His family contacted me to let me know and I shared a little here.

I know he would have been touched by your words & enthusiastic in responding.

Thank you too for telling us a little about your story of survival and the great sacrifices of your parents. I’m sure they would be filled with joy and pride to know that you ended up living such a long and healthy life.

You’ve been very encouraging, Drew! I like your attitude and willingness to “pass on the savings” to all of your friends and readers!

It became easy for me to avoid junk, for example donuts in the office breakroom, because I had no idea how many calories were in them. Strangely enough, because I could not account for them in my spreadsheet, it was easy to pass them by. :-)

Different methods appeal to different personalities, though. I think counting calories appeals to my left brain / hyper organized self. An unaccounted for snack would ruin my count for the day, thus compromising my lists comparing theoretical to actual weight loss, thus ruining my awesome graphs. :-)

Enjoying your blog, just found it.

My parents wanted another child (me) after losing almost all their children during the earlier part of the famine. Perhaps not the wisest decision, to have a child during a famine, but here I am nevertheless. My mother died during child birth and my father kept me alive by regurgitating food into me. He hid food in the side of a river bank, covered by a large discolored rock.

When I was old and strong enough to travel my brother came home from the Soviet collectivist farm and carried me off into the woods. Eventually we made it to Poland, which we had to leave as Warsaw was sacked and Germany took the Western half whereas the Soviets took over the Eastern half. We managed to sneak into the UK, used our connections there to immigrate to Canada and then moved to the US and the rest as they say is history.

I chose to not include my experiences with those of the Holodomor survivor sites because, in my opinion, they’re looking more for experiences of the famine as it was lived but I don’t remember living it. I remember surviving it, or rather surviving the after effects of it and escaping the impending war that was enveloping Europe at the time.

I don’t believe I’ll write anything formal about my life. My daughter has documented my memories and she or one of my grandchildren may choose to do a book about it. I leave it to them.

Meditation and weight loss… well, here’s the thing. One of the best things I ever heard from Leo (who kind of specializes in making life changes) is to pick one thing at a time. You know how someone who’s quitting smoking might start overeating or drinking more? It’s kind of like that.

If you already have a strong meditation practice (meaning daily), you have already learned a great deal of willpower, which will help you in your weight loss efforts (or any difficult endeavor). However, if you don’t already have a strong (daily) practice, don’t try to do both at once. Either take two months to develop your meditation practice, and then add in health efforts; or take two months to learn healthy eating habits, and then add in meditation.

It might take longer, but you’ll end up succeeding at both instead of letting them peter out.

Thanks for your comment Vivek, and great to see you here!