Sometimes the road to diet change can be fun

When I was a kid, if I were told that I’d be writing a book about diet and nutrition when I was older, I would’ve thought that whoever told me that was out of their mind.

Living in Newark, New Jersey, my parents and I consumed anything and everything that had a face or a mother except for dead, rotting, pig bodies, although we did eat bacon (as if all the other decomposing flesh bodies were somehow miraculously clean). Going through high school and college it was no different. In fact, my dietary change did not come until I was in my 30’s.

Just to put things in perspective, after I graduated from Weequahic High School and before going to Seton Hall University, I had a part-time job working for a butcher. I was the delivery guy and occasionally had to go to the slaughterhouse to pick up products for the store. Needless to say, I had no consciousness nor awareness, as change never came then, despite the horrors I witnessed on an almost daily basis.

After graduating with a degree in accounting from Seton Hall, I eventually got married and moved to a town called Livingston. Livingston was basically a yuppie community where everyone was judged by the neighborhood they lived in and their income. To say it was a “plastic” community would be an understatement.

Livingston and the shallowness finally got to me. I told my wife I was fed up and wanted to move. She made it clear she had to be near her friends and New York City. I finally got my act together and split for Colorado.

I was living with a lady in Aspen at the end of 1974, when one day she said, ” let’s become vegetarians”. I have no idea what possessed me to say it, but I said, “okay”!

At that point I went to the freezer and took out about $ 100 worth of frozen, dead body parts and gave them to a welfare mother who lived behind us.

Well, everything was great for about a week or so, and then the chick split with another guy.

So here I was, a vegetarian for a couple weeks, not really knowing what to do, how to cook, or basically how to prepare anything. For about a month, I was getting by on carrot sticks, celery sticks, and yogurt. Fortunately, when I went vegan in 1990, it was a simple and natural progression. Anyway, as I walked around Aspen town, I noticed a little vegetarian restaurant called, “The Little Kitchen”.

Let me back up just a little bit. It was April of 1975, the snow was melting and the runoff of Ajax Mountain filled the streets full of knee-deep mud. Now, Aspen was great to ski in, but was a bummer to walk in when the snow was melting.

I was ready to call it quits and I needed a warmer place. I’ll elaborate on that in a minute.

But right now, back to “The Little Kitchen”. Knowing that I was going to leave Aspen and basically a new vegetarian, I needed help. So, I cruised into the restaurant and told them my plight and asked them if they would teach me how to cook. I told them in return I would wash dishes and empty their trash. They then asked me what I did for a living and I told them I was an accountant.

The owner said to me, “Let’s make a deal. You do our tax return and we’ll feed you as well”. So for the next couple of weeks I was doing their tax return, washing their dishes, emptying the trash, eating three squares a day and learning as much as I could.

But, like I said, the mud was getting to me. So I picked up a travel book written by a guy named Foder. The name of the book was, “Hawaii”. Looking through the book I noticed that in Lahaina, on Maui, there was a little vegetarian restaurant called,” Mr. Natural’s”. I decided right then and there that I would go to Lahaina and work at “Mr. Natural’s.” To make a long story short, that’s exactly what happened.

So, I’m working at “Mr. Natural’s” and learning everything I can about my new dietary lifestyle – it was great. Every afternoon we would close for lunch at about 1 PM and go to the Sheraton Hotel in Ka’anapali and play volleyball, while somebody stayed behind to prepare dinner.

Since I was the new guy, and didn’t really know how to cook, I never thought that I would be asked to stay behind to cook dinner. Well, one afternoon, that’s exactly what happened; it was my turn. That posed a problem for me because I was at the point where I finally knew how to boil water.

I was desperate, clueless and basically up the creek without a paddle. Fortunately, there was a friend of mine sitting in the gazebo at the restaurant and I asked him if he knew how to cook. He said the only thing he knew how to cook was enchiladas. He said that his enchiladas were bean-less and dairy-less. I told him that I had no idea what an enchilada was or what he was talking about, but I needed him to show me because it was my turn to do the evening meal.

Well, the guys came back from playing volleyball and I’m asked what was for dinner. I told them enchiladas; the owner wasn’t thrilled. I told him that mine were bean-less and dairy-less. When he tried the enchilada he said it was incredible. Being the humble guy that I was, I smiled and said, “You expected anything less”? It apparently was so good that it was the only item on the menu that we served twice a week. In fact, after about a week, we were selling five dozen every night we had them on the menu and people would walk around Lahaina broadcasting, ‘enchilada’s at “Natural’s” tonight’. I never had to cook anything else.

