Have you passed by a hospital recently? Hopefully, just passed by rather than popping in to visit someone or, even worse, to undergo some kind of procedure yourself. Casting my mind back 30 or so years, I seem to recall hospitals being far more compact affairs.
These days, they sit on spacious, campus-like grounds complete with shopping malls and hotels. Once you step through the gate to the complex, you get the impression that you could probably live there long term, perhaps until you move on to celestial climes.
But why are hospitals such gargantuan affairs today? And why are commercial outlets like Super-Pharm constantly full of consumers lining up to get their prescription drugs? Healthcare is an enormously big business today. Why has it grown so exponentially over the past two or three decades?
Eliran De-Mayo’s take on all this is that contemporary Western lifestyles are simply and fundamentally unhealthy. The bare, cold figures appear to corroborate that and tell a sorry tale.
The latest statistics show that over 11% of people living in the United States suffer from diabetes, and an incredible close to 40% are obese. The 2021 figures for this country don’t paint a more positive picture, with 9.8% of Israelis aged 18 classed as diabetics, and 49% considered overweight. How did we arrive at this lamentable state of affairs? What went wrong?
That is one of the topics that came up at the De-Mayo Health Center in Kibbutz Tuval in the Lower Galilee during my recent week-long stay there. The facility’s website says it is “a unique health farm, a health center for healing, and a way of life, a health resort in ideal conditions for healing.” After seven days there, I can attest to the veracity of that claim.
There were around 10 of us in the group who embarked together on a journey to greater awareness and corporeal and cerebral awakening. That may sound a little cultish, but De-Mayo makes no bones about his intent.
“Normally, if I see someone come back here, I feel as if I have failed,” he declares when we sit down for a chat on my last day there. Ideally, he would like his patrons to engage fully in the center’s program, take the welfare-enhancement mindset on board, and sustain that when they leave the peaceful cloistered kibbutz surroundings and return to everyday life with all that entails.
The above observation was made with specific reference to an A-lister guest at the health center, a certain Lee Korzits. For those who don’t follow watersports or the Olympics, Korzits is a former four-time world windsurfing champion, including winning three in a row. She competed in a couple of Olympic games, narrowly missing out on a medal.
The baby-faced 40-year-old dropped by in the middle of our week and immediately captured our attention and hearts. She was an engaging conversationalist and regaled us with tales of her athletic conquests and also some of her intense healthcare backdrop.
The latter contained some harrowing stories, including a nine-month stay in the hospital, all manner of surgical procedures, and two bouts with cancer. Thankfully, all of that was preceded by a two-month sojourn at Tuval.
“I never would have survived my time in hospital and all of that had I not been here first,” she proclaimed. “I had a friend who went through something similar in the hospital at the same time as me, and at some point, he just gave up. He died.”
We were a motley bunch. Each came for their own reasons. Some were looking to address pressing ongoing ailments; others were more interested in kickstarting a new pathway to healthier living. Four of us were in the senior citizen age group; one, a little younger, was looking to go cold turkey on “emotional eating” and shed several kilograms in the process.
There was a film industry professional between jobs who had been through his fair share of substance abuse, a choir director in her late seventies with cancer who looked to be in the pink and said she felt great, a fellow septuagenarian architect with various health issues of her own, and a 50-something-year-old man with the painful constricting repercussions of a couple of serious sporting injuries.
There was also a high-flying, hi-tech professional couple, with the male partner expressing reservations about participating in the program and delivering daily “threats” about leaving on the morrow. In the event, both stayed, as planned, for five days, and the husband visibly softened and became more enthused as the week progressed. There was also a wonderful chemistry and warmth between the group members, notwithstanding the personality and outlook discrepancies.
For most – if not all – of us, the itinerary at Tuval was initially challenging. We arose before daybreak and stepped out of our compact but comfortable accommodation to frosty and sometimes rain-flecked air before wending our way, largely in silence, for about half an hour through the lush kibbutz grounds ending up at a cliff edge overlooking Deir el-Asad, Majd el-Kurum, and Karmiel.
We may not have talked on the walk there, but the multifarious birds, up bright and early, made quite a racket. The ostensible ornithological volume level made for heightened raucity in comparison with the otherwise silent surroundings.
With the world at our feet
Once at the cliffside, with the world seemingly at our feet, we waited, naturally in silence, for the sun to make an appearance.
The tension of expectancy, of waiting for something to happen, an event that has taken place every single day since the beginning of time, something over which we had no control – there was no app to download it or speed it on its way – was palpable. And when the great red orb rose over the horizon or winked at us through a sliver in the clouds, we inadvertently gasped as the accumulated tension finally found an outlet.
THAT WAS quite a start to every day, as the day began in practice. Then it was a gentle stroll back to the kibbutz, and to the Terra Rosa building where the majority of our activities took place. That began daily with a couple hours of Qigong or some other movement, breathing, and meditative form of exercise, and yoga, after which we finally made our way to the dining room.
Breakfast started at 10:45 a.m. – that took some getting used to – and mostly consisted of delicious fruit salad, yogurt and porridge, freshly squeezed fruit drinks and herbal tea infusions. All the food served at Tuval is vegan, and everything is germinated and fermented ahead of time, thereby upping the nutritional value, facilitating digestion, and providing the system with valuable probiotics.
