David Wolfe post in memory of my father

Ten years ago, nearly to the day, my father’s life was ended in an NHS hospital.  The hospital in question used to exist to terminate elderly and terminally ill patients, so that the statistics were all at the same location.  Whilst it was a superficially nice place, it was the equivalent of taking your pet to the vet for the last time.

My father had vascular dementia, which I knew very little about at the time.  Nevertheless, I made sure that he was able to stay at home for as long as possible.  My mother, not the most proficient of carers, would not have lasted as long as she did had she not had someone there.  She still lied about the help I was providing until she was not listened to by the rest of the family anyway.

A lifelong socialist and pacifist, my father rebelled by marrying my mother, whom he met on the shores of Lake Geneva, despite both being from Glasgow.  His family were very well known communist/extreme trade unionists in Glasgow.  My great grandfather was behind the revolution that had tanks in George Square.

A large proportion of my father’s family rejected him when he bought this house and married a militarist Conservative, although my mother was not the most thoughtful of political thinkers.  He never told her, she was quite shocked when I broke it to her a couple of years ago.

During WW2, he and his friends were conscientious objectors.  One was jailed for it, but later had a very respectable life and did quite well.  This would not happen now, of course.  My father was sent to work in the forests as he had defended himself in court and it was established that he had rather obscure religious reasons for his communitarian beliefs and seven single widowed aunts from WW1 to support.

His interest in natural health was so obsessive that it cost quite an astonishing amount even when I was growing up in the 70s.  We had a dehydrator going and sprouts along the window sills.

He was a very quiet, humorous individual, who you did not get to know unless you showed some interest.  Therefore I was told the family secrets even my mother did not get to hear.  I have to say, since his death I have become more and more like him.  My attitude to Wolfe has been much like my father’s love affair with this house.  When he failed to secure it on the first attempt, he shuffled around muttering “that was my house” until the person who had bought it changed his mind and sold it to him.

If anyone deserved to be saved by my persistent interest in natural health, it was my father.  I did try to extract him from the clutches of the NHS, but to no avail as my mother had just had a stroke and was considered ‘a handful,’ although there was no question of my having any support at the time.  I was just expected to manage, regardless of anything going on in my life.

What really gets me annoyed is the fact that within two days of being in that hellhole he was drugged because he was considered difficult.  When I challenged this, I was flatly told that he was suddenly in pain.  He was still capable of speech and eating normally prior to this.  Within three months he was less than half the weight and we were told that he must not even drink anything.

The figures for Alzheimer’s deaths in Scotland indicate that this is deliberate policy.  I can see that the NHS regard aging as an unacceptable burden, and that they are trying to take quality of life into account, what I do not understand is why the alternatives are so frightening to them.  I am still suffering from an invasion of nurses who appear to think I should be burnt as a witch because my mother is still alive, despite their best efforts.

I am, rather helpfully, very angry about what happened to my father, and about the continuous bitching and battling I have to do to protect my mother.  Anger is a useful energy.  I daresay it is considered negative in some circles.  Personally I think it is the best fuel ever.

Over the last decade, I went from being a Senior Banking Consultant, government researcher and corporate researcher to now being a fledgling author and artist.  During all of this time I was renovating and maintaining a mansion which will never belong to me and taking care of my parents.

At the beginning of this period, I had around six ex-boyfriends who used to come and visit, thankfully missing each other in the process and helping out if they felt like it.  None of them were particularly keen to get me out of my shell, they kind of delivered themselves like pizzas as and when they were not busy.

Overall, the crucial years from the age of 25, a long time ago now, were taken up with my parents and family.  I had previously been a successful chef, and was out-earning the rest of the family when I was told that I was to take care of things as nobody else would do it.  I could have ignored this, but it turned out to be a statement of fact.

I only really realised that my life was over at around 33 or so, when it proved impossible to get decent employment locally, and I could not leave my mother to take care of my father alone as she was not a natural carer by any means.

So, from being absolutely work-obsessed, driven and very keen on pretty poor quality relationships with equally lazy boys, I have become a loner, who slowly moves towards a life of self-expression, for good or ill.

My friend from Slovenia, who I got to know when building the island in Second Life, is now married and is contemplating, at 40, having a child.  I am contemplating the fact I will never have a child as I do not leave the house and have no prospect of forming any new relationships.  The old ones were curtailed as a result of my overwhelming feelings for Wolfe.  I do not regret this at all.  In many ways he was an excuse to move on from a rather stagnant life.  Nor do I genuinely envy anybody.  I just feel rather despondent at the moment and am struggling a bit with the idea of moving on with no goal in mind.

