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.

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Your eating habits and your relationship with food is something that develops over your entire life. Every time you’ve ever put something in your mouth you’re reinforcing your eating habits. It takes time to change it. A long time.

How many years have you been alive? However long it is, that’s how long you’ve been developing your eating habits and your relationship to food.

Is it reasonable to expect yourself to break that pattern overnight? No Way! So Take Your Time!

A big problem is that people want to be 100% raw right away, never eat cooked food again or never even want to ever think about eat cooked food again. Our culture is all about instantaneousness. I’m not saying it can’t be done “cold turkey” but for a lot of people it has to be a process.

And when I say take your time I don’t mean give it a week. Years. Many Years. Really.

Here are examples of some of my favorite raw fooders and how long it took them to get to the longterm 100% Mark.

Dr. Doug Graham

Dr. Graham is the author of my favorite book on raw foods the 80/10/10 Diet. Doug was constantly trying to find a diet that worked for him even as a teen. Even when he began raw he failed on it for EIGHT YEARS before successfully becoming 100% Raw 80/10/10. Note: I wanted to source this with a link but can’t remember where I heard/read this.

Doug was developing his dietary habits for most of his life until he started doing what he’s since coined as 80/10/10.

Harley Johnstone

Harley Johnstone aka DurianRider - Was a vegan eating high raw for FOUR YEARS before going 100% Raw. Source He says it at about 0:50 into the video.

Notice that Harley’s diet evolved over a period of many years. If you watch the full video you’ll even see where he says that he hasn’t drank coffee in 10 or 11 years either. Again proving that it’s a process that takes a lot of time. So if you count from the time he gave up coffee to the time he started being 100% raw you’ll get a period of about six or seven years.

Steve Pavlina

Steve gave Raw a shot in 1997 and only lasted 3 Days! He gave it another shot five years later in 2002 and lasted 30 days. In 2008 he blogged publicly about his raw food trial and was eating 100% raw for most of the year. Steve Still doesn’t eat all raw and occasionally will still eat cooked food. Source.

Notice again that his diet evolved over a period of many years. Steve became vegetarian in 1994. Over 15 years of dietary evolution, and even now he still not at 100% raw.

I’m a Wannabe Raw Fooder

I’ve posted before about my diet, but for a quick recap I eat mostly raw and I have eaten all raw in the past for one 5 month period and one 4 month period, both in 2008.

I wrote this post because I too am a wannabe raw fooder. Sometimes I get upset or frustrated I’m not 100% raw not because I’m a freak or insecure or anything like that but because I know when I am 100% raw I feel amazing pysically. Better than my body ever feels.

But I too have to realize that this is a long process that takes a lot of time. I’ve been upgrading my diet since December 2006, and there’s still improvements I’d like to make.

I’m so happy for all the improvements I’ve made so far even though I know I’m not where I’d ultimately like to end up. That’s one of the great things about life, there’s always room for improvement if you want it.

That’s the real takeaway here. All growth, personal or social is a process, and it might take longer than you want but you have to be willing to accept that as part of the ride.

Are you a raw fooder? Or someone who’s been trying to improve an area of your life for a long time? Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts!

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Work smarter not harder is such a misleading phrase because it makes you think that you can get by on smarts alone and you don’t have to work. The emphasis is the “smarter” part, not the work part, but the work part way more important than the smarter part.

You can’t work smarter if you’ve never started working in the first place.

Chances are you’re very smart (or at least you think you are), so being smart doesn’t help. Working helps.

If you’re overweight for example and haven’t exercised in three years, working smarter just means working.

You have to learn to work, before you work smarter.

I find that this shows most in planning. You can create the smartest goddamn plan in the world, but if you don’t follow it, it means nothing. Do you not follow the plan because you’re not smart? Maybe. It’s possible, but it’s more likely you don’t follow it because you know it’s going to be HARD.

Being smart is overrated, while working your ass off is extremely underrated.

Work smarter not harder is so appealing because most of us (me included) are allergic to hard work. It’s very comforting to be told that you don’t have to work hard in order to be successful or achieve a goal.

It’s also bullshit.

Sometimes working smarter, just means working.

Are you 100lbs overweight? Can you lose all that weght just by being smarter?

