Primal Kiwi has been born out of my passion, exercised over decades, to discover the keys to health & wellness.
As a child in New Zealand, I grew up in an era that saw a huge growth in dietary sugars, carbohydrate & grain intake, alongside the very purposeful demonization of animal fats.
Looking back, few people expressed concerns about this, or discussed it much. My Dad & his mates proudly sported beer belly’s. The younger generations were into Paisley shirts, flares & platform shoes, & no-one’s body hair had gone out of fashion. A medical doctor’s word was considered Gospel, & of course with no internet, any other or, conflicting information was virtually non-existent.
No-one I knew went to a Gym, or really talked about fitness. In saying that, there’s no doubt that there were a lot more physical jobs & manual work that kept people in shape.
By the late 1980’s, as a young & carefree bloke, I was in a flat on the Gold Coast of Australia, with a great bunch of mates, much laughing & silliness. We spent disproportionate percentages of our time & incomes on cheap chemically created beer.
I trained at a local Gym multiple days a week, & did my best to be cool & tough & funny & attractive, with dubious & limited results.
By then, the extent of my nutritional understanding was to purchase a tub of Whey Protein Powder & maybe a bottle of Amino Acids, in the hope of gaining as much muscle as possible.
I was really burning the candle at both ends. It was then that over the space of a few days, I was struck with an illness that took me from my strongest, to near death.
My parents flew to Australia to see me in intensive care, not knowing if I would be alive by the time they got there.
I am eternally grateful to the hospital & staff, that I got to emerge six weeks later, albeit a lot skinnier & with a chronic medical issue to manage thereafter.
After a number of months taking toxic medication, & being told this may be for life, I rejected that course of treatment. I went on a search for natural therapies that could rebuild & sustain my health.
I found that medically trained doctors were largely very dismissive or even ridiculing of natural therapies, treatments, or nutritional protocols that they considered alternative.
This all led to decades of way above average interest in health, many books, the gift of the internet, much reading, listening & dietary experimentation. I shudder to think how much money I spent over the years on different treatments, diet protocols & supplements. Some of these had merit, many turned out to be pointless, expensive, or sometimes detrimental. There was much pain & many setbacks along the journey.
I had enduring faith that our bodies have an amazing ability to self-heal when we create the right internal & external environment, This understanding continues to inspire me.
I really learned that we are all different, & what works for one, wo/man may not work for another.
I learned that there are some health principles that are common to all of us, but that many do not know, may need a reminder, or reinforcement of the knowledge.
We may often think “I wish I knew then what I know now” & “You can’t put an old head on young shoulders”.
I am certain that if I knew all those years ago what I know now, I would not have gotten ill in the first place, & Primal Kiwi would not be here for me to share with you.
