Please note: the featured image header has been obtained from YouTube for The Magic Pill documentary listing. Link provided in image description.
I have some time to spare today due to a work course finishing early. Great for me, because I can finally write the review on the documentary movie The Magic Pill.
Let’s not waste any time. Some of you might know that I recently moved to the LCHF (Low Carb High Fat) way of eating. I was in Melbourne about 7-8 weeks ago for my grandmother’s funeral and came back a bloated, heavy, swollen mess. I noticed even on previous trips, I would come back a bloated, heavy, swollen mess. I’ve been eating organic and clean for a few years now – and by that I mean being really cognizant of where my food comes from, how it’s made and created and processed and what it’s sprayed with. I am absolutely and fundamentally anti-GMO and have been for many years. In fact, I’ve been following the motto of “’ïf your grandmother can’t pronounce it then it probably isn’t good for you’’ for some time.
I come from a big European family where eating lots of carbs is considered normal. My grandparents came from a peasant village in the Former Yugoslavia where corn was not only used to feed livestock when there was nothing else, but women gave birth in these same fields, and went straight back to work like nothing happened. My grandmother has stories of German soldiers in WWII giving candy to children so they weren’t afraid. So, in that war time period, my grandmother was used to having to rely on water, flour and salt to make dough, and utilised her own homemade cheese from her own cows to make savoury pastries called “pita” to feed the rest of the family. Eating food to ‘keep you through the winter’ was normal – when my family migrated here they did the same thing, and unfortunately you couldn’t ever reason with that mentality because if you tried to, there would be huge backlash. So, coming from a big European family meant we didn’t stop eating – food was never put away after a meal, and we would sit at the table while we picked and picked at it all day till we couldn’t breathe. Potatoes, pasta’s, cabbage rolls with mince and rice, pastries, cakes….the list of carb and sugar laden food was endless….
So going low carb was more of a mental challenge for me rather than an actual challenge considering I had already made amends to rectify the way I ate. I read about LCHF constantly for about 3 weeks and had been hearing reviews about its effectiveness for even longer, but somehow taking that plunge seemed so daunting, despite me knowing the effects wheat and grain and high carb foods had on my body personally. Like so many women I suffer from PCOS and have been riddled with secondary issues from PCOS (including weight gain and the inability to lose weight and insulin resistance) since I first got my period at 11. But back then, Dr’s didn’t know about PCOS and I had many doctors tell me it was puppy fat or that I ate too much when in fact I never did. If only someone knew about intolerances or the damage that what we now call wheat is actually doing to our bodies back then…
So I went low carb just like that. Overnight. I decided one Sunday, tomorrow is the day, and the next day I just did it. I spoke to my weightlifting coach about it and he was supportive, reviewing my food plan and caloric intake and especially making sure that I was fueling my body for all those awesome lifts he had planned for me. Together, we said if nothing, it would be a great experiment to see if I could shift some weight around my tummy and ease the load on my left knee which was also suffering tightness from an inflamed and unstretched ITB (I know it’s the tendon from the hip to the knee and shin, but that’s about it!).
I was about 3 weeks in to LCHF when the opportunity to go and see a documentary about low carb came into my FB newsfeed. (This was before my social media boycott!). So basically, a woman from Brisbane Paleo Group called Leah Williamson, who also runs the podcast Low Carb Conversations organized for a viewing of The Magic Pill documentary, co-produced by renowned Australian Chef Pete Evans. Viewings occurred though a company called Fan-Force. Fan-Force operates on the premise that you put out an EOI basically on what movie you would like screened and pre-sell the tickets. If all the nominated seats are sold, then the movie goes ahead. If not, the ticket purchaser gets their money refunded. So Leah got involved as a host basically, to see if we could get a screening of this movie in Brisbane. Low and behold, the screening had heaps of interest and was sold out in a few days.
Here is the trailer for you, just so I know we’re on the same page:
The movie looks at Australian examples and American examples of families who were unwell. For the Australian families, there was a look at remote Indigenous communities and in the American example, the Director Robert Tate’s family offered to be the subjects. The premise of the movie is that modern diseases are symptoms of wider problems. It argues that we medicate far too quickly and far too often for diseases which are man made, so to speak. Nobody asks anymore about what food we eat or where we sourced it from, but doctors are very quick to prescribe medication upon medication upon medication, instead of treating people holistically. There were so many phenomenal examples of where this occurred, and where this traditional notion of health was debunked. For example young Abigail who is the daughter of the Directors cousin, has Autism, is non-speaking and has epilepsy. Her father talks about how every day he is medicating her in the same way a heroin addict is medicated. He says surely, there has to be something better than medicating little children with heavy narcotics. Poor Abigail doesn’t communicate and because of her illnesses does not attend kindy or has other friends, so she does display some learning concerns. In the beginning, we get to see what kind of food the family and Abigail eat. Her diet consists entirely of chicken nuggets and flavored corn chips and sodas.