Do you waste mountains of time on aimlessly surfing the internet? Is being smarter going to help you stop?

Are you addicted to drinking or smoking? Does being smarter help you stop?

Conscious effort is really the key, aka Hard Work.

So here’s my suggestion, next time you hear “work smarter not harder” focus on the WORK not the smarts.

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In the online world, your life, the data that makes up your online identity is stored forever. Everyone is going to be able to see everything you’ve ever done. Not just now but forever.

Think about this from the perspective of a little kid today. My 9 year old brother has a Facebook now. My little brother is going to have everything about his life from this point on documented online in some form. Crazy right?

I have some new mother Facebook friends and they post pictures of their kids and status updates about what their kids are doing all the time. These kids are having their entire lives documented online from Day One!

Guess what? You’re going to have your life documented online for the rest of your life too.

In the past legacy was for history books, famous people and word of mouth stories from your parents. This is such a huge change from how it used to be. Now everyone has a legacy, and everyone can see it.

When my great, great, grandkids want to see who their great great grandfather was, all they’re going to have to do is go to google (or the future’s equivalent) and type in my name. Realize that!

Leaving a Positive Legacy

You’re the ultimate authority on your online identity. There will likely always be somebody out there who wants to trash you, but if you’ve put enough good stuff online to back up who you are, it won’t matter.

Think about the legacy you’re leaving from time to time.

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I feel a bit conflicted on this. I don’t feel like I have anything to hide but currently I keep certain elements of my Facebook profile hidden. As an example, I only let certain friends view my photos. I do this because I only want certain people who I feel comfortable with to be able to see tagged photos of me.

At the same time though this I realize this is dumb.

I can always untag a photo of me if I don’t want people to see it right, but if the person who took the picture of me doesn’t take it down than what’s the point? The photo is still out there on the internet to be found. I’m just burying it a little deeper.

How do you handle this?

I think you have to be transparent. You can’t expect to bury anything and have it just go away. You’ve gotta be a PR person. Address it and move on. Don’t hide.

Everyone’s in the media business now.

There’s pictures of me on my facebook drinking alcohol, eating fast food, and making obscene gestures. (someone’s going right to Facebook to find these, haha) I don’t do any of these things anymore, so should I hide all of those photos because they don’t align with the person I am now? I suppose I could and I guess it’s really a personal choice, but I think it’s better to leave them up and not hide who I used to be.

I’m not proud of those things (although I did have some epic nights as a drinker) but it’s part of my story, ya know? Yea I got drunk, and did some stupid things. So what? I bet I’m not the only one

So after writing this I’ll probably be a little looser with my online privacy settings and see what happens.

Consequences

Do you see any possible consequences to this?

My hope is that through transparency our society will become a lot more accepting.

For example if I’m going through a tough part of my life I’ll be able to share it online and have support during that time. People will use their social networks for growth and development.

There could be negative consequences too. Maybe I’ll become unemployable because of my lack of privacy.

Here’s some questions to think about for comments:

How do you handle your privacy on social networks?
Do you think transparency is a good idea or bad idea?

Looking forward to you answers! And Happy New Year!

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Looking at it now that conversation seems unbelievably stupid. There’s more media outlets now than there’s ever been. You can build your own media outlet from scratch on Wordpress or Youtube. Plenty of people have and plenty more will.

But remember this was 2004 when we had this conversation. When I was thinking about this I asked myself was I really that stupid? How could none of us have seen this?

Back In 2004

Fast Forward back to 2004 for a minute and think about it with me because chances are you don’t realize how much the world has changed since then.

Back in September 2004, when I started college, Myspace was the social network of choice, before the phrase “social network” was even on the radar.

Blogs had been around for awhile but were nowhere near as popular as they are now.

Facebook was .edu for college students only and hadn’t even reached Seton Hall University yet.

What about Youtube? Non-existent. The first youtube video wasn’t uploaded until April 2005. That’s close to two full school years after we had that conversation.

Twitter? Nope. Not until 2006.

So looking back on it maybe we weren’t that stupid. Maybe we just didn’t realize the how quick the world was changing.

Saturday

Saturday was the best day I’ve had so far with a total of seven 30 minute naps.

