THE ANVIL

by | Feb 11, 2016 | Health & Wellness

I would tackle the clean up of Grandad’s workshop that had remained just as he left it when he passed over 50 years ago. There I noticed all the threads of the life he once lived and his multiple streams of income that he needed to support a family of eight on a Missouri farm: his hand made horse tack, parts to his saw mill, brooms that he crafted and sold himself.

The list went on.

But one item I would actually ‘feel’ before I laid eyes on it: The foot and a half long anvil he used for his blacksmith trade made contact with my foot almost causing me to land on my face.

The anvil was left in the middle of the floor and it was a pain to work around. So I did what anyone else who would do out of sheer frustration who was sporting a throbbing toe:

I picked up the crazy thing and moved it out of my way.

Later I did some research and found there is a market for antique smithing equipment. Placing the anvil for sale online, it wasn’t very long before I had an interested buyer.

“How much does it weigh?” came my first inquiry..

“I don’t know”, I replied. “It can’t weigh over 40 lbs because I lost the ability to lift that almost 20 years ago…I can tell you its about 18 inches long”

“Lady, if it’s 18 inches long that thing weighs at least 80 lbs”.

I had the audacity to argue with him.

“Yeah, there must be some mistake because I’m 56 and I can tell you that my teenage son was having to lift 40 lb bags of top soil for me before my 39th birthday.”

Later when my husband came home I told him the story. The conversation sparked both of our curiosities so we went up the hill with a scale to weigh it and settle any doubt.

It weighed 122lbs.

Knowing how a rush of adrenalin can impact strength, I decided to do a test to see if I could lift it again

–and I did.

What had changed to make me stronger in my fifth decade of life versus my third? I could only come up with one thing:

Diet.

Since moving to the farm the last couple of years I had been able to realize my longstanding desire to go completely organic.

I had always avoided junk food, exercised, and taken in plenty of water, but because of my busy corporate life, I still defaulted to a lot of processed food. Healthier processed food granted, but processed none the less with ridiculous amount of sugars and preservatives.

In two years I had changed all that. My exercise, which I kept up with had actually fallen off just a bit as I adjusted to my new life.

I was now growing a large quantity of my own food however, buying or bartering from local farmers for that which I could not grow, found a resource for raw milk, acquired eggs and free range chickens sourced from local farmers. Grass fed beef and pork now were the only meats we consumed.

I know it was making a difference because I felt better. As a proponent of good diet and exercise, I had long been a firm believer in the quote from Hippocrates, considered the father of modern medicine: “Let food be they medicine and medicine be thy food”.

One could easily say that I didn’t need an anvil to fall on me in order to make healthy choices…

I did however need to trip over one in order to realize the difference those healthy choices could make!

(**As a side bar, if you wish to know more about how our diet impacts our health, you may wish to read this posting by Dr. Mercola: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/04/20/sugar-dangers.aspx.)

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