De-Mayo told us that, in terms of our diet, the accent is on variety and providing for all our nutritional – vitamins, proteins, etc. – needs. We never came away from the dining room feeling unsatiated, or heavy and drowsy.
I was never a heavy coffee drinker but I always enjoyed a mugful of the beverage made from freshly ground beans at the start of the day, generally accompanied by biscuits and sometimes toast. Perhaps it was my British upbringing and the generally accepted idea that you need to start the day with a hearty breakfast loaded with calories. That has gone out the window. I have sipped a total of one small cup of coffee since, and I feel all the better for it. I don’t even miss it.
We learned from De-Mayo that while coffee can serve as an efficient pick-me-up and provide first aid help when, for instance, we are tired and have to drive somewhere, it is fundamentally bad for us. He enlightened us about the sympathetic nervous system and its counterpart, the parasympathetic nervous system.
The former’s principal role is to stimulate the body’s fight or flight response in emergency predicaments. The parasympathetic system is a gentler, more sustainable and sustaining mechanism that generates a “feed and breed” followed by a “rest and digest” state of affairs.
Although living in this country presents all-too-frequent existential challenges, pumping ourselves with high octane fuel only serves to heighten our emotions and, in all probability, make bad situations worse instead of leading to a solution.
As an avid cyclist, who hardly puts on weight, I was also laboring under the misapprehension that I could merrily nosh junk betwixt regular mealtimes. That was until I did a blood test, as required by the De-Mayo Health Center on Kibbutz Tuval pre-stay there, and was astonished and perturbed to discover I was veering steadily toward diabetes. Evidently burning up fat does not help with sugar accumulation.
According to De-Mayo, and like-minded professionals in the alternative healthcare field, one should abstain from eating for as long as possible across the 24-hour day. Completing all the daily repasts within six hours and fasting for the other 18 is the ideal way to go. Dinner at Tuval was over by 6:30 p.m. so we got close to that. The thinking behind it is that the body, a truly amazing mechanism if left to its own natural devices, when not busy digesting food will regenerate healthy cells, clear out poisons, and repair damage.
De-Mayo is an impressive, fiercely independent character. The 38-year-old never made it past 10th grade and eventually discovered Open University and began to devour information across a wide range of fields, including psychology, philosophy, and agriculture, and all kinds of Eastern teaching. If the energetic, self-confessed autodidact is anything to go by, the method works.
The instructors who guided other activities, such as yoga and taking ice baths, were similarly enthused, genial, and supportive. By the way, the latter was not as challenging as it may sound, particularly for someone like me who takes year-round dips in springs.
The Tuval approach is not just about what to eat and when to ingest it. People who stay there – visits can range from a week to a month or more – often come away with a lifestyle makeover. Of course, that doesn’t happen overnight. It requires persistence and conviction to make the transition, but the benefits are there to be had, on all sorts of levels.
Imagine, for example, making all the food you eat. No frozen pizzas slung into the microwave for 10 minutes and summarily gobbled down. No quick adrenaline fixes, sugar-rich snacks, and beverages that may provide you with an immediate sense of comfort and an instant high, but that euphoria is fleeting and you soon find yourself down in the emotional and dynamic doldrums again, and in sore need of another injection of energy.
Yes, making your own food from scratch is time consuming and seems at odds with the fast pace of life in the 21st century. It demands a lot of self-discipline and efficiency, but once you get into the swing of things, there are numerous benefits, not least nutritious, tasty dishes devoid of chemicals and harmful additives.
The ills inherent in our modern way of living came up in several illuminating talks given by De-Mayo. That, surprisingly, included products that more enlightened health-minded folk purchase at nature food stores. We were told, for example, that unrefined pink Himalayan salt does not do us any good. “Salt is bad for you,” De-Mayo noted. “Any doctor will tell you that.”
For De-Mayo, it is not a matter of “everything in moderation.” Rather, it is about cutting out all the unhealthy stuff completely, if possible, and only eating what the body needs. That includes reducing our screen time as much as we can. We were advised to leave our cellphones behind in our accommodation during the day, and only check messages in the evening before hitting the sack. “Lights out,” by the way, was at 9:30 p.m., after a sunset walk and evening session-activity.
Maimonides prescribed sleeping around eight hours a day and believed that pre-midnight sleep is more beneficial than in the wee hours. That’s quite an ask for many these days, in a world swamped by distractions, sound and visual bites, the constant bombardment of “important” information, and the almost universal addiction to our cellphone screens. I found, after a day or so, that not having my phone induced an endearing and compelling sense of calm.
We undeniably live our lives largely out of tune with the natural order of the world. If we can take a step back, away from the relentless maelstrom of the rat race and existential living, and take an unblinkered look at the way we live and the implications thereof, we might get a shock.
If we have learned nothing else from the COVID-19 years, it must be that we should take as much responsibility as we can for our own welfare. We should do anything and everything we can to ensure our immune system is in the best shape possible so that, should another health risk come along, we will stand the best chance of warding it off.
We were already vegan and made much of our own food, but now we make 95% of it, enjoy the preparation processes, and delight in the tasty end result. And adding daily yoga sessions and sunrise walks several times a week ain’t bad either.
For more information: home.demayo.co.il/en