health - Ina Disguise

RIP Raw Food Culture and Motivation

August 26, 2017 3 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.

https://youtu.be/fQWkitvfncc

health, motivation

Finding your happy place

August 25, 2017 3 Comments

Regular readers will know that my writing a post like this is very odd, given what has happened over the last couple of weeks. Obviously what I was feeling about the Wolfe Era was not what I interpreted it as, because I cannot tell you how relieved I was to be off the hook after the initial flush of fury.

My theory on why he provokes such a strong reaction in people is that he is using hypnosis techniques and they are misfiring somewhat. The NLP is great, and makes you feel a lot better, but, particularly if you end up spending a lot of money on him as many Americans do, it seems to end up with a period of utter fury, which is what I spent my downtime on over the last few years.

Anyway, enough about him. Mystery solved. His wife was, apparently, the last person I spoke to before all the garbage started. I had assumed it was him taking the mickey, but I now realise that she was protecting her future. Fair enough, I didn’t want your future anyway, whoever you are.

So, now that I am relieved of the worry of that lengthy period of misery, I am working on making myself happy. I am heartily sick of putting other people first, with the obvious exception of my mother, who continues to be very spoilt.

So, in honour of making myself happy, I have invested in some me-specific herbs, moved onto supermix, I now drink a lot of water, and I am persisting with my self re-modelling. I have even, after all these years, started actually wearing my corset collection. I used to buy them and then hide them with the rest of my ‘oddments’ so there are rather a lot.

If you are sexually neglected, or even just pissed off with your partner’s idea of a sex life, which is likely to be kind of repetitive in my experience, a corset is exactly what you need to cheer yourself up. It reminds you of your bits, it hugs you all day long, and it makes you look better in clothes. In my advanced state of poor posture, caused by crouching over my needlework and computer, it also allows you to do a lot more exercise, since your back has some support. So, I think we can safely say that the future Ina is going to be wearing a lot of tailored clothing and strictly firm underwear.

Weight loss is slow by my standards at the moment, but I am aware that the new requirement to walk every day is likely to have increased my blood plasma, and several painful lumps have subsided. Still getting a few ergonomic twinges, but I am sure that with persistence they will go as they did the last time. Restarted my old channel on youtube, and found I was not nearly as crazy as I thought I must be. I just wanted to get on with some work. Why was that so hard to understand?

Not getting on with much in the way of artwork at the moment, but the books are going very well, thanks to the new additions. Long may my lower-stress approach be allowed to continue unmolested.

health, motivation

Who is hiding behind your depression?

August 23, 2017 52 Comments

I am decluttering at the moment, and I am very surprised by some of the things I am finding. I have been shuffling about in the same rags for years now, since I did not consider it worthwhile to dress when nobody was going to see me, and I had thought that I needed to look at buying clothing.

Obviously, since I am losing rather a lot of weight at the moment – replacing the icon and logo with a new image is the current priority for the website – I do not want to buy anything. The plan is to emerge as a completely new visual concept before I let Ina out in public, which takes a lot of work.

To my surprise, I find that I am quite a snappy dresser, and had twenty pairs of fairly nice trousers. I also had a full cupboard full of jumpers.

The biggest surprise today is that I am clearly very kinky, and have a couple of dozen items of very restrictive underwear. I haven’t worn any of it, so it is all brand new and in a variety of sizes. Evidently my alter ego/non-repressed self is quite a gal.

Caring for others involves a lot of hiding your personality. There is no point in tarting yourself up to be covered in half digested food, poo or anything else, so you end up shuffling about in your studio clothing, if you happen to be me. Even when I go out for my twice daily walk I am in glue covered clothing. This is how I end up with three wardrobes full of clothing that I barely remember – there is no reason for wearing any of it.

I suppose this is why they try to insist that you have a day off now and again. It doesn’t seem terribly relevant when you redirect your life around constraints you have had no control over. I didn’t even insist on privacy until a couple of years ago, so it was necessary to hide any aspect of personality from any potential intruders. I like to leave a pair of vibrams out now, since it disgusts my sisters. Beyond that, I try not to tell anyone anything.