The family decide to convert their diet to a low carb way of eating. Which is basically removing all refined and processed carbohydrates, and eating whole clean foods, full fat dairies and meats and lots of vegetables.
Other examples include within the Indigenous community, where large scale levels of diabetes and heart disease as a result of Indigenous persons not eating their natural way are prevalent within the community. One of the beautiful ladies talks about how she’s lost so many friends and family to all these diseases. They even ask, what did people used to die from? They pause to think, but then they go through diseases like typhoid or diphtheria, communicable diseases we now have vaccinations for.
This made me think of that show Life Below Zero. There are so many depictions in that show about ‘paleo’ eating. One specific example is the Inuit family who eat no carbohydrates and very little fruit other than bush berries – all their food comes from locally sourced salmon and other fish they catch, seal blubber as fat (and then they use the hide to make a vest to keep warm in sub zero temperatures), eggs, caribou, moose, ptarmigan birds and other local wildlife. And these people have no doctors nearby – in fact they don’t even have sealed roads – they travel on skidoos and plan their entire year around where they will hunt and fish to source food for their family.
I recently listened to David Asprey on the Tony Robbins Podcast (What’s it mean to be Bulletproof) discuss his Bulletproof coffee (another LCHF/Keto staple) where he also mentions that Paleo eating is native to the tribe. For example, a traditionally Islander indigenous community is likely to have access to perhaps bananas and mangoes and lots of fresh fish and some vegetables, compared to an Eskimo or other northern native group of people who have access to more land animals like moose, caribou, wolves and bears, which might sound strange to us, but is the way that people used to eat.
Mind you, NONE of these people on the show Life Below Zero are considered overweight or obese, yet their diets are large amounts of fat and protein and very little carbs.
It makes you think about what the hell we’ve been doing all this time, and why we’ve been manipulated into thinking that this old way of eating is the right way of eating.
The documentary is phenomenal. There are far too many things to recall, but they do have the Diet Dr, Joel Salitan (who, if you’ve watched Food, Inc and other documentaries, will have seen him and his beautiful farm many times), Professor Tim Noakes and the account with his matter where he was reported as providing unsolicited advice when he told someone to eat a low carb way – the snippets from the trial itself, and at the end when they find him not guilty, I actually cried. This poor man was set to lose his livelihood and everything he worked for because people were just not willing to listen when he said, but I have proof this isn’t working.
The human examples are endearing. People genuinely thought they were doing what was best for them by following the standard western diet. There were examples of diabetics, asthmatics, children with aspergers and autism – all of these examples tried eating low carb and all of them showed significant improvement in the way that they progressed in life. The children with autism began communicating – Abigail’s dad said she lost the bloating in her tummy – the Indigenous tribe went back to their roots and learnt the skills they had within them about eating the way they were supposed to, and not the Western way.
I am so totally and utterly an advocate for this way of eating. I’m even now trying to get my mum into it, by developing her an eating plan and trying to wean her off carbs. She is so ridiculously unwell, and inflamed and swollen, and overweight and tired, and her excuses are always about something – oh, dad won’t eat that, or I just don’t have time, or I’m too tired. I’m sorry, but when it comes to your health, you should never be too tired or without time…never.
I urge you, with every fibre of my being, to go and see this documentary. Go and see what the message is about – there is no fanfare, no hysteria and no random facts. The advice provided is expert, the knowledge is passed through generations and the filmography phenomenal– we need to stop and learn to listen to our bodies. And it was great because, at the end we had a Q&A with Chef Pete and someone asked about carb counting and macro counting. And it was awesome that he acknowledged he knew about that (the different between keto and LCHF, for those that don’t know, is that keto eaters stick to <20grams of carbs every day and LCHF 20-50g carbs) and that he didn’t think we needed to focus so heavily on that. I agree. I monitored caloric intake in the beginning and macro counts just to see where I was favouring my food intake, or where I could fill extra gaps, but now I eat intuitively, but with the LCHF way in mind. I eat when I’m hungry – I don’t overeat – I eat until full, and I eat clean, organic or pastured, whole foods, completely unrefined and unprocessed, the way nature intended.
As a result of my own journey with LCHF, I’ve lost 13cm off my waist, 10cm off my hips, 4.5cm off my chest and 7.3kgs in 7 weeks! I look like a different person. As for my weightlifting – I have lost no strength and funnily enough, gained muscle by 2cm in my thighs and biceps. Surely with these types of results, it can’t be wrong. The Magic Pill acknowledges that – The Magic Pill aims to remind us of where our roots hail from, and about slowing down the industrialization of the world as we know it. We’re going too fast, to the detriment of our livelihood, health, well-being and our sanity. Go and see this movie. I guarantee you, you will be awe-inspired and humbled by the experience. Go, now.
That Fitology Life 