28 Diet Wise
was stiffness: some days it would take him one-and-a half hours to get out
of bed and get moving sufficiently to leave the house or hotel. Although he
tried to conceal his difficulty, it soon became obvious to his workfellows.
Instead of enjoying his work as he always had, he suddenly found in it only
embarrassment and physical discomfort.
Things drifted for a while. Various doctors treated him, but this
amounted to no more than painkillers, which did little to help and made
no impact on the progress of the disease. Inevitably, it became impossible
for him to do his job, energy consuming and demanding as it was. The final
straw came in Japan – a heart attack which was followed by angina: pain due
to cardiac under-perfusion brought on by exercise. Mac was pensioned off,
so to speak, on health grounds and sent home to this country. There he was
given work that was much easier, but it was very unfulfilling for someone
like him. He felt as if he had been relegated to the back row, and it cast a
long, deep shadow on all his achievements and his career as a whole.
By the time he came to my clinic he was an unhappy and frustrated
man. His body was causing him great anguish, and his mind had begun to
lose the razor-sharp edge to which he had always been accustomed. His
speech was broken up by embarrassingly long pauses while he tried to
resume his train of thought. It is particularly sad when a condition of this
sort brings down the “big” ones: men and women of great zest and skill,
the “doers” in life that most of us envy. They take it very hard. And to add
to his gloom, he had been told by every doctor he had spoken to that his
debility was permanent and “incurable”; they said he would have to “live
with it,” (a favorite phrase, and an unbearably depressing one).
From the first I suspected food allergies. High-fliers are often high-
livers, and a study of his diet showed this to be the case. I explained to
him the diet wise plan (I don’t call it that with patients; the correct name
is elimination and challenge dieting) and he started on it. To his immense
delight, within ten days he noticed an improvement. The pain and swelling
in his joints began to subside. He started waking with a clear head and a
body that responded within minutes instead of hours. He wasn’t of an age
to leap out of bed, but in contrast to the way he had been that was how it
felt to him. Each day, especially the mornings, again became something to
look forward to instead of to dread. On his second visit he looked and felt
a new man.
We then set about finding out which foods had been causing the
trouble. I allowed him to slowly, one at a time and over a few weeks, reintroduce
the foods he had been avoiding. Those which caused a recurrence of his
symptoms he was instructed to steer clear of. If there was no reaction, that
food was considered safe and allowed to remain in his diet.