A year later the restaurant closed, and somehow I gravitated to a little health food store in Wailuku. I never told anyone I was an accountant and basically relegated myself to being the truck driver.

The guys who were running the health food store had friends in similar businesses and farms on many of the islands. I told them that if they could organize and form one company they could probably lock in the State. That’s when they found out I was an accountant and “Down to Earth” was born. “Down to Earth” became the largest natural food store chain in the islands, and I was their Chief Financial Officer and co-manager of their biggest store for 13 years.

In 1981, I started to do a weekly radio show to try and expose people to a vegetarian diet and get them away from killing innocent creatures. I still do that show today. I pay for my own airtime and have no sponsors to not compromise my honesty. One bit of a hassle was the fact that I was forced to get a Masters Degree in Nutrition to shut up all the MD’s that would call in asking for my credentials.

My doing this radio show enabled me, through endless research, to see the corruption that existed within the big food industries, the big pharmaceutical companies, the biotech industries and the government agencies.

This information, unconscionable as it is, enabled me to realize how broken our health system is.

I left Down to Earth in 1989, got nationally certified as a sports injury massage therapist and started traveling the world with a bunch of guys that were making a martial arts movie. After doing that for about four years I finally made it back to Honolulu and got a job as a massage therapist at the Honolulu Club, one of Hawaii’s premier fitness clubs.

It was there I met the love of my life who I have been with since 1998. She made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. She said,” If you want to be with me you’ve got to stop working on naked women”. So, I went back into accounting and was the Chief Financial Officer of a large construction company for many years.

Going back to my Newark days when I was an infant, I had no idea what a “chicken” or “egg” or “fish” or “pig” or “cow” was. My dietary blueprint was thrust upon me by my parents as theirs was thrust upon them by their parents. It was by the grace of God that I was able to put things in their proper perspective and improve my health and elevate my consciousness.

The road that I started walking down in 1975 has finally led me to the point of writing my book, A Sane Diet For An Insane World. Hopefully, the information contained therein will be enlightening, motivating, and inspiring to encourage you to make different choices.

Doing what we do out of conditioning is not always the best course to follow. I am hoping that by the grace of the many friends and personalities I have encountered along my path, you will have a better perspective of what road is the best road for you to travel on, not only for your health but your consciousness as well.

Aloha!

To learn more about Hesh, listen to and read hundreds of health related radio shows and articles, and learn about how to stay healthy and reverse degenerative diseases through the use of organic sulfur crystals and the most incredible bee pollen ever, please visit www.healthtalkhawaii.com, or email me at heshgoldstein@gmail.com or call me at (808) 258-1177. Since going on the radio in 1981 these are the only products I began to sell because they work.
Oh yeah, going to www.asanediet.com will allow you to read various parts of my book – “A Sane Diet For An Insane World”, containing a wonderful comment by Mike Adams.
In Hawaii, the TV stations interview local authors about the books they write and the newspapers all do book reviews. Not one would touch “A Sane Diet For An Insane World”. Why? Because it goes against their advertising dollars.

Sometimes the road to diet change can be fun

Sian Williams: "Sometimes it"s much better to open the box"

“Well, I’ve constantly wanted to review the workings of the mind, inasmuch as you can, and imagined I’d do an MSc to challenge myself.”

She says her interest in psychology constructed slowly, stemming from a expanding unease about numerous dimensions of the unequal connection between journalists and the topics whose lives are pillaged for broadcasts and print.

“I was in Liverpool in the Eighties – there had been a good deal of massive news stories going on which was why I needed to go there. But sometimes you’d be sent out on a street targeted traffic accident or to interview victims with no correctly knowing how to manage them. I did a great deal of interviews, aged 21, with folks who had been at Hillsborough and who were in a state of shock. Now I appear back and feel, ‘How did I handle people people? Were they even mindful I was there? These had been their stories, their lives.’”

She started critically to assess her personal direction at the end of 2009, the yr in which her youngest child, a daughter, was born and her mom died of bowel cancer. Then when BBC Breakfast transferred to Salford in 2012 she resigned from the programme and determined to use the time to embark on the course.

_{Williams with her research (MARTIN POPE)}

We pause for a second to order. The menu is modern comfort meals: small plates, soups – there is lobster lasagne on the menu but we demur.

