the vocabulary of eating more widely. As a South African, I come from a big meat-eating culture. I have also got a weird, quirky relationship with fruit. Particularly messy fruit. Something odd from my childhood (my excuse) gives me obstacles with regards to the textures, smells, and spray. You can get over that, I am told. I try with smoothies, which I enjoy and make occasional more direct attempts. 

I did discover soups as a similarly fantastic indirect middle-of-English-winter diet shifter. I got a Ninja Blender which both blends and cooks. You can put stock with any vegetable and have great soup half an hour later. The more you learn the components of cooking, the easier it is to solve both the health and the taste issues with joy, which boosts energy levels much more than the kick of my three yummies.

convenience

Mental Health

You don’t “go on a diet”. Diet is what you eat. We all eat. The question is, what is the quality of food you put in your mouth. The same is true of Mental Health. I don’t believe working on proper Mental Health is something you do when you have had a breakdown. It isn’t something you do when your relationships aren’t working, or you are wrapped with anxiety and behavioural problems because of a horrible childhood incident. Proper Mental Health is just one vital part of living a full and meaningful life. Making sure we are aware of the quality of our maintenance and upkeep. It’s all connected. What we put in our mouths. How we move our bodies. How we draw in and release breath. How we sleep, process, and recover. Looking after Mental Health isn’t a sign of weakness. It is a sign of the resilience and endurance necessary to release your own special creativity.

Conscious Eating

I am not a vegetarian. I don't eat particularly badly, but I am not even close to a role model. The ethical arguments (Factory Farming) and existential arguments (Climate Change) for reduced meat consumption are slam dunks, but every time I make a concerted effort, it changes the relationship I have with food. I am not an excessive eater, and do enough exercise, so food simply becomes a big source of enjoyment. Comfort food. Cultural food. Food that keeps us connected. Like I believe investing is a team sport, I think the same is true of diet. It's much easier if we eat better together, and it isn't that relevant if any particular individual is reducing their meat consumption, if they get swamped by others eating up the left-overs. 

Afterthought

Somewhere between narcissism and self-negation, sits self-care. We over-simplify into Good and Bad. Our stories, conversations and play all reinforce the things that make us work better together. One of the things that made us work better together in a world of scarcity is hard work. Effort. The ability to prioritise and focus on things that add explicit, demonstrable value. To avoid things that are indulgent. Self-care is mostly internal. Proper exercise. Proper diet. Proper relaxation. Proper breathing. Constructive and caring thought patterns. None of this is externally obvious. We can't see the growth. We can't count it. So we don't prioritise it. Every day, we get up and go to work. Till we can't because we haven't looked after ourselves. Self-care is not indulgent. It shouldn't be an afterthought.

Endurance

'Hara Hachi bu' means eat until you are 80% full. Life is not a sprint. Part of the skill of Endurance is the ability to hold something back. Full Commitment may seem like you need to give everything to every situation. That is short-sighted. Truly caring about things means you detach a little. Detach 20%. Keep a little bit of space. This enables you to keep things ticking. To focus on the basics. The mechanics. Eating, breathing, relaxing, exercising and building constructive patterns of thought. Then you can dive into the relationships and creative exercises that give life meaning.

Presentation Zen

Saucepan

Half of our job is looking after ourselves. Even if we care deeply about something, half of our job is protecting that ability to care. My friend Galeo introduced me to the idea of being a 'Half-hearted fanatic'. I use a tool I learned through Yoga. 5 simple points. Proper Exercise. Proper Breathing. Proper Relaxation. Proper Diet. Postive Thinking and Meditation. These are all things we do anyway. We have to do them to survive. But do we do them properly? Consciously? Sometimes the thing that drives us becomes such an obsession that we forget to survive. Life is water, but if it slowly boils, the frog figures that out too late.

Check the Temperature

Not About You

I have had a couple of attempts at becoming a Vegetarian. I am completely convinced that we need to dramatically reduced our meat consumption. The two most compelling reasons for me are environmental sustainability, (the amount of food needed to produce meat) and the horrors of factory farming. I am not vegetarian.

The push back I have is that it is not that relevant if I, Trevor Black, am a vegetarian. It is very relevant if the 7.5 Billion people on the planet are eating too much meat. The minute I put myself on the moral high ground and start preaching to others that they too should do what I am doing, my experience has been that defence mechanisms kick in. Whatever the issue.

We are nudged. We move from where we are, not from where others want us to be. The best form of judgement, in my experience, is when someone who likes me and is on my side says, 'do you think we are doing this wrong?'

