Jedi Mind Tricks Drum Kit
Clint Callas
After a series of serious medical emergencies that nearly took his life on three occasions, I had nearly given up hoping for a turnaround, even though he was only in his fifties. But I continued to love him and share my passion for seasonal food whenever possible.
My dad has always been a fan of spicy foods, and I knew that padrns would be right up his alley. At his house I cooked them with a little more olive oil than usual, because it becomes infused with the oil from the peppers and tastes delicious. We used the bread to sop up the extra pepper oil and cool our mouths when we got burned on the spicy ones. My dad loved every bit of it and quietly started paying more attention whenever I mentioned food.
His next great epiphany was beets [ubersimple recipe at the end of this post]. All his life he had hated beets, and consequently I had never eaten them as a child. The first couple of times I tried them, even at nice restaurants, beets tasted a little off to me. Something about their flavor reminded me of dirt, and I could never get past that to enjoy their earthy sweetness. But I continued to sample them when they were available, hoping one day something would click. That day came one sunny afternoon at the house of a friend who was hosting a dinner party. We were having Dungeness crab for dinner, which I was totally excited about, but the main course was a long way off, so she put out a huge pile of roasted beets sprinkled with chvre cheese and fresh mint as an appetizer.
A few weeks earlier I had released a video on Summer Tomato about salt, explaining how it affects your health and what you need to understand to make smart food decisions. My basic argument was that salt itself is not bad for you. In fact, it is necessary to have some sodium in your diet. Moreover, salt makes food taste better, and I encourage everyone to sprinkle some on their vegetables if it helps them eat more of them. There are three reasons salt is a problem for most Western societies. The first is that we eat way too much of it, which can lead to hypertension. However, a whopping 75 percent of the sodium we eat comes from processed foods.11 Relatively speaking, the salt you add to your own home-cooked food is insignificant.
If my dad can learn to like beets at the age of fifty-five, anyone can. This is the recipe that convinced him (and me a year earlier) that the humble beet can be as delicious and elegant as any exotic vegetable.
This is the perfect dish for the beet skeptic and beet lover alike, and it hardly requires any cooking skills. If you are still worried you will not like the flavor of beets, look for the milder and less messy golden or pink-and-white-striped cioggia beets. Whenever possible I like to use a few different colors to mix it up, but if all you have are the common red garden beets they work beautifully on their own.
Add the olive oil to the beets and toss to coat. Sprinkle the beets with salt and place in a single layer in a large Pyrex baking pan. Place the pan in the oven on the middle rack and roast until the beets are tender and have a glazed-like appearance, stirring every 8 to 10 minutes. Roasting takes approximately 35 minutes.
Five minutes before the beets are done chilling, stack the mint leaves on top of each other and chiffonade them by rolling them lengthwise like a cigarette and slicing them into thin ribbons. For very large leaves I like to cut the ribbons in half once by making a single cut through the middle of the pile along the vein of the leaves. Discard the stems.
Using a fork, crumble a small amount of the chvre into a small bowl or plate and set it aside. When the beets are ready, sprinkle the mint onto the beets and stir, reserving a few ribbons for garnish. Adjust salt to taste. Transfer the minted beets to a serving bowl and sprinkle with the chvre and remaining mint. Serve immediately.
The Tim Ferriss Show is one of the most popular podcasts in the world with more than one billion downloads. It has been selected for "Best of Apple Podcasts" three times, it is often the #1 interview podcast across all of Apple Podcasts, and it's been ranked #1 out of 400,000+ podcasts on many occasions. To listen to any of the past episodes for free, check out this page.
I understand how you feel about your dad, as both my parents have a ton of health issues. I finally convinced my father, who is type 2 diabetic, to stop drinking diet snapple and diet soda all day long. He likes plain fresh brewed iced tea so I convinced my mother to make a big thing of sun tea every few days for him. They are on the pharmaceutical hamster wheel. Not sure that dietary changes could address everything for them, but most of these medications make them sicker and doctors just do not ever re-evaluate this stuff.
The test will probably show that you have an overgrowth of Klebsiella. This bacteria is present in all humans but in sufferers of leaky gut it is usually quite high. The dysbiosis reading will probably suggest more klebsiella bacteria than biffidus bacterum. Which is not good.