Williams set out some of her views on how journalism might be honed and improved in a latest and extremely lucid cover story for The Psychologist, the regular monthly magazine for members of the British Psychological Society.

In it, she discusses practice all around the coverage of mental well being stories and the fine line in between making it possible for people’s stories to be told and utilizing tactics to extract juicy particulars that may well not very be in the greatest interests of the vulnerable.

She’s appropriate, of course. The statistics say that one in 4 individuals will have a psychological health issue at some stage in their lives nevertheless these are nevertheless stigmatised and we haven’t identified the right language to speak about it openly and very easily. But how realistic is a much more considerate strategy in other regions? Is her editor – she has recently started an interview demonstrate for BBC Wales – going to consider she’s gone soft?

This draws a wicked laugh. “An interview with a politician is always going to be an interview with a politician. No.”

The piece also touches on her recent area of analysis, the difficult-to-manage emotions of people sent to cover the stories in catastrophe zones.

“You’re caught up,” she says now, speaking quickly. “You’ve got conflicting feelings. There is the adrenalin. You’re operating to consider to hold up, what’s taking place now? What are the most current casualty figures? How many individuals have pledged to the helpline? When’s the support coming by means of? Receiving all this, asking what was it like, what did you encounter, how several household members have you misplaced, where are you going to rest? But you are in a position in which you can request people questions, their lives have been changed forever.

“In Pakistan we were sleeping in a automobile and we did not have any foods. However, we had a auto to rest in, whereas most people had practically nothing. And afterwards you get to go house and they really don’t and I do not like that feeling.”

A single of the problems faced by information teams is the struggle to locate a way to approach what they have observed and heard when it is filtered through this sense of guilt. Williams says sharply, “It feels self-indulgent to acknowledge your own feelings in this kind of situations – it is self-indulgent,” but her own investigation is about the require to do specifically that, so it’s obviously a conflict she’s even now resolving.

She has also said that following covering stories, recollections were returning “uninvited”. What was returning?

“Images, folks. Smell. Smell goes straight to the limbic program and gets locked in there. Even if we attempt to control all these other bits. I can block out that picture, I really do not need to have to keep in mind that. By some means you can not shake smell.”

What smells came back? There is a extended silence ahead of she solutions.

“The smells that you would expect in a catastrophe spot. Which is just… what you’d anticipate. What you’d assume following five days of tsunami. Where there’s no sanitation and there is no care and aid is taking time to come by way of and dysentery is starting up and bodies haven’t been cleared away and you do not have foods. That type of issue.”

She is rapid to stage out that she has by no means experienced PTSD herself but investigation suggests war correspondents demonstrate comparable ranges of signs and symptoms to those who have been in energetic services. Not only is there little assistance but newsroom culture is all about coping, staying specialist, and moving on.

“And you don’t want to bring it home simply because of what benefit is that to folks who enjoy you? None. So you put it away and maintain the box very firmly closed. Whereas what I am learning now is at times it is much better to open the box and get stuff out and have a search at it and place it back.”

Our meals has arrived by now – there is a especially wonderful tiny plate of pickled watermelon and goat cheese, and I’ve ordered a springlike and uplifting glass of Framingham pinot noir from New Zealand (you can consider the girl off the wine page…). But we’re not producing much headway with it. There is as well a lot chat to consume or drink. Sian will not inform me what she has in people mysterious boxes, so I request about receiving to grips with the deeper demands of academic examine when you are used to daily deadlines.

“Slowing down was the most demanding thing. The lecturer would stand in front of me and I’d be like, appropriate, inform me everything about cognitive psychology and I’ll write it down, thank you really significantly, and then I’ll know it by the end of the day. But you want to consider time to analyse.”

Is she very impatient? Does she get cross with men and women who stroll slowly down the street? There is a lengthy laugh then a prolonged silence. I’m contemplating the answer’s yes but she’s worried that will sound undesirable.

“Do you meditate?” No. “I remember getting a CD years ago and sitting there, it was slow! I wanted to say to her, just get to the bit that I need to have to know. I desired to put it on quick forward!

“But individuals who do mindfulness programs usually appear calmer in the rest of their lives. One issue I’ve learnt is that the brain is plastic and there are real physical changes within it – a single review showed those who’d accomplished an eight-week mindfulness course had significantly less grey matter in their amygdala (a part of the brain thought to be connected with concern amounts), it wasn’t firing up so significantly, their anxiety amounts were diminished.”