The same is true of the other messy issues we are working on. I am not a fan of pitch fork attacks on individuals who get it wrong. If someone gets it wrong, we have gotten it wrong. Whether the issues is racism, privilege, sexism, homophobia, intolerance or any of the other ills we perceive in others. It is amazing, for example, how in South Africa (which is fundamentally a very religious, conservative society) someone who is very aware of race and gender issues can still be homophobic. Someone who is liberal can still be unaware of their privilege. A feminist can still be racist.

There is a push for 'personal' experience and to speak from your perspective. From your 'lived experience'. While we can only see things from our perspective, we would do well to own all our challenges.

If you live in a racist society, and you are not racist, well... it's not about you. 

Five Points

Even in our own version of Utopia, we would likely be uncomfortable, anxious, and dreaming of alternatives. Reality can't compete with our imaginations, and emotions. The best I think we can do is find more beautiful questions. In the mean time, it is easy to spin our wheels, and feel stuck. The Yogi who brought Sivananda Yoga to the West felt it was best to keep it simple. While you are searching for difficult answers, set a solid base by answering 5 much easier, beautiful questions. Are you exercising? Are you breathing well? Are you making space for proper relaxation? Are you eating properly? How is your mental health? Proper exercise, breathing, relaxation, diet and positive thinking is a great base for coping with whatever life throws.

Setting Boundaries

There is a real conflict between what we want when we are cool, calm and collected, and when emotions get involved. Emotions are awesome. They are the stuff of life. The juice. However, they mean that in the moment, we are not going to make the same decisions we would if we were an avatar. If we were controlling ourselves from a distance. If we had Self Control.

Controlling an Angry Avatar

I am relatively good at getting up in the morning when I am forced to. I probably fall into the morning person category, even though I love sleep. When I was doing the daily commute thing, Morning Me used to battle between the very unpleasant tube journey if I slept in, and the very comfy bed if I didn't move. Being squashed against some sweaty, hairy, bearded man doesn't sound attractive to me. So I got up.

Another example of useful self-control was snacking and Yoga. I used to get home from work just before a Yoga class at 8pm. From 5pm onwards Tummy Me would be weighing the yumminess of various snacks on offer versus the feeling of arching your back, holding your ankles, and rolling around on your stomach. Yoga is fantastic when you feel light. Not so much when you are stuffed. It wasn't a rational choice that stopped me from getting those ridiculously yummy, chocolate filled doughnuts from Leon. It was a tummy battle, and feeling great in Yoga won. 

Everything in moderation, including moderation

I think we can set traps/constraints for ourselves to control for the situations where we don't do quite what we would want. Like parenting our inner toddler, not providing any boundaries isn't freedom. Sometimes constraints allow for more creativity. We can script for situations where we know we usually don't behave in the way we want.

I started taking the bus on the way home, partly because being above the ground was more pleasant, but also because the bus didn't pass a stand with chocolates. On a commute, I knew that after a long day at work I always 'deserved' a chocolate. Today I had always 'worked really hard'. My inner toddler is adorable. I love my inner toddler. There is no way I can so no. The bus meant I didn't have to.

My inner toddler still wins lots of battles. I still, weirdly, don't eat messy fruit. But I am getting more cunning. Slowly.

Bubbles and Walls

Who says something often matters much more than what they say. An object's story often matters much more that what the object can do. How we feel determines our opinion much more than what we think. Even if we can't make a rational argument, we know the answer.

People are essentialists. We will value a piece of clothing that has been worn by a celebrity more than an identical piece that hasn't. We will even value an unwashed piece of clothing by that celebrity more! If someone we know to be senior, someone with gravitas, tells us a pearl of wisdom we will listen with bated breath. Exact same words coming from a minion and we will laugh them off. If we are given a mug, and then asked how much we will sell it for, the price will be higher than if we are offered a mug or money. We owned the mug. That changes everything. It becomes part of our essence.

Part of our own essence is the story we tell ourselves about our identity and the world. The story fills the gaps that we don't understand so that we have confidence to get on with things. A core part of that story is that we are good people. Nothing gets people more fired up than feeling judged. Our feelings of good and bad are so deeply wound up in our story that they don't change overnight. We have to overcome the massive barrier that allows us to think we are still good people, and we always were. Even if something we used to think is repugnant to us now.

Source: explosm.net HT Cammy

An example of this is the argument around eating meat, which becomes a discussion around factory farming and climate change when it gets to the 'moral bits'. I think it is pretty difficult to engage with the facts of the story and come away without your head spinning. Watching some documentaries about how we are treating animals is usually enough to buy a few weeks of fruit and veg for dinner. Culturally though, meat eating is so much a part of our story that it is ridiculously difficult to change. One of the hardest parts is being in social settings. If you refuse meat, you can be socially difficult. Special meals may be required, or simply not being able to be an unfussy guest makes things awkward. Your story may be that you adjust easily to other people's stories. More awkward is when people feel you are judging their behaviour. Because essentially you are (even if you don't make a big deal of it).