As it is evident that I will never trust anyone enough to have a child with them now, I am inclined to focus on my appearance as a major project that I can spend a lot of time thinking about.  I also need to resolve some of the issues that caused my current problem set in the first place – the fact that I never felt that I looked good enough, the fact that I have insufficient real emotional support to let things go easily, (my reaction to Wolfe was most uncharacteristic)  the fact that I have failed to get any of the things I wanted – life in a rural location, career, children etc.  A major worry is that I have no real way of building a pension.

I always have at least half a dozen plans, which I usually carry out within five years or so.  A former friend recently commented that it was always worth dropping in on me every ten years or so because it is never boring and there is always a masterplan.  This is not the problem.  The problem is that my heart really isn’t in it at the moment, and I feel as if I have been swimming around the same bowl for the last decade.  I can handle being wrong, I have been wrong countless times.  I just don’t know quite how to break out of the cycle of being wrong over and over again.

One good thing about the Wolfe era was that it forced me to give up a lot of things that were holding me back, and it forced me into a situation in which I had to express myself publicly since there was no way of doing it privately.  For this I am strangely grateful.  Every step I take at the moment, however, is tempered with a feeling of impending doom.  I am sure that this will pass, but at the moment it is rather sad.

None of the people that I have left behind over the last few years did anything unusually wrong.  There was more of a generalised wrongness that meant that I was constantly feeling suppressed or undervalued.  Wolfe was very much the last straw in that lengthy period.  I was insulted, under-valued and not listened to, not directly by him, but by his associated entourage, and after the experience of my family stabbing me over and over again in the hope of gaining money from my parents, enough was enough.

So, although I am numb, lonelier than ever and again forced into a situation in which I have to come out of my shell or perish, you will not catch me genuinely hating Wolfe or his crappy idea of business practice.  I have learned and observed a lot that I would never otherwise have noticed, and I am overall better off as a result. despite my almost total destruction in the course of my latest metamorphosis.

In the course of a relatively short life, I have been everything from 98lb to 311lb. (150lb is probably about right given my build)  In my case, any attempt at a normal diet after the age of about 9 or so ended up with continuous weight gain. (following glandular fever) I do not eat entire packets of biscuits or fries and now have an extremely high level of nutritional knowledge.  I just cannot eat ‘normal’ food or engage in social eating of any kind.

It has taken, for a variety of reasons, decades to accept this and put myself first.  Even when I found the answer, something came along to cause me to ignore it.

As you can probably tell by the website, my second love is men.  Food is more of an obsession.  I was a Michelin level chef for a few years, and following my education became very interested in food politics.

Causes of self-neglect have varied.  From avoiding men, to being upset by men, to trying not to be assaulted by men, to ignoring my own needs for either gender, I am guilty of having put myself last at every opportunity.  I used to think that this was a virtue.  I have now, finally, thanks to the Wolfe era, accepted that it is my biggest failing.  With the exception of my mother, who is 90, I will no longer be doing that.

So, one of my theories about why people like me put on so much weight is that they have the following issues:

• lack of self-confidence caused by bullying because they have forgotten how to assert themselves
• lack of awareness about gut health – eating badly causes you to eat even more badly
• poor ability to prioritise themselves over other people in order to survive
• crippling social anxiety caused by reactions to their appearance

To be fair, in my case, the issue was complicated by a lengthy battle with my love of smoking, which, being orally fixated, helped for a while, however the real basic problem is the repulsive comments made to me at an early age by my sisters.  For those who do not understand the effects of bullying at an early age – all those nasty comments you make stay with the person forever.  Be very careful what you say to people.  I will probably never choose to spend time with women because of this, because I am always looking for the next negative comment to cling to.  That is my problem, not theirs, but it is a fact.

So, in the spirit of empowering a few people who hide in their homes as I do, please remember the following:

• If anyone tells you that you don’t matter – run.
• Sometimes people are just horrible – it isn’t you its them – it took me until I was 39 to accept that.
• No problem ever got better because you got fatter.
• Walking is a better way of dealing with emotion than stuffing it down along with some food.
• Everything you put into your mouth affects your health.  Everything.
• You deserve to feel good, no matter what you imagine you have done or failed to do.
• Repairing the damage starts from losing the guilt and putting yourself first.

