Catching Up, Moving on

It’s been a few weeks since my last post, because quite a bit has happened recently.  Let me catch up, and start with a little history.

I moved to Idaho in 2007 to begin school (BYU-Idaho) as a Health Science major, with the intention of pursuing dietetics and/or Naturopathic Medicine.  Two years later I had a falling out with the institution and, subsequently, the culture of draconian conservatism that embraces this part of Mid/Northwest.

So I had my credits transferred to the equally affordable state school in Boise, where I picked up the slack and kept moving toward my degree.  Maybe Rexburg left a bad taste in my mouth, or maybe I’d changed my outlook on education, but by the Fall semester of 2011 I was burned out.  School became a tremendous burden, and the stress was disallowing me to progress in other was.  Important ways.  Key among those was as a filmmaker.

I’d spent the next 6 months working on setting up a funding vehicle for the documentary Eat Right, and making arrangements to interview & collect stories (hence Eat Right Stories).  Even though the pursuit of a Naturopath degree was no longer a priority, my original goal from six years ago is, and has always been, alive and well.

I feel like my whole “purpose”, if you will, is to educate people about the work of Dr D’Adamo.  To see his research and concepts become more widely accepted in the mainstream of medicine and culinary culture.  Documentary filmmaking would be a perfect way to achieve this, especially in this century when people are reading less and relying on audio/video forms of media.

Well, I’ve had to put the documentary on temporary hold, due to lack of funding.  During the recent struggle to get the movie financed and find a way to pay my bills, I received an opportunity that I could not pass on.  In late August I was offered a full-time position to work for D’Adamo Personalized Nutrition in Brooklyn, NY, where I would oversee the retail of Blood Type Diet supplements, patient scheduling, and marketing – which includes making videos.  It was really a dream come true.

Not bad news for the documentary, but quite the opposite.  This will allow me to actually start shooting and putting up teaser video clips for Eat Right.  Since so many of my interviews and contacts are in the NYC area, I’ll be able to produce parts for the movie without a budget, while taking care of my own survival.  And as the audience widens while these segments are being produced, I believe I will have a much greater chance of stumbling upon the right individual(s) with the fiscal allowance for completion of the feature film.

Needless to say, things have been going very well, both personally and professionally.  Of course it would have been nice if “Plan A” worked out, meaning I would be close to post-production and editing, with hard drive full of amazing footage, but regardless of the bumps and detours, I find that life always steers in the right direction, and we end up where we need to be.

Right now I have the work opportunity of a lifetime, living in a city that feels comfortable, surrounded by people with similar goals, interests, and priorities.  After all, the first step in this documentary making process was to get out of Idaho.  Now that I’m in New York, I feel an incredible energy, and renewed sense of creativity and excitement.

I can’t make any timeline predictions at this point, but I can tell you that I have an ever growing list of exciting ideas, and the connections and opportunities to make them happen.  So stay close and subscribe for the latest updates.

Lots of very cool things to come!

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Sleep II

I just wanted to post a quick addendum to my previous blog about sleep. Maybe it’s the bad feng shui in my bedroom, but lately I’ve had a hard time dozing off.  I find that when there are unresolved problems; be they social, financial, or otherwise, my brain won’t let me sleep until the world is fixed.  So I’ve been experiencing this unusual but extreme insomnia the last few weeks, which is attributed to my mind’s inability to cap it under stress.

Thanks to a recent conversation with well trained and super friendly Naturopath Dr Ryan Partovi of San Diego (also a Blood Type Diet practitioner), I came out with some tips and a surprisingly simple solution.  He suggested I try putting on relaxing music or a meditation CD while trying to sleep.  Since I broke my iPod early this year in a bike accident, I had to drag my laptop over to my bed & extend the headphone reach to my pillow.  I actually happen to have a guided meditation track, and so I gave it a go.  Hours of turning and restlessness while trying to resolve a sabotage of life challenges turned into blissful slumber, after which I arose in the a.m. feeling fantastic.

