Goodbye to Michael Mosley: the inventor of the 5:2 diet

For anyone who is interested in the health and wellness world, they will know that Michael Mosley, the inventor of the 5:2 diet died a couple of weeks ago in Greece. He was on holiday and went for a walk after lunch. I gather he took a wrong turn in 40 degree heat and wasn’t able to get back to a town before heat go the better of him. The 5:2 diet is a form of intermittent fasting where you eat normally on 5 days and very little on 2 days of each week. Michael Mosley himself used this to reverse his own Type 2 diabetes.

Michael worked for the UK BBC and produced documentaries in the health and wellbeing sphere. He ‘got into it’ after being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes which he subsequently reversed. In series after series he made himself a guinea pig and tested ideas of what was healthy (and what wasn’t). For me, the ones that stand out are two documentaries he produced in Australia: one on sleep issues and another on Australia’s normal foods and showed its terrible impact on Australian health and Australian communities.

Michael was personable. You felt like you knew him. You felt like he knew you. He spoke simply, honestly and practically. He had a real knack for distilling complex ideas into simple concepts that people could easily grasp. Whenever he spoke, it felt like he was talking to you. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world seem to recognise this. Comments on social media posts all ask questions like “why do I feel like I’ve lost a friend” and “why do I feel so affected by his death”. What an extra-ordinary power and reach he had and how well he used it.

There is something that keeps playing over in my mind as I think about his death. What is the point of being healthy? Michael did things he hated each and every day (like cold showers, squats and push ups) in a crusade to be healthy. Yet despite all this good health, he died! So why bother? Why bother about being healthy if you could just die at any minute. Why not just eat what we want and be lazy sloths because we will all end up dead one day? In fact, for Michael, the post-lunch walk which essentially led to his death, was probably motivated by health as he would have been conscious of burning off the glucose from his lunch. As a post-diabetic this would be an important part of his daily life. Yet this act of good health killed him!

So what can we make of all this?

The answer is that we do not do ‘healthy things’ to have good health. We do them because good health enables us to enjoy life. When we are healthier we are happier. If he hadn’t been healthy he wouldn’t have got so much out of life. He would have been dependent on regular medications and he wouldn’t have had the energy and zest for life to keep doing the work he was doing in making all of his documentaries. So in summary good health isn’t about being healthy it is about feeling good so that you can enjoy every second of every day that you are alive. In other words to live in the present (not to be healthy for the future).

We eat to be healthy. We eat to feel well. When we feel well we can enjoy ourselves. When we can enjoy ourselves, life is worth living. If we don’t eat well, we feel rubbish.

These are just some thoughts as I ponder the life of an incredible person who I didn’t even know! I wish all the best to his wife and children and closer friends. It just isn’t fair for them.

I couldn’t be more sorry to hear the news about Michael’s death. Please take a moment to read about him, learn about him or take on board ‘just one thing’ of his advice. He really was a magician in the world of health and wellness.