Darin Olien - This Body, This Life: The Five Things You Need to Know to Be Healthy, Happy, and Fit Forever

To my late father,
who always encouraged and supported me
in the face of adversity, and to my mother, who forever
nurtured and loved me as I found my way

What Are the Five Life Forces?
And Why Do They Matter So Much?

I m really psyched.

But before I explain why, I want to tell you about when I saw the comedian Louis CK on one of the late-night talk shows.

Hed just been on a plane, he said, when the attendant announced that Wi-Fi service was now available. The guy sitting next to him immediately began working away on his laptop, but after a few minutes the Wi-Fi suddenly went off.

This is bullshit! the guy said angrily.

Louis CK said he immediately thought, here we are sitting in chairs that fly through the air at five hundred miles an hour, and this guy is pissed because he cant read his e-mail?

Thats funny and brilliant because its so trueabout all of us. We become so accustomed to the miracles that surround us every day, we dont even notice them.

Im talking about your body. My body, too. Everybodys body.

Its a freaking miracle. Not just one miracle, eitherits an infinite number of freaking miracles.

Its so mind-boggling that we can hardly begin to grasp it all. If we really had to stop and think about every amazing, breathtaking, jaw-dropping thing that our bodies are constantly doing, completely on their own and without any conscious effort on our part, without us even knowing about it, we wouldnt have time to do anything else. Wed be too dazzled to try.

Turning water into wine is a miracle, no doubt. But is it more miraculous than turning broccoli, walnuts, beets, apples, and water into bones and organs and blood and brains? Not to me.

I started writing this book when I was thirteen years old.

I was sitting on the living room floor back home in Minnesota, eating my Cocoa Puffs and watching cartoons. Next thing I remember, somebody was talking about the grapefruit diet and how it made them feel fantastic and healthier than they had ever been before.

I began paying very close attention.

At this point in my life, I was a mess. I had been born prematurely, weighed 3.5 pounds and was given a fifty-fifty chance of surviving. I made it, but with underdeveloped lungs and a lot of other difficulties. By second grade I wore glasses and a patch over one eye and had severe headaches, a resting heart rate of 120 beats per minuteabout the same as a hummingbirdsa bad case of hyperactivity, and some kind of thyroid problem, which they medicated with a pharmaceutical cocktail. By the age of ten I had water on my knees and had undergone various medical treatments for allergies and immune system dysfunction and other weirdness. I was removed from the normal kids classroom due to what the doctors and teachers believed were learning disabilities.

I was a wreck.

After the commercial ended, I put down my Cocoa Puffs and asked my mother to buy me some grapefruita lot of it. I began eating it for breakfast and several other times a day. The grapefruit replaced the pizza, candy, soda, and all the rest of the junk I had been pouring into my body.

I started to feel different. Better. Making my own decisions, ones that worked, empowered me. I stopped taking my hyperactivity pills too. I didnt tell anybody. I just did it. That made me feel even better. Cooler.

Of course I didnt stay on the grapefruit diet permanently. I reverted to the sketchy eating routine of a normal midwestern kid. But as I grew up, I continued paying close attention to what I ate and drank and how it made me feel.

Ive been on this pathtrying things and getting feedbackever since. Im not a professional scientistIm an eternal student. But Ive learned a lot along the way, and Im constantly discovering more.

I became an athlete in high school and played football in college. A back injury eventually ended my career, but my passion for learning about what makes us healthy was stronger than ever. I studied exercise physiology and nutrition in college, worked one-on-one helping people who were injured, discovered more about what makes our bodies tick. I read everything I could get my hands on, and then I went out to meet scientists and researchers who were devoting their lives to the study of health and nutrition, and picked their brains.

When an expert told me something that made sense, I tried it out on myself. If I felt better, I stuck with it. If I didnt, I moved on. I read lots of scholarly papers, but I didnt wait around for experts to tell me what to do. I jumped in and figured it out on my own.

I went from thirteen-year-old wreck to college football player to nutrition counselor and physical trainer, and now I spend my time traveling around the world investigating and searching for the most intensely powerful foods, the healthiest, most amazingly nutritious things that nature has ever made. Superfood Hunter is the title thats stuck, but my passion for this subject goes so much farther and deeper than that.

Now Im psyched because I get the chance to tell you everything Ive learned about our bodies, what they need, and how they really operate.

Like this: disease doesnt exist.

I know how insane that sounds, but its true. Disease doesnt exist. At least not how its been explained to us by doctors and scientists.

Heres how weve been taught to think: We go through life feeling fine, with fingers crossed, hoping we always stay that way, but knowing that at some point something bad is going to happen. Somethings going to break down. Somethings going to go haywire. Maybe it will be our hearts, or our livers, or our blood, our lungs, our colons, our bones, our brains, our breasts. Someday, something will go wrong.

And then it does. Dammit! Why me?

Now we have a disease. Its probably got a scary name. Theres usually a specialist nearby who treats nothing else. If were lucky, its something the doctors and pharmacists can fix. Otherwise, we may be in real trouble.

According to what weve been taught by the experts, thats disease. Except its not.

If were worrying about our heart or our head or our prostate or our pancreas or our kidneys or anything like that, were already looking at the wrong thing. Were working with bad information.

Were not paying attention to what really matters.

All those diseasestheyre just symptoms. They are signs that something has been allowed to go wrong inside us. Once the symptoms get bad enough, they become genuine problems, true. But even when we treat them, were still dealing only with the symptom. Not the underlying cause.

Heres what Ive learned: every disease has many possible little causes, but the little causes are all the result of just a few big causes. We keep treating the little causes, and they keep on happening. If instead we deal with the big causes, then suddenly disease becomes something we can prevent rather than just treat.

Im talking about every sickness, especially the seriously gnarly ones, the modern-day terrors that either end our lives too soon or leave us alive but sickly and infirm for years, decades. Chronic ailments like diabetes, emphysema, arthritis, heart disease, cancer...

The truth is, were not supposed to get sick at all. And if we do, were meant to recover fully and fast. Were built to be amazing physical beings, each one of us. Our bodies are genetically programmed to be healthy and lively and strong. When we do become ill, its unnatural, not inevitable.

Our number-one killer, heart diseasemostly preventable. Our number-two killer, cancerthe same. Believe it or not, there are places on this planet where those two scourges are uncommon. But here, where we enjoy the most expensive and scientifically advanced medical care in the world, they are everyday tragedies.