Growing up, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to what I ate. My parents made sure we got plenty of fruits and vegetables and other healthy foods. We enjoyed occasional treats together, and I would get a fun size candy in my homemade lunch every day, which I looked forward to, I might add. I’ll be forever grateful to my mom for getting up early to make me and my siblings a hot breakfast and lunches for school. I know it’s not an easy thing, but it’s one of the ways she showed us love.
My sophomore year of high school I did a short experiment in cutting out sugar that you can read about here. In college, I switched to fat free milk and ate dessert just about every night and sugary cereal in the mornings. I still made sure to get my fruits and vegetables in, so I thought I was maintaining a healthy, reasonable diet.
My first year of college I put on the dreaded “Freshman 15.” I didn’t even know it had happened until the end of the school year when I stepped on a scale at the doctor’s office. I was floored. What had changed? I was dancing 12 hours a week and walking everywhere! I was eating low fat too. I had made the switch from 2% milk when I left home to skim milk. Less fat! It had to healthier, right?
I was stumped until I started thinking about the daily desserts in the cafeteria and sugary cereals I had started eating for breakfast in my dorm room to save time in the morning. Huh. Was it really all the added sugar? This was during the low-fat diet era where no one was talking as much about sugars. This was my abrupt welcome to college life/adulthood where you start to question all sorts of things.
Spencer and I were still in college when we got married. The first summer we were married, he got food poisoning. He was sick for a few days with typical symptoms, and then he didn’t get better. He was tired, weak, and threw up every day. He stayed sick for 6 months.
During that time, he saw several doctors and had several tests done. We were beginning to wonder if he would ever get better. He didn’t work, and he almost dropped out of school. It was a really scary time for us.
With everything I knew up until that point, I never once thought about trying to change his diet beyond the typical “healthy diet” I had learned about. It never once occurred to me that there were other factors like stress and sleep that were affecting him. I simply didn’t know.
I remember my mother-in-law coming over about 5 months in to his sickness. She took him to see a naturopath. I thought it was a crazy idea, but we had exhausted all of the typical medical routes with no improvement.
He came home with a bunch of homeopathics, supplements, and a crazy schedule to follow complete with detox baths. We had a glimmer of hope to go on and figured we didn’t have much to lose at this point.
Imagine my shock and utter amazement when a few short weeks later, his symptoms were completely gone and his energy had returned.
I didn’t give the protocol Spencer went through much more thought at the time, but looking back now, I can clearly see why his body latched on to the sickness in the first place and why he was able to eventually heal. It’s too much to write here, but I’ll post about it soon.
There is so much more to a whole, healthy lifestyle than simply what goes in your mouth.
You can read Part 2 here.