Saturday Sleep

3am-3:30am
7am-7:30am
9:30am-10am
11:10am-11:40am
3pm-3:30pm
7pm-7:30pm
11pm-11:30pm

Saturday Sleep Total 3h 30m

I added an extra nap in between my 7am and 11am naps because I was exhausted. From what I’ve read taking additional naps in the adaptation phase might help you to adapt quicker. Sleeping an extra planned nap is better than stretching too far and dosing off for a whole afternoon. It’s not like you’re blowing off any progress either. If you’re going from eight hours down to less than four, the extra half hour makes little difference.

I wish the tiredness had set in a different interval though. I’d rather take the extra nap during the night time so I’m not missing out on daytime hours. Maybe I can purposely schedule an extra nap for future days at 5am during this adaptation phase, so I can sleep more at night when the rest of the world is sleeping and not during the day.

After today I was feeling like I was on my way to being polyphasic.

Sunday

Then Sunday morning came and my doubts crept back in. After my first successful day where I had no oversleeping I had my 2nd big failure. On my Saturday 3am nap I forgot to set my alarm. I set it for 3:30am, but I didn’t have the correct day selected. I woke up at around 8am really frustrated. I can remember thinking when I first opened my eyes “sunlight, huh?”

I’m not treating this as a big deal at all. Just continuing forward.

Sunday Sleep

3a-8a oversleep
1p-1:30p
7p-7:30p
11p-11:30p

Sunday Sleep Total 6h 30min

I decided to skip a nap and move another one around because I had already messed up in the AM. I thought skipping one would help me get back on track quicker.

Discipline

One thing keeping me positive is that I’m not just giving up and crawling into bed. I went to bed at the correct time both times I overslept. I basically messed up because I didn’t know how to set a proper alarm.
It’s not a lack of discipline that’s causing my failure but instead a lack of mindfulness. I set my cell-phone alarm so all the days are selected now so that shouldn’t be a problem anymore. Having less details to think about while sleep deprived is probably better anyway.

From most of what I read on polyphasic sleep so far the adaptation period is the most difficult part. The more you oversleep and get off schedule the longer it takes to achieve adaptation. I’m not doing myself any favors by oversleeping, but I’m not discouraged at all. I’m going to keep trying until I get this down.

Benefits

I’m not fully adapted and still having some issues, but I’m still noticing some benefits. I’m enjoying the extra awake time. Although I haven’t been fully polyphasic and sleeping 3 hours a day I have been sleeping less hours total. I’ve been spending that extra time on writing. That’s been fun.

Since I started polyphasic sleep my mental chatter has turned waaay down. I feel like I’m being more present and focused on what I’m actually doing instead of constantly thinking and over-thinking. This happened when I first ate all raw foods too. My mental chatter going away helped me sleep better and to focus easier. I was in college at the time and remember feeling extra focused those first couple weeks raw. I wasn’t having any trouble falling asleep at all.

Falling asleep right away has been great too because before I started this I was having a lot of trouble falling asleep. That’s why I called my last post Insomnia Induced Polyphasic Sleep Trial. I wouldn’t be doing this if I hadn’t had so much trouble sleeping before.

Look for another update tomorrow.

Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts!
____________________________________________________________

Polyphasic Sleep Trial Update 1

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Read Time: 11 Minutes
Bold Parts Only: 2 Minutes

On Tuesday night I had a lot of trouble sleeping. I got into bed, and I laid awake for about 2.5 hours or so trying to get comfortable and clear my thoughts so I could get some rest, but I wasn’t really tired. I took my phone off my night stand and started reading some articles on the internet while in bed. After reading a few and still not feeling tired I got up and went on my computer. I stayed up until 5am or so reading articles, and watching youtube videos. I ended up sleeping from about 5am to 10am. I woke up and went about my day deciding I would try to stay awake so I could normalize my schedule and not be up all night again. What followed was the most massive failure to be normal in the history of humanity.

Tuesday Night / Wednesday Morning

I stayed up all night again not being able to fall asleep. This time I was up until about 6:30am. I slept until about 11am still not very much sleep for me, but the peculiar thing is that I wasn’t feeling exhausted and needing to get more sleep. I was feeling a little tired but I didn’t have this overwhelming compulsion to dart into bed like I typically do when I’m tired. This is the moment I considered giving polyphasic a serious go. What happened to being normal? I took a 30 minute nap later that day around 3pm and still felt pretty good. I took another one at around 11:00pm and still felt alright.