The easiest way to deal with offence is to leave the group. To defriend someone who has a morally repugnant view. Find like-minded people. The problem with this is that what we do as individuals is to some degree irrelevant. If a handful of people give up meat, nothing changes. If there is a massive shift towards plant based food, and farming techniques become more humane, and we get a handle on the climate stuff, then 95% of the battle is won.

That is just one example. There are plenty of other places where good people disagree on things that make them question whether the other people are good at all. We quite simply can not understand how the other person could possibly disagree. To do that we may need to let go of our story. That requires bravery. That requires empathy, compassion and to be honest... acting. We have to lean into the role of seeing the world from their perspective. We have to trick our body into feeling the way they do to even start to understand. Discussion isn't enough.

If we retreat into our bubbles, the bubbles eventually become walls.

A Little Maya

The advantage of living in a world with so many different ways of doing things is that no assumptions go unchallenged. We need to pick a path and having nagging doubts about the forks in the road we didn't choose, we create stories that help us believe our way is the right way. Stories are awesome. Parallel stories keep us honest. Peter Menzel & Faith D'Aluisio tell a wonderful story in 'What I Eat' with photos from around the world of 80 Diets. I wrote in 'Triumverate of Yumminess' about a cunning diet that lets you eat whatever you want as long as you take a photo of it. We talk about pets and reflecting their owners personalities, it is amazing paging through this book how well it seems someone's story is told through a picture of what they put in their mouths.

I have some friends who are taking the story of what they put in their mouths quite seriously. They have started converting their garden into a pretty hardcore urban farm along with 5000 or so earthworms. One of my favourite movie scenes is from Sideways, where Maya explains to Miles why she loves wine. It is worth adding a little Maya to our own diets. She describes the story of the wine. She revels in it. By the time it reaches her lips she has already savoured each little characteristic that makes the wine what it is. Drinking the wine becomes a conversation with the entire life of the wine. It becomes a performance in which you participate. We have to eat and drink to stay alive, but clearly this level of enjoyment is more than about staying alive. It is about living. I think growing your own food has a similar appeal. To have dug the ground yourself. To have watched the food grow. To have a story to savour.

Beyond the romance, a book looking at the diets of people around the world also tells many other stories. They look at the age, height, weight and caloric intake of the various people and diets. From very simple diets that struggle to fill the gap to competitive eaters. Taking photos of what you eat is one thing. Placing those photos next to what others eat is food for thought. 

Taste Buds

Taste evolves. One of the ways we like to describe ourselves is by our likes and dislikes - but those aren't static. For the first 34 years of my life I didn't drink coffee. I didn't like the taste and had been told it wasn't good for you so didn't really feel the need to tweak my buds. Then coffee houses started to become the new pubs. Instead of meeting down the pub for a pint, we started meeting people for a coffee. When you don't drink coffee, your options are fairly limited. There are only so many occasions you can order hot chocolate with a poker face. Like whiskey and wine, there is also the attraction of the story behind the coffee. Where the beans come from. Exploring the different flavours. I think life is a little better when coloured by stories. So I pulled my taste buds into line and am now a coffee fan.  

Adventurous people like to talk about a willingness to try things once. You never know if you will like it. Sometimes it actually takes more than that. You have to train your taste buds. I can think of plenty of other things that I used to really dislike and then they became favourites. The idea of a Spinach and Ricotta pizza certainly didn't appeal to the younger me and is now something I will devour. In trying to shift my diet toward more plant based stuff, I am trying to add stuff rather than give stuff up. The idea being to find really tasty food I look forward to making. Scott Jurek talked about his Minnesota Winter Chili as being the thing that convinced him that eating plants didn't mean having to give up on taste. His book, 'Eat & Run' has a recipe at the end of each chapter and I decided this would be the first one I attempted and it is ridiculously yummy. I hesitate to say it is easy too, because the first time you do anything is never easy. Even going to the shop to get the ingredients is confusing. Then you don't know for sure if you are doing things right or if you are going to have to throw mountains of food out. Easy isn't easy till it is.

I think we should question first tastes and preferences when other people get a lot of joy from something. South Africans love it when people don't like biltong. It means more for them. One of the Brazilian equivalents I tasted last night is Brigadeiro. Friend Marianna and Roberto brought some over nervously saying that lots of non-Brazilians don't like these balls of delight (cooked condensed milk) which means more for them. Perhaps my taste buds had been trained by Koeksisters which are dough deep fried in syrup, but I wasn't a neigh-sayer. Yum.