The point of hiding behind Ina, was to express myself without interference. It turns out that even I was interfering, since I have clearly been hiding things even from myself. Obviously, I was aware of my sexual proclivities in the past, but I hadn’t realised quite how much I was avoiding thinking about it because of sheer misery.

Distracting yourself with friends does not help with this, since naturally you concentrate on more sociable topics. I certainly don’t discuss my sexuality with my exs, since they are either aware or were not capable of dealing with it.

So, I wonder, have you considered what you are avoiding by hiding behind your depression? Would it help to identify and indulge whatever that is?

health, motivation

My raw food eating disorder

August 22, 2017 114 Comments

One of the exs, who befriended me this week to borrow a ladder (I kid you not) last night announced that my objection to his attempts to sabotage my health constituted an eating disorder.

This guy has just spent three years with us, on and off, and is well aware that in the course of his gaining 14lb I gained 140lb eating the same thing. He literally just watched that happen. I am very active within the constraints of taking care of my mother and this place, basically the only difference between us is that I am constantly under a great deal of stress, which is usually made worse by spending time with an unpredictable and potentially violent person who is apparently obsessed with getting attention in the form of food and interest.

This is one of the main weaknesses of declaring yourself a raw foodist. Your former friends just don’t get it. They believe everything they have been told and think that you aren’t getting a balanced diet. Another objection, which I have just read from a Paleo site, is that the use of superfood products just ain’t natural.

The social difficulties of retaining your raw diet include not being able to eat out, being an awkward guest at parties, frequently finding yourself either very hungry or eating non hydrated nuts because nothing else is available, and basically avoiding social events because you know you will be unable to eat anything that you haven’t prepared. You can get as obsessive as you want, the opportunities are endless, but there are workarounds for almost any problem. Fairly early on, I came across someone who had managed to remain raw whilst eating from a MacDonalds, so I figured, you have to be a little flexible.

In recent years, thanks to some of the wrecking attempts of close observers of the raw foodies, it transpired that almost nobody was 100 percent raw, even though they were telling you they were. Having actually done it for some time, I concluded that my first impression was correct. 90% is as much as is sensible. That was certainly the case for me, but as I come from a cold, meat obsessed country, it may not be the case for everybody.

Another frequently observed criticism is that raw veganism, as it is sometimes misnamed, represents extreme asceticism, in other words you are not only vegan, you are raw vegan. This is a typical reaction of somebody that has never either done it, or thought about it. Many raw vegans are not actually vegan, using bee pollen and honey, for example. I prefer raw foodist, as it conveys the same difficulties in feeding yourself without the loaded moral gun. Besides which, my ten percent involves smoked fish. From a personal perspective, it is more of a way of indicating that I am unlikely to suddenly enjoy flour, sugar, potato, steak, milk etc so please just give me a green salad.

Over the last few months, I have employed what I learned from the raw foodies to create a high nutrient diet for my mother. Having seen her go from ‘weeks away from death’ to a more robust state, I can verify that the use of superfoods and raw food principles works extremely well in cases such as hers. From being unable to lift a fork to guzzling down 1500 calories of nutrient dense drinks per day, with a meal when she requests it, she would have probably have died in hospital if I had not used my knowledge to take care of her. Nevertheless, I had to explain her diet over and over again to nurses with no nutritional knowledge or interest in learning anything. I then had to explain it to GPs and a dietician. I have no confidence at all, even after all these explanations, that they fully understand the implications of my mother’s life having been saved by this. Even now, they attempt to tell me that she should be eating more mince. (she hates it)

A great reason for doing it is in combination with use of your knowledge of herbal medicine, amino acid and antioxidant therapy. It is a particularly good base for this, and if you happen to sell health products, I am sure it is very lucrative. From my perspective however, I wanted to be able to regulate, medicate and ensure that my mother and in the past, myself, had the building blocks to repair actual damage, and a ‘normal’ diet would have slowed this down enormously.