Another thing that helped was realizing my insulin was too high before going to bed, and without any kind of healthy food churning around, I was playing hormonal Badminton.  But I’ll save that for another topic.

So thank you, Dr Partovi, for your wisdom and support.  Hopefully this will be a useful trick for anyone else who has a broken brain mute button.

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Support

A woman in Oregon with severe depression contacted me recently and wants to try the Blood Type Diet, in hopes that she might be able to wean herself from her medication.  It will be the first time in her life she’s ever changed her diet.  There are also four other people near Portland waiting to be interviewed for Eat Right Stories.  If you yourself might be able to, or you know someone who could support the filming of these individuals, please send me an email.  ericscottmorrison [at] gmail [dot] com

Thank you so much!

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Chocolate Monday

Today is Chocolate Monday.

Maybe only closer friends of mine will know what I’m talking about, but it’s time the world be let in on the secret.

College roommate and best friend Zach with gluten-free chocolate covered deep fried bananas.

It all began circa 2008 in Rexburg, Idaho.  I realized I was devouring likely unhealthy amounts of theobromine, on a nearly daily basis.  Now that I look back, I’m pretty sure the intense chocolate cravings were a sign of Magnesium deficiency… but that’s another topic.

I wanted to find a way to control this inner chocolate monster (after all, Mormons are the suppression experts), so I decided to allow myself one day a week to eat it.  This would not only give my liver a break, but make the indulgence more meaningful as a “special occasion”.

And it worked.  I suppose Chocolate Monday became a meme; or maybe an inside joke.  But whether or not a more public perspective would lend credibility to this extreme-semi-annual holiday, its celebration always provided a good time.

There were no rules.  If it involved the consumption of theobroma cacao in any shape or form, it fit regulation.  Sometimes you’d create your own elaborate chocolate desserts, and sometimes you just ran to the nearest open gas station for a Skor bar.  But the underlying principle was that chocolate is delicious.  And Monday sounded like a good day for it.

Now that I’m no longer in college, I don’t have the same social network to relish in the tradition.  But occasionally I’ll get a text or an email from someone from the founding days of chocolatedom with a greeting and reverent reminder, which is always a nostalgic surprise.  I can’t tell you how many people still celebrate ChocMo, but it will never melt from the palm of my heart.

So to those of you who remember, and to the new recruits everywhere else -

Happy Chocolate Monday!

p.s.

If you’re concerned about the quality of your chocolate, NAP has the best!  Click here.

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Biology

Biology is something I’ve always found generally fascinating.  I was a Health Science major in college, but looking back I would have done Biology with a minor in communication.

I think all of my explorations & previous career paths can be distilled into my two principal interests:  Figuring out how stuff works, and fixing what doesn’t.  That’s why I began school as an electrical engineer, after all.

As I got older though, I cared less about electrical/mechanical problems and more about health and social problems.  Then the developing interest in film brought me to the realization that I can have the best of all worlds:  Promoting better health through digital media.  Communication, Health, Film, and Problem-solving.  Bam.

Back to the title of this post, and what actually inspired this rant… I think it was a TED talk I recently listened to, where the keynote speaker said that dogs and humans have the same genes for detecting smell, but ours have been turned off.  I tried to verify this claim through a little PubMed research, and came across some fascinating articles; although my limited research (and limited understanding of the research) didn’t particularly verify this.

What I did find was this article:

“We identified 26 losses of well-established genes in the human genome that were all lost at least 50 [million years] after their birth.”

Evolution.  Natural selection.  Whatever you want to call it, it’s pretty damn cool.  Most of our DNA is “junk” DNA… meaning it doesn’t actually code for anything we use.  Why do we have it?  Because somewhere down the family tree, one of our ancestors did.  It got turned off due to epigenetics and/or natural selection.  Some mammalian grandmother of ours decided her family was going to switch their diet around, and eat more soft leaves & less grass.  Genes had to be finagled in order to handle the digestive requirements, so now there’s an extra piece of “junk” as we don’t use that particular enzyme anymore.  And so it went for hundreds of millions of years until today, with our massive collection of has-been genes that only serve as a neat historical account.