A big mystery for me is wondering why I became an insomniac all of a sudden. I have no idea why I had so much trouble falling asleep on Tuesday and Wednesday nights.

Thursday

I had penciled in another nap for 3am to 3:30am. I set my wristwatch countdown timer for 30 minutes and an internet alarm for 31 minutes to wake me up. I woke up at 7:22am, almost 4.5 hours later. I was a little miffed when I woke up because I didn’t really get why I had slept that long, but still I wasn’t feeling that exhausted feeling. I was feeling relatively ok. I realized later that windows on my PC had installed an automatic update and restarted itself during the time period that I set the internet timer. The wristwatch probably just wasn’t loud enough to wake me up. So anyway I overslept, but wasn’t discouraged. I finished out the rest of the day according to schedule.

Friday

Despite the previous day’s failure I decided just to keep plugging along. Friday morning I overslept again on my planned nap for 11:00a – 11:30a. I woke up and it was 12:16p. This one was a little funny because I remembered waking up at 11:30a when my cell phone alarm went off. I can remember standing next to the desk looking at my cell phone. I have no idea how I got in bed and started sleeping after that, but it was only another 45 minutes.

The rest of Friday went according to schedule and I slept a total of 3 hours and 45 minutes on Friday.

Here are my sleep totals for the week so far. Wednesday afternoon was when I decided that I was going to give polyphasic a try.

Tuesday: 5.5 Hours
Wednesday: 5.5 hours
Thursday: 6.5 Hours
Friday: 3.75 hours

Over four days I would normally get between 32 and 36 hours of sleep. Over the past four days I’ve gotten 21:45. I’m still functioning at a pretty high level despite the missing sleep hours. I exercised yesterday, got 2.5 hours of writing and editing in. I had a couple periods where I felt like I was just spacing too though. When I woke from my morning nap and my 2nd nap I felt like a total zombie just trying to keep my eyes open. My energy was pretty consistent for the rest of the day after those two struggling incidents.

Outlook

From what I’ve read from other people’s accounts of polyphasic sleep there’s an adaptation period where your body has to get used to the new pattern. This period is said to be the toughest part and if you can make it through the 1st week your success rate improves dramatically. Once I get passed that initial period I’m expecting the spacing out zombie like feelings to go away.

The structure I’m using is the 6×30 nap strategy where I take six 30 minute naps spaced evenly throughout the day. I’m allowing leeway and not being super strict, but I’m also not trying to go too long without skipping a nap. Right now I’m aiming for my naps at 3am, 7am, 11am, 3pm, 7pm and 11pm. Isn’t that cool how it works out like that? I’ll just sleep on the 3’s 7s and 11’s.

Saturday will be interesting because Friday was really the first day that I had this working. Under 4 hours of sleep is new territory for me. I feel okay though. I’m feeling like I want to try to get the nap schedule down pat and not have any slip ups like I did yesterday, when for whatever reason I went back to sleep once. I have no problem with adding an extra nap in there somewhere if I’m feeling tired in between a nap. I don’t have a general feeling of tiredness or lethargy or anything like that. Tiredness seems to come and go. I was by far most tired yesterday after I woke up from the extra unscheduled 45 min nap I took. Good thing I had to take the garbage out and do the dishes and not do anything where I had to think too hard because I was in zombie mode. Zombie Tom subsided after I was finished with the dishes.

Previous Sleep Experimentation

Polyphasic sleep is something I’ve always wanted to try ever since learning about it in 2006. It always seemed to me like it was odd that humans needed to sleep as long as we do. I thought you could game the system and sleep less. Resting for 9 hours seems like too big a percentage of total time spent alive. If you average 8 hours of sleep per day that’s 33% of your life sleeping. It just seems like a lot. Since your time in the physical world is limited it makes sense to me that you would want to spend as much time interacting with the physical world as possible.

I ended up giving polyphasic a try once and that’s all it was a TRY. I failed pretty miserably and just wrote off polyphasic sleep as prolonged long term sleep deprivation. After this I did try biphasic sleeping with moderate success in the summer of 2006. I stopped that because my schedule never seemed consistent enough to allow a 90 minute nap somewhere in the middle of the day with any regularity like biphasic required. That was really the end of my sleep experimentation.

