One day many years ago, 47-year-old Steve Cooksey asked his wife to take him to the emergency room, and he collapsed the moment he got there. They put him in a wheelchair and, suspecting the symptoms of diabetes, took his blood sugar reading. It was at 740 mg/dl, which is off the charts. (A normal range, at fasting level, is around 80-130.)
Steve passed out a few times in the ER, and the doctor told him he was on the verge of a full-blown diabetic coma, a medical emergency that can be fatal. They kept him in ICU for four days with all kinds of IVs stuck in him before they could get his blood sugar down to a safe level.
“My lifestyle up until that point, in one phrase, was ‘sedentary sloth,’” Steve told me. “My normal breakfast was going to Bojangle’s Chicken ‘n Biscuits and getting a couple of biscuits with their sweet tea and Bo-tato Rounds® [hash browns]. Then I’d go out to lunch I’d get bread and rolls and buns, and I’d eat spaghetti. If I wanted to eat ‘healthy,’ I’d get a big-ass salad, but I’d use the sugary salad dressing. If we went to fast food, I’d get a big Subway sub, with juice or Gatorade or Pepsi. My lunches were full of carbs. For dinner, I’d stop and eat a Big Mac or a Big Fish sandwich, with French fries and sweet teas. I was feeding that carb addiction 16 hours a day. At my peak, I was around 235 lbs [at a height of 5’10”]—and that was not muscle.”
As they let him out of the hospital, the nurse gave him a copy of the Food Pyramid to put in his pocket and told him to keep his eating below 2,200 calories.
That was the only dietary advice any medical professional at the hospital gave him after he nearly died.
“When I heard that, I thought, ‘That’s basically like I eat now!’ I could still eat bread and cookies and drink juice on the diet they were recommending to me.” Instead of rejoicing at this freedom, Steve suspected there was a deeper issue here. He intuitively felt that there must be some link between all the sugar and carbs he was eating, and his blood sugar issues, even though the hospital doctors assured him there was none. He began looking into the matter–and what he found changed his life.
Steve’s general practitioner suggested that some diabetic patients were having success with a low-glycemic diet. Cooksey bought The New Glucose Revolution by Dr. Jennie Brand-Miller and Kaye Foster-Powell and started following its low-carb prescription. “Very soon, I needed less and less insulin. By the end of March, I was off all the drugs they had put me on in the hospital. They had told me I was going to be on a lot of these for the rest of my life, but I refused to believe that. Just a month later, I was off cholesterol drugs, I was off blood pressure drugs, I was off diabetes drugs, and I was off insulin.”
Impressed with the power of this simple dietary change, he began learning more about low-carb diets. He discovered the paleo diet, which encourages followers to focus on foods available in our ancestral environment such as meats, fruits, and vegetables, and to avoid recent additions to the human diet such as grains, legumes, and of course, refined sugar.
Cooksey dove headlong into paleo and adopted this lifestyle and philosophy as a central part of his life. “I’ve been on a rocket ever since. I’m 52 years old. I’m in the best shape of my life.” Steve recently weighed in at 165 pounds, having lost around 70 pounds since the day of the hospital. Like many Paleo enthusiasts, he’s embraced the trend of barefoot running—and recently completed a challenge of 100 barefoot miles in 30 days. He’s ripped now too.
***
Had Steve listened to what the hospital doctors told him, he’d still be eating the Food Pyramid way, and he’d probably still be overweight and stuck on meds.
Instead, Steve Cooksey decided to go searching for a map to his own treasure.
Right now, out there in the world, there are hundreds of hidden treasures within your life.
These are opportunities and changes that will take you to the next level. To find these hidden treasures, you need what I call a “Treasure Map.” This consists of the small clues of information that will have a significant impact on your life if you follow them.
For Steve, a vital clue of the treasure map in his life consisted of these three words: “eat low glycemic.” Had he not found that clue, and followed it, his life would be radically more miserable. He might not even be alive.
However, not only are the treasures hidden; the correct maps themselves are hidden. They are hidden, primarily, by all the competing maps, drowning out the relatively few ones that will actually work for you, in a cacophony of contradictory information, messages, strategies, tactics, and approaches that won’t end up working for you.
If you know there’s hidden treasure in your life, here’s one thing that almost as bad as having no map at all: having hundreds of competing, contradictory maps.
These competing maps tend to have massive marketing or lobbying budgets, promoting them and belong to a system of wealth-holders who have a significant stake in you believing the misinformation. In most cases, the wealth-holders themselves believe the misinformation is true and applicable to you, which makes them that much harder to spot.
The problem is not lack of information; more information is available to you in your pocket, while you’re sitting on a bus or train, than was available to the greatest emperors of history, with their legions of clerks in their imperial libraries.
Rather, the problem is TMI… too much information! Specifically, not knowing which, out of the millions of terabytes of information now available to you, are the bits that will work for you.
That last phrase, “works for you,” is crucial. In telling Steve’s story, my point is not necessarily that paleo will work for you. It may or it may not. I’m not a nutrition expert, and I’m not here to recommend any particular diet or lifestyle change for you.
Instead, my point is that there are probably some simple changes in each of the major contexts of your life—nutrition, fitness, career and earning power, socializing and relationships, creativity, mindset—that will be game-changers for you, as dramatically as paleo was for Steve. These are the clues in your treasure map. Your job is to go find the clues that work for you and to construct the map to the treasures waiting for you in the rest of your life.
Let’s go treasure hunting together!
–Michael
