Tom Holowka . com

The following is an essay for a scholarship contest honoring James “Rhio” O’Connor. For more information about James “Rhio” O’Connor or to enter the Contest yourself visit here.

Introduction

James “Rhio” O’Connor was diagnosed with Mesothelioma a rare malignant cancer found in the mesothelium which is a protective sac covering most of the bodies internal organs. For more information on Mesothelioma consult www.survivingmesothelioma.com.

O’Connnor was given less than a year to live but because of his extensive research and determination to stay alive, he was able to live for several more years.

In this essay I outline my approach to a healthy lifestyle, because when it comes to cancer or any other disease the best thing you can do is prevent yourself from being diagnosed. For many people, by the time they’re diagnosed it’s very late in the disease process and chances of survival are slim.

There are direct causes of disease, and although we may not know exactly what they are there are things we can do to drastically reduce risk of disease.

Many of our modern diseases such as cancer and heart disease can be avoided by very simple lifestyle changes.

So how do you prevent a disease like cancer? The simple answer is that you must lead a healthy lifestyle. Through this post, I’ll break this down to explain what a healthy lifestyle is.

Physical

As part of a healthy lifestyle it’s very important to move your body everyday. This is a pretty obvious assumption because the benefits of exercise are well documented, but many of us in America still don’t do it.

People can have an all or nothing approach to exercise. You don’t have to go to the gym everyday for several hours to start getting healthier. All you have to do start is get down on the floor and do some push ups right now. Building up to an hour of exercise is a way more sustainable approach than to go straight off the couch to exercising for an hour.

Another false assumption is that moving your body everyday has to be something unenjoyable like running seven miles everyday. For some that’s fine but moving your body can be as simple as enjoying a hobby like gardening. Pulling weeds, getting down and getting up repeatedly, tending to the plants, you’ll burn way more calories per year as a gardener compared to the person who doesn’t garden.

Not just exercise is important, but creating a lifestyle that allows for movement everyday. If it means going to the gym and lifting weights everyday, great. But it could also be going for a walk, doing yard work, being a roofer, or taking dance classes.

If you create a lifestyle with movement you’ll have an excellent shot at remaining healthy and avoiding diagnosis of a debilitating disease.

Diet

Diet is the big one I’m going to harp on because people are more out of alignment with it than any other area. Changing the foods you eat and engaging proper nutrition is the biggest factor in disease prevention.

The food you eat is very important. Think of the body as an evolving building. You want your building built with the best materials. The body uses food to build itself. If you give your body shoddy materials to build your new cells, the body’s not going to last as long. The walls will crumble in the form of disease and the building will be in serious danger.

What foods are healthy and which ones aren’t? You could probably ask 100 different people in and get 100 different answers. Just go into the nutrition section of the bookstore and see all the different health programs out there.

Below are my dietary recommendations based on lots of reading and a few years of personal experimentation.

Eat Raw Organic Fruits and Vegetables

Eat as much raw organic plants as you can. Bananas, grapes, oranges, apples, strawberries, peaches, nectarines, tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, are the real health foods. Almost all fruits are very low fat and extremely nutritious. Vegetables like lettuces have an excellent mineral profile and are also important to building health.

These foods are the ones you want your body building your new cells out of. For anyone diseased or healthy.

Why raw and not cooked? When you cook your food you are destroying most of the nutrients. Forget about some nutrients becoming more available from heating. When you cook food you’re destroying countless other nutrients and phytonutrients. When it comes to food the whole is always better than the sum of parts.
When you cook you’re altering the whole into new substances.

Why Organic? Organic food is more nutritious than non-organic. Nutrient content of the food is determined by the nutrient content of soil. Organic soil has a more nutrients than non-organic because commercially farmed soil has been sterilized by chemicals, herbicides, and fungicides.

Chemical industrial farming is a relatively new endeavor, with a track record of less than 80 years. Prior to that all plants were grown organically throughout the history of the planet. I trust the million year track record of organic food way more than the eighty year history of chemical industrial food.

Limit Animal Products or Cut Them Out Entirely

Animal foods like cheese, milk, chicken, fish, beef should be severely limited or cut out entirely. Rhio O’Connor began to figure this out too. He ate grass fed beef once per week to the exclusion of all other red or white meats when he had Mesothelioma. He did also eat a lot of fresh fish too but had I been his nutritionist I would have advised him to stay away from that too. Animal protein is dangerous in any form. (Campbell 59)

According to the China Study, animal protiens are linked to causing disease. Many diseases of modern society could be avoided by removing animal products from the diet.

A general concern that many people have is that without animal products in the diet they will suffer from a lack of protien. This is simply false. In fact overconsumption of animal protien is one of the main causes of cancer (Campbell 59).

If you have trouble believing that, note that there is actually no term in medical literature for protien deficiency. Lack of protein produces negative health effects (Graham 109).

Animal products are not good to eat. They don’t digest well, and have high amounts of fat and protein (Graham 15). Non-Organically farmed animals are fed an unnatural diet, injected with growth hormones, and given loads of antibiotics to stave off diseases due to the unnatural conditions they’re raised in. If you eat this meat you’re consuming all the antibiotics and hormones too. Same thing with dairy products. All these things are a barrier to your health and are better off avoided.

Limit Fat Intake

In numerous studies it’s been found that diets high in fat produces negative results. So how much is too much? As a general rule your fat intake should remain below 15% of your total calories. There is much support for a low fat diet of under 15% of total calories consumed from fat sources.

The Pritikin Longevity Center which has a track record of reversing heart disease reccomends fat consumption of 10%. (Graham 111)

Dr. Dean Ornish a cardiologist and widely read author also reverses disease with a nutrition program that includes less than 10% of total calories from fat sources. (Graham 111)

Pritikin and Ornish both know how to reverse disease, and they’ve proven that you’re much healthier eating low-fat than high fat.

Mentality

The way you feel about yourself may be as eqally as important as the physical things you do to your body. This seems a little hard to quantify but the placebo effect is well documented. Rhio O’Connor himself knew the importance of the mind in healing, he dedicated a whole chapter to it in his book.

The way you feel about your life may be even more important than the actual content of your life in determining your happiness. You can be broke and homeless and choose to feel grateful for your life. Alternatively you could have money, power, and a great family and choose to feel that you deserve better and be unhappy. It sounds very simple but it’s also very true.

The importance of structuring your life around a strong sense of self with purposeful work, lots of gratitiude and lots of love is hard to quantify but hard to ignore.

Conclusion

Overall the recommendation for when you have a disease are the same for when you don’t. If Rhio knew all the information he discovered during his post mesothelioma diagnosis research, prior to being diagnosed, he may have lived a very different life. He may never have gotten mesothelioma and might still be with us today.

His book will live on to spread his message of health and the best we can do to honor him and his work is to lead full healthy lives ourselves.

Sources
Graham, Doug. The 80/10/10 Diet. Key Largo: FoodNSport Press, 2006.

Campbell PHD, T. Colin, and Thomas M. Campbell II. The China Study. Dallas: BenBella Books, 2006.

Leave a comment below and share your thoughts!

Like This Entry?
Get Tom’s Articles Free in a Reader!
Get Tom’s articles Free in your email!