Sixth life: Health. Changing your life series: Episode 5.

As I reached my late 40’s, a burning question came to me: Is this all there is to my life? You may say I was in a midlife crisis. Many things were suddenly going wrong and I could do little about them, except for one: my health. Let’s talk about it.

When you are focused on a career, it may be easy to forget your health and your relationships. These three aspects of your life require work. In the first decade of the new century, my relationships, my health and even my career seem to be going in the wrong direction. My daughter had left us, my family in Venezuela had become distant, and my relationship with my wife, while always dependable, was in rocky ground. The events of 9/11 and the dictatorship of Chávez in Venezuela also got me worried about the future.

Year after year, despite my efforts to keep a low caloric intake and daily exercise, I kept gaining weight. My career, which was my source of a sense of accomplishment, was falling short of my expectations. Inevitable, I got depressed. I was not living up to my full potential and time was running out. Even the messages of Earl Nightingale did not seem to motivate me anymore.

Of all the things that were going wrong then, it seemed that I could do something about my health. So I focus on that, hoping to score a win, in the midst of my loses. But after decades of battling obesity, I was at a loss about what to do. Then I discovered the regimen of eating only one meal a day in a Sixty Minutes interview. The story of General Stanley MacKrystal appealed to my sense of discipline and determination. This is how I started my journey to my sixth life.

Back then no body would have come to defend fasting as a lifestyle under any form. MacKrystal himself warned about potential dangers of trying his regimen. To me it sounded reasonable, out of the box thinking, and I thought, ideal for me. Like never in any diet I previously followed, I felt more energetic with every passing day. I was soon doing hundreds of pushups, like not even in my twenties.
Weight loss lead to physical fitness, and this to confidence and the ending of my depression. Now I know that there are some scientific basis for my recovery from that dark time in my life. The ketones generated by fasting, now we know, are excellent for your brain too. My physical and mental changes gave me a new outlook. I call it my sixth life.

I restarted my expansion by learning more languages. First Italian, then French and then German. I also started teaching options trading through my own website and then YouTube. My pathology business was not all that I would have wanted, but my life was changing in different, more enjoyable ways. Eventually I begun to tell my OMAD story. In my 50’s I felt more accomplished, happy, and confident than ever before.

If you had discovered the fountain of youth, Wouldn’t you want to shout it to the world from roof tops? Wouldn’t you want everyone, not just you to benefit from it? Obviously, there isn’t such a thing as the fountain of youth, but OMAD is the closest thing to it. At least that I have experienced or seen in my many years of life.

I have shown you key points in my life in which an event transformed me in ways I could not have predicted. My sixth life is one of them. The so called midlife crisis appears as the countdown to the end of your life. If instead you feel, like I do, that you are in a new chapter, you won’t be missing your earlier lives. This new chapter may be full of rewards and joy.

Regardless of your age, every day, every minute of the present is your actual life. What happened in the past is merely what has brought you where you are. Today, is the first day of the rest of your life. What are you going to do with it? I suggest that you set your goals high in the service of humanity. This is why despite my age, I continue to repeat convincingly, that life is looking up, thank you.