I recently came across Mark Hyman’s book “The Ultramind Solution”, which led me to Barry Sears older Zone Diet system.  Both books cover the same topic, which is how diet and lifestyle impact our bodies, which in turn impacts our cognitive capacity and personal resilience (ability to weather upsets and disappointments).   I have been playing at the edges of this for some time (raw foods and juice feasting, polyphasic sleep, lifestyle design) but I see now how directly related all this is to my primary interest in “peak performance”.  Peak Performance is simply the ability to function at higher levels of awareness and well-being all the time (or most of the time).  It stands to reason that, as physical beings, our mental and emotional state has physical root causes.  Mark Hyman even declares that many types of mental and emotional problems, from ADHD to depression and anxiety and even major physical disabilities can be cured through relatively simple lifestyle and diet changes.

This is all quite intuitively obvious.  The main question is, why do we so rarely actually do the things that we know would have such a dramatic impact on our well-being, our performance and the quality of our life?  My quick response to this question, is that we actually enjoy the upsets and ups and downs of our everyday lives!  They create excitement and make us feel that our lives do have some meaning and purpose, which is our daily (and generally losing) battle against negative upset, about which Cheri Huber writes about so eloquently in There is Nothing Wrong with You.

However this is all speculation, and of no importance really to achieving the desired outcome.  What I mean is that an intellectual understanding of the origins and causes of the types of behaviors that we engage that are not fully self-serving, is not necessary to changing these behaviors.

I invite you to join me in an exploration of the impact of diet and lifestyle on “peak performance”…

There are several ways you can do this.  You can write to me or comment to the blog.  If you live in the Philadelphia area, you can come to Trellis for our 4-part Conscious Eating course that begins Monday June 15.  It’s probable that we will form a support group around the Conscious Eating class, and you can join us via teleconference.  Or, just stay tuned for further posts…

With love,

Marc

If you are wondering how my juice feast is going, I am now on the modified version, which is juicing two meals and eating solid one meal a day. I was feeling so incredible for 3-4 days I could not believe it (unbearably happy and very-very expanded), but I wasn’t very focused.  This is the known problem of very expansive diets (see Steve Pavlina’s latest on the topic).  So now I am experimenting with various things (including tea, Yerba Mate, and protein shakes), and still feeling quite well and getting a lot done.  I am also 8 days off coffee, yay, if that were the only thing accomplished it would still be a triumph.  I feel this experiment is going to have profound and far-reaching consequences for me.

The larger story around all this, and my motivation for starting this program in the first place, is about some of the larger shifts and growth that I have been blessed with in the last 18 months. It’s in the style of some of my other autobiographical writing, but it’s the first time I have ever put something like this out on the internet. It’s also substantially shorter than the 80 pages of my previous autobiography, that I inflicted on my entire family and most of my close friends, so you should be grateful . I feel that this is a story whose time has come for me to tell.

Why I started the juice feast

I found out about juice feasting through Steve Pavlina’s personal development blog.  As I mentioned earlier, I want to be like Steve Pavlina when I grow up.  The first reason being, that his values are my values: love, passion, courage, contribution.  In addition, he spends his entire day writing, relating, and conducting experiments in consciousness (most famous of which is his polyphasic sleep experiment which I am also very intrigued by).  Writing, relating, and conducting experiments in consciousness, is what I love to do more than anything else.  All I really want is a lifestyle where it would be economically possible for me to do this full-time – I cannot begin to describe the happiness that I feel at this thought.

Now, let’s get real here, this is a very ambitious project, particularly in a recession.  First of all, I am still paying off the considerable debt that was left over from the dissolution of the web business a year ago.  Secondly, it has become critical that I get my problem with hypomania and coffee handled (see below), and thirdly, I am going to need a heck of a lot more physical energy and focus than I have now to do all this.  Right now when I get home from work on weekdays I find that after making dinner, walking the dog etc., I only have about 2 hours to myself.  Weekends are spent resting and catching-up on all the things that I didn’t have time to do during the week.  I am sure many of you working folks out there (and/or parents) can relate. 