So has she now signed up for meditation? “I did, but I had to cancel due to the fact I was also occupied.”

We speak a bit more about her course. She tells me about becoming wired up to a heart-charge keep track of and shown a video of a brain dissection. “You feel nicely, I can watch Casualty, my son’s undertaking medicine, how undesirable can it be? But – the guy had grey hair and you hear this large crack as they’re opening the skull – and I closed my eyes. Oh! You’re consuming your lunch! Sorry!”

And about her investigation task, “It’s particularly about one thing referred to as subsequent publish traumatic development which has been recorded in firefighters, emergency responders, social workers, therapists, carers. It is a strengthening of resilience and a modify inside oneself and your daily life that can happen as a consequence of PTSD. The hope is to locate one thing new, to include one particular small cog of data to what we know.”

We also chat about her mother, who had been an intensive-care nurse and ended up getting handled for cancer in the very same hospital in which she had worked for twenty many years and who was moved to a Macmillan hospice two days just before she died. “It was really quick and I slept there so I was with her when she died.”

There’s almost a teary second as she loses her composure for a second. “Don’t open that box,” she says quietly. “That’s 1 of the boxes.”

The photographer arrives and she’s straight back to fast-fire, competitive form. “Have you considered a PhD? Does not a small small bit of you want to be a medical doctor? Just a tiny bit? My son is instruction to be a medical doctor, and I thought it would be great if we could each be physicians at the same time! Then I realised he would be truly annoyed with me. So I am not going to do that.”

And dashing off to the college pickup, all the while talking about how she’s going to Feel Gradually, that is Believe Gradually,yes, definitely Feel S-L-O-W-L-Y, about what she does up coming.

Sian Williams: "Sometimes it"s much better to open the box"

Sian Williams: "Sometimes it truly is greater to open the box"

“Well, I’ve always wanted to study the workings of the mind, inasmuch as you can, and thought I’d do an MSc to challenge myself.”

She says her interest in psychology built gradually, stemming from a growing unease about many dimensions of the unequal relationship between journalists and the subjects whose lives are pillaged for broadcasts and print.

“I was in Liverpool in the Eighties – there were a lot of big news stories going on which was why I wanted to go there. But sometimes you’d be sent out on a road traffic accident or to interview victims without properly knowing how to handle them. I did a lot of interviews, aged 21, with people who had been at Hillsborough and who were in a state of shock. Now I look back and think, ‘How did I handle those people? Were they even aware I was there? These were their stories, their lives.’”

She began seriously to assess her own direction at the end of 2009, the year in which her youngest child, a daughter, was born and her mother died of bowel cancer. Then when BBC Breakfast transferred to Salford in 2012 she resigned from the programme and decided to use the time to embark on the course.

_{Williams with her research (MARTIN POPE)}

We pause for a moment to order. The menu is contemporary comfort food: small plates, soups – there’s lobster lasagne on the menu but we demur.

Williams set out some of her views on how journalism might be honed and improved in a recent and very lucid cover story for The Psychologist, the monthly magazine for members of the British Psychological Society.

In it, she discusses practice around the coverage of mental health stories and the fine line between allowing people’s stories to be told and using tactics to extract juicy details that might not quite be in the best interests of the vulnerable.

She’s right, of course. The statistics say that one in four people will have a mental health problem at some point in their lives yet these are still stigmatised and we haven’t found the right language to talk about it openly and easily. But how realistic is a more considerate approach in other areas? Is her editor – she has recently started an interview show for BBC Wales – going to think she’s gone soft?

This draws a wicked laugh. “An interview with a politician is always going to be an interview with a politician. No.”

The piece also touches on her current area of research, the difficult-to-handle emotions of those sent to cover the stories in disaster zones.

“You’re caught up,” she says now, talking rapidly. “You’ve got conflicting emotions. There’s the adrenalin. You’re running to try to keep up, what’s happening now? What are the latest casualty figures? How many people have pledged to the helpline? When’s the aid coming through? Getting all this, asking what was it like, what did you experience, how many family members have you lost, where are you going to sleep? But you’re in a position where you can ask those questions, their lives have been changed forever.

“In Pakistan we were sleeping in a car and we didn’t have any food. However, we had a car to sleep in, whereas most people had nothing. And afterwards you get to go home and they don’t and I don’t like that feeling.”

