One of the more popular posts on my site is the one about gout. People hang around for 10 minutes reading it. If you’ve ever had gout, you’d know why! To cure it, my gout got me associated with the writing of John Tilden.
Tilden is pretty awesome. So much of it boils down to self discipline. And Tilden lived this type of life himself—healing people as a medical doctor with sound and practical advice. Restoring people to health and living robustly until 88. Fasting was a common cure for Tilden.
He had practical advice on eating and some simple recipes of nourishing food. One of my favorites is the Tilden Combo Salad.
It’s related to gout in that this combo salad is super alkalinizing. I take a spring mix or an herb mix and top it with cucumbers and tomatoes in the summer and celery and tomatoes in the winter. For dressing it’s lemon and olive oil. Usually I drizzle half a lemon on and then pour olive oil as evenly as possible.
This brings me to Brooks Kubik. Famous for his Dinosaur Training, which I’ve never read, he also has an excellent book called Gray Hair Black Iron, where he outlines his thoughts on training for the person 40 and above. In one part he talks about diet. It’s basically a salad with a lot of fresh herbs and meat or eggs.
It’s this whole green leafy vegetable thing. You just feel better eating this type of food. It’s also pretty easy to add in to your meal plan: buy an organic salad mix, get some good olive oil, have some lemons on hand, and cut up some tomatoes and cucumbers.
But with the good food you need the exercise. And since we’re talking about fundamentals here, probably one of the best things for the modern man is walking. We sit too much. Walking is the foundation, that movement. From there add in other stuff like weights or whatever, but if you aren’t moving enough and getting enough fresh air and sunshine, those are the first things to address. As George Hackenschmidt wisely stated, “Air and sunshine are the principle foods of man.”