Why I Feel Healthy & Lost 12 kg

Since meeting Larisa Zoska at Bill Giles clinic in Canberra

at his Medical Ecology Centre my life has changed.

I did not start out to lose weight it was all about being healthy

and weight loss became part of the result.

Then Nora came along and took things to another level.

Nora Gedgaudas was a guest speaker on a Teleseminar last year outlining the principles of the Paleo diet.

Even though I had been following this way of life for all of 2011,her teleseminar and visit to Australia clarified the lifelong benifits of a Paleo style diet.

This teleseminar had the greatest impact on the listeners i have experience with people calling and emailing recently how much weight they have lost and how healthy they feel since changing their way of eating.

So when Nora let me know this Paleo Summit was on next week I thought I should pass it on.

You can listen live online or to the recordings depending on your schedule.

Can you afford not to get this lifechanging information ? Especially when you can do it from your home.

Check out the line up of speakers (including Nora) by clicking the image below.

                                    

Family, Community & Land Management

 Angus Whyte has continued on from his last guest post :

Well I’m going to start this with a bit about change in general within this environment and then I’ll talk a bit about us.
In Western NSW where we live, it is grazing land, predominately sheep for wool and lately meat as well.  The focus is on the animal making sure that they have feed and water and are kept in good condition.  How we judge the land condition is on the condition of the animal and the grazier’s skill is based on the quality and quantity of the product that they produce.

This makes sense because as a community this is the only way that we pay graziers and a farming business is the same as any other, so need a major economic focus.  So as a community if we feel that landholders have degraded the land, then we are part of the problem as we have chosen to only pay for produce and not recognise “managing the land” as an outcome.

The focus of skills is around being able to manage livestock, selecting good quality and managing the business, very little focus on managing the landscape.  I realise that not everyone fits into this category and it will offend some as when you generalise you always do, I feel it is important to set the scene as up until 10 years ago we were very happy being part of the above.

So when about 15 years ago my eyes started to be opened as to the opportunities associated with improving the landscape, this was another language to most of our peers.  As the decline in the landscape had happened so quickly in the late 1800’s and then since then decline has been slow, most would say the landscape is in good health and you have no control over the land, only “Mother Nature” can do that. 

In order to change so that you succeed, you need to have as many people “fighting in your corner” as possible to support and advise you through change.  This is required as a change away from the norm in any community can be viewed as a threat to those that consider they are leaders and don’t wish to change.  The thinking is “what if they succeed and become viewed as good farmers, the hierarchy of the community will change”.  This is the “old bull versus the young bull” stuff and can be very confronting and hurtful if you aren’t prepared for it, take it from someone that wasn’t prepared and felt the pain.

So we come to our change in our business which was to look at the livestock, the land, the people and the money as equals and they all needed to be in “balance”.  While this may not be considered a significant change, in order to “balance the books” in the beginning we had to forego some livestock productivity and money in order to put our land on the same footing, all this at a time when we had a drought, young family and low equity.  This is where the power of a meaningful vision and goals is important as it is so easy to lose focus and run off track.

The message that I would like to get across is that the decision to change pathways in whatever you do in life is relatively simple, success is based on the strong support networks that you have around you and making sure that the end goal is meaningful to you and not someone else’s goal.
Next time I’ll talk about the changes on “Wyndham” and some of the obstacles that we have faced.

Angus Whyte Guest Blogger

                                                      Gus, Kelly and Mitchell Whyte

Welcome all to the first of “Gus’s Guest post”, a big thank you to Grahame for allowing me to have room on his wonderful blog. 
First up I’d better introduce myself, my name is Angus (Gus) Whyte and I’m married to the wonderful Kelly and we have a beautiful (read bloody naughty) 8 yr old boy Mitchell.  We live on a 12,500ha property on the Anabranch River in Western NSW where we graze sheep and cattle as well as from time to time opportunistically crop some of our flood country.

I’m a fourth generation landholder in the area, my parents live on another property about 20km away and we help them with the running of their property when required. 
Our philosophy for managing the land is to work in harmony with Mother Nature rather than against her and that in the production of our beautiful produce we must make sure that the land consistently improves. 

So to achieve this we have a system of strict rotational grazing that involves different species and densities as well as rest, we provide a diversity of management to achieve a diversity of plants.  We also strive to use as little chemical as possible so that we enhance the natural predators/defenses that are available to our stock to keep them healthy.

Our attitude is that everything that happens on our place is our concern; weeds are plants with a story and it is up to us to interpret that, animal health is a dietary problem and again we need to change our management. 

Kelly and I came from a culture of “conservative set stocking” (putting the amount of stock in a paddock that the area can run conservatively year in year out) and our focus was clearly on making sure that we look after the health and well being of the animal (as that is the only way we make money??).  We ran purely merino sheep and considered ourselves “good producers” as we produced a very nice animal and fibre, we drenched when required, jetted as required etc.

The outcome of this was a landscape that was declining in health every way you measured it, us working 6-7 days a week and at the end of the year receiving very little money, this was a major driver to change. 

We have always sought to run the best possible agricultural business from the time I came home from Longreach Pastoral College (same as Grahame), by always striving to do better we have been asking lots of questions, mainly of ourselves.  This lead to an involvement in Catchment Management and natural resource management, where over time I “arrived” at answers to some of our questions.

Certainly this put me more in touch with the landscape and alerted me to things such as that after every major drought carrying capacity of the landscape had decreased by about 10-20% so over time since about 1860 when the area was settled the landscape had probably “lost” 80% of it’s carrying capacity, what a great opportunity there was to rehabilitate the wonderful landscape and have not only more produce, healthier produce. 

In the my next blog guest post I’ll discuss the difficulties of change in a very conservative environment.
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