I contracted dysentery in India about a decade ago and had a lot of antibiotics to treat it. Since then I have had even more antibiotics to treat annual sinus infections (a common complaint among leaky gut sufferers). Unfortunately I really stuffed up by not trying to recolonise gut flora.
If you want to go down the antibiotic path to rid yourself of Klebsiella you should ask your doctor about Carbapenem treatment (Imipenem or Meropenem). According to randomised hospital studies, ESBL-producing organisms (bacteria that are resistant to penicillins etc) like Klebsiella are susceptible to these two broad-spectrum antibiotics. That said, Klebsiella can be resistant to these as well. Just because Klebsiella is an utter bastard!
You really need to be focused on getting diet and stress under control because this kind of thing can lead to Ulcerative Colitis and many other big issues down the track. I think you will discover that as time goes on there are going to be many discussions about Klebsiella. And, in fact, Klebsiella pneumoniae is a one of two superbugs that hospitals are absolutely terrified of. With treatment the mortality rate is 50%, without treatment it is 90%. There is also a lot of info coming out about childhood austism links to antibiotic overuse, Leaky Gut and Klebsiella.
He happened to have a Nestle Strawberry Milk in his coat pocket. I pointed at the bottle and asked him how often he drank one of those. He said everyday. I asked him if he knew how much sugar was in them. He looked at the wrapper and said 31 grams. ( =fjrd&rid=1027728) I told him that he had to double that number because there were two servings in the bottle. He smiled as the light came on, and I suggested that he just start by no longer drinking this Nestle per day.
This was a really beautiful excerpt Darya, I loved reading it because it really reminded me of my dad and how hard it is to see them depressed and wanting to help. I am so happy for you and your dad that it clicked and he is really happy in the lifestyle now. Such an inspiring story! I will have to work on my jedi mind tricks ?
I wanted to train my parents who are obese. My father had drum like tummy. High in visceral fat. He has high blood pressure. My mum does not have any condition yet but hopefully nothing is popping up. I start by volunteering to train my yonger brother who is also fat to workout and teach him how to eat healthy foods and cook/ Educate him to make wise food choices. Once I send him home, he volunteer to cook, my mum could not compain. Hopefully that in the near future, they would allow me to train them too. I would use how to lose 100 pound in 4HB for them in order not to instill too much stress in chaning their lifestyle. Minimum effective dose to change their health and lifestyle. Great article and great lifehack.
Thanks for sharing this. Tim, am a big fan of your books, several years ago I spent weeks jabbing myself with my diabetic mates glucose monitor after every meal, so glad you saved me from a lot more pain/time with the 4HB, thanks for your research.
This was a tough one for me as I started the 4 Hour Body diet when the book came out and lost 30 lbs of fat and then went from Geek to Freak and added 20 lbs of muscle at age 55 I now have a male models body and look 15 years younger. I got a lot of flack from my wife and daughter about the diet. My wife gave me a very hard time as she had gotten heavy after our child was born and there seemed to be a lot of jealousy regarding my quick transformation. I never tried to push it on them. We all cook diner together and slowly they started getting in the habit of eating better. It took a year to get them to full come around. They still will not eat Kim Chi for breakfast but no complaints when we have Sashimi for breakfast. It takes time and it is not easy.
I found out that I had rheumatoid arthritis one week before finding out I was pregnant with our first child. To manage the disease through what has now been two pregnancies (which would not have been possible on traditional RA meds) I switched to a vegan and gluten-free diet. This was an enormous change from a lifestyle that celebrated whole foods but heavily indulged in meat, dairy, and gluten. The change in my health was so dramatic and encouraging my entire immediate family began to pay attention.
Over the period of a year they all slowly adopted a vegan diet. It was never anything I pushed, but by sharing good food (no bland tofu here!) and being authentically excited about the knowledge I gained each family member started to try a vegan diet out for themselves. Now they are just as enthusiastic as I am about eating vegan. There has been weight loss, increased energy, and a reduction in aches and pains all around.
I never would have thought that my parents or brother would embrace such a significant diet change but once they took the first few steps and felt the results first-hand it was a steady move into new eating habits for all.
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