“Epigenetics”, or “above/beyond” genetics, the principle that DNA does in fact change throughout generations, is fundamental to evolutionary biology, and it’s fundamental to Peter D’Adamo’s research into diet and nutrition.

I’m pretty sure the major reason there are so many skeptics to the Blood Type Diet is the misunderstanding and/or lack of understanding of the biology.  And I get it.  Even though *we know from decades of research that blood type plays a huge role in so many physiological areas (fetal development, tumor detection, enzyme production, to name a few), public education, universities, and medical schools still only teach that blood type is the thing that can kill you in a blood transfusion.  Or if you get the advanced lesson, you’ll learn about pregnancy and the Rh (+/-) factor.

*We =  Those willing to accept the evidence.  It’s no secret.  It’s just not promoted or investigated by mainstream science or medicine.  Why?  Welcome to my world.  Get on board, and follow me as I search for the answers.

Because biology is cool, and the world needs more D’Adamo.

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Still Waiting

I know many of you are probably wondering what the status is on the documentary.  Well, hang in there.  I’ve been itching and ready to hit the road for months now, but the financial obstacle has yet to be tackled.

I’m actually going to be making a short video soon, explaining the progress and detailing the needs and projections of Eat Right.  The trick, it seems, is to not only have a large audience to reach out to, but to have material as well.  The latter has been my challenge, since all the material I could be putting out is contingent on the original problem of locating seed money.

This next video should send out a clear picture though, and hopefully wrap the project all together.  And it will be my first on-camera appearance, so no making fun :)

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Documentaries

I’ve been catching up on the popular documentaries of the last 10 years or so, whilst observing the various filming, editing, storytelling, and overall production techniques.

A great book I just finished, How to Shoot Video That Doesn’t Suck, has been a good movie-watching guide, and real eye-opener to the aspects of filmmaking that capture an audience’s attention.  After all, the point of Eat Right is not just to show people how important the Blood Type Diet is, but to induce that itch to need to tell their friends and family about it.

Most of my favorite documentaries seem to have a central story that keeps the audience wanting to know more, which is what I’m hoping to capture.  But some of them are interesting simply due to the facts, whether they tell a compelling story or not.  If I can capture both of these elements and get my foot into the right doors, I don’t doubt that this could be the next big thing.  Or maybe that’s just my Type O optimism ;)

What do you think?  What are some of your favorite documentaries, and why?  Is there anything you’ve wanted to see addressed in other films that they just keep leaving out?

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Major Progress

Well, after a two week graveyard construction job out of the way, and legal obstacles in regard to raising capital successfully overcome, I’m finally back on all cylinders.

I was able to pay for hosting of my new websites today, and now in hot pursuit of a reasonably priced web design.  I don’t want to send anyone there until I have them built, but I just can’t contain myself:

sunmorproductions.com

eatrightmovie.com

And I’ve revived my old friend battleforhealth.com, which had recently expired.

I’m mostly excited that things are finally moving along with the film venture.  I just incorporated Sunmor Productions, Inc. for legal, management, and funding purposes.  I should hear back from the Secretary of State (New York) next week and know when it’s official.

I decided on New York, because that’s where I hope to end up after this Eat Right Stories road trip.  There are far more opportunities and resources there than Idaho, and I feel like I would fit in better culturally.  So big city life, here I come!

The goal is still to be on the road next month.  I have a lot to do (logos, trademark, bylaws, PPM, asset acquisitions…) but having a ridiculous deadline keeps me on my toes and working hard to get it all finished.

I look forward to the next few weeks, and will be sure to keep you updated.  Thanks, as always, for the readership and support!

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Website

I got a message today from someone who noticed my website battleforhealth.com is inactive.  I just wanted to make a quick note about this, in case anyone has observed the same issue.

