The purpose of this series of articles is to tell by example how you can become a healthy person and how I did it. I will try to remember and demonstrate to you the documentary and scientific evidence on which I relied and which influenced these or those of my decisions. And to show in which direction my thought was moving, analyzing and comparing certain texts.
If this is not possible, how can it be?
It is clear that we are all different: the circumstances of life and many other things may not coincide. But we are all about two arms, legs and a head, we all live in the same world.
What needs to happen to start taking care of yourself? Maybe, God forbid, an earthquake, a UFO arrival, a blizzard in July or a blow on the head with a butt, or maybe all of them together? Let's figure it out.
Many of us have already understood, it has come to some, it has broken through, got enough of what the wonderful director Stanislav Govorukhin said with his film back in the 90s - “You can't live like that”. You can not continue to live as slaves, not remembering kinship.
If this is not possible, how can it be? What needs to be changed in your life? And in which direction to change to match? And to correspond to what or to whom? Who should wave the flag? When to start? See how many questions.
The circumstances of our life have imperceptibly, but have changed dramatically over the past 15-20 years. The nature around us is changing rapidly, but we continue to live as we did - it’s impossible. After all, we are part of nature and must change, correspond to its changes, otherwise we will die, fall out like a chick from the nest. And right there - a cat … A cat in our case is a disease! This is what I persuade you
Life is nervous, emotions are overwhelming, we are both confused and aggressive at the same time. Few people manage to stay calm. But if you remember the Eastern sages: "The worst enemies of man would not wish him the troubles that his own thoughts can bring."
Got up on the scales: 147 kg!
In 1971, with my parents, I went to Kamchatka and only 19 years later returned to Kaliningrad. School, philological faculty of the Kamchatka State Pedagogical Institute, journalism faculty of the Lomonosov Moscow State University, editor-in-chief of the Kamchatka State Television and Radio Committee, deputy director of the public television studio “UFO”. By the way, "UFO" was the first national television in the USSR.
During this time, I became the master of sports of the USSR, the bronze medalist of the USSR swimming championship.
In 1991, already here, in Kaliningrad, he was deputy chairman of the state television and radio company Yantar. And on March 1, the Premier TV channel, the first non-state media in the Kaliningrad region, went on the air.
As a leader, it was hard for me, especially in the first months of this crucial 1991 for the country. The money had to be obtained by ourselves and to learn to live on self-sufficiency.
Since “Premier” became incredibly popular, the author of these lines, “the hero of Russian fairy tales,” had to, sometimes sacrificing his health, establish contacts with business at tables covered with food and drinks in various places of our glorious city. The time was such, revolutionary in every sense, everyone had to survive, and we could survive only by uniting. Everyone went their own way, but the reliable shoulder of a friend was always there.
Since the 80s, the former athlete, whose “combat” swimmer's weight was 68 kg, began to slowly, imperceptibly, spread in breadth. And 20 years later, in the early 2000s, standing on the scales in the Yunost swimming pool, which he decided to visit for sudden weight loss, he was surprised to see the number - 147. The verdict hurt the pride of the Premier director. I remembered: “They say that laughter eats up extra pounds. Help make fun of yourself 15 kg.”
What can make us change dramatically?
I have almost 100% correct answer - only a serious illness. Nothing else will help. The system in which we live will not allow us to escape from the carousel of affairs, worries, events. Everything goes on in a circle every day. "There is no way out" - sang the leader of "Splin" Alexander Vasiliev. But there are no hopeless situations.
Now let's look at “almost”: it is possible, I think, only for 3-5% of people, you can correct me. These are those who have already embarked on the path, and some I know. Like attracts like. If only it could reach 10% - this is a critical mass that can turn the minds of most of them. Remember the hundredth monkey effect?
Let's continue about those who got sick of the universal global lie, who became unbearably uncomfortable to live “like everyone else”. I talked with these guys and was once again convinced that the impetus for change was the new information they found in new books and the Internet. Knowledge is power!
But at first there was tiredness from the old life, without the light at the end of the tunnel. It was this exhaustion that became for them a “serious mental illness”, as in my case - with a physical one.
They began to change: someone quit their previous job and started their own business, someone mechanically continues the routine, but is looking for their own, everyone has different ways. But the path they took is no different from mine. Only I had a chance to start a little earlier and go further, but what are their years. They are 25-30 years old, it will be easier for them.
By the way, it was not a serious illness (necrosis of the pancreas) that became the starting point of my journey, but a clear premonition that this will happen and will happen soon. It all started eight years before the health disaster.
What happened one evening
Almost like Shevchuk's, but I mean “war” in my body.