Having said all of that, I choose to combine my ‘health crank’ raw foodism with some eggs and fish. This is not to denigrate all the people who do it without, I just find it works better for us as we do not like to think about food all day. It is still easier to say raw foodist than list all the things we avoid in order for her treatment to work.

My friend knows this, and still refers to us as having an eating disorder (he is an ex-nurse, so presumably old habits die hard. I had to explain poo to him a year or so back.) This from a guy with high blood pressure, anxiety and a host of other health problems, which vastly improved when I briefly managed to persuade him to do it. He is, of course rather jealous of Wolfe, as he was the perceived problem blocking my undivided attention.

Having been goaded into again ruining my own health by the aforementioned emotional garbage (see previous posts) of the last few years, I am having none of this. A normal diet makes me ill, is the bottom line. Now the awful Wolfe issue has finally been cleared up, he is nothing to do with it. I employ a vastly different knowledge base than he does anyway, as my original interest was from the European/Swiss tradition. I am just sick of being sick, basically, and I am more than tired of prioritising other people since it clearly does my health and well being no good at all.

So, when in doubt, do more research. This Paleo dude I am reading seems to have thought that raw foodism consisted of eating a bag of raw cabbage. If you thrive on that, I will happily shake you by the hand, but it isn’t really how you do it long term. The bottom line is that you are unlikely to be eating enough vegetables, and you are likely to be eating too much of everything else, so start from there if you cannot be bothered doing any further reading.

health, motivation

Disassociate to succeed

August 21, 2017 No Comments

As I walk off some weight in order to progress Ina – I am more aware than ever that a face is required to move projects on in this day and age – I am considering the lessons from a lifetime of being too considerate of other people. I cannot tell you how much your connectedness to others holds you back.

In the past, I have considered my family, I have considered my friends, I have considered everybody else before myself. I used to think that this was a virtue, that vanity was selfishness and that my health was incidental and not to be considered above anything else that came along.

This led, in 2009, to my painting a 14 room house in 10 minute increments, lying down for 20 minutes in between times to recover. I was extremely ill by the time I started researching natural approaches since my GP was not at all interested in helping someone who worked four jobs and looked after everyone but themselves when they said they were tired!

Ironically, had I indulged my fascination with selfish people at a much earlier age, I would have been ready to discard others far more easily. I have always been fascinated by the ability to simply ignore everyone and carry on regardless as I am incapable of doing it.

In the most recent case, I tried many times to let go of the idea that I had done something terrible to deserve the last few years. I had not done anything apart from being born, being a perfectly normal adult, and trying to make the best of a bad situation. I am continuing to punish myself for it, even by persisting with this project. What I should do is ignore any new information and continue to push for what I want, regardless of anyone else.

This, however, would be psychotic behaviour, and I am, despite my many other failings, a thoughtful person. What I now have to do is repair my ailing health, pick up the torch I was trying to give to Wolfe, and do something with it. Whether it turns out to be useful or not is not really relevant. What is relevant is whether I believe in it, and I think the most loving response is to decide that I do, regardless of the consequences to my privacy.

So. in the spirit of disassociating, my first job is to replace the icon on the homepage, which will take about a year, since it is a work of self-sculpture. In the course of doing that, I have to turn myself into a public speaker and I have to write at least two major non-fiction books. The first one being Lucifer Ogilvie, which is my alternative history of Boris Johnson, and the second being the original book.

Do I feel stupid for trying to invest in Wolfe, when I knew it was a bad bet in the first place? No, it was an act of stupid selflessness, but it was in keeping with my less bitter and twisted character and it was a kind of play against someone I knew to be extremely selfish from his history. I admire that, rather than condemn it, but any time I have tried to give a gift to such a person, they immediately assume that the gift is somehow loaded. From this, I consider that time spent listening is as important as time spent talking, and this should stand me in good stead for the future.

That is not to say you should take everything everyone says on board. Quite the reverse, you should discard anything you aren’t interested in, otherwise you end up being a follower rather than a learner.

