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.