I think the idea of Acquired Taste extends to learning which is why I am experimenting with the 'First 100 hour' concept. When you start learning a musical instrument, e.g. the piano, you have to build up physical fitness and strength in your fingers. It is physical, technical and academic. You have to learn to read music. You have to train your ear. You have to teach your hands to move independently. You have to do scales which are the equivalent of pushups and situps and can feel like a drag. For a creative, emotional person you can imagine them being keen but then being turned off by the initial slog. Josh Waitzkin talks of 'Numbers to leave numbers, form to leave form' when talking of chess and martial arts in terms of learning the groundwork till it becomes so entrenched that other stuff matters. That is the good stuff. The problem if you give things up because you are bad at the initial stages is that the initial stages may not be the thing that matters. The initial stages may just be an obstacle. The great musicians are the ones who tap into something else when the technical stuff disappears. When the mist lifts and they get in the zone tapping into their creativity. If we only ever do the things that taste good initially, we may miss out on the juice of life.

Don't always trust your taste buds. They are very very sneaky.

They're Losing

When we are taught to debate at school we are given a side of the argument. The objective is to win. I know there are many styles of debating, but I it would be interesting to see if there was one that could incorporate philosopher Daniel Dennett's four steps to arguing intelligently. The style I was used to was 3 speakers from the opposition (Opp) and three from the proposition (Pro). The order was - Pro 1, Opp 2, Pro 2, Opp 2, Opp 3, Pro 3. There was then a team that won the debate. It would be interesting to see if you could design competitive debates around finding agreement. I still struggle with party politics now where policies and ideas almost by definition have to create differences between the two options. What someone 'believes' is then decided by the party rather than the individual. Most supporters become members for life. They often define themselves in opposition to half their countrymen.

What if the role of the 2nd speaker was to articulate what the opposition said. The third speaker could then point out the stronger points in their argument, and ask some questions. The final speakers could then speak with the ability to change their view, and show the ability to incorporate new information after their ideas had been challenged. I am not suggesting a world where no competition exists and everyone is handed participation certificates, but it would be good if we practiced getting to really understand where alternate beliefs come from.

The counter argument is that some alternate beliefs are stupid and harmful. Free Speech doesn't mean we should give everyone the platform to speak. This is one of the challenges of public broadcasters being expected to maintain neutrality and giving equal time to various views independent of their merit. Perhaps the reason it is difficult is a reason Public Broadcasters shouldn't exist. With the spreading of ideas through Social Media (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Blogs etc.) becoming near free, we decide what to spread and what to block (for ourselves). We don't have to feed trolls. Perhaps the ease of spreading ideas means an end to party politics is near? We can all be on the same side. If we were able to take more regular votes nominating representatives for specific issues, perhaps we wouldn't have to give blanket power to individuals for a bunch of issues. The necessity for parties could make way for individual representatives? The individuals would be freer to seek to find agreement than to have to find areas to make their party unique.

While the year seems to have started quite violently, I think it is worth taking a step back. Space permits us to see the bigger picture and look for consistency in our ideas. We can also get perspective. Steven Pinker makes the strong case that we live in far more peaceful times than ever before in 'The Better Angels of Our Nature'. While we should carry on trying to make things better, we should also realise just how lucky we are. The most dangerous things we face at the moment are poverty, cars and what we put in our mouths. While an end to poverty is almost a choice, Google et al. try work on driverless cars and we can stop stuffing our faces with fat and sugar, we are also slowly winning the war against the much less potent but much more noisy forces. The reason they are terrorists is because they are losing.

Monotongue Life

I just made Moong Dal for the first time. Yesterday I ate a Mango for the first time. The one is more embarrassing that the other. Moong Dal is a literacy thing. Mango is a toddler thing. Much of what we put in our mouths and our heads is an accident of geography. 'Mother tongue' extends to our taste buds and our diets. The friend who just taught me to make Moong Dal learnt by helping her grandmother in the kitchen. Cooking was a part of her upbringing. She didn't use measurements, the ingredients have become words to her that she uses with the same ease as she speaks. She said her father was quite a cook. Her mother reserved her skills for groups of 50 or more. Most of her learning was with Gran.

Yellow Moong Dal

I also learnt to cook a few dishes from my mother, but cooking was largely a functional experience. We enjoyed the dishes we had and my Spaghetti Bolognaise is the kind of thing that legends are made of. It wasn't a continually changing, evolving hobby though. In fact, my repertoire narrowed over time to my favourites. Then I largely outsourced it to ready meals. I think eating healthily is a big contributor to happiness, but I am also trying to respond to various other challenges which make me think eating more of a plant based diet is worth trying. I am consciously trying to add things rather than trying to give things up though. I don't want it to feel at all self-sacrificial because I think the hero in me is a weakling. Expanding my diet feels very similar to learning a new language since there are a whole bunch of things I simply don't know how to cook, what they are, or how they taste. There is also the issue of having to train the taste buds. The idea of tasting something to see if you like it is only half the battle. There is stuff you may love... eventually. You have to get to the juice. Think of red wine, whisky, coffee or any other number of acquired tastes. I admit freely I have very little knowledge of spices. We talk about variety being the spice of life and yet without training you can live a monotongue life.

