Primal Blueprint, Day 4

A few things I’ve noticed now that I’m paying more attention to them.

The Undying Cough!

If you’ve had a bad cough recently, you can empathize with what I’m about to say.  Yesterday, I was feeling pretty darn well.  My head was clearing up, I had no headache and that crummy “sick” feeling was almost completely gone.  Only one problem, I was coughing.  Now coughing is a natural thing.  It’s your body’s way of trying to get rid of crap in your airways.  So I don’t usually take anti cough medication during the day.  However, what about at night?  As good as I was feeling, the cough was definitely keeping me awake.  It’s hard to fall asleep when every couple of minutes your body is wracked by a coughing spell.  So I did what most normal people do and took a couple of cough lozenges.  Basically, these are bits of candy with some numbing agent in them that makes the coughing trigger go away.  It seemed to work and I fell asleep.  By the way, I never used to take these lozenges before.  I only started doing so a year or two ago when someone told me that needlessly suffering coughing attacks is silly and only leads to prolonging the cough.

This morning I woke up and I felt worse than before.  The headache was back, the throat felt worse than ever and I felt generally crappy.  So is Mark right?  Is coughing something we should put up with even at the expense of sleep?  Was the cough lozenge a good way of covering up the symptoms but a bad way of getting healthier?  The answer is, I have no clue.  This could just be a bad cold that came back or it might be that I blocked one of my body’s necessary ways of getting rid of disease.  My sample size of 1 is simply not enough data, but it is something to think about.

I wonder how many other ways we have of circumventing the body’s natural function in the name of comfort.  There’s a study I read a while back on how some necessary nutrients are no longer in our foods because we insist on cleaning them up.  That’s right, dirt has nutrients and when you insist on making all your food perfectly clean, you lose out on a lot.  Same applies to medication which reduces fevers.  Fevers are a way for our body to make it tough for viruses and bacteria to live inside us.  When we suppress those fevers, we often make it easier for infections to persist.

So is all medication bad?  Is all treatment unnecessary?  Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far.  However, this is giving me a lot of food for thought.  I think that, as I progress along this two month experiment, I will try to avoid all unnecessary medicine, even things as simple as throat lozenges, and see how I do.

Chocolate Tasted Funny!

Yes, that’s right, I had a sweet tooth breakdown yesterday.  I was in a candy store and there was maple fudge (my favorite!) and I just craved it so much that I broke down and bought a small piece.  Guess what?  It tasted WAY too sweet.  Just four days after starting, something that would have tasted perfectly fine to me before, now tastes way too sweet.  Again, this is just a sample of one, which means that in the long run, this might be meaningless, but I find it encouraging that the cravings for processed sugar are less and less frequent.  Maybe I can finally kick this candy addiction once for all!

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All in all, I’m liking this new lifestyle, although I’m still having difficulty finding good things to eat.

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