The “bourgeois”, it’s buffet life, which I led, brought a lot of inconvenience: poor health (especially “after yesterday's”), problems with clothes (3XL were sold only in Moscow), etc., etc.
And now - about the starting point in more detail.
The year 2000 turned out to be the turning point, when I turned 40. The sacred Russian number: forty forty, forty days … This date, as I now understand from the heights of my experience, is not accidental. This is the time when a more or less healthy person runs out of energy in the body, the endless patience of our wise body, completely tired of enduring the bold antics of its carrier, ends. Drink and eat recklessly, sleep a little, do not exercise, without thinking about the consequences.
I noticed that on my Instagram the main contingent of friends is from 35 to 44 years old. Here it is - a critical age, when it is already hot and I want to know how to emerge. Some (I suppose) have already, as I once had, rounded up, someone was “lucky” with cellulite on the bottom, “something here and there whine and itch”. And surely this collective fictional character has not yet quit drinking, because he is not tired yet, to paraphrase Vysotsky.
Guys, everything is ahead, and the most unpleasant diseases (no matter how unpleasant it may be) are just waiting for you and are already determined to strangle you in their “friendly” embraces. Pah-pah …
I am sure that the sad story with a happy continuation will be interesting to listen to everyone who is ripe. Agree, it's never too late to change your life.
We live something without excitement, Monotonous, as in the ranks. Do not be afraid to throw everything at stake And turn your life around.
This song by Andrey Petrov and Eldar Ryazanov in the film "Station for Two" was performed by Lyudmila Gurchenko almost 40 years ago.
And at 40, one evening, when after dinner I habitually and desperately took one pill for tachycardia, and another for hypertension, I thought about life … Of course, I had to think about it earlier.
Left alone, I suddenly became acutely aware that continuing to drink and snack as recklessly, I would not last long without a stroke or heart attack. That is, such a bad life: without pindulas, as without gingerbread! And the pindyuli will come - inevitably, like spring! In the form of immobility: full or partial, and then a happy choice between 1st or 2nd degree disability.
I thought about my wife, who would go to the hospital to wash from bedsores and spoon feed. But after a while, she too will get tired of it … Friends who will often visit at first, and then they will get it too … I remembered about the children whom I can no longer help either in life or in work … I imagined how sad and I will stupidly stare at the ceiling and scold myself, "the eccentric from 5 B". Such a child's film, forgotten. What I could become …
What I was thinking about that evening, what thoughts were swarming in this head, I will devote a whole next article: about developing an intention, a goal-path in life, about the logic of decision-making. In the modern school they don't teach this, and in general they teach little, no offense to wonderful people - teachers who, like all of us, have fallen into the slavery of the system.
In the meantime, I have not forgotten, I will fix an important point! I was left alone that evening with my thoughts. One. No one bothered me to think and finally make a decision. One…
I want to warn you: when you are left alone in a dark room, it becomes scary. No, not because of the darkness. And due to the fact that you cannot stop your thoughts and focus on the one for which you came here - think about your life. Thought breaks, jumps, without stopping, from one to another. Try to be alone in the evening … and you will understand.
What to do? I began to breathe through my nose and focused on this breathing, that is, I watched how the air enters and how it leaves. Donkey Eeyore tried not to think about anything else. How difficult it was! Try it. I'm sure no one will succeed right away. This is one of the very first and most difficult tasks for someone who has decided to change. Namely: calm down your thoughts and start thinking in only one direction, one thought for a long time, without getting lost in others. What a feat! Start with it.
So, that evening I made a decision to change my life, and decided to start with nutrition. It was right at that time. After all, then I did not know yet that everything needed to be radically changed. Well, I came up with the heap to do my favorite swimming to stimulate the weight loss process.
Miracle porridge and magic soups
I have to upset all the fat men and fat women at once - physical education alone will not help business. No matter how hard I tried, every single day plowing my native element: I swam for 2 km slowly and sadly, and tried to push the weight off the dead center with a ragged rhythm, going out onto the side with the eyes of a mad cockroach - everything is useless. A month later, the giraffe realized that knocking apples off the tree with his head was painful and inconvenient.
Just then one friend advised a Japanese diet: fresh white cabbage with olive oil, no salt, the same carrot salad, then a piece of boiled fish, you can have coffee, some rusks or croutons, drink water - heaps and something else, now I don't remember anymore. My wife and I spent a week on this “island of Honshu” and then threw off three kilograms or something. But without salt it is melancholy! The only plus from this dietary misunderstanding is that they have become accustomed to drinking coffee without sugar.
Then, at work, some crazy peddler with a box of dry concentrated food fell into his office and let's light it up: like, I offer you a course on scientific dietary nutrition of the Fest Princeton Consensus, which works wonders. In a month, he says, you will not only be invisible because of the mop, but va-a-shche atas how useful!