Source: Elite Spice

The Mango bit is a bit more embarrassing. I think I have even written about it on this blog before to publicly shame myself into eating more fruit. The stubborn, irrational toddler in me still gets a gagging feeling when handling messy fruit. There is something about the texture that makes me, to overuse the word, irrationally cringe. So yesterday I treated myself half parent, half toddler and sliced up a mango, breathing through the cringes. I kept telling myself how much I love mango juice. Then I ate it piece by piece. 'Now that wasn't so bad was it' big Trev tells toddler Trev. I even considered making train noises as I lifted the pieces to my mouth.

What my Moong Dal teacher did suggest though was to go visit Farmer's markets. Add to the story. The story and the friends was what convinced me to train my pallette for red wine and coffee. The idea of finding places that release food from being chore, and allow a tale from seed to tongue with all the senses involved in between sounds rather appealing. 

Exciting times.

Do Things

'Sometimes you just do things'. Scott Jurek is an ultramarathoner who has won many of the sports most challenging events on multiple occasions. In 'Eat & Run' he tells his story, but it could easily double as a textbook for what I am looking at in this blog. Although criticised as oversimplifying things, I always liked Malcolm Gladwell's 'Outliers' for the simple idea that it takes away the excuse of not having the talent for something. Even the talented have to put the effort in. Jurek takes it beyond talent or physical attributes. His claim is that in ultras it is something else that matters. It moves to the space of a deep inner struggle and playing fields are levelled. 'Born to Run' talks about the success of women, for example, in competing with and often dominating men at the highest level. Ann Trason was a pioneer (and also happened to win the Comrades Marathon).

What I like about Jurek's approach is how holistic it is, and how imperfect. He was learning all the way. He never stopped reading and took every opportunity to tweak. It seems fairly common click bait to 'debunk' the 10,000 hours concept popularised by Outliers. Even one of my favourites, Maria Popova, does it in 'Debunking the Myth of the 10,000 hour rule'. There are plenty of things that people can have spent 10,000 hours doing and still be awful. Think driving. Think sex. Think discussing tough issues. The point (which Gladwell made) is purposeful practise. Anders Ericsson is a leading academic on the subject and works with multiple people to understand the deliberate acquisition of expertise. The key is being conscious. While our automatic performance is very powerful, allowing us to delegate much of our activity to our elephant as soon as we are good enough. If the rider can stay awake, observe, and train the elephant, then the magic starts.

Jurek's rider is always watching. His tale looks at all the seven points of the framework I use for looking at happiness (see here). Rather than delegating anything, he delves into it. The exercise bit is obvious - he is running. He also discusses the impact of breathing properly and the effect it has on energy levels. Most ultrarunners are happy to eat whatever. Pizza, Oreos and Soda seem a staple diet. 'Despite' being an uber-athlete, Jurek's has eaten only plants since 1997, and has been vegan since 1999. 'Eat & Run' has a recipe at the end of each chapter, and he credits the way he eats as a key to his superior athletic performance and recovery. His rider watches everything that goes into his mouth, and watches the effect that it has on his body. Part of the challenge of running long distances is regularly running through a mental checklist to observe the body and ensure you are relaxed (easy, light, smooth... fast) but it is also a case of relaxing the thoughts. The final challenge, and the one that levels the playing field, is the mind. It is positive thinking. It is finding the ability to go on. To just do things.

In that 'time when everything seems hopeless, when to go on seems futile, and when a small act of kindness, another step, a sip of water, can make you realise that nothing is futile, that going on - especially when going on seems so foolish - is the most meaningful thing in the world'. - Scott Jurek 'Eat & Run'

Beyond those 5 points, 'Eat & Run' dives deep into some deeper emotional struggles. He talks of the relationship with his mother, father, loves, close friends and the community. He talks of how he processes some dark places. He talks of loss. The book is deeply moving and subtly asks some great questions.

Finally, the book is about flow. In pushing yourself to the edge of your ability, slightly beyond your comfort zone, but not over the edge - worries melt away. You are doing something amazing. You aren't even conscious of you anymore and you get a deep sense of fulfilment. Flow is the reward for a life of purposeful practise.

A wonderful book.