Despite all this, I feel deeply and irrationally hopeful about the situation.  I have always believed that “where there is a will there is a way”, or as Joseph Campbell would say “love bears all things”.  The two statements are synonymous because to consistently exercise one’s will in the face of overwhelming obstacles requires a lot of love.  This is the “hero’s journey” that Joseph Campbell talks about. 

The founding of Trellis

When Rebekah and I moved to Philadelphia in February of 2007 and started Trellis House, my vision was to create an environment for accelerated growth and transformation: for us, for our housemates and for our extended community.  Rebekah’s stated goal was to “embody bliss”, and my stated goal was to research philosophies and practices that would lead to peak-performance and enhanced states of perception, intuition, and joy.  We took a huge risk doing this, taking on a large mortgage (and many people told us we were crazy) but we were young and foolish . 

But an amazing thing has happened in the last two years, as we went after a goal that we both felt very passionate about: we are succeeding.  When I talk about an “environment for accelerated growth and transformation”, these are not just words or abstract ideas.  I see lives being transformed here on a daily basis, Rebekah’s and mine included.  That is the topic of the Trellis House blog Adventures in Relationship and Community and I hope there will be many more articles there of this nature.  This article is about me, but it’s not all about me. 

[Note: the "Marc's life and travels" content - including this article - has moved over to my personal blog Marc's Lifestyle Design Blog. I will continue to post articles from Rebekah and our community blog from time to time to this list].

Then the “shit hits the fan”

During our first six months here approximately, and after our wedding, we received a huge amount of appreciation and acknowledgement from friends and from the community.  It was totally intoxicating, and it happened in the midst of tremendous conflict in the web business and ongoing intense financial pressure.  But the strain was mounting, and I finally cracked.  In October 2007, after the web business dissolved and I was contemplating bankruptcy, Rebekah and I came close to splitting up, but a powerful  experience we had at a Shalom Retreat led us into another 3 months of bliss together. This is the pattern of my life actually (even before Rebekah): alternating periods of tremendous excitement and optimism, with periods of despair.  The last two years however – and especially the last few months – have been the longest period of generally “up” time that I have ever experienced.  My relationship with Rebekah, as challenging as it sometimes can be, has been the greatest gift and stimulus to grow that I have ever received.  Rebekah is my lover, my soul-mate, my best friend, my confidante, my greatest supporter, and my business partner. Thank you God.

Then in early spring of this year, things went flat again.  Rebekah was dealing with some very troubling custody issues with her ex-husband, some conflicts arose within friendships, and the company where I worked shut down, throwing us again into financial instability.  And Rebekah and I weren’t really connecting again. 

Grace and redemption, and healing Hypomania

I started my new job (as a contract technical writer for an insurance company) in early July, and as I wrote in Working a job and having a life, I thought it was going to be the death of me.  Instead, the opposite happened – I found myself living with a depth of passion and purpose, and a joy and excitement, that I had previously only dreamed of.  I started waking up in the morning excited to be meeting the day, and grateful to be alive, which hadn’t happened to me for a very long time.  A key part of this transformation (aside from the obvious one of greater financial stability) was “finding my voice” through my writing.  I wrote half a dozen articles in the space of six weeks, including one major research piece, which was high-power fun and also made me clear that this is what I want to do for a living. 

As I started to see my own vitality and passion increasing, most everyone I was close to, and our community as a whole, seemed to be going through some big expansion this fall. Everybody in the house was having breakthroughs, our housemate Jason got his NVC certification (the first one in the state of Pennsylvania), our other housemate Joanna went to Shalom Mountain and came back transformed, our children were thriving, we started up Mark Groups again that had been on hiatus for a while, important relationships shifted for the better, and just recently we got approval to produce a Morehouse course at our house.  Clearly, something important was going on, even though I could not fully fathom the depth of it or understand lines of causality. 