There have been many times over the years that I have tried to take it in other directions in the time I have available. All of these have turned out to be bad ideas. Best Adventure Ever, the game I am working on, for example, will fail to absorb Wolfe’s marriage, but it is still worth making from the perspective of what it has to say about people and their approach to life. Therefore I am going to persist with it anyway. As a creative exercise it is still a worthwhile project, despite its failings in terms of reality. If Wolfe has a problem with a couple of million extra followers, I daresay he can let me know.

I have actually come quite a long way since the pre-Ina days. I used to worry about doing anything because my name was on it. Ina solved that problem. I used to worry in case things weren’t of sufficient quality. Wolfe cured me of that. What is most important is that you do something, regardless of anybody else or the consequences, because the more ripples you create, the more inspiration you dispense.

So, I must again thank Wolfe for my new cold, more efficient approach to rocking the boat. There are far more ways to skin a cat than you could ever imagine. There is always a way out of the most convoluted mess, as long as you are willing to leave it behind. Shame and feeling sorry for others is a waste of time you could better spent making your dent in the world, whether the dent is useful or simply self-serving.

Being bullied is quite serious in the course of your life, both in terms of your assumption of lack of importance and the voice that tells you that you just aren’t good enough. If you are in a similar position, please remember that the love of your life will not understand your baggage and it is therefore important to discard it and not expect any understanding or consideration. Fight for what you need to grow beyond what you are told you are capable of, regardless of the consequences or the length of time it takes you to stop beating yourself up. I know better than most how difficult that can be, especially after this harrowing and lengthy episode of self doubt. I can do better, and so can you.

For the benefit of regular readers, I obviously have no intention of attending the event in October. I am sure I could manage to have a civilised conversation, since that was all I wanted in the first place, but I am not at all confident that Wolfe could manage it, whatever his dick-led reasoning.

business

The Great Thing about Nonentity

August 12, 2017 68 Comments

The great thing about being a nonentity is that you don’t have to worry about what you say. You can say anything at all, nobody is listening. I had to take the website over from the website manager a few months ago, and since then have had to try to figure out how websites work from scratch. It has only been close to back to normal for the last week, so I have no idea when it plummeted in numbers between then and now. There was quite a serious gap, so basically Ina had to be restarted from scratch.

Whilst I am quite fond of some of my old posts, I see that I waste a lot of posts talking about personal stuff. I tend to think it might be of use to somebody, but perhaps it is just a bore. I actually got more retweets than readers for the last post!

Facebook and Twitter seem to be phasing out the free sharing of posts altogether. To make things worse, Twitter are banning authors, in particular, from promoting their posts. The ‘eat shit and die’ blog entry about healthcare was mistaken for hate speech, and so Ina is no longer allowed to promote anything at all on Twitter.

Good news for more mainstream advertisers, but what use is Twitter to me now? It seems that unless you are posting several tweets, with a variety of hashtags, you will not reach very many people. Between the two of them, Twitter and Facebook are streamlining more visible content to reflect bland material. I am sure that this is very helpful to the producers of bland material, but it does not seem to me that it is particularly diverse.

I guess the answer is to be more bland and less quirky, which is a crashing bore. Perhaps it is time Ina died a death and became Brenda Bland?

I will use this slow phase to catch up on building the Youtube channel, and considering more of a strategy for the blog. Wittering on about a niche author that hates me anyway would seem rather pointless.

Am up to 5 miles per day, which is amazing considering my first walk, of a mile, was incredibly hard. Evidently there is some stiffness that you resolve simply by doing it. Pretty sure I will not be going to Wolfe’s event anyway as it is probably pointless and will just get me annoyed.

Spoke to a woman in the market today who told me that there were 200 kinds of dementia and that there was nothing you could do about it. She laughed at me when I said I had kept mother going for this long by pretending there was no problem and constanly rehabbing. Her sister, who has dementia, is 58. It struck me by this woman’s disparaging anger towards me, and the illness, that attitude is very important to remain well as you progress with the disease.

health, motivation

Appearance is everything

August 6, 2017 80 Comments

Appearance is everything

As regular readers will know, I have had a hard time over the last couple of months, with complete strangers entering our home to tell me how I should live according to them.

