What happens when a fat man who should have been a stand-up comic loses over 150 pounds and then writes about it? You get a book that is funny, sad, insightful, interesting, readable and inspirational.
What happens when a fat man wakes up to the fact that the only way to achieve real health is to eat real food? You get stunning, inspiring life-style transformation.
A Life Unburdened is a myth-breaker. Richard Morris demolishes them one after one: the myth that eating fat makes you fat, the myth that no food is better than any other food, the myth that junk food in moderation won’t hurt you, the myth that all calories are the same, the myth that no one has time to cook, the myth that losing weight will automatically make you healthy, the myth that exercise will cure disease. Morris sheds myths the way he has shed pounds, emerging as a new man from the fog of misinformation.
His program is simple. . . and absolutely radical: don’t eat processed food. Ever. Eat only real food and only when you have prepared it yourself.
And what is real food? All the foods the experts have told us not to eat: butter, lard, beef, whole raw milk, eggs, liver, coconut, cream.
His message is absolutely liberating: the only way to lose weight and be healthy is to eat foods that are satisfying. Satisfying foods are foods that contain the F word—fat, old-fashioned fats, which our ancestors ate. Satisfying foods are foods prepared the way your grandmother made them, with soup bones and love. Satisfying foods are foods that give your body what it needs, so you’re not hungry an hour later. Satisfying foods grow in gardens nearby, not monocropped furrows in far-off places. Satisfying foods come from animals that live outdoors, not in factories. Satisfying foods have not been adulterated, embalmed, emulsified, sterilized, pasteurized, irradiated, manipulated or standardized.
Morris arrives at his breathtaking epiphany by asking the right questions. Why were the members of his family getting fatter, and fatter sooner, with each generation? Why were they dying so young when his grandparents lived so long? Why did he keep hearing that food should be convenient? Why did dieting make him depressed and lethargic? Why did the “experts,” the MDs, PhDs and RDs, keep promoting the same dietary advice when it obviously was not working?
Morris does not have a bunch of letters after his name but he has a different kind of credentials–he’s been there, been in the trenches. He has lived the physical and emotional agony of being fat. He has lost weight on all the diets–before gaining it back and more. And he has achieved the supreme accomplishment of transforming himself from an obese to a normal man by making one revolutionary change: real food instead of processed food. Everything else followed from there–slow and steady weight loss, a rebirth of optimism, the end to cravings, resolution of health problems, enthusiasm for exercise, new goals, improved family life, hope for the future.
A Life Unburdened is more than just a diet book, it is a saga, and more than a saga of one man only, but of a couple and a family, a saga in which the discerning and supportive role of Richard’s wife Mary emerges as an example of quiet heroics. It is a modern epic of self-transformation, one that unfolds with suspense and drama, as one suburban family replaces commercialism with wise principles. It begins in despair and ends in triumph.
Read, learn and enjoy!
About the Author...
Sally Fallon is founding president of the Weston A Price Foundation, a non-profit nutrition education foundation with over 400 local chapters and 9000 members. She is also the founder of A Campaign for Real Milk, which has as its goal universal access to clean raw milk from pasture-fed animals. Author of the best-selling cookbook Nourishing Traditions and also of Eat Fat Lose Fat (Penguin), both with Mary G. Enig, Phd, Sally has a encyclopedic knowledge of modern nutritional science as well as ancient food ways. Her grasp on the work of Weston Price is breath taking and her passion for health freedom, inspiring. In each edition of Nourished Magazine Sally answers your questions about nutrition, health, food and medical politics. Send us an email with your question and we'll put it to her.
Feb 6th, 2008 at 6:29 am
Is it also nourishing to see for yourself how your nutrient-dense, locally-produced, natural food got to your plate? I suggest that it may not be, where (deceased) animal products are concerned.
I think it is time to see that food isn’t just nutrients. Could you yourselves pole-axe that naturally-grazed or -fed cow or calf or lamb or pig between the eyes?
I need to talk about this with those who have been into the way of eating described above; I need to know how to square all that wonderful physical & emotional health with the sheer ugliness of animal slaughter. Not the death of the animal in itself, but its killing. Am I nourishing myself by pretending it doesn’t matter? (That is an honest question I need help with.)
I hear so much about the great lives these animals had - but never, ever any talk of their death. It is ugly - I have seen it so many times, and actually assisted a bit, but even tho this was eons ago, I can’t forget it. Dr. Mercola thinks that people like me are, literally, mentally ill - that we need his particular treatment to “get over” our revulsion. He likes your Nourishing Traditions kind of diet.
