What Lies Beyond The Kale? Part One

Kale slipped right under my radar for much of my life. In fact, I’d never even tasted the stuff until I first visited the USA in 2011. I was in a Wholefoods in NYC thinking about a huge lunch when I happened to notice a small sign near the salad bar that listed the ANDI index. The Aggregate Nutrient Density Index ranks the nutrient content of foods based on a scale of 1–1,000.

Right at the bottom with a score of 1 was cola (no surprises there) but catching my eye standing proudly at the top with a score of 1,000 was kale. Being deeply focused on nutrition and fitness, and in love with rating things, I immediately elevated kale to the top of my own “must-eat list”. I promptly loaded up on a massive helping of its green goodness as part of my giant takeaway salad. I proceeded to eat kale any chance I had for the rest of the trip, and it went on to become a staple in my diet when I got back to New Zealand.

So yeah, that’s pretty much how I used to roll. To clarify:

Rule #1: Fitness and nutrition were the answer to everything.

Rule #2: If that wasn’t the case, try nutrition and fitness.

Rule #3: See Rule #1

So I’d say and write things like:

‘The more raw food I eat, the better I feel. The better I feel, the more raw food I eat”.

“If one green smoothie a day is good, then four must be great”.

“Now that I’m doing yoga every day, I feel amazing.”

And that’s genuinely how I thought. Five green smoothies a day seemed entirely normal to me, and health in my world revolved around doing and eating.

I was peripherally aware of the idea that there was more to health, in more or less the same way that I knew about quantum physics or macroeconomic theory. Sure I could understand that stress could cause all kinds of illness, and I appreciated that disease could well be nothing more than dis-ease but that sort of stuff just didn’t apply to me because I was super-healthy right?

I may have looked and acted that way but under my superficially healthy lifestyle, I was an angry, explosive guy, with a penchant for holding onto grudges, past slights and even imagined affronts but none of that mattered because I knew I was fine.

Until I wasn’t.

When The Levee Broke

I’d lived with physical pain for much of my adult life but it wasn’t until December 2015 that I was literally stopped in my tracks and had to confront my life.

Forced initially into a state of immobility by crushing back pain, and then into a lengthy rehabilitation process, I had a lot of time to contemplate things. In the lead up to my back letting go, I’d been as enraged as I’d ever been in my life. Insane as it sounds, this was mostly thanks to the loud music played at all hours by our Russian neighbours. I’ve historically been able to tune out most noise, from angle grinding and hammering to barking dogs, but booming bass notes? Not a chance.

I was being driven to distraction, and there was plenty of other stress from things like my stalled writing career, the question of what we’d do in 2016 and other trivial and non-trivial stuff. Over the years, I’ve noticed that the body can hold itself together till the stress comes off — people get sick as soon as they go on holiday for example, but often not while they’re at their hyper-stressful job.

So as soon as we left town for a weekend away on Koh Lanta, my back started to play up, and then it quite simply fell apart. Sarah was adamant that my emotions had a lot to do with where I’d ended up — both the massive anger of recent months plus the high amounts of intensity and stress I carried around with me on a day to day basis.

While I could generally appreciate this concept, it took a long time for me to even begin to accept that the way I thought, felt and acted had a lot to do with my overall health and current situation. But then one day, out of the blue, I was convinced.

The great motivational speaker Zig Ziglar once said something about a message being able to go around the world in an instant but taking years for it to travel that last quarter inch to reach the brain. I’m living proof of this.

Thank goodness I’d been listening to a bunch of podcasts (as per this post). Sarah and I were working through Rich Roll’s back catalogue and we’d started this one where he interviewed a guy named Tim VanOrden. The podcast is called Tim VanOrden Runs Beyond The Kale — Why Personal Growth Begins With Self-Acceptance.

I didn’t really pay much attention to the title. Instead I just hit play. At around 11 minutes, I started to seriously listen as Rich said, “… it’s not about the food, it’s about emotions and it’s about psychology”. Things got deep from there…

This really resonated with me in a profound way. I suddenly understood that an almost obsessive focus on food and exercise was futile unless I was also working on all the other things that were part of the health equation. The idea that there was more to my health than a bunch of green smoothies made a whole lot of sense, especially in light of my precarious physical situation.

Why it took so long for me to understand this, I’ll never know. Sarah probably rolled her eyes extensively when I loudly proclaimed this truth, after all she’d been telling me something much like it since we met but she’s too nice to say, “I told you so!” although she totally could have.

Every word of that podcast made sense to me, every aspect of Tim’s approach clicked. It seemed that there was in fact an alternative way. But self acceptance? That was a big idea that needed a much closer look. Sounded better than what I’d been doing though. Much better.

In the show notes, Rich says it very well indeed:

“Food is a super important aspect of this process. I believe it’s the best place to begin the process of transforming your life. But it’s also easy to get overly caught up in the dogmatic aspects of diet and nutrition. Unnecessarily boxed in by labels. Overly focused on details and minutiae. This presents a treacherous social, political and internal minefield that can result in truncating long-term growth potential. Because when we obsess on our plate at the exclusion of objectively redressing the many other very important areas of our lives that warrant focus and attention, our overall development towards full actualization is arrested.

I didn’t clean up my diet so I could get stuck pontificating on the various types of dark leafy greens until all my friends fled for the hills. I cleaned up my diet so I could raise my energy levels, shift my consciousness and direct my newfound lease on life towards continual growth and expansion. A search for greater meaning, purpose and answers that will hopefully occupy me for the remainder of my days here on Earth.”

And that’s where my health changed for the better. A couple of hours spent listening to two guys chatting, and BOOM, new life! Didn’t cost me a cent, but it was worth so much. Change what you listen to, watch and read, change the way you think, change your life. It’s that simple. And if a dogmatic, locked in stone bloke like me can change, then anyone can.