Being a kind person is very nice, but it may well be killing you.  Having been put through a lot, you may regard your kindness as your best feature, but in terms of your own health, it may not be.  Learn to make space for yourself, and avoid anyone that will not let you do that.

If you have any questions, feel free to use the comments.

As I am dealing with rather a lot of change at the moment, physically and mentally, I decided to take a quick look around the raw foodies on youtube today.

The last time I bothered to look was some years ago, around the time that Patenaude and Gianni were telling everyone that none of the ‘leaders’ were actually raw.  This was when FullyRawChristina (apologies if the name is wrong) seemed to be becoming immensely popular.

I stopped looking at any raw food material around 2012 or so, due to my failure to communicate with Wolfe about the original book.  It was just too depressing.  Now I am looking at videos that are even more depressing, for a different reason. Fresh faced young things complaining that they were ‘sold’ an impossible lifestyle, that they expected all their problems to be solved with positive thinking, that they felt guilty about having feelings at all, that their periods stopped etc etc.

Even Freelea is punting a non-raw diet.  Who decided that it all had to be so defined?

Liferegenerator seems to have moved from his stance on 801010 to more of a Monarch-style rawness.  He also seems to be making some rather Wolfe like videos on keeping his hair, whilst losing it.

If I was a nastier person, I would laugh at this, but really I have never seen so many people cut off their noses at once.

From the standpoint of somebody who had always had problems with food and positivity generally (see previous post on positive thinking)  a few things were obvious the minute I even considered being raw.

• an attitude of gratitude and feeling positive every day ain’t gonna happen.  This is a sales pitch mentality, originally created before any of us were born by a vitamin salesman who trained Jim Rohn.  Being healthy does not solve all or even any of your other problems.  It did not help that Mr Charisma, David Wolfe, did not like emotional confrontation, and a lot of people got suckered into that, including me very briefly.  After that moment, I confronted until I was blue in the face, to no avail.
• 100% raw, whilst I gave it a damn good try, was not sustainable long term because you spend most of your day thinking about, preparing or finding the correct food.  It was also quite expensive in some cases.
• Ignoring your B12 requirement is insanity. (801010)
• Inserting the word vegan into anything makes it a niche product, and cuts your audience by about 80%.

The strengths of the raw ‘culture’ on the other hand were as follows:

• adopting a fairly anti-social lifestyle in terms of food altered adoptee’s personal relationships, in terms of prioritising themselves over whatever their former friends were doing.
• feeling better meant making slightly better decisions short term.
• looking good is always nice.
• learning to take partial advice is supposed to make you more capable of leadership and less inclined to follow ‘leaders’ in the first place.  It is not supposed to turn you into a Patenaude-like whiner.

As I said many years ago about the 801010 Wolfe-haters back then (who were far less embittered than the more recent ones that contacted me) You take up the information that you need and you explore further.  You do not cling to every mistake and bit of bad behaviour in order to discredit both them and yourself for listening in the first place.  It is a bit like considering suicide.  Utterly pointless and self-defeating.

As the scene seems to have kind of imploded, perhaps now is the time for some sense to enter the world of raw food.  The fact is that 100% was never going to work for everyone.  On a macrobiotic basis alone, expecting people from all over the world to eat the same thing made no sense at all.  Cold countries tend to have been meat eating, and tropical countries less so for a start.  There are ways around this if you are really determined, but the learning curve was too high for most people.  Arguing over which diet was best did not help.  I believe I mentioned this several years ago.

From a personal perspective, my hop, skip and jump into raw food has not only saved my life, but also my 90 year old mother’s, simply because it is a very clean way of setting a base for natural medicine.  My learning curve was not as unassailable as most people’s, because of my father and my intense scrutiny of anything I do, but even I double check everything.  I certainly don’t fall hook, line and sinker behind any so called leader, no matter what my personal feelings may or may not be.  We are not vegan or even vegetarian, but the fact is that raw foodism comprises 90% of our diet for very good health reasons.

If anyone in the raw food line of work had any sense, they would restart their thinking process along the lines of actual nutrition.  The WHO say that 9-15 portions of fruit and vegetables should be the basis for anyone’s diet, not five as people are told.  If you start from there, you can create a much more stable basis for your raw foodism argument.  Why arsing about is necessary instead of actually helping people I do not know.  Nobody cares if Freelee hates Durianriders.  Nobody. Get your acts together.