One part of the contents of the box consisted of sweet bars a la "anti-fat", they could be chewed just like that, and the second part consisted of concentrates of miracle cereals and magic soups, which had to be filled with hot water.
In short, he gave the talented breeder his honestly earned $ 100, and, to celebrate, he fitted a couple more boxes. And again, thanks to my innate gullibility and impenetrable stupidity, my wife and I got involved in another scam, this time called "Rabbits are fools in a rabbit hole." Lewis Carroll was nervously smoking on the sidelines!
We honestly cut off all these “carrots” in about three weeks and lost a few more pounds. But we could not add this honestly lost weight to the previous one, because in the period before the magic synthetic box we were able to successfully make up the kilograms lost with such difficulty during the “Russian-Japanese” war in our bodies.
And then a shadow appeared on the horizon - no, not Hamlet's father, but my friend Zhenya the savior, almost a holy man with whom we successfully and contagiously loved to sit at the table. He brought me a clipping from a German magazine, the statby was called Fat Soup. That was the bomb! Moreover, with his colorful confused story, seasoned with wild waving of his hands on the topic of how he happily lost weight on this very soup. Indeed, the result was on his face and on the rest of his body. He joyfully pulled back his trousers at his waist, freely thrust his palm into it and shone like the sun.
In short, inspired. Natalya cooked a five-liter saucepan in which there were chopped white cabbage, celery root, peeled tomatoes, onions, tomatoes, green bell peppers, and a vegetable soup cube.
I had to eat this brew twice a day for a week. And every day, additives were allowed to diversify the menu: then fruits, then vegetables, then skim milk, then juice. One day, I even remember, there was boiled potatoes in their uniforms, and the other two, 200 or 300 grams of boiled beef. It seems that everything is tasty and tolerable, but on the fourth day, the very taste of the soup already got to the very best I can not! I added ketchup and garlic there, and somehow survived the week. I dropped 3.5 kg. Lot.
The next week I ate again, as I used to, but I noticed that the portions became more miniature, I ate less food. This inspired, I decided to try to sit on the soup for another two weeks. He turned on willpower and, can you imagine, endured. I still remember - 7.8 kg. I now understand that such a discharge is very harmful in such a short time, and in the end I paid dearly for the mockery of my own body. And then he drank to celebrate and went to brag to everyone. This recklessness, stupid bravado, “the boldness of the city takes”, as in my case, should in no way help you in gaining health.
My wife and I periodically sat on this soup for several months. In between, I must say, I continued my old life, that is, I drank and ate. But all the same, 20 kilograms have gone during this period. These were the lightest kilograms out of 147. I walked along the edge, because the further into the forest, the more firewood. The further I was integrated into the process, the more the weight became capricious.
By the way, it's time to share the little things of the heroic epic. When I no longer had a stupid goal of stupidly losing weight, and by that time I had found a comprehensive solution to how to become healthy, I noticed a seemingly discouraging thing. It happened like this: in a week it took from 0.3 to 0.5 kg - and this is normal with a systematic approach, and then the weight stood for a week or ten days. Out of habit, I was worried, I thought: maybe that's not what I'm doing.
I explain: everything in our body happens gradually, evolutionarily. In one period, the weight is lost, in the next period, our body shrinks, takes on a new shape. That is, for example, the waist becomes thinner, encapsulated toxins are removed from there. It turns out such a swing: the body regulates these processes so as not to harm itself. So do not be alarmed: losing weight is a cyclical process. If you are determined, then everything will go according to the plan of your smart body. Listen to it!
Even now I can advise some to try such an unhealthy “Soup for Fat Men” with only one purpose: to find out if you can painlessly infringe on yourself, sacrifice your usual diet for the sake of achieving a goal. Find out if your willpower is at work?
The diet is quite decent, but unusual. Therefore, on the fourth day, one begins to feel not only hunger, but a strong longing for synthetic food. Yes, I forgot to say that there are no sugar and sweet dishes on the menu, there is no food drug. You (if you dare) have to endure this breakdown.
By the way, three or four years after my experiments on this soup, TV presenter Vladimir Solovyov was losing weight. Well … got into a jacket.
How I walked over the edge of a knife
Disappointing conclusions Come to mind in the fall, Disappointing conclusions Come to mind in winter.
As in the song of Oleg Mityaev, the conclusions from my daring, but simply stupid dietary behavior were not long in coming and also manifested themselves in the fall, by the end of November 2008 …
What can I say from the heights of my experience? All these diets, although, at first glance, effective, completely tugged at my body, and so "exhausted by narzan": sometimes there is a restriction in some products, then in others. For a long time, I did not get enough and in a constant mode of living fruits, herbs and vegetables, sometimes I ate just synthetics. I neglected both seasonal and geographical principles of nutrition.
