FINDING OUR RECIPE FOR EXCELLENT HEALTH

We are inspired by elderly folks that stay in shape, like the 90 year old in San Francisco who ran 5 miles a day and an 80 year old that we recently met at KTA grocery store in Hilo who was still earning medals from his long distance running events. We have been searching for the secret recipe of exercise and diet that will confer the same remarkable health and vitality upon us. Several times in our life we have gotten the mix of exercise and diet right and it was a wonderful experience. Each time our optimal health ended with some major life change like an injury, a pregnancy, a cross country move, a new company. We are always striving to get the recipe back and recapture that wonderful feeling of health and energy. As we age, what worked in the past does not give us results as quickly.

We confess to having done some pretty radical things in pursuit of improving our health. In our thirties we became vegans to avoid growth hormones in beef, chicken and dairy. We found it greatly improved our health and energy initially, but after eight years, we started to feel a loss of vitality. We had all our mercury fillings removed and replaced them with ceramic fillings with good results particularly improvements in memory and slowing aging. We moved to a place that had the best availability of fresh organic fruit and vegetables with low cancer rates and we felt more energetic and seemed to never get sick.

During our forties, when stress from a high tech start up seemed to consume us, we went to retreats to fast, drink wheat grass juice, detoxify our bodies, and take time to consider the spiritual side of life. We went on a completely raw diet for four months learning ways to create amazing meals from nuts and vegetables. But we were always hungry and gained weight, so we stopped. We have tried a lot of other diets including Atkins, Blood type, Weight Watchers, Glycemic Index, and low fat diets. Each diet has some kernel of truth in the recipe of our health that we have found helpful and retained in our efforts to lower our weight and gain vitality.

We continue our search for the perfect recipe of diet and exercise. In the last year we have exercised to the point of not being able to do anything else during the day discovering that at our age exercise causes more exhaustion and pain than when we were young. Now we exercise less, just three times a week instead of six, and we are focusing energy on our diet and food preparation. Since moving to Hawaii, we have changed what we eat, adding fiber through locally grown fruits and vegetables and low fat protein through grass fed beef raised on the Big Island and fish caught off Hilo’s shores. We continue to marvel at Hilo’s high quality of food and the sub-tropical climate perfect for exercise; we believe this combination provides the key ingredients we need for our excellent health.