At one point, one of these worthies even asked me if I left the door open when I went out, such was my perceived level of stupidity. It was intensely annoying. It is amazing how your dishevelled appearance leads strangers to believe they can say whatever they like to you. I was reading a rather emphatic article about this last night. It doesn’t matter how hard you work, smaller breasted and thinner women are always perceived as more competent than you. Personally, I was a psychotic over-worker, so it did not affect me as long as I managed to get the job in the first place.

This is probably not over yet, so as I am doing a bit of an overhaul anyway, Mrs Wolfe has again reared her slightly better looking head.

Normally, since I looked after dad, then mum, on occasion my friend, it does not matter what I look like. Nobody is looking and I have no sense of time or capacity for looking in the mirror. I would rather think about anything else than what I am doing, as what I am doing is rather tedious. As a result, it is often months before I even notice that I have a problem.

Supermix also makes you rather lazy, since you know you have something that will have you looking and feeling significantly better within about four days.

Anyway, since my friend was potentially dying and liked eating, it made sense to indulge him, especially given the risks involved in not indulging him. Oddly, during times when he was not staying with us, I found myself reverting to raw within a few days, so evidently I preferred it. I still ended up very large and looking very ill after three years.

For anyone considering doing a raw diet plan, the positive effects last a lot longer than you would think. You do not look ill for months because your raw or rawish diet is still hanging around. After this, however, you can expect to age about ten years in addition to the unpleasant smell and decline in your performance. (waking up is not at all the same for cooked food eaters, for example)

I am happy to say that my unachievable weight loss is proceeding well so far, I am looking a lot better today. I will have to watch out for my liver, however, so it looks like green smoothies will have to replace any ideas about water fasting for the moment.

The curls have fallen out of my hair in the last couple of years. I am not sure why this is, I have tried tweaking my diet, but still I can no longer simply rub my hair and expect it to look ok. This is extremely tiresome, since I will now have to actually think about it rather than staggering through life without having to worry.

My clothing is mostly covered in resin and glue, especially since I started work on the furniture collection. I am not going to bother replacing it, since I do not know how big I will be in ten weeks. As I have gone through so many rapid changes in appearance over the years, I have a lot of clothes in a lot of different sizes. It was rather telling that I started buying the biggest size in the shop fairly quickly after the Wolfe drama. It had not been quite as obvious before.

Actually attempting to speak to Wolfe in October would be a logistical nightmare. I would have to get employed carers in for three days, a housesitter, and I would have to notify the people who have involved themselves with our life, none of which I am happy to do. I will have to revisit the idea in a month or so, as I see how things are going. In the meantime, I am recreating the character that rescued my mother seven years ago in an effort to avoid future regret. There is literally no point in my doing this unless I look bursting with health as I will stick out in that crowd like a sore twinlike thumb.

health, motivation

David Wolfe’s Uk dates 2017

August 5, 2017 46 Comments

https://treeoflifemagazine.co.uk/october-2017/oct-7-david-wolfe-full-day-masterclass-best-ever-birmingham/

So, in the spirit of punishing myself further by attempting to reverse my current health problem in nine weeks, I sought thinspiration by taking a look at the material for Wolfe’s event in Birmingham – if you are seriously obsessed, you can get near his greatness for £90.

I thought about doing this briefly, and then decided that the sight of me giggling and ranting into my notebook might put him off. We can’t have that. I nearly went to see him in California a couple of years ago, but decided that Marrakech was a better idea. Given the blockings and the reputation for turning people away because they aren’t smiley enough, not to mention the actual fans that have emailed me over the years, I thought better of it.

Then I took a look at the pictures of the audience, which appears to consist of well-built young men who go to the gym, and slightly dry looking hippy chicks that are a little bit too serious looking for the context. They are wonderful looking fans though, but this ain’t my bag.

No, I thought, this is not for me at all. I look a whole lot more like Wolfe than they do, and I know where the funny bits are. Leave him to his harem and his glory, and stay well out of it.