Feb 6th, 2008 at 6:53 am
I don’t have a very deep reply to this post but, I see the death of an animal to give me life as a natural thing. Animals in the wild do the same thing for their food. I know we have a more complex intelligence than wild animals and that’s what makes us human, amongst other traits. However, my ideals go back to my view of creation and the way life is supposed to be. I believe that God create vegetation and animals for our pleasure as well as our consumption. I hope I’m not opening a can of worms here, but this knowledge allows me to eat my locally raised and butchered meals in peace. I also know science has proven that my body is created to consume and thrive on animal protein and fats. Unfortunately we as humans have mistreated our rights as the overseers of nature and we’ve upset the balance with GM crops and horrible conditions for livestock. THAT makes me sick to my stomache, and THAT is why I choose to eat local, organic foods that I know were raised in a humane and proper way.
Feb 6th, 2008 at 9:30 am
Miriam from Pasture Perfect Pork shares her experience with living on farms all her life. Her lovely post may help.
http://pastureperfect.nourished.com.au/thank-god-i%e2%80%99m-a-country-girl/
Feb 6th, 2008 at 9:53 am
I will second Lacey’s comments. Also, I do not feel well when I don’t eat animal products.
I understand this is a moral and ethical issue for some people. Each person must decide this for him or her-self. I have no problem eating meat from animals raised locally, ethically, humanely by farmers I know. There are also decent, ethical ways to slaughter animals. I feel that I would have no problem say, killing a chicken or taking part in an animal slaughter, in order to feed myself and my family. But I don’t have any actual experience with this, just no squeamishness at the thought.
I know that is not the case for others. You must do what you feel is right.
Feb 7th, 2008 at 12:16 am
Anna, I have dabbled with vegetarianism too, but feel downright unwell when I eat no meat. Then i can’t cycle to work, i get migraines and PMT and then get shouty at my kids and partner.
Part of the issue you question is I think that we are becoming so far removed from our natural state (as when we lived as hunter gatherer’s, remembering there are people NOW on earth that live like this - read “Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn), totally in tune with the environment and cycles of life.
I think that if we only take what we need (- and truly need instinctively and nutritionally) we are honouring nature. Where I live it is obvious that large ploughed fields of grains are much more detrimental the the environment than chickens scratching around in my garden which give me eggs and meat. In my garden also lives a full ecosystem of species, but in the ploughed field only a small number of species can find a home.
like Miriam I too was fortunate to live part time on a small farm growing up, and saw it all. Killing animals (once again - only as we needed) was just reality and it shapes ones way of viewing the world I guess. The media likes to distort our emotions around animals and humanise them. The vegetarian and vegan lobbies are also very powerful in spreading their messages about animal rights, which are possibly of some use (when it comes to factory farms), but place an enormous amount of guilt on an easy target audience….young women.
A lion doesn’t think twice before killing for food, once neither did we.
Maybe some of us are able to live healthily and reproduce, breastfeed and look after healthy offspring on a vegetarian diet. If Darwin was right we will gradually evolve to accomodate this. My genetic pool certainly doesn’t allow this, and I don’t know many vego friends that are truly strong and healthy, that can cycle instead of using fossil fuels, and whose kids are truly strong and healthy in every way. Whether their children will be able to have kids - time will tell. Maybe vegetarianism is of benefit in controlling unsustainable population growth?? - these are my honest and serious questions.
There are many things we can all do to make the world a better place, for me eating some meat allows me the energy to do so. Hope that helps, nicole
Feb 23rd, 2008 at 10:34 pm
I came face to face with the reality that eating meat was brutal after coming to live in the country. Here people chop off their chickens heads when they are too old to produce eggs anymore, raise cattle to be butchered, pigs to be slaughtered and it is an industry soaked in blood. Before then, I could kid myself that eating meat, was just like eating vegetables - just chop it up and throw it in the stir fry. That it came from a living, breathing animal, I tried to block out from my mind. When you say that an animal that is raised for human consumption. lived well and therefore its death has meaning, it is more than just trying to ignor the fact that the animal was a breathing and living creature, it’s trying to paint death as beautiful when it is brutal and ugly.
To open up a can of worms, biblically God did not create man to eat meat and throughout the old testament the blood of an animal was held as sacred and was to be spilled on the alter or the ground and not consumed. It is only because people are now taught evolution that they think that life comes from death. This false doctrine justifies eating meat, and is a precursor to the belief that eating meat is necessary for human health. Christianity has adopted this pagan teaching of life coming from death, and added some new testament stories to pagan traditions like christmas and easter. Sin, which is the breaking of God’s commandments leads to death, and animals were sacrificed on the alter, according to the law of moses, to atone for sin. Death was meant to be ugly. It was meant to be heart wrenching. You were meant to feel sick to the stomach when you witnessed the priest kill the lamb or goat as part of sin offerings and sacrifices.