Most recently I’ve just been letting myself sleep as long as I need to. Going to bed and then just letting myself wake up naturally whenever woke. Sometimes I’d sleep 7.5 hours. Sometimes 8 or sometimes 9 or 10. Usually not more or less than that.

Interesting Naps so Far

One of the odd things that happens to me when I go to take a nap is lying down and not feeling like sleeping at all, even if I’m feeling really tired before nap time. I can recall being conscious almost the whole time lying down. My alarm goes off and I’m surprised that I wasn’t able to fall asleep and then I get up. Only that I’m refreshed. I get up feeling rested and ready to tackle another few hours before my next nap even though I feel like I haven’t slept at all. This has happened about three times over the past couple days. I’m lying down, aware, not really sure if I’m sleeping because I’m able to direct my thoughts and even consciously move my body, yet I don’t think I’m awake. Sounds weird right? My eyes do this rapid fluttering almost like a twitching during this. Is that what REM sleep refers to? I know REM stands for rapid eye movement, and I could feel my closed eyes moving rapidly. I guess maybe I should study a little more about sleep and see what I can find on that.

From what I understand you can do polyphasic sleep because the middle stages of the sleep cycle aren’t as important as the first and last cycles. When you sleep deprive yourself you condition, or possibly recondition yourself to enter the last and most important stage (REM Stage) quickly. I say possibly recondition because I’ve seen evidence that newborns are not monophasic sleepers (Edit: although babies also sleep 18 hours a day so maybe that’s a moot point). I don’t know if you would consider them polyphasic or biphasic though.

Why Am I Doing This?

Don’t take the above in any way as scientific because I’m really not sure what I’m talking about here. I’ve read others accounts on polyphasic sleep and I’m just going by them. Since I’ve had some extra time lately I spent about 2 hours the other night reading all of Steve Pavlina’s Polyphasic sleep logs. They’re the most extensive posts I’ve seen from someone who seems to have gotten this to work long term. Steve did polyphasic sleep for about 5.5 months in 2005 and 2006. I Also too a look at Puredoxyk who has lots of info too. She’s been polyphasic for longer than Steve, although she practices a different type of polyphasic that’s different from what I’m doing right now. I’m not seeking to make this more scientific. I’m not really interested in the scientific knowledge behind it.

The personal experiential questions are what I’m interested in answering. The science doesn’t really matter to me. I just want to see if and how this works from the inside out. Others appeared to have gotten it to work, but there’s not many of those claims out there, and it’s tough to know what to believe on the internet sometimes. I imagine that if I get this working and am regular with the polyphasic schedule I might become more interested in the why and how it works. Right now though I’m just interested in the: Does it work?

I’m interested in getting it to work and seeing how I feel when I’m doing it. I can read accounts of what others say about polyphasic sleep, but there’s almost something phony about that, like I’m not really learning enough about it by just reading about it. I have too many questions that could only be answered from an experiential standpoint. Like can I really survive and not feel tired on 3 hours of sleep per day? How does this tie in with athletics? Will my recovery be slower? On a hard training day will more naps be required to keep awake and alert? How will this affect my productivity? I’ll have more time to do work but will the quality of my output be the same? Is polyphasic sleep just a quantity/quality tradeoff? Like am I just trading a few hours of sleep to have some lower quality hours in the day? Even if it is working and feels like I’m doing no harm, what is the long term affect on health?

Don’t Believe it’s Possible?

If you’re skeptical of this I can understand. I’m a little skeptical too, and I’m doing it. It’s like wow if this works why doesn’t everybody do this? And why does nobody really know about this?

I felt a similar way when I started eating all raw food for the first time in November 2007. When I started my stomach did not feel good at all. I was extremely bloated for the first seven to ten days. On the first day though I experienced a very high degree of focus. There was no other external event that would have explained that and I heard other accounts of people saying the same thing. It just felt like a fog had been lifted. Like it had been a perpetually cloudy day in my brain and all of a sudden the clouds opened up and the sun shined through for the first time. This caused me to stick with it initially even though physically I wasn’t feeling so great with the stomach bloating. Eventually that subsided and I felt better than ever. This is comparable to the adaptation phase of polyphasic sleep.