Food Literacy

I have found learning new languages incredibly difficult. I agree with Megan that part of why I have found it so incredibly difficult is because it has always been a choice. At various stages I have taken stabs at Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, German, Italian and French. Languages are the most explicit case of where we don't have access to whole swathes of people and culture because of literacy obstacles. I think the same obstacles actually exist elsewhere. I recently wrote a guest post on a friends blog about 'Trying to Unsquiggle'. The world is full of information and flavours, but most of it is just squiggles. Whilst some see through the squiggles, most of us just ignore them and move on because we don't understand. Normally we don't have to. We haven't made a conscious choice about which bits of life will give us the most meaning and fulfilment because it requires an initial effort to unsquiggle. Unsquiggling is intimidating, and as Meg's post suggests, sometimes choice can be a bad thing leaving us less happy.

So I do think a balance has to be found between always looking for alternative choices and being content with what you have. One of the issues I have been chewing is not alternatives but whether I am conscious of the choices I have made, or the choices that have been made for me. This involves a degree of literacy. More specifically the one I have been thinking of recently is diet. Following on from 'Born to Run' in my Unogwaja Challenge process, I have been reading 'Eat & Run' by Scott Jurek. If you, like me, have been looking for a replacement hero to fill the Lance Armstrong void, Jurek may just be that man. He is ridiculously awesome. His book is a combo of a biography of his ultramarathon (>50 miles, often >100 miles) and a cook book. The book is also peppered with other books to read. Like Josh Waitzkin used his Chess Knowledge to conquer Martial Arts, Jurek left no stone unturned as he has refined his knowledge of the human body and its limits. Sometimes dipping into alternative choices isn't about switching. It is about unsquiggling enough truths to help you refine the path you are on. 

Jurek is arguably one of the most hardcore athletes to have ever lived. He is also a vegan. Part of the book also details his transition to a plant based diet. It wasn't immediate. He did it slowly and pinpoints various milestone meals where the emotional obstacles fell away not because he gave something up, but because he found something more epic. I eat meat for various reasons. One of them is that biltong tastes so awesome. Another is because of the cultural side of food and the memories triggered by certain meals. I also value highly not being fussy and fitting in to what company and hosts have prepared as easily as possible. I also enjoy variety. One of my favourite things to do is to say to a waitor - 'bring me the thing you think is the best. Don't ask me any questions, I am not fussy.' I have been philosophically convinced that Factory Farming is not something I feel comfortable with. I recently watched 'Food Inc' and that bought me a few meat free days. I am a 'conspiracy-skeptic'. I don't believe we can blame the machine for the choices we make with our dollars, time and votes. Ignorance isn't an excuse. Capitalism is a ruthless mirror. The captains may have studied our emotional responses and wants and fed the vices we 'don't' like, but we can't blame anyone but ourselves for the ugly picture that presents itself when we don't make conscious choices. Food Inc is an ugly mirror. But emotional kicks fade. Other emotional kicks come to. Comfort. Company. Selective Ignorance. Energy.

Changing diet is like learning a new language. There are so many foods that aren't even in my vocabulary. I don't know what they taste like. I don't know how to prepare them. I don't even know where to buy them. At the risk of sounding stupid, I don't even know how to choose them. When I shop, everything I buy is standardised. I don't have to choose. Like becoming literate so you can understand a language, literate so you can tell between wines, literate so you know good from bad music... part of changing my diet will require literacy. I suspect there is a world of untapped flavour that will make the choice less difficult. As Megan mentioned, a language can be easier to learn when you move to a place where it is spoken. You have no choice. I didn't struggle on my month long yoga courses. Going on courses, workshops or submerging yourself in a way of life is one thing. Real life is another. Ariella has made a successful transition as she described in her guest post. I am still on the fence.

With necessary apologies to the Rider-Elephant metaphor, and recognising the irony when describing trying to increase the plants in my diet, the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. So my first step is to try learn who to make Scott Jurek's Vegetarian Chili. If it is as awesome as he suggests, then perhaps I can switch it for my Spaghetti Bolognaise and make one small step for Trevkind. 

Devastating Effects (by Ariella Caira)

Guest Post: Ariella Rosanna Caira

Ariella is a freelance musician and an electric cellist with Sterling EQ, earth and animal lover, yogi and vegan. It is my opinion that some of our biggest challenges in terms of the more thorny issues we are facing are not a case of debating the cold hard facts. We need to understand the relationships and emotional response and wade our way through the minefields. Ariella's thorough and heartfelt response to one of these has all the touches of an artist. She has done some of that wading. It is difficult to be happy when the impact you have isn't sustainable. Ariella writes beautifully, and I hope you find her piece as genuine and kindly provocative as I did.