When God took the people of Israel out of Egypt, he fed them from heaven with manna, which was a bread and then the people craved meat “If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost—also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic. But now we have lost our appetite; we never see anything but this manna!” God heard their wailings and gave them quails to eat but he was angry with them because they lusted after meat. “All that day and night and all the next day the people went out and gathered quail. No one gathered less than ten homers. Then they spread them out all around the camp. But while the meat was still between their teeth and before it could be consumed, the anger of the LORD burned against the people, and he struck them with a severe plague. ” Today’s people lust for meat in the same way and they convince themselves that they were made to eat meat and their bodies need meat but there is no proof that meat eating is necessary, the truth is that people lust after the flesh of animals because they like the taste of meat.
Further Daniel, under babylonian rule did not want to defile himself with the kings delicacies and he and his friends ate a vegetarian diet and were found to be physically and mentally superior to those who ate meat. People are no different today as in Daniel’s day, they truly believed that eating meat made them healthier and that Daniel and his friends would wither away without meat.
From personal experience, I have been a vegetarian for almost 2 years now and I have never felt better. I have heaps of energy but I am also careful to eat a strict Old Testament diet - I don’t eat processed food, grind my own flour, make my own bread, eat lots of fruit, milk, cheese and legumes. My children have no problems being vegetarian - they have strong bones, clear skin, shiny hair, great appetites and the closest they get to being sick, is a runny nose, usually if they have stayed up too late on several successive nights. They are athletic, mentally alert and full of energy. They are not withering away because they don’t eat meat but quite to the contrary, they are thriving on a vegetarian, grain based diet.
Although people may like to look back to the hunter gatherer stage and say, they ate meat, they were our ancestors and we should eat meat too. They do not ask themselves the question, what preceeded the hunter gatherer phase. The hunter gatherer phase was a result of exile from God’s original creation where man did not strive by the sweat of his brow to eat but who like the animals today, was well provided for. Evolutionists do not ask themselves, why is it that man evolved to wear no clothes, to need shelter and why is it that man is vulnerable in the natural environment. Put a kitten in the bush and it will adapt and thrive but a human in the bush with no means of getting to a community and they will likely die. The Old testament gives a clear explanation for how these things came to being but it just doesn’t make sense that if we evolved from apes, we gave up our coats for a brain, so that we would need clothes and shelter to survive.
My husband’s father was a great meat eater. Every night was a meat night. By the time, he was sixty he had a blocked colon, then it was surgery, heart attack, couple of strokes, skin cancer, eye cancer and a host of other problems. But his health deterioriated long before he was sixty. According to all the theories on meat eating and health, he should be in peak health but he is not.
I think watching Hugh Fearnley from the tv series, River Cottage, who is the champion of this kind of meat eating where he buys a couple of pigs, fattens them up and tells them what a lovely life they lived and what a wonderful end it is, to have them grace his dinner plate, is plain aweful. He looks unhealthy. He is not athletic or strong, and he is constantly thinking about what animal he is going to kill next and if Hugh lives to he’s a hundred on this meat eating diet, I’d be surprised because he already looks old for his age.
People who eat meat should at least acknowledge that it is ugly and brutal. Trying to say that the animal led a good life is unjustifiable. Perhaps we should be eating humans when they die rather than waste such good meat. After all, why not - if we evolved from animals and if life can come from death? Why should a human body be held sacred - perhaps we should clone humans, raise them and slaughter them or use them for transplants. The same argument applies - if their wasn’t a need for them, they wouldn’t exist and we could give them a happy peaceful life in the countryside before we send them off to slaughter or transplant surgery, then their death would mean that someone else had the chance to live on their organs and meat.
If you think, perhaps this last paragraph is going too far, perhaps you should ask yourself why? Farming meat to eat, is certainly not biblical. And if you believe in evolution, then why is farming humans wrong? Aren’t they just another form of ape? If we clone them, they aren’t really human just a product of our advanced intelligence.
We need to be honest. Killing animals for food is brutal. Unless you can go out to the farm, raise a lamb from birth, put your hand on a lamb and cut its throat, skin it, wash off its blood, cut it up and eat it, you can not really know how brutal killing is and looking at an animal that was alive and now is dead, there is no beauty in death. WEll not any that I can see.
