When I was about seventeen I learned I had an allergy to fish. I was out of the country with my soccer team, a trip to Europe with all of its amazing new sights, and foods. We were staying in a local home one night and our hosts had made a scrumptious potato dish that I gobbled down without hesitation. Later, after I spent all night writhing with a stomach ache, I found out that it had anchovies in it, but at the time had no clue about my allergy.
Over the following years, every time I ate fish, within five minutes I would be running to the bathroom with the fish exiting my body from both ends at the same time. That is tricky without a bucket.
Eventually my list of food sensitivities would grow. On the A list was fish, and on the B list was a host of other random food that gave me a bad stomach ache, but didn’t send me running. Turkey, avocado, banana, eggplant, zucchini, melon, raspberries…the list goes on and gets weirder. It was easy to live a life of avoidance so I never did anything about it, until recently.
I just finished a workup at NIHA, The National Integrated Health Associates, here in the D.C. area, to begin to put the puzzle pieces together and solve my food sensitivity issues, along with a worsening afternoon fatigue that over the last couple years has me napping way more than I would like. After 15 tubes of blood were drawn, the results were in, and I had one question:
Now what do I eat?
Over my lifetime I have watched and listened as different official sources change our nutritional requirements, give advice about what is healthy, and talk about the obesity epidemic. Heart disease and diabetes are in every health magazine headline. So is GMO. So is the problem with our drinking water. So is organic. And fake organic. So is The Zone Diet, Paleo, South Beach, Atkins, Blood Type, um…you get the idea.
Living and eating in America has become so complicated and loaded with shoulds that it is no wonder we are confused and our cholesterol is a little high. Oh wait, there is medicine for that. Don’t get me started on that topic.
During my visit with Dr. Gant he said one thing in our two, hour long visits detailing all of his recommendations that has stuck with me. “It is scary what they are doing to our food and water sources.” I could tell he was hesitant to say everything he knew, but he said enough to get me thinking.
It isn’t hard to see what is happening, and why it is so scary. The one thing that is highest on the list for true survival, food and water, is being wrecked, by chemicals, which is slowly poisoning us.
Now, if you really want to feel overwhelmed, let’s add the black mold behind the walls of your house, and the mercury fillings in your teeth to the list of health worries. Oh yeah, yeast, what about yeast? And chem-trails. Oh, and Lyme Disease, and the electromagnetic radiation from our phones, computers, and iPads.
Listen, I am not saying that any of these things is unimportant, but I look at all of it and the first thing I wonder is how we are all going to survive. How we have survived this long. How are children’s lives are going to look, and what they will be facing in terms of health issues and environmental challenges. My friends who have been paying attention these last many years are cheering right now. Another awakened soul to help fight the fight. Every single one of us now knows a child with ADD or Autism. Should that be included in this discussion?
It sucks. It is overwhelming. It is enough to make you hopeless and give up on it all. What can one person do about all this crap?
So, I started by trying the gluten free bread. I decided that me giving up is exactly what “they” are banking on. They want me to continue to eat my chemical-laden food and drink my contaminated water and get sick, so that they can prescribe me a medicine that will make me sicker and reliant upon more medication. They don’t bat an eyelash at the amount of Round Up or plastics that show up in my bloodstream.
I decided that I can do a lot of things. I can start to listen when my BFF talks about her sources for humanely raised, grass fed products, and I can pay attention to what labels I should pay attention to. I can slowly wean off the processed crap I eat and lean in toward the whole foods. I can buy the Zero Water pitcher and stop buying plastic water bottles. I can get involved and sign that petition I ignored on Facebook about GMO’s and actually read the article about what Erin Brockovich is successfully doing about chem-trails.
We feel overwhelmed and powerless inside our own minds. We talk ourselves into resignation. It is easier.
So as I look over the list of foods I should avoid, I chew on my tasty little piece of gluten-free bread with real, organic butter, and think, I can start small. I can talk myself out of being lazy and resigned and into peak health and optimism. I can vow to teach my children what has happened to our food and our planet, and why it is important to pay attention, and I can do that all right in my own home with the choices I make. I think a lot about my grandma’s kitchen, her homemade food, and the whole, natural ingredients she used, and I realize it is about getting back to simple. But simple isn’t easy – it requires a lot of awareness, and a lot of shopping.
The ultimate question of what do I eat now, as my longer than usual stare into the fridge causes it to beep at me, remains a challenge. One can only eat so much broccoli. I try not to let the overwhelm creep in, but it gets ahold of me and I sigh and slam the door. There are very few things left on my allowed list. I have a short but growing list of recommended supplements to take. I only managed to drink three out of my eight glasses of water today. Everything I want to eat contains gluten. The fake cheese I bought really is horrible. None of the produce currently in my fridge is organic. GASP!
I decided this is going to be about breaking out of the forty year old “balanced meal” mindset and being okay with having a bowl of kale for dinner. I have to redefine mealtime. I have to break a few of grandma’s rules. A baked sweet potato might have to do it for now. Until I make the time and gather the motivation to read, and shop smarter, and try some new recipes, I must give myself some slack.
Meanwhile, incase you are interested, Dr. Gant wants me to do a few new things. He has me on some digestive enzymes, which he says he would make everyone take if he had his way. He told me that because of the way our food has been grown, raised, etc…and the limitations some people have, digestive enzymes are absent in most people’s diets, which means you can’t digest your food properly. Proper food digestion equals the body’s main line of immune defense, so you can extrapolate the problems from there.
He also recommended a supplement, that because of the way he explained it, I bought into, but couldn’t for the life of me rehash right now for you because it has something to do with the Creb’s Cycle, something I vowed never to remember after I took, and barely passed my chemistry class. Something about the process of methylation in the body…OMG, see, it may have been beneficial to have been paying attention in class back then.
And the last group of recommendations had to do with basic vitamins that my body wasn’t getting enough of. Vitamin D, B’s, A, etc..stuff that was a “Duh,” but none-the-less, important. I ordered my multivitamin, as asked, and began taking it yesterday. Yesterday, for the first time in, I don’t know, a year maybe, I did not experience afternoon fatigue. Yep.
So, hopefully you won’t have to spend the time and the money for a doctor to tell you to start taking a multivitamin and eat more veggies, like I did. But I am thankful for the lesson I learned by starting this journey of inquiry for myself. And I appreciate the time and authentic caring I received with Dr. Gant, who really gets the bigger picture of what is happening to our food and knows how to solve some complex health issues by putting the puzzle pieces together. I will now begin to make changes that I know will make a difference, for me and my kids.
Now what do I eat?
Real food. Whole food. Food that helps my body and mind feel good. Food that makes sense. Food I would want my kids to eat. Food that goes bad if you don’t eat it quickly. Food that fuels and nourishes, that improves my health and vitality.
Now off to find it.
Laura Probert, MPT has navigated her life by combining body awareness, myofascial release and corrective exercise with therapeutic writing, and art. A 20+year career in healthcare, and a nine year journey in the martial arts has helped her define herself and find her purpose. Her passion is to teach others how the integration of mind, body and soul results in transformation and healing. Her new workshop series, When Your Soul Speaks, Healing Moves for 2015 starts in March. For more info and a free copy of her “5 Ways To Use Writing To Heal Yourself,” click here: www.bodyworksptonline.com and sign up for her monthly newsletter.