All this was very good and very intense, but for me, it was still very hypomanic and driven by coffee.  Hypomania is a psychological condition characterized by mood swings between intense euphoria / excitement, and depression.  It’s kind of like a mild manic-depression but with shorter cycles, and I have had it for a long time, as did my father.  Coffee triggers hypomania for me, which ultimately affects my sleep, my focus and concentration, and the quality of my attention on other people (people close to me hate it when I am on coffee).  However, the experience of being hypomanic while engaged in creative activity (especially writing) is so thrilling that I was unable, or unwilling, to stop, despite my “best” (stated) intentions.

In the end, my hypomanic behavior created a lot of conflict with Rebekah, and I was also tired all the time and not getting anything done around the house, and I was taking risks with my job by not being able to focus at work.  This is what caused me to finally seek out the juice feasting diet and to begin this new phase of my life.  Prior to this, I was in the land of “good intentions” with regards to my addiction, which as everybody knows, means nothing.  I needed a complete lifestyle change, which has now begun. 

What all this means to me

Those of you who know me, know that my life until now has been a rocky road (although, truthfully, whose life isn’t?).  Despite this, I have continued to grow and to evolve, and I am very proud of what I am accomplishing and who I am becoming.  What I have finally resolved, is that I am no longer willing to let the love that I have stay inside me, or the power that I possess remain unexpressed. 

In this recent period I feel that I have finally passed the threshold of “becoming a man”.  What I mean is that the act of gaining conscious control of one’s emotions and intelligence, and then using this to serve the world, is a masculine task.  This is a lifetime work, obviously, and it is distinct from the “feminine” task of finding joy in all things and in creating through attraction. Although my teachers in this area are many, these terms and ideas are mine – for a brief description of them click here and scroll to the bottom.  The way I see it, all of us need eventually to fully own both masculine and feminine, but in the meantime, we can use our intimate relationships to empower the aspects that come less naturally to us.  David Deida says that the masculine goal is freedom, and the feminine goal is love. In my experience, the real power happens when you put the two together, and they start talking to each other.

My goals right now – to pay off our debts, to earn a living by writing and coaching, and to grow our community – are all masculine goals. It stands to reason: I am a man.  I don’t know what’s coming next, but I am wondering how my beginning to establish this deep connection with the masculine will impact my willingness and ability to enter into feminine territory. I am also aware that there are many many layers of masculine consciousness that remain for me to explore, and that masculine consciousness is more about non-attachment, non-judgmental awareness and non-reactiveness than it is about power per se. These are all areas where I have much work to do.

I started a diet today called Juice Feasting (well, I’ve actually been on it 3 days with some experimentation, but I want to be rigorous).   Essentially, it involves drinking “unlimited” quantities (3-4 quarts a day) of freshly squeezed fruit and vegetable juices.  People do it for as much as 90 days, and report healing all kinds of illnesses as well as extraordinary feelings of happiness, connection, energy, clarity and focus. The testimonials on the website are pretty compelling, and after just 3 days, I believe every word of it. I am feeling incredible.  I am extremely happy but also more calm and focused than I’ve been in a very long time – maybe ever. 

I started this diet to get my coffee addiction handled, and it worked beautifully for that, but very quickly I realized the consequences were much more far-reaching, even life-transforming.  My plan is to stick to it for two weeks, then start adding solid food, but weighted towards raw food, and maybe only one meal a day of solid food, plus occasional animal or whey protein.  Most of what I have read on the topic of animal protein (including my food guru Annemarie Colbin in her classic “Food and Healing”, and the New York-based Institute for Integrative Nutrition) talks about how people have varying needs for it (which may be none).  Meat is a highly contractive (yang) food which, when taken appropriately, can serve to balance more expansive (yin) foods like fruits and most vegetables, and promotes focus and concentration.  I will write more about this later, just to note that I am in a very expanded state right now, which is delicious, but probably not sustainable given the need to earn a living .  Even so, I am far more grounded than I ever was when I was drinking coffee.