The fog lifting is analogous to the extra time I’m gaining. Even though I’m having my zombie episodes, I’m enjoying the benefits of having more awake time. Just like how I enjoyed the increased mental clarity eating raw food. I have to deal with feeling like a zombie at times, but in a week or so hopefully I’ll adjust and won’t be feeling that way anymore.

It would have been easy to write off these accounts without ever trying it and just call somebody crazy because they do something that isn’t normal. When you try it yourself though it’s much more difficult to deny your own experience.

It’s 2:40am Saturday morning right now as I’m working on this post and I’ve spent a total of about two hours writing today already and the day is only about 3 hours old. That makes me feel really good! It’s like wow I can focus all this extra time into my goals and that prospect is really exciting. If I slept only 3-3.5 hours per day over the course of year that would lead to me to 1825-1642.5 extra hours of awake time per year versus someone averaging eight hours of sleep per day. That’s like living an 76 more days per year than the average monophaser!!

I’ll continue to update on how this is going over the next few days so check back when you can.

I’d really like to know your opinions on this. I want to encourage you to ask any questions you have on what I’m doing. You can do this by leaving a comment or sending an email to Tom at TomHolowka dot Com.
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The best part of this trick? You don’t have to do anything but wait.

Wait till it’s Spotted

I see so many people chomping down on these perfect looking golden yellow bananas. Those bananas might look perfect but they could taste waaay better. Why? Because that banana’s not ripe.Ripe bananas taste better.

The reason ripe bananas taste better is because during the ripening process the starch to sugar ratio changes. When the banana ripens the amount of sugars increase while the amount of starches decrease. Sugar tastes good. Starches are bland and boring.
(Photo: Unripe Bananas)

Seriously. Just wait.

How You Know They’re Ripe

The bananas aren’t ripe until they’re spotted. I know, it’s hard to wait until they get spotted, but it’s worth it for superior taste.

It almost seems a little counter intuitive, but that’s the way nature made em. Those spots on the peel signal that they are ready to eat.

Many people won’t even eat a spotted banana because they think it’s bad, spoiled, gross, or yucky. I was one of those people when I was a kid too. Time to grow up people!

(Photo: Ripe Bananas)

Taste Test

Don’t believe me? Do the banana taste test.

I’ve done this test with a few people and they all preferred my ripened banana over their unripened banana.

Get a ripe banana (yellow w/ spots) and an unripe banana (yellow w/ no spots). Take a bite out of the unripe banana. Chew. Swallow. Notice the taste. Next, take your ripened spotted banana and do the same. Viola! Behold the superior sweetness and flavor of the ripe banana!

Excuses

People eating unripe bananas give me the excuse that bananas are too sweet when they’re spotted. Lame.

Too Sweet? Really? I’ll see this person gorging themselves on ice cream or cookies sometime later. Maybe they’re just comfortable deluding themselves. A ripe banana is definitely not sweeter than a big bowl of chocolate ice cream. Lots healthier too.

Wait till they’re ripe for a tasty delight!

Did you like this article? Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts!
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For those not familiar I ate completely 100% raw for two periods. The first began in November 2007 and lasted until April 2008. The second began in July 2008 and lasted until October 2008. My diet has been forever changed, because even in the periods after and in between I still eat a very high percentage raw.

Not 100% Raw

Some days I still eat 100% raw but most days I’ll have raw fruits all day and have cooked meal at night. Like yesterday I had a Banana, Spinach smoothie in the morning, about two pounds of grapes in the afternoon, and at night had potatoes, a very small bowl of soup, a vegan chocolate chip cookie, and a piece of vegan coconut cake.

I don’t really speculate nor care at the moment about what percentage raw I am, but if I had to guess I’d say about 50% raw by calorie. Could be more or less but I really don’t know because I’m not really keeping track of what I’m eating. It always felt to me like people in the raw food world focused too much on percentages than progress in general, so I don’t really like to go by that. (I read over this post and it’s basically all about percentages so I guess I do that too…oops)

The staple of my diet is still bananas! When they’re ripe and abundant I can eat upwards of 30 a day.

