My Bloody Diet

In my ongoing search for various experiments to inflict upon my unsuspecting body, last week I started a blood type diet. There is one train of thought, so far as I can tell originating from a couple of American naturopaths (a father and son team at that), that suggests that your perfect diet can be completely dictated by your blood type.

I should note that when I talk about diet I am talking about overall strategies for eating and health, not some ridiculous plan to get thin. I don't need to get thinner. If I got any thinner I could fit into the fax machine and send myself around the world for almost nothing.

So I started thinking about this after a visit to the local Port Macquarie kinesiologist, acupuncturist, masseuse, naturopath and all round health conscious person Jacqualine O'Brien. Most of the people living here have suddenly developed an addiction to seeing her, to the point where she's talking about making day trips out here to save all of us coming in so often. For my part, she's been helping to realign my skeleton and musculature system that seems hellbent on slowly turning me into a human variety of Angothra. It's working well.

But after one visit Pam, who was also there, was getting a blood test. I have never known what blood type I am, so I asked to be pricked as well. Turns out I'm an A. I don't know whether I'm positive or negative. From what I've read this has little to do with anything of any use, so I don't really care.

After Mark told me I was an A (and oohed and aahed over my exquisite blood specimen that did exactly what an A type blood specimen should), he gave me a few pages that talked about the best diet for my blood type. As these things tend to happen, a couple of days earlier Angie's aunt who had been visiting had left us a book called Eat Right For Your Type. Funnily enough, it was written by the same two dudes I mentioned above, and was where this short summary that Mark handed over came from.

The most interesting and relieving thing I noticed was that for an A blood type, the best possible diet you can have is vegetarian. They recommend that if you're an A blood type and not vegetarian, you should seriously contemplate it. Meat for you is like glue for horses. You don't want to go there.

It was actually nice to see that a lot of foods I like eating (lemons, ginger, apples, grains, lentils, even chocolate - that's right, chocolate!) are good for me. It even recommends I have half a lemon in a glass of water every morning (I've just been downing the juice of a whole one straight - that's how I roll). The downsides were that I'm not supposed to eat cheese, which is something I've always consumed in almost as large quantities as chocolate. I'm "allowed" goat's cheese, feta, ricotta and mozarella, but only in small amounts. It was also saddening to find that oranges and bananas, my two favourite fruits, and well and truly in the avoid camp. So much so that the book talks about oranges for a whole paragraph, explaining how they know how much us A types like them but for the love of God, leave them alone because they'll turn our stomach linings into something the Toxic Avenger might blow out of his nose.

Like most of these kinds of things I'm reserving a healthy amount of skepticism, but an eager and open mind to see what happens. I've been keeping almost religiously to the diet for the past week, and haven't yet noticed any specific health improvements except perhaps for slightly more energy. Now, I normally have more energy than most people (or has Henry Rollins has offered in regards to his own cynicism, more than the average stadium of people). But Jacqualine told me that she feels my body is almost constantly in fight or flight mode, ready to punch on or run every second I'm awake. This might also explain why I can nap so well - at the mere hint of sleep, my body instantly shuts down in an attempt to make the most of the rest period. She believes the extra energy I'm feeling could well be a more normal kind of energy, meaning I'm using real energy instead of working off reserves all the time that are meant to be just that - reserved for something special (like facing down a charging bull, which nearly happened yesterday, but that's another story).

So I figure I'll stick to this for a few weeks, or at least for as long as I can go without cheddar, and see what happens. If I can become a super healthy machine, then perhaps I'll keep with it. If not, I'll go back to normal, which isn't that far from the diet anyway. It just has more cheese.

Star struck

I've really got to find some motivation to write in here more often now that I don't have the at-hand inspiration of sleep deprivation and the amusing things it does to the body to analyse. Perhaps I just don't lead a very interesting life out here in the country.

The resort here set up its own Twitter account quite a few months ago. I tried to get the other staff interested in tweeting but nobody, and I mean nobody at all, has any interest in being involved. They don't see the point. In fact, we were talking about deleting the account until someone driving past one day set their phone to collect tweets from people in the area. He was surprised to find someone tweeting near him when he was in the middle of absolutely nowhere, and pulled in to visit. As a result we had a decent sized church reunion held here with a much bigger one planned for next year. So Twitter became an accepted, however grudgingly, form of promotion.

I'm not the most technically capable nor knowledgable person you will ever find. I resisted Facebook for ages, and I don't have my own Twitter account because I just don't enjoy people's company enough to want to interact with them 24 hours per day. I enjoy Craig time, I love having space to hide away to myself, reading books that don't need to be charged, listening to albums I need to physically place on a turntable or in a CD player. I'm not about to argue that the world shouldn't be speeding along its technological path, and I'm not about to start marching in the streets to prevent the mass slaughter of CDs, but I'm also not going to deny I love kicking it old school.

But I've been listening to some lectures from SlowTV that discuss Twitter, and I've slowly been learning what it's supposed to be about. (Phil here tried to tell me yesterday that it was about whatever anyone wanted it to be about, but I disagree, I think that if the majority think it's about something then that's what it's about. You can disagree but you're not going to be communicating with the rest of the Twitter world who don't agree with you.) To date I've just been updating with the most banal and esoterical snippets you could imagine. I mean, I try to post interesting things but for god's sake, we live in a place where the highlights of some days are that we got eight eggs from the chickens instead of seven.

But apparently it's all about sharing and caring. Posting lots of interesting links and retweeting lots of interesting tweets. I've been contemplating spending more time on there so that our resort personna attracts more friends and hence more promotion. It just makes sense.

So I added a couple more people, namely the journalists Leigh Sales and John Birmingham. I read both their work in The Monthly regularly, and like the cut of their jib, so to say. (On a side note, Phil told me that Leigh Sales is a regular at the Bodymindlife Yoga Studio he runs in Surry Hills - small world.) The next morning I logged on to find, much to my shock, John Birmingham was following us in return.

I love the guy's writing. He Died With A Felafel In His Hand is the obvious hit, however I absolutely adore his "unauthorised biography" of Sydney, the vast Leviathon. In terms of research and information it's as compact as Robert Hughe's The Fatal Shore, but with a much sharper sense of humour. Okay, so Hughes's tome has no sense of humour. Birmingham has the attitude of an illiterate larrikan except he can actually write. It's a wonderful mix, especially when you're reading his fascinating political articles.

I noticed him following us and double checked to make sure it was the real Birmingham (links to his articles, notes on his drunken escapades - yep, definitely him). I then started thinking, "How can I continue to tweet the tweets of the past with John Birmingham reading them?" Suddenly it's not just a throw away comment to bust out before signing in a group booking, it's a literary creation that has to be good enough for the eyes of a revered and respected (if only by me, I think only one other person here knows who he is) author.

I now plan on working on my tweets for at least two hours per missive, and send it off to Jude who lives here and is an editor in her own right for checking. I'll attempt to keep character, plot and a thematic brilliance that not only enlightens on life here at Jasper's, but consists of clever societal undertones and comments on the wider world we live in.

Christ, and I thought writing stories was a challenge.