About
Or how Jack got interested
in the microbiome
“Eat for living but do not live for eating”
In 1972 we moved to India (Jack, Mary and Satyavan) with the mission to live in and help build Auroville. For the first few months, we lived in Pondy waiting for a place to live in Auroville. During that time, we got familiar with the Ashram, made friends with several members and ate at the Ashram Dining Room. One day, there was on the notice board, a memo from The Mother in the entry way. I had always loved Her handwriting and was feeling privileged to be in a position to see this on the wall while we waited for the doors to open for lunch.
“Eat for living but do not live for eating”
This message was up for a long period and I thought about it numerous times on my way through the line. There were a few Ashramites that really heaped up their plates with mountains of rice and I wondered if they had read the memo. Soon we were given a house in Hope and we moved out to Auroville and this message from Mother stayed in my mind.
My food intake, although thoroughly leaning towards health food and being a vegetarian, I was very prone to sweets and this would follow my for the decades that followed.
Fast forward to my 7th decade and I developed a minor pain in my hips that my Health Care Organization said was arthritis and I would need a hip replacement or rely on pain medication to manage. Neither option was interesting and I ignored the issue until I was having trouble walking more than a block with my wife Mary.
At this point I started to study about inflammation and how it affected joints and one day, on the border of the Google browser screen was an advertisement for a program by a Dr Gundry that dealt with these issues by limiting simple carbohydrates and sugar. Although I knew sugar wasn’t good for you, I had no idea the connection it had to my hip pain.
With this possibility, I decided to remove all simple carbohydrates from my diet along with milk and wheat and did what we call: “Quit Cold Turkey”. This was not easy and a visitor (Peter Holl) from Auroville that was passing through on a trip to Germany and looked at me at breakfast one morning and asked: “Are you OK?”
Apparently, it showed. I was in withdrawals worse than any time I had experienced them and it was tough. Luckily I was free to change my diet because Mary was in Auroville helping with our grandson’s birth. I started eating more carefully, staying away from white rice, white bread, sweets of any type and keeping an eye on the recipes in the books on how to feet the microbiome.
Within two weeks, the French pastries in the coffee shop stopped looking like food. I had never had this experience with any attachment I had faced before. The temptation to eat sweets was gone. And replacing it was a longing for green vegetables. In one month, I could walk as far as I wanted without pain. My new go-to food was spinach! But my new friend was none other than the Vegus Nerve. This nerve that connects all our organs back to our brain was the power behind my new ability to walk away from an open box of donuts in the office. The mind-gut connection was alive and well in me and a message on the Ashram Dining Room drifted back into my consciousness. That message now was possible and necessary to understand and to live.