100% Vegan

I started being vegan in November 2007 and I’m still vegan today. I won’t say I never “cheated” during that time, but I have been 100% vegan since at least April of this year. I’ve eaten meat about two times in the last eighteen months and both times were in the same week in November. (I fell off the wagon HARD that week!)

When I do eat cooked food I always make sure it’s vegan. When I first became vegan I was interested in being vegan for the health reasons. Today I’m into it for the environmental reasons as well as health reasons. Veganism is a pretty important part of my life now so I stay vegan.

I also tend to eat vegan foods that are very low in fat. These are considered bland tasting to the average person, but they’re good to me. Eating all raw for a long time really changed by taste buds. I can eat a plain slice of whole wheat bread with no topping and be perfectly fine with it. Same goes for a baked potato with no toppings or oils. I like the way the foods taste on their own. Plus it’s unhealthy to add oils to your food because oil is 100% FAT.

Health

My physical health has slid since not being 100% raw anymore. When I was 100% raw I never had any physical illnesses. Nothing more than a headache and even that was a rarity. Since then I’ve had two colds. One in December 2008 and one about two weeks ago. They both were very short, lasting only a few days. When I notice myself getting sick I make it a point to eat a higher percentage raw, to rest more, and to eat less to help myself get better quicker.

Prior to my dietary makeover in November 2007 I would get sick numerous times per year. I wasn’t the guy with the runny nose always sneezing all the time, but I would usually get sick hard two or three times per year. Strep throat, pneumonia, flu, and bronchitis all have multiple occurrences in my medical history report. I considered that normal at the time because I didn’t know any better. I would usually have a fever accompanied with some type of nasty cough and the only thing I could do would be to lay in bed for four days to get better.

About a month before I tried all raw for the first time, I had tonsilitis really bad. I was sick for 5 or 6 sick straight days. I was living in an apartment in South Orange, NJ at the time and actually called my mom to pick me up and take care of me. Wuss!!

Since drastically changing my diet I’m much healthier. I wouldn’t attribute all of my health gains to diet though. I get a lot more sleep these days than I used to. I usually get about eight to nine hours of sleep per night. Sometimes more or less depending on my activity level. If I ran 12 miles that day I tend to sleep more than if I ran only 5 or 6. If I don’t get enough sleep I feel the effects of it pretty quickly.

I’m also a lot more fit today than I was in 2007. I can go out and run 10 miles no problem just about any day. A claim I couldn’t have dreamed of before.

Why I’m not 100% Raw

So why am I not 100% raw despite all the benefits I gained from it? It’s hard!! Being 100% raw is difficult to do to begin with. It’s even more difficult when you’re in an environment that doesn’t feel supportive to it. I’m enjoying being a cooked food vegan who eats a high percentage raw though. I may over indulge sometimes with cooked food, but that’s okay with me right now.

My girlfriend is becoming an excellent vegan chef and it’s fun to try the new things that she makes too. She made the coconut cake and chocolate chip cookies referred to earlier. It’s also fun to go to the vegan restaurants where I live. There’s two very tasty vegan restaurants a short drive from where I live (New Britain, CT)

I’m not 100% happy that I’m not 100% raw anymore. A part of me wishes I was still following the low fat, raw vegan, 80/10/10 lifestyle, but I do my best not to beat myself up for it. I’ve come a long way in terms of my health and I can appreciate where I’m at right now in contrast to where I was. I also know that some day I will be 100% raw again. I’m just waiting for the right time to do it. I’m not trying to rush it. I think it will be easier for me once I move.

Moving to Miami

In less than a month I’ll be moving to the Miami area in South Florida. Part of that decision was health related. I’m not a huge fan of winter either. It’s stressful to me. In this part of the country I feel like it’s tough during the winter to get high quality produce. It’s much easier to eat unhealthy in that environment because even when you’re well stocked up on produce it doesn’t always taste so good. Makes you not wanna eat it. No one wants to eat food that doesn’t taste good. In Miami I’ll definitely find better weather during the winter and hoping better quality food too.

I’m thinking that I’ll begin moving up to a higher percentage raw once I live there. I lived in Hawaii from June 2008-August 2008 and it was so easy to eat raw there. The produce is fresh, cheap and abundant. I”m hoping the Miami area will be similar.

Health like all facets of conscious growth takes time to develop. What does your diet and health situation look like??
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