Learning that Food is Medicine

Not long after I got out of