At that time, I still did not know that I had to drink a sufficient amount of clean warm water, I didn’t know that multiple meals lead to sad consequences, and most importantly, I didn’t know that nothing could be done with food alone. The fanatical desire to lose weight at any cost is a fetish! It does not bring health 100%.
Yes, you feel lighter when there are not so many extra pounds, but I would have known then how much grief all these experiments with food will bring! In addition, alcohol was not excluded from my life, although its volume decreased several times, but it did not disappear completely.
And now 2008 is the Kaliningrad Regional Hospital, a place where I did not get bored. Two weeks later, with holes from syringes and droppers in all places, they let me go home, saying that I now have to eat in a special way: everything is grated, grated, steamed, stewed and steamed. Little kashki, bitter, spicy is impossible. A month later - again on the tomograph.
I want to note a very important fact: doctors - my friends, of course, said that I had pancreatic necrosis, but they did not make tragedies out of this, they did not frighten me with death, which was actually near. Well done, I am very grateful to them! They just said: go, they say, eat, as they said, then we'll see. Although later, a year later, they admitted that they were 100% sure that they would have to do the operation, they saw no other way out. And after the operation, according to practice, they do not live long.
After a month and a half, the tomograph showed that the pancreas had regenerated by some millimeter, that is, it had recovered. It's good that the doctor was so keen-eyed and attentive: he compared the pictures and noticed a microscopic difference.
So I went along the edge of the knife. Some miracle happened, and the doctors with a pure heart wished me luck, saying, "Do what you did." And I, in addition to following their advice on nutrition in every possible way … still really wanted to live! The Creator gave a second chance.
And it is very important that during the entire recovery period I was not nervous, I was taken care of both at work and in my family. I walked as calm as a tank, and at the same time firmly confident that everything will work out for me.
Fifty books
The acute phase of the crisis is over. Now they had to truly become healthy, to justify the trust of the Creator. To be honest, I didn't know how to do this, but I really wanted to. In those years, I was not yet friends with a computer, only books remained, and I bought them in incredible quantities on my business trips in Moscow and St. Petersburg. And the first thing I did was formed the correct natural nutrition, which, by the way, I am still correcting. The world is changing, remember?
The authors of the books are “awakened” doctors, specialists in Ayurveda, Tibetan methods of treatment, energy-information technologies, masters of “Russian health” and “Cossack Savior”, folk medicine men, herbalists and so on. To understand the general processes occurring in the body, I was not too lazy and studied the wonderful book of Academician Nikolai Alexandrovich Agadzhanyan "Fundamentals of Human Physiology."
In addition to Indian pranayama, there are: in Tibet - Vajrayana, in China - qi-gong, in Central Asia - the Sufi respiratory system. They are all alike. They are all fragments of the ancient knowledge of our great ancestors. There are dozens of breathing and exercise systems for health restoration in the world. Of ours, I can mention those with whom I am now familiar: the systems of Ermolaev, Strelnikova, Popov, Gnevushev, Lobanova, Lukyanova, Buteyko. And then there is holotropic breathing. Someday I'll tell you more about all the systems, this is extremely important.
I carefully read and subscribed to what I liked from fifty books by foreign authors. These were works on psychology, psychosomatics, physiology, oriental practices. They are all kept in my library, and I periodically refer to them.
My interests concerned not only food, but also the entire Russian tradition, which includes information about the life of our distant ancestors, their spiritual component, language, calendar, holidays, fasts, etc.
This information was slowly collected in the head, analyzed, carefully and repeatedly checked against parallel sources, and finally formed in the head into a coherent system. He called it "natural way of life".
It includes six principles. The first and most important is a change in consciousness: getting rid of pride as the source of all our stresses, that is, negative emotional states, fostering calmness, balance, getting rid of experiences called fears, etc. The second principle is breathing, then - nutrition, exercise, sun and fresh air, life according to natural rhythms.
Everything turned out to be simple, you just had to think of it. I am glad that it worked out, because, having lived by these rules for 12 years, I am not sick at all. The weight from 147 kg stabilized around 80 kg.
If one of these principles does not work, the whole system of natural lifestyle does not work either. This I have learned absolutely precisely. Therefore, you cannot achieve health by changing one diet. Everything works only in a complex.
In short, you need to cleanse your body using different methods and not contaminate it anymore. Cleanliness is the key to health!
To be continued
P. S. Finally, I will tell you two rules of life of the cardiologist Robert Eliot.
Rule 1: Do not be upset over trifles.
Rule 2: Everything is nothing!
