Could a paleo type diet have saved my mother’s life?
That’s the kind of bullshit you commonly hear when people refer to their deceased mothers. The thing is though, it’s not bullshit when talking about my mom. My mom was someone who was constantly giving and rarely taking. She loved life, people and nature. She never took anything for granted. She never once raised her hand, nor even raised her voice to discipline me. All she had to do was give me one disappointed look and I was crushed beyond repair. The thought of me disappointing someone of her level of greatness was more punishing than the harshest physical beating I have ever taken. The thought of disappointing her kept me from making even more fucked up decisions than I did anyway as a teenager. My mom touched the lives of anyone who ever had the privilege of meeting her and they all absolutely adored her.
It wasn’t losing my virginity that made me a man.
When I was around 12 years old I was doing some fine dining at the local Red Lobster with my parents and my paternal grandmother. My mom was feeling a little under the weather and didn’t touch her food. She never once complained, but when someone inquired about her appetite she said she was having “a little stomach pain”. That “little stomach pain” went on for a few days, long enough to encourage her to see her physician. As it turns out that “little pain” wasn’t actually from her stomach. It was from her spleen which had swollen to several times it’s normal size due to an over abundance of white blood cells which were a direct result of leukemia…..mother fuckin’ cancer. My parents beat around the bush for a while, trying to protect me I suppose. When they eventually they sat me down and told me, “Mom has cancer”, my life changed, I changed. At that exact moment I stopped being a boy who was raised by his mother and became a man that had to be strong for his mother.
5 foot 3 and full of fight.
My mom has always been a fighter, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at her. She was only 5′ 3″ and spent the majority of her life weighing around 120 pounds, maybe less. She was never violent, nor even angry, but she has always been full of fight. Before my mom and dad were married, they were at Pawleys Island vacationing as drunken college students do. My dad ended up pissing of some dude (or possibly several, I forgot the exact details) and was about to be on the losing end of a fist fight when all of a sudden my tiny little mom breaks off a beer bottle and runs over about to shank this son of a bitch for messing with her man. She never lost that fighting spirit either. Cancer tried to take it away from her the US government tried to take it way from her (by regulating interferon shots done through medicaid) but she kept on fighting until the bitter end.
For the rest of this article, keep on keeping on.
Taking her life by the balls.
My mom’s life expectancy was only a few years. The doctors said it was too late to cure the cancer, they could only hope to improve her quality of life. She did the chemotherapy as prescribed….it was worse than the cancer and definitely no improvement for the quality of her life. My parents quickly realized just how fucked the American medical systems advice could be. My mom decided to take her life by the balls, reclaim it as her own and ignore the bullshit she was fed by the medical industry. My dad and her spent an ungodly amount of hours researching alternative cancer treatments. I don’t recall what other options were seriously pondered, but they ended up choosing a macrobiotic diet. The macro diet shares some ideas with us paleo inspired folks. Both diets understand the need for avoiding toxins and eating local organic produce. Both diets abhor modern eating habits and lead people to follow a more natural way of eating. However, the similarities end there. Macro is a mostly vegetarian diet with the exception of fish. Paleo inspired diets include a wide variety of naturally raised meats as one of their staple ingredients. Macro also pushes for 2 things that us paleo folks consider to be amongst the most evil of all natural ingedients, grains and soy.
You can’t argue results.
She followed the macrobiotic diet to a tee. She ate only what she was supposed to eat, cooked it how she was supposed to cook it and chewed each and every bite of food the suggested 100 times. She gave up all of the sweets and other junk foods she loved so much. No matter how tired or sick she was she made it to the local health food store to buy ingredients and she always found the strength to cook for herself. Macrobiotics worked for my mom, you can’t argue with the results. It never cured her, but she was able to lead a far better and significantly longer life than she could have ever dreamed of by only following the American medical advice. The doctors said she would be lucky to live 3 years, she made it over 12. Her doctor, after seeing her progress, opened his mind to the concept of dietary fixes for medical issues, that speaks volumes for her and for the efficiency of a dietary change. Macrobiotics may not have cured her, but it gave her hope and it gave her a better and longer life and for that I will be forever grateful that she not only found that diet, but believed in it and above all stuck with it.
Where were the cavemen when we needed them?
Towards the end of her life the disease had taken away so much from her physically. She was withering away to nothing, weighing well under a hundred pounds. It was obvious, she needed protein. All of the soy in the world will never compare to the protein in beef and other meats, we primal types know that and she knew that as well. She felt she had to give up on the macrobiotic diet because it’s cons were starting to outweigh it’s pros and she knew she needed meat. She went back to following the SAD diet, but she managed to maintain some of the healthier concepts she learned from her many years following macro.