One of the difficulties faced by news teams is the struggle to find a way to process what they have seen and heard when it is filtered through this sense of guilt. Williams says sharply, “It feels self-indulgent to acknowledge your own emotions in such circumstances – it is self-indulgent,” but her own research is about the need to do exactly that, so it’s clearly a conflict she’s still resolving.

She has also said that after covering stories, memories were returning “uninvited”. What was returning?

“Images, individuals. Smell. Smell goes straight to the limbic system and gets locked in there. Even if we try to manage all those other bits. I can block out that image, I don’t need to remember that. Somehow you can’t shake smell.”

What smells came back? There is a long silence before she answers.

“The smells that you would expect in a disaster area. Which is just… what you’d expect. What you’d expect after five days of tsunami. Where there’s no sanitation and there’s no care and aid is taking time to come through and dysentery is starting and bodies haven’t been cleared away and you don’t have food. That sort of thing.”

She is quick to point out that she has never experienced PTSD herself but research suggests war correspondents show similar levels of symptoms to those who have been in active service. Not only is there little support but newsroom culture is all about coping, staying professional, and moving on.

“And you don’t want to bring it home because of what benefit is that to people who love you? None. So you put it away and keep the box very firmly closed. Whereas what I am learning now is sometimes it’s better to open the box and take stuff out and have a look at it and put it back.”

Our food has arrived by now – there’s a particularly lovely small plate of pickled watermelon and goat cheese, and I’ve ordered a springlike and uplifting glass of Framingham pinot noir from New Zealand (you can take the girl off the wine page…). But we’re not making much headway with it. There’s too much chat to eat or drink. Sian won’t tell me what she has in those mysterious boxes, so I ask about getting to grips with the deeper demands of academic study when you’re used to daily deadlines.

“Slowing down was the most challenging thing. The lecturer would stand in front of me and I’d be like, right, tell me everything about cognitive psychology and I’ll write it down, thank you very much, and then I’ll know it by the end of the day. But you need to take time to analyse.”

Is she very impatient? Does she get cross with people who walk slowly down the street? There’s a long laugh then a long silence. I’m thinking the answer’s yes but she’s worried that will sound bad.

“Do you meditate?” No. “I remember buying a CD years ago and sitting there, it was slow! I wanted to say to her, just get to the bit that I need to know. I wanted to put it on fast forward!

“But people who do mindfulness courses always seem calmer in the rest of their lives. One thing I’ve learnt is that the brain is plastic and there are actual physical changes within it – one study showed those who’d done an eight-week mindfulness course had less grey matter in their amygdala (a part of the brain thought to be associated with fear levels), it wasn’t firing up so much, their stress levels were reduced.”

So has she now signed up for meditation? “I did, but I had to cancel because I was too busy.”

We talk a bit more about her course. She tells me about being wired up to a heart-rate monitor and shown a video of a brain dissection. “You think well, I can watch Casualty, my son’s doing medicine, how bad can it be? But – the guy had grey hair and you hear this big crack as they’re opening the skull – and I closed my eyes. Oh! You’re eating your lunch! Sorry!”

And about her research project, “It’s specifically about something called subsequent post traumatic growth which has been recorded in firefighters, emergency responders, social workers, therapists, carers. It’s a strengthening of resilience and a change within yourself and your life that can happen as a consequence of PTSD. The hope is to find something new, to add one tiny cog of information to what we know.”

We also chat about her mother, who had been an intensive-care nurse and ended up being treated for cancer in the same hospital in which she had worked for 20 years and who was moved to a Macmillan hospice two days before she died. “It was very fast and I slept there so I was with her when she died.”

There’s nearly a teary moment as she loses her composure for a second. “Don’t open that box,” she says quietly. “That’s one of the boxes.”

The photographer arrives and she’s straight back to quick-fire, competitive form. “Have you considered a PhD? Doesn’t a little tiny bit of you want to be a doctor? Just a tiny bit? My son is training to be a doctor, and I thought it would be great if we could both be doctors at the same time! Then I realised he would be really annoyed with me. So I am not going to do that.”

And dashing off to the school pickup, all the while talking about how she’s going to Think Slowly, that’s Think Slowly,yes, definitely Think S-L-O-W-L-Y, about what she does next.

Sian Williams: "Sometimes it truly is greater to open the box"