Preface, Part One: A Personal Note to You From Mac

I am a rancher, a boat builder, a sailor, and a coffee grower. I’m 70 years old and work every day alongside my 85 year old wife who is even more active than I am. (She’s been a carnivore for most of her life.) We have two farms on two different continents and aren’t slowing down much. Well… maybe just a little. We don’t break up bull fights anymore. We quit that about 3 years ago when one nearly killed me - again. Oh I can still get over that top corral rail, but not quite as fast as I need to. I don’t say these things to brag. But, you need to know something you’ve likely never been told before. Getting older doesn’t have to be an unavoidable downhill slide into the waiting jaws of a dozen horrible diseases and disabilities that you see happening to the elderly around you, and may already be happening to you.

Do you ever wonder why doctors, when we bring them our health issues, just write us one more prescription for drugs to add to the half dozen others many already take. Why no suggestions for solutions? Why no guidance toward health? Why only managed decline?

If that describes your own thoughts, you are not alone. Millions of people know there is something seriously wrong. Where did all these horrible diseases and disorders come from that weren’t even heard of a hundred years ago? Why are so many young people experiencing illnesses and mental disorders unheard of just 40-50 years ago?

My family and I refused to believe the narrative that around age 50 our quality of life was destined to begin a steady decline. Sure we could see it all around us just as you can too. Yet everything inside us screams that this cannot be God’s intended life for anyone.

So we went looking, digging into health issues looking for real solutions because nobody else was handing us the answer. Years of research. Reading papers we struggled to understand at first. Making mistakes. Spending money on things that didn’t work before we found the handful of things that did. Nobody was coming to do this for us, and I suspect nobody is coming to do it for you either — which is most of the reason this book exists.

Here’s what happened to me, plainly. The weight came off, and stayed off, without counting calories, without starving myself, without a gym membership, without white-knuckling anything. The joints that used to announce themselves every morning went quiet. The fog I’d stopped noticing because I’d lived in it so long — I only knew it had lifted once it was gone, and I could suddenly think clearly again in the afternoon the way I used to be able to in the morning.

I’m not telling you this to sell you something. I’m telling you because if any of these problems sound like your own Tuesday morning — then I think you should keep reading.

I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to settle for the narrative that tells you your life is headed straight into a myriad of serious diseases just waiting for you over the horizon and there’s nothing you can do to avoid them because after all, it’s “normal”. Not true! There are some simple - not necessarily easy - things you can definitely do each and every day that will, if consistently followed, significantly change your outcome. The sooner you make a course correction the sooner you can begin experiencing improvement.

Before I go further, I want to say two things plainly, because I don’t want you to misunderstand what’s coming.

Some of the health issues you’re carrying, you may not be able to put down. They may be too deeply rooted for too long. However, almost nobody is carrying as little as they could be — and the exciting part is that what you can change is a whole lot bigger than anyone has told you it is. That’s the whole argument of this book, and it’s a more honest one than the downhill narrative you’ve been sold.

And nobody is going to do this for you. Not your doctor, who has eleven minutes and a waiting room full of people just like you. Not the government, whose dietary advice helped get a great many of us here in the first place. Not your family. They will love you either way — that’s their job, not this one, and I’d never ask you to lean on them for something that has to come from you. The deciding part is yours. That’s the hard part of what I’m telling you. It’s also the only good part that actually matters, because it means the whole thing is available to you, starting today, regardless of what anyone else in your life decides to do about it.

So here’s the real question this whole book is built to answer:

Are you going to surrender to the pain, your doctor’s shrug, the slow year-by-year narrowing of what your life is allowed to look like? Or are you going to stand up, arm yourself with what you’re about to learn, and fight like hell for your freedom?

I won’t promise you this is easy. No journey worth taking ever is, and yours won’t be either. There will be mornings you want to throw this book at the wall. Keep it anyway. Keep going anyway.

What I can promise is that you won’t be doing this blind, you will understand why, and you won’t be doing it on the word of some old rancher. Unlike most books written about health, every claim written in the pages ahead is referenced in the bibliography at the end of this book so that you can check for yourself, and I hope you will.

So, saddle up, turn the page. Let’s ride.

God speed, friend.

Mac