We didn’t know of the paleo diet then, and it’s a god damn shame because I honestly believe it would have been even more beneficial for her than the macrobiotic diet was. We primal folks encourage eating whole foods, with an emphasis on healthy fats and real protein. We strive to avoid toxins, anti-nutrients and foods with high glycemic loads. Also, even though this wouldn’t have helped her health wise, paleo/primal food is far tastier and also easier to prepare than the macrobiotic dishes that were regular staples in her life. Taste and convenience are two luxuries most Americans take for granted and two things that could have greatly improved her quality of life.
So what if she had discovered paleo instead of macro? Is there a possibility she could still be alive today, or at least have lived longer than she did? Would her quality of life have been better? Could she have been happier? It’s impossible to know, but in my heart, I truly believe she would have been better off with a paleo/primal grain free diet as opposed to the mostly vegetarian diet full of grains that she was on.
So who’s to blame?
Where did her cancer come from? Fuck where did all these multiple types of cancer come from and why is it that this non-contagious disease is spreading like the black plague? Science can’t pinpoint what gives us cancer, or why cancer is becoming more rampant. Common sense though, dictates that something had to change over the years to cause each generation to be at higher risk for cancer than the last. So what changed? Our genes? Our environment? Or could it be something as simple as our food?
Before her cancer diagnoses, my mom was a full time kindergarten teacher. She taught kids during the day, then spent her nights cooking and cleaning. She liked to cook, and was damn good at it, but often the time just wasn’t there for her to make every meal from scratch. She ended up using a lot of modern convenience foods to save steps. or several years my mom struggled with her weight. At 5 foot 3, there just isn’t anywhere to store excess calories. She played tennis, walked and swam regularly but it wasn’t enough to keep the weight off. She joined weight watchers and was successful with their program. A program that includes a lot of premade chemical filled faux foods.
Her parents are both still alive, and doing damn fine for themselves. They are both in their mid-nineties, walking without assistance and able to still greatly enjoy life. Her parents, and the rest of that “the greatest generation” grew up eating real food. My mom and other kids from the “baby boomer” generation grew up in the modern age of tv dinners and other convenience foods. Right now, for the first time in recorded history the next generation is likely to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents, and it is most likely a direct result of the food we consume. Could the reason for her cancer be those convenience foods she made us, or those weight watchers pre-made meals and slimfast shakes she consumed pre-cancer?
One day I was talking to my mom on the phone, making tentative plans for her next visit up to see me. A few days later, I got the call from my dad, “it’s bad”, he said. My mom was in the hospital, my dad used the words “it’s bad”, this was serious. I left ass early the next morning. What should have been an 8-9 hour drive took me 12, an overturned tractor trailer on 95 south totally fucked traffic for hours. By the time I got to the hospital, my mom had been in a coma for several hours. I bypassed all the friends and family in the hallway and rushed to be my mom’s side. She was just a shell of the woman I knew and loved. Her eyes were open but eerily crusted over, a machine was breathing for her……she wasn’t smiling, she was always smiling when I visited her other times, seeing her without a smile on her face was almost unfathomable.
I stayed in there a while and just talked to her. Then we had to go home. The next morning my dad and I snuck out of the house before anyone else was up. We didn’t want to have to fight for time with her. We got to her room and both took one of her hands. We sat in silence for a minute and then it happened……she died. For the first time in my life I saw my father cry. I held the hand of my dead mother, my fallen angel. It was by far the worst thing I have ever lived through.
Life goes on. It’s hard, and it’s never the same but it goes on. The real heart breaker is that when my mom died I was still kind of a worthless fuck up. She never got to see the mature, successful man I became because of her. She didn’t get to go to my wedding or even get the chance to meet my wife. Worst of all, she never got the chance to be a grandmother to my kids, a role she would have been perfect for.
I don’t want my kids to have to go through that. I don’t want my kids to have to ever take care of me. I am the dad, I am the caregiver. I want to live a long, amazing and healthy life. I want to see my kids have kids and their kids have kids and then I want to die in a high speed car crash while driving a race car around Road Atlanta……or perhaps I will die fighting terrorist…..or maybe mid orgasm. In any case I don’t want to die in a hospital bed and I damn sure don’t want to die before I get the chance to see what my children will do with their lives. So I will do everything in my power to make damn sure that doesn’t happen and I truly believe following a paleo/primal diet and living the modern caveman lifestyle to the fullest is my best bet at improving my odds.