It is not fun at all, hating what he does for a living. I need to get out more and find someone who doesn’t have quite such an extensive line of misquotes-by-meme.

So, another year passes, I still feel the same way, and I still don’t want to go anywhere near him, particularly not in a crowd scene. I can do the whole public face thing, I just don’t feel it is appropriate or necessary. This was just a random emotional aberration, it doesn’t need to define my actions.

It is as my mother says, never try to have something you cannot stand losing. She is right, you are far better off with things/people that are not precious.

In any case, it is unlikely that the game will be out in the next ten weeks or so, as I will be doing other things. I would rather make that point, even though he will probably reject it on principle. For someone who has so much to say about mean-spiritedness, I can tell you that from my perspective, he takes the crown for it.

I am still looking pretty dreadful, not sure how long it will take for that to calm down, but am feeling significantly better when walking or moving. Why can’t the NHS manage to spot these things? I have gone through years of shit with my health, and the parameters that they work with apparently don’t allow for spotting things on a prevention of disaster basis?

Anyway, it is time to do something different, whilst I work on my ailing health on the pretense that I feel remotely positive or optimistic about finally seeing my beloved in person.

health, motivation

What would Mrs Wolfe do? (shocking)

August 2, 2017 No Comments

What would Mrs Wolfe do? (shocking)

Google analytics has indicated that I am not quite as dead as I thought since I connected it. I am still stuggling a bit with isolating the blog. It is a slightly different format to the rest of the site, but still, I have readers so yay!

Today I am going to tell you a story which shocked my closest friends. The are all male, which I suspect is why they were shocked by this, but I think given my degree of social isolation it is not a particularly surprising story.

Back when I first ‘met’ Wolfe – I use the term very loosely since we merely exchanged a few words on a website – I was being hounded by my family because they wanted to take my mother’s money. they did not like that I had done well in any of my careers, they did not like us remaining in our beloved home, and they wanted ‘their’ money.

Fortunately, my father had warned me before his own period of dementia that they would do something along these lines. Evidently he was aware what a grasping and selfish bunch of no-hopers he had brought into the world with my mother. He was very clear – it is her money – do not let them take it from her.

So, as I was restoring our house, I stuck to the programme. My siblings are too stupid to know how much of ‘their’ money they would have lost had I chosen to walk away at any time. As a result of their lack of help, my life has not been my own since 2003, when my father was brought downstairs due to his illness. Explaining this to them is pointless, as they simply reject the information.

Anyway, I got through the worst period of my life without telling anybody anything, thanks to Wolfe. The shame of having these people as relatives has meant that I do not want to bring anybody new into this situation, my friends have dropped by at times and helped, otherwise I have at times been awake for several weeks ensuring that my mother is well looked after. My imaginary friend has been very helpful, although in person he actually just briefly messed about, realised he was out of his depth and ran ten miles to get away from me.

The climax of this horrible state of affairs was seven years ago, during the time we actually communicated briefly. The social work department got involved, saw an opportunity to seize my mother and her property, and used my spiteful siblings to try to take everything, even as I was pulling the rubble out of the house and restoring it.

So, since I was shaking like a leaf 24 hours a day, vomiting and weeping constantly with stress, I had to take on social services and my family in battle to protect my mother from the same horrible death that was inflicted on my father in 2007. Within two days of being taken, my father was drugged and a testing team was brought in to tell us he could not eat. Having seen their actual reports, what they really said was that my father was not awake, and could not be tested. Hence, despite my fighting them, my father was starved to death for the sake of the convenience of the NHS. I tried to remove him, and was told that I could not.

Back to seven years ago, and I wiped the floor with both my family and social services. How did I do this, despite the trauma and the horror of what my family had grown into?

I asked myself “What would Mrs Wolfe do?”