When I first created Battle for Health in 2009, I wanted to have a hub for telling my and others’ experiences with the Blood Type Diet, and to explain some of its basic concepts with images and videos.  Since then, I’d decided to focus more on the video part by doing a feature documentary, which is why I haven’t done much site maintenance.  Now the three-year hosting I paid for has recently expired, so I’m working on eatrightmovie.com, and not sure whether I will continue Battle for Health.

I’d like to get your feedback on this.  For anyone who has seen battleforhealth.com — should I bring it back, or just stick with the documentary page?  Or maybe both?

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Sleep

I’m a night owl.  I seem to have the most energy and creativity right when I need to go to bed.  I get all my great ideas and ambitions, and feel the most motivated right as the world hits the sack.  And for years I got away with these late nights and sleeping in, with the excuse of being a college kid.  No job and living off of student loans, with term papers, dates, and long bike rides til 2 in the morning — seemed like a great excuse.

And then just recently I came to realize how this sporadic snoozing has negatively affected my health.  But this time it’s actually the Medical Doctor I have to thank.

I’ve heard the “early to rise” speech my whole life, but never really agreed.  I believed, since it seemed to work for me, that the time frame of sleep was irrelevant, as long as you got the correct amount.  8 hours of sleep is 8 hours of sleep, whether it’s in the middle of the day, or the middle of the night.  But the doctor disagreed.

I went into the University medical center to see Dr Vince Serio while I still had school insurance last December.  This was just after I decided to take a break from college for a few years and pursue production.  I knew I needed to adopt a normal sleeping cycle, not for the health consideration, but because I simply wasn’t accomplishing everything I needed to in the day.

The good doctor informed me of the evolutionary program of night-to-morning sleep, and that afternoon awakenings were detrimental to one’s health.  I never considered that you could cause physical damage to yourself by screwing up the circadian rhythm, but he said that even diseases like diabetes and heart disease are serious threats and legitimate consequences of years of bad sleep.  Damn that’s scary.

I don’t like to admit it, but I opted for pharmaceutical intervention to get back on track.  It was a serious issue at the time, because I could not fall sleep before 1 or 2 am.  I could (and often tried to) take a handful of valerian root, chamomile, melatonin, 5-HTP, homeopathic remedies, or any other natural sleep-inducing substance, but to no effect.  Luckily though, I was one of the patients with whom treatment followed a “text book” example.  The drugs worked great for the period of time I used them to re-adjust, I didn’t experience any side-effets or addiction, and I went off of them a few weeks later.

I partially tell this story to express my moderate ideology on healthcare — that is, that I think contemporary medicine certainly has its place, and should not always be shunned by alternative practice — but mostly to remind myself how truly holistic health is.  There is no singular factor to feeling well.  All the pieces need to fit in order for the puzzle to be complete.  Nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress, society, psychology — all key parts, among others, to what we call wellness.

Since I began retiring before or around midnight and waking up while it was still “a.m.” I cannot tell you how much better I’ve felt.  I will never be a 6am riser, but even shifting my pattern by just a few hours has done wonders to mental clarity, energy, focus, optimism, and digestion.

I won’t try to tell anyone who does enjoy the late nights that they should go to bed earlier, but I can say that I’ve found life to be fuller, richer, more colorful, and much more productive.  I still go downtown on the weekends and sometimes get to bed at 3am, but I’ve found that as long as I’m on a good schedule the rest of the week, I can have the occasional late night and social enjoyment without feeling terrible afterwards.

I’m writing about this now, because I just started a full-time temp construction job, to take care of finances until I hit the road in July.  Only problem is, the hours are from 9pm to 5:30 in the morning.

It hit me like a ton of bricks.  Screwing up the sleeping cycle for days at a time has brought me back to feeling like garbage.  But just as Peter D’Adamo lectured about at the 2011 IfHI regarding hormesis and small doses of bad being potentially good, I’m trying to see this experience for the benefits.  A couple of weeks and it’ll be over, then I will once again resume a healthy, stable pattern of rest, with all the accompanying benefits.

This time, ready to hit the road with my film gear, to bring your stories and epiphanies about health into light.

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