I suspect I’ve been around longer than most who will read this excellent article, The Unquestioned Pursuit of Weight Loss Had Us Eating Wrong for Years. I’ve read through many of the comments below and it appears that many don’t remember a time when food and eating was simpler. I remember visiting my grandparents in rural Maine when i was young and can still remember the smell of Gramma’s bread, baking silently in the wood-burning cook stove in the kitchen. We didn’t think about grains, gmo’s, diets or many of the other m-i-c, k-e-y’s, mouse of culinary demise that have infected Americans and indeed, much of the “developed” world since those days just following WWII. Food was good and we ate it.

Through the succeeding years many things changed including me. One day less than four days ago I was accompanying my wife on one of her doctor visits and after the med tech took her vitals, for no particular reason, I asked her to take my blood pressure. Now, my blood pressure has always enjoyed a certain free spirit. Indeed I found some years ago that if I changed the way I was thinking when it was being measured and I could alter the reading. But that time in my wife’s doctor’s office, my blood pressure was really too high even for this somewhat stubborn male to rationalize. I also knew I had become a bit over the top around my waist and it just might be time to consult a physician for myself. It had then been about twenty-two years.

When I saw him the doc wasn’t THAT much disturbed about my bp, but he did suggest I get more exercise and “lose some weight”. Worse, my blood tests showed that my body was all out of whack with far too high cholesterol readings. At that time I weighed around 245. Although I was working on restoring our antique farmhouse, I wasn’t really getting much “exercise”.

My son suggested I read Robb Wolf’s book, “The Paleo Solution”. My wife and I decided to take his “thirty-day Paleo challenge”, and we ate like hunter gatherer cavemen for a month to try things out. Credit to my wife who had to make the technical steps, altering the way she cooked and the materials she used in meal preparation.

It wasn’t “a diet” we were on, Wolf had pointed out. It was a way of living and eating that we were engaged in changing. The first twenty-two days were very revealing: I lost 21 pounds and never felt it. We decided to continue being “hunter-gatherer cavemen” in this house.

Six months in, we had to go to some event and when I stepped into the closet to get my quite new suit, I found not only the pants wouldn’t stay up, they were so large they were made for someone else: I had lost six inches from my waistline. My weight was down to around 205 pounds. The doctor was shocked at my new blood test: I had lost 100 points off my triglycerides level; my blood pressure was normal.

NO DRUGS!

Now, “paleo” has become a thing in our house. My wife has fully bought in to the program and has spent hours researching how we take food, what happens to it, and how. She has become alarmed that so much of the food we eat in America has simply lost nutrient value compared to the way it was back in those days when my grandmother’s bread was so carefully hand made.

A year after “going paleo” my wife gave me a subscription to the gym. Every morning I would get up and drive the ten miles to the gym, and follow my old, not-forgotten routine: twenty minutes of cardio on the treadmill followed by back and bi’s, or chest and tri’s depending on the day, with legs and back mixed in. A year after that I entered my first ever in my life, athletic competition, setting a new state bench press record for my age and weight group.

Today, and I guess for the rest of my life, I will struggle against what seems to be the meaningless mediocrity of the food supply, which appears to be dedicated to the concept that eating should make us WANT to eat MORE and get fatter and fatter and less well and healthy as a people. I weigh in the mid-190’s now and three days each week I spend two hours late in the day with a power lifting group. I’m the oldest and the youngest lifter in our group is twenty-two. An interesting mix.

I haven’t had a piece of bread in more than three years and dearly desire a slice now, slathered with butter. But I know that I can’t have some of that bread kneaded so skillfully by my grandmother those years ago. She’s gone and so is that pure flour. So, I know today I will say no, if for no other reason no caveman ever even saw a piece of bread and was healthier for it.

Oh, and yeah, I almost left out this: I’m seventy-two.