Okay, to call Dr. Gundry a messiah is a bit of a stretch but after more than 20 years of digestive discomfort for unknown reasons, he seemed to have some answers. He talked about lectins, a plant-based protein that was toxic. He talked about the microbiome, what the heck is that? He talked about fasting, super scary. He had created a “yes” list of foods to thrive and a “no” list of foods to avoid. I wrote those down in my book. He created a list of must-have pantry items (at the time there were 39 items on this list and we had 2 of them). Now we have 32 of them, my how things have changed!

To be overwhelmed by this process is an understatement. When you look at the remaining 37 items on the pantry list and you don’t recognise half of them, this is where you think to yourself, is this guy crazy? How am I supposed to change this much? I’ll tell you simply, you will only change if you want to see change. No one can tell you to change, it’s hard for others to even recommend change. But what others can do is support change. I made some immediate change that January (this was 2020) and started eliminating carbs and starches; removing pasta, bread, crackers, rice, potatoes, etc. Just with that change, there was improvement with digestion and heaviness. I wasn’t 100% diligent, I just made the choice to enjoy those items when I really wanted them, not because it was 6pm.

During this month, I also started walking. I seemed to think of myself as an active human but the truth is that I would drive across the parking lot to get from the grocery store to the drug store. Not good! I had the added bonus of working on a property that is over 100 acres of nature, so going for a walk at lunch was easy. I created a couple of loops depending on how much time I had; 15 minutes = 1.5km loop, 30 minutes = 3km loop, and so on. I kept this up and continued to walk generally 2-3km per day all through January and February. Then March hit and conveniently in the middle of March 2020 was a Friday-the-13th that seemed to signal the beginning of the end (at least on the West-coast of Canada.) That was the day we all remember as lock-down day – the pandemic had started!