The thought that a modified juice feast could be a permanent lifestyle change is also very exciting.  One of the great things about it is that it’s extremely easy.  It takes about an hour a day, which is about the same as most people spend cooking and eating anyway.

In my next article I am going to talk about some of the other extraordinary changes that have been happening to me in the last few months, that have led up to this.  But for now and without further ado, here is how it works:

The Juice Feasting Diet

I first learned about this through Steve Pavlina’s blog (I love Steve Pavlina, I want to be like him when I grow up).  Steve went for 30 days, and then gave up because it made him too expanded (as mentioned above).  The best reference is the Juice Feasting website. It’s got a lot of material so I am giving a summary below.  Note: the site is a bit confusing, all this info is in the “Juice Feasting / Spectrum Intro” pull-down, but make sure your browser is maximized to see the sub-menus.

What you need

There are three kinds of juicers: centrifugal (the normal store type), impeller (like Champion juicers) and high-power blenders (Vitamix).  Ordinary centrifugal juicers are probably not adequate to produce the 4 quarts needed daily.  I have an old Champion and it works well but a bit slow.  With a Vitamix, you blend the vegetables and strain them.  It’s the fastest way but perhaps not as good as an impeller juicer because the food gets oxidized. This article has all the details.

Food to buy

First you need to determine the correct proportion of fruits in the juice for your metabolism.  More fruits = more sugar = more expansive.  You can take a fasting blood sugar test using a blood glucose monitor (about $20 at the pharmacy) to determine this (or else use common sense and your body’s reaction).  In general you should juice at least 2 pounds of green vegetables (spinach, broccoli, kale, romaine, parsley) every day, a celery bunch, a cucumber, and a few lbs of carrots if you like them.  I buy big bags of spinach and romaine at Costco (not organic – I haven’t figured that out yet).  From this base, add fruits, particularly apples, but anything goes (watermelon, cantaloupe, pineapple, orange).  Right now its costing me about $10-15/day.

How it works

I juice 4 quarts in the morning.  It takes me about an hour.  I store them in 1-quart mason jars and bring them to work.  They say its best to drink “meals” rather than to sip all day.  There are some recommended supplements but I haven’t gotten into that yet.

That’s it!  If you do give it a try, please drop-me a mail or comment.  I think if you even try it for 2 days, you will get hooked (like me).

A note about fasting and dieting in general – Master Cleanse, HCG Diet, and Isagenix

I have often read that a 7-10 day fast should be done at least once a year for optimal health.  Unfortunately, ordinary fasts don’t work for me. After a couple of days on a straight water-fast or a Master Cleanse I get quite spaced-out and a bit nauseous.  Also, if you know me, my goal is to gain weight, not lose.  Even losing 10 lbs would not be good for me (I might float away . Simply eating more doesn’t work for me either – I just feel bloated and eventually go back to my regular diet (and I eat quite a lot and never gain weight).

The Master Cleanse needs more said. It’s a lemon-juice and maple-syrup fast, so it is slightly caloric, and has many benefits including healing illness, detoxifying the body and redefining one’s relationship to food and to food addictions. However, it is not intended for long-term weight loss. Rebekah did it twice for 10 days. It was a great experience for her.

In general, as most of us know, diets don’t work well for weight loss. Those that do work are either not very healthy or else not long-term sustainable (ie Pritikin and other high-protein diets). Rebekah has recently had great success with the HCG Protocol. She lost over 50 lbs in 4 months and has kept it off with hardly any effort at all. She looks fabulous and feels great. The HCG diet changes your metabolism permanently. Rebekah and I are thinking about writing a website for it, as its an incredible diet.

Aside from this, I also have friends and family that are huge fans of Isagenix, which is a liquid fast consisting primarily (as I understand it) of high-quality dairy protein and green foods. I intend to try it at some point. But, it’s still processed & dried food, it’s not cheap, and it’s not a permanent lifestyle change. I like the fact that all I need to juice feast is a trip to my local grocery store .