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The Devastating Effects of a Plant-Based Diet

by Ariella Rosanna Caira

Veganism absolutely ruined my life. At least it completely destroyed my ideologies about food, my old eating habits and my indifference to what I was consuming. There I was thinking I'd simply be rejecting using, eating and wearing animal products, that the rest of my life would go on as before, but boy, was I wrong. "Going green" was like experiencing a seriously devastating break-up. My divorcee's dishonesty seemed to be everywhere: the gelatin lurking in a seemingly innocuous sorbet, the milk protein hiding in the dark chocolate I had thought was lactose free, the bit of leather trim on a handbag I was eyeing and the honey in my shampoo. Everything was tainted. The Ronalds and Colonels seemed to sneer at me from their fast food logos. Adverts which once made me salivate now made me physically sick. I started to see things through a different pair of glasses; a view which made me see quite clearly that cow's milk is quite literally the secretion from a lactating bovine intended as a growth formula for a baby cow and not as a daily beverage for an adult as well as our skewed ideology of speciesism which says pat the dog but make a patty out of the pig.

I became obsessive: spending ages scrutinising food labels, getting emotional in the meat aisle and boycotting restaurants which refused to keep soy milk. I felt alone. I felt like I'd been given this new knowledge that no one else was aware of and I didn't know what to do. No one in my family shared my sentiments. I dared not attempt any sort of debate with friends for fear of alienating myself (hell hath no fury like a person's diet under fire). Life before this "awakening" was so blissfully simple and safe! But I couldn't unlearn the facts I had absorbed from books like 'Eating Animals' by Jonathan Safran Foer or those hard-hitting doccies like 'Food Inc, The End of the Line' and the ultimate 'Earthings'. I couldn't forget, but I also seemingly couldn't move forward. I was trapped in the same meat-centred society as before with the same principles and ideologies, but my beliefs and Truth had changed. I had changed. And it was then that I realised that if I was going to make this sustainable and indeed pleasant for myself, I would have some work ahead. I couldn't expect the biggest transition of my life to be a piece of (vegan) cake - changing habits of a lifetime was going to require a little patience. We live in a world where we expect things to come easily, but nothing good and enduring happens overnight.

And so I began my journey and the first thing I needed to change was my attitude. I had an undeniable calling to follow this lifestyle and come hell or high water I was going to embrace it and make it work for me, so much so that I would love every challenge it presented along the way.

I started to read. A lot. I discovered blogs, forums, chat groups. I was certainly not alone. I connected with locals through social media. I discovered alternate recipes for favourite treats like chocolate truffles and carrot cake. I began to frequent markets and became a regular client of an organic fruit and veg supplier. I started to only eat local, in season and recycle everything that was recyclable. I became a better cook, experimenting with new foods and flavours. This also made me more economical and more connected to my local community and what the small businesses were producing. I became healthier, replacing saturated fats and hormone-filled animal products, with fresh fruit and vegetable salads and juices and my skin, hair, nails and energy levels thanked me for it. Heck, I even started cooking food for my dog to avoid buying the processed kibble we automatically assume is good for them!

The effects of this choice were reaching far beyond what I put on my plate. My actions of shopping and feeding, which before were selfish and unconscious, were now purposeful, meaningful, extending beyond myself and having an actual visible effect on my environment and the people around me. Without proselytising, friends and family were getting curious about my choices and sampling a slice of the vegan pie. I learnt to smile at the inevitable negative comments and calmly deflect the age-old arguments regarding the calcium and protein myths. I became strong enough to not feel embarrassed or ashamed of my veganism and rather to wear it with a mixture of humility and pride, explaining to those who would give my pitying looks at social gatherings that it's not because I "can't" eat certain foods but rather that I "choose" not to. But most importantly I became empowered. I was conscious of every choice: I no longer just accepted what was foisted upon me as a consumer by supermarkets and the corporate powers that be. If the media purported something as healthy or nutritious, I would immediately second-guess it, looking deeper for the true (almost always financial) reason behind the promotion, instead of grabbing greedily at the two-for-the-price-of-one on offer. I was in control of my own life and my own decisions. My health, my environment and my choices mattered and had a right to be nurtured. My powerlessness turned to power as I stopped struggling with the challenges of being vegan and began to wholeheartedly embrace my Truth.

And this journey also brought my partner and me closer together. We've come a long way from the first weary (hungry) weeks where "crème brûlee" and "4-cheese pizza" seemed to wave at us from every menu and limp, unexciting salads were the order of the day. We hardly ever step foot in a mall these days and when we do the life-sucking force of the place, which we were previously numb to, is now quite tangible. Instead we juice carrots and beets collected from the local co-op and have been on many explorations together discovering new restaurants and eateries which we proudly support. We engage in stimulating conversations about animal rights and read articles and watch revealing documentaries together. We sometimes laugh that date night has gone from sushi and an escapist rom-com to kale chips and Cowspiracy. He's learnt to stirfry and we bought a wok in celebration and we're planning a summer veggie garden so we can harvest our own health from the back yard. I'll admit we've become eco-nerds: we get fired up about recycling, maintain our grey-water system and are investigating solar power options. But our vegan life isn't thick with rules and regulations, stifling us and unforgiving if we err. Rather, we question and look for ways to do things better, not "perfectly", together, with patience and consideration and always with love. We're healthy and happy and better functioning members of society than before because we are awake and aware. We are living consciously, knowing that this planet isn't simply here for us and our pleasure. Rather, we are on it, however briefly, and have a fundamental obligation to treat it with consideration and care because without it, we simply would not exist.

