Joe, while an Australian, is in terms of health very much a stereotypical American. And, like so many others, came to realize that without your health, nothing else much matters.
By the time he hit 40, he was “professionally successful but physically bankrupt,” tipping the scales at 300 pounds and taking multiple medications for an autoimmune disease doctors could not find the root cause of. His weight, his mysterious medical condition, and side effects from the drugs were sapping his life away and destroying his quality of life.
By the time he hit 40, he was “professionally successful but physically bankrupt,” tipping the scales at 300 pounds and taking multiple medications for an autoimmune disease doctors could not find the root cause of. His weight, his mysterious medical condition, and side effects from the drugs were sapping his life away and destroying his quality of life.
“When I turned 40, I realized that I had been all talk and no action for years,saying that someday I would change my life and do something to reclaim the robust health I had enjoyed as a younger man,” he says.2
“It was a sobering realization – I had focused my capacity for action, determination and discipline on nothing but creating wealth. It was time to harness those skills to create health.
It occurred to me that I was not alone. Yes, my disease was very rare – but lots of people are sick. And you certainly don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see that most of us in the developed world are unhealthily fat. Like lots of people, I had been outsourcing my health problems to doctors, but no one had been able to fix what ailed me. What if I could take control of the problem, and my own role in creating the situation?”
Shunning his steady diet of processed food for real, whole foods – the stuff that grows in the ground and on trees and is sold without a nutrition label – was the logical place to start. For the first 60 days, he juiced his way across the United States with film crew in tow, talking to people about their diets along the way. Says Joe:
“Making this movie changed my life, opened my eyes and re-focused my mission on something that is startling simple and utterly effective: helping people reclaim their health and vitality as I did by consuming more fruits and vegetables... It is amazing what can happen. I can vouch for this by first-hand experience. After 60 days of juice and another 70 days of eating just fruit, vegetables, nuts, beans and seeds I was 100 lbs lighter and off all medication. I've been that way ever since.”
