THE circle of life has taught us that each species has its own version of a purpose-driven life. This is also true for creatures that make your skin crawl or those that crawl on your skin — hmmm, hello, spiders, rats, mice, snakes, cockroaches, ants, mosquitoes, flies, toxic people.
Why is it that each time we see any of these species, all we wanna do is get rid of them? By banishing them to Siberia, we may have alleviated our fears but with the risk of eliminating what could have been their contribution to our life.
No need to worry, though — once they’re banished to Siberia, they’ll manage to return to Pinas through airplanes, ships, submarines, submarine cables, submarine pipelines, etc. “Where there's a will, there's a way,” as the proverb goes.
Wish ko lang I can use that same proverb in my trying-so-hard carnivore journey which has been going back to Day One after a high-carb meal.
If you’ve been reading my columns about the low-carb diet and now the carnivore diet, it’s actually not a diet but a lifestyle.
It’s not the lifestyles of the rich and famous, though. It’s more like the lifestyle of someone who has been there, done that with all sorts of diets that might have worked for a while until they did not, most precisely because I considered them as diets — temporary solutions to a perennial weight problem.
I used to joke about this: that my body weight was easy to calculate. Simply add 100 to my current age, and that was it. So, at 13 years old, I was 113 pounds. At 20, I was 120 pounds. At 30, 130 pounds.
But at 40, it could have been 145 pounds? I don’t know. I didn’t have a weighing scale then and I was afraid to find out. But each time I looked in the mirror, I knew that my weight was not following its standard operating procedure (SOP) anymore.
When I turned 50, the more I was convinced my weight was way beyond what it should have been, the 150 pounds per its SOP.
I heard SOP refers to the commission that some government people in Pinas allegedly demand from contractors, suppliers, and taxpayers, but that’s another story.
For me, SOP is what my body weight should be and on what to do to keep it from increasing to infinity and beyond.
In January 2021 when my blood pressure went to infinity and beyond, I thought no-red-meat was the cure. But my blood pressure still remained higher than normal.
And then in October 2021, I saw a video on Facebook where Dr. Josephine Grace Rojo Tan was talking about not having rice for three years. That piqued my curiosity. I continued watching Doc Grace’s other videos which led to other low-carb doctors’ videos.
But I always found excuses to avoid the low-carb diet: birthdays, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, Chinese New Year, Valentine’s. The loveless celebrating Valentine’s — go figure. Haha.
By the second half of February 2022, I ran out of excuses. The low-carb journey finally began. And three years later, here I am, trying so hard to be carnivore.
I can always quit and simply accept that hypertension, body pains, allergies, rhinitis, depression, anxiety, and panic attacks will never go away as I become older. And then I’ll take more medicines and wait for more illnesses to arrive. What kind of a life will that be?