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In writing a blog about several topics in which I admit to being a complete beginner, I am going to have to rely heavily on the people I am writing for who cumulatively know most of what I am likely to learn already. I would love it if some of you found the time to write a guest post on the subject of happiness or learning. The framework I use for thinking about these things is what I call the '5 + 2 points' which includes proper (1) exercise, (2) breathing, (3) diet, (4) relaxation, (5) positive thinking & meditation, (+1) relationships, (+2) flow. Naturally if you would like to write about something that you think I have missed, I would love to include that too. If you are up to doing something more practical, it would be awesome if you did a 100 hour project and I am happy to do the writing based on our chats if that is how you roll. Email me at trevorjohnblack@gmail.com

Ueber Alles. Uber Everything.

Nassim Taleb takes an interesting approach in his books. He directly insults, on a regular basis, the people who are reading his books. He knows a bit about who buys and reads what he writes and he says openly that they are the people who he is complaining about. He 'jokes' and tries to make it clear. As in... I am talking to you. The person reading this. He says you will laugh and think he is talking about someone else. Another MBA. He then proceeds to point out, with jibes, what he thinks are the likely holes in your thinking. Most readers will read this and think he is talking about someone else. It is difficult for us to self evaluate but we are quite good at seeing gaps in other peoples thinking. That is why feedback is useful. Painful to take, but useful.

    

Taleb's books are fascinating and I will definitely talk about them at some stage. One of my biggest frustrations is our faulty definition of risk. This is partly the theme of his first book 'Fooled by Randomness'. Without basic training in statistics, many people can get fooled by seeing random things happen which they think aren't random. We look for patterns and can make really bad decisions based on stories which simply have no evidence. His second book 'The Black Swan' talks about how things you can't see, control, and largely can't prepare for can be a really big deal. He also says we waste a lot of our time planning around 'noise', i.e. things that aren't important, and don't act in the right way for things that are. In 'Anti-fragile' he argues that by avoiding good noise or rather good stress, we set ourselves up for big falls. Strong things benefit from stress rather than falling apart. So as a theme for all three books, he is saying that we focus on the wrong things. I agree with that, and enjoy the way he describes some difficult concepts (although I don't agree with everything he says). I am not sure I would want him at a dinner party though. He would likely insult most of the people very quickly. Perhaps if the dinner party was with Richard Dawkins and Russell Brand and I could just sit back and watch the fireworks discussion going on. That would be good fun.

I will take a leaf out of his book(s) and talk directly to you though. Part of what I am trying to do with this blog is get people talking. We moan about Social Media and how it works but the truth is no one controls Social Media. We do. If it isn't working there is absolutely no one to point the finger at. The founders of Twitter had no idea what it would morph into. It is still morphing. We get to choose how to do that. The same thing is happening to lots of other things. They are being ubered. Ueber Alles. Uber everything. But as Will Wilkinson says, perhaps Uber for the proletariat. Social media is whatever we want it to be as long as we are brave enough to speak. If we can get over the Picasso Problem and realise things aren't for marks, there is no teacher waiting to correct us, there is no bully waiting to tease us, and people want to hear our story we can make things what we want.

So I am talking directly to you. Yes, the person reading this. I want you to write a Guest Post of about 500 words on anything that you think is interesting. I write about happiness and learning as a framework, but that is all it is. A framework. Thinking of happiness in categories like exercise, diet, breathing, relaxation, positive thinking, relationships, flow and learning just helps me keep a little focus and cover as many bases as I can. I don't claim any expertise though other than some experience at looking at complex things and trying to get to the bottom of what matters. To strip out Taleb noise. I write mainly for and to the people I know, so if you want to have a cup of coffee, I can write up the post for you. I may not have seen you in years, but I am still talking to you. I have lost contact with lots of awesome people and would rather write for friends, old and new, than random people. If like Rob, a limerick is the way to get started - do that. If you want to send me stream of consciousness to work into a post, do that. Best case, you start a blog of your own. It is tough to get people reading it if you don't write regularly, but I can solve that problem for you and we can pick a guest post when you have something you think needs a bigger audience for a conversation.

Broadcasting is over. Let's start a conversation.