Feb 25th, 2008 at 8:19 am
I understand your argument Jen, as killing can be both brutal and disturbing. However, I believe that animals should not be put on the same pedestal as humans. If your argument is based on biblical facts, how do you explain the laws of clean and unclean food? God gave us strict rules for eating in Leviticus. I don’t think it’s fair to pick and chose what you want from the bible to back up your beliefs. You believe it all, or not because you are either saying it is all true, or it is false. But that’s a different subject. God claims, or rather the author of Leviticus whom was inspired by God, says any animal with cloven hooves may be eaten, however the pig is considered unclean. Any fish of the sea with scales and fins may be eaten… and so on and so forth. If It were wrong to eat meat entirely, don’t you think it would have been said? I do not deny you your choice to eat meat, but I feel completely justified eating the meat that is ‘allowed’ us based on the bible. Jesus ate fish, and I’m sure other meat. Are you saying he was unholy in doing so? My family buys all our meat and poultry from local farms where a chicken was allowed to be a chicken, pecking in a field. Where cows were allowed to be cows, grazing and soaking in the sun. Yes, they are then butchered, as humanely as possible, but that is the natural cycle of things, life giving life, all things getting their energy from the sun. If we were meant to live off vegetation, why do we not have the stomach for grass which contains many nutrients that are key to our survival, which we can get from a rumen whose spent it’s days digesting the tasty morsels? What then of the carnivores in nature who kill healthy and unhealthy animals alike for food? Are they sinful? Should they be done away with or declared cruel and brutal? And when Daniel and his friends ate a vegetarian diet, it was because the Kings food was food that was declared ‘unclean’ and prepared in an unclean manner. Of course Daniel and his friends would seem healthier, the King and his court were eating foods that were prepared in an unsanitary manner. Nothing is said that this was always the way they ate, or continued to eat. As with meat eating, particularly beef, I have been reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which answered this question for me. ‘Why is red beef causing so many health issues?’ It is not the eating of the red meat, it is what the meat itself is eating. Cattle raised on grain diets are higher in the wrong fats. Animals that are raised on a natural diet have a balance of Omega 3 and Omega 6. An animal raised on say a corn or grain diet will have more Omega 6, which helps the blood clot. Over time that will translate into heart disease as well as several other things. In order to make the food chain healthy, we need to make sure our food was fed and lived healthy. Jen, I appreciate your argument, and I enjoy your comments on many things. However, I don’t think it’s fair to say an Omnivore’s diet isn’t humane. It is natural, just as death and life are natural. Death should not be seen as the end, rather as the transition to something new. Death creates life, in this case.
Feb 25th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
correction, ‘I do not deny you your choice to NOT eat meat…’
Feb 25th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
“but I feel completely justified eating the meat that is ‘allowed’ us based on the bible. Jesus ate fish, and I’m sure other meat. Are you saying he was unholy in doing so?”
Jesus also condoned slavery (http://www.atheistresource.co.uk/jesusandslavery.html). It’s clear that if you want to be ethical you can’t rely strictly on the bible. Would you say the was animals are raised in intensive farms (see this video: http://meat.org) is ethical.
Feb 26th, 2008 at 3:18 am
John,
No I do not condone the way animals are raised in intensive farm settings. If you had read my post you would have seen that the only animal products my family eats come from local farms where I have SEEN the animals living peacefully and in the way they were intended. We do not eat animals or their by products from grocery stores. I research all our sources so I know where our food comes from.
I don’t think it wise to get in a religious debate, as this is a site for health, not religion, but your source is bogus. God did not condone slavery, he sees each man, women and child as an equal. Christians in the past and present HAVE and will act wrongly, but you can not base a belief on it’s followers, especially when it comes to the following of Christ. One of the key principals of following the Lord, is knowing that you fall short, in other words, we are all sinners. Masters were instructed to treat their slaves with respect (Eph 4:1) so it was not as though they were slaves, but workers. Instead of relying on a source, I suggest you read the entire bible, if you have not already, before you start trying to disprove it. There are also several references in which God instructed slaves to respect their masters (Eph 6:5, Col 3:22) because we are to make the best of our circumstances. People treat people unfairly, but it is not condoned. Anyway, it is fruitless to convince you of this as it is obvious you are set in your beliefs, as am I, so we will need to agree to disagree in this matter of beliefs. In the matter of animal treatment, please be aware that I, as well as my family, strive to see each animal treated right.
” The righteous man cares for the needs of an animal, but the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel’. (Prv 12:10)