Now, for the shocked males – this is a normal part of the female psyche – within hours of dating or even noticing you, we are looking at our clothing and deciding what you would rather we wear. It is very annoying, and a part of our female selves that we do not like or even acknowledge very much, but for somebody like me, who is habitually scruffy, it is very noticeable and rather annoying.. It is a basic part of nesting instinct – we want to make the theoretical nest as pleasant as possible. At least women do not do things like rubbing their vaginal fluid on the furniture any more (yes, this was a thing many decades ago)

Mrs Wolfe is quite assertive, compared to me. She doesn’t take any shit from anybody, she sees through problems in much the same way I do, and she presents a rational and forceful presence, particularly when she is being attacked. She dresses better, walks straighter, and elbows some room for herself when she needs to. In short, she is a much improved version of me. I am inclined to sit and watch the drama before bulldozing it. Mrs Wolfe does not wait for the drama before telling you exactly what is going to happen and then implementing it.

Being in love – and I do mean in love, as opposed to being a fan – Wolfe would have been very well aware at that time that I was not a fan – with/of a famous person is not fun. You question everything. Since I have never entertained poster boys in the past, it was particularly odd for me. There are many, many things that I do not like about the history of Wolfe, just to make things even more confusing. As I walked the hundreds of kilometres to regain my health, I pondered this, and many other things, including the probability of my actually doing anything with my useless emotion. To make things worse, Wolfe swithers between over-intense interest in you and blocking you, which means you are also in love with someone who blows hot and cold even more than you do, if you happen to be me. The first thing you do is stop looking or listening to them, because you fear madness.

So, in putting my heart in the unlikeliest safe place in the world, I was beautifully distracted from the horror of discovering that my superficially respectable family were actually the worst people I had ever met in my life. I have frequently had cause to laugh at what Wolfe himself would actually do to them in the event he was presented with a similar situation. It is the weirdest version of saying ‘My hero’ ever.

Anyway, having taken a step back from all this and looked at it again over the years. I am now at a suitable distance from it to say it was the healthiest flight of fancy ever. Rather than have a breakdown, run away from my family and see my mother die at the hands of the NHS and social work department, and rather than seeing my own health destroyed, I survived thanks to delusion.

The problem was in the years following, when I wondered how I could let go of the idea that I really should be more like Mrs Wolfe. Mr Wolfe does not like or want to talk to me, and so letting go is something I should have done a long time ago. I hate crowds, I hate the whole idea of the USA, and I don’t particularly relish travelling as much as I used to. Wolfe, in short, is the worst candidate for a partner ever.

And yet, here we are seven years later, and I am still thinking of Wolfe. Perhaps it is an internal rebellion to a situation that I am stuck in. My siblings are all retired now. There is still no question of them giving up so much as a night out for my mother, and I have not only spent a great deal on maintaining her ailing health, but my youth and life are pretty much finished doing it.

Having said this, given that trying not to be in love with Wolfe seems to make me ill, perhaps I should just stay in this safe but pointless bubble. There are worse delusions than finding the person that completes you, however unlikely he happens to be.

health

USA versus UK healthcare – eat shit and die

July 30, 2017 2 Comments

USA versus UK healthcare – eat shit and die

I played backgammon with a friend from Tel Aviv in NYC, then had a very drunken night out with the nephew of Wallis Simpson, before touring Pennsylvania with a gang of bikers, finishing with a very drunken week of secret gambling in South Carolina a few years back. I was just as shy then, I just played a lot of backgammon.

The bikers wanted to know how I liked America, wouldn’t I want to live there?

“Definitely could not live in a country where people die from lack of healthcare because they are poor.” was my response. I was as surprised as they were.

It is amazing how many Americans are indoctrinated into the idea that nothing bad will ever happen to them, if you are poor it is your own fault, and everybody else’s comparatively civilised system of public healthcare is daylight robbery. It beggars belief at times, the lengths they will go to to justify a clearly rotten system.

So, from the perspective of a lady who failed to complete writing a very comprehensive book for Wolfe a few years back – here is how the system works, and I believe Wolfe may actually agree with me, for a change:

The USA is set up on the principle that money tops anything. People are not very important compared to dollars. Hence we see a government with a full complement of lobbyists who hand out money to dictate public policy. ie. Coconut oil bad, because it is produced elsewhere, vegetable oil good, because it is produced in America, even though twenty minutes of research would tell you the opposite is the case.

This nurturing of corporations worked for a few decades, but companies are so large now that the system has entirely broken down. It was not until I saw the Eli Lilly/Walmart deal to supply cut-price, reduced quality diabetes medication for the victims of the American diet, that I realised quite how rotten it had become. ie. you shop at Walmart for food, buy your frosted flakes and your doughnuts etc. Then, when you discover that your shitty diet has given you diabetes, you simply go back to Walmart to pick up your meds. Win-win, as long as you happen to be a corporation rather than a person.

In the UK, we have a parallel copycat system where we have doctors who are paid by major food companies to sit on the Board of Nutrition – Hannah Sutter’s book Big, fat lies is a nice short introduction to how this works. Again, you are given shitty nutrition advice so that large food companies can continue to sell you food.

The difference in the UK, is that the public pays for this corporate domination of judgements that we are told are gospel. The so-called obesity crisis has also been invoked to attract yet more funding to the NHS. If you had complained to your doctor that you were fat in the nineties, they would have told you to go raffle yourself, but now you have a wealth of useless advice to ensure that you spend your life worrying, or dieting, or both between enjoying your increasingly large portions of standard British fare, approved by corporate interests on the Board of Nutrition.

Of course, in America this situation is amplified by the fact that there are more middle men with interests in the eat shit/get sick/ die market. Large insurance companies also want to ensure that private medicine stays private. Providers want to make money by providing lots and lots of care etc etc. In short, no interest in served in America by your being healthy. Therefore, let us have McDonalds provide school lunches to get the ball rolling. Go forth and get nice and sick.

The public interest in the UK would be served far better if people were actually healthy, so we see a relatively small quango style operation shyly asking us to maybe, sometime manage five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. However, the large number of medical staff would prefer to see money endlessly pumped into the NHS, so even the five a day message is pretty quiet. I had quite an argument with a senior pathologist several years ago. He wanted more money for doctors. My response was that what we really needed was better health.

So, from a British perspective, we are copying a corrupt and mad system for the benefit of some food companies and a few thousand doctors, at the expense of public health. Nobody gives a shit about this. Nobody cares about nutritional research, nobody cares about the numbers of people becoming ill. All they care about is more money to pay more staff ad infinitum.

So, stemming from this, we have this idea that science is good, nature is bad. If a man in a white coat said it was so, therefore it must be so. I have news for you, that man in a white suit was paid by a drug company to say so, just like the people telling you what to eat are paid by the food industry. An eminent professor of nutrition from an American university was once asked what we should really be eating. She readily admitted that she did not have a clue.

The WHO recommends 9-15 portions of fruit and vegetables every day, not five. Statistics suggest that the benefits tail off after 7, but you can see from this that reading the newspaper does not cut it when it comes to staying healthy. You really have to put the work in yourself. Trusting in your government’s idea of what is good is not likely to provide you with a winning formula.

In terms of the harshness of the American healthcare system, Americans are fucked over in numerous ways, especially if shock, horror anything bad happens to them. These people who scream about personal responsibility and not paying for other people’s healthcare clearly have no social conscience, and they will defend this to the death if you bother to engage them in conversation. God forbid they should have a child with an expensive health issue. God forbid they should realise that other people deserve to live, even if they disagree with them. I am sure it makes perfect sense for a militarist country, but in terms of common decency it represents a very peculiar degree of poverty of spirit.

In the UK, meanwhile, we are looking at greed and stupidity. Nobody genuinely cares about your health when they are handing out this incorrect advice that they have accepted from the USA. As a peachy example of this, John Yudkin’s Pure, white and deadly, a book which identified sugar as being a source of heart disease, was ignored in favour of Ancell Key’s study showing that saturated fat was the culprit. The noisy Yank must be correct, we were told, because we were processing about half of the world’s sugar at the time to flatten the prices and benefit our colonies.

So, now that you know this, please accept two things:

You are not important to capitalism. You are a unit, and you are entirely expendable as long as someone else is in work and someone else is taking the money.

You are being lied to. Every day, to maintain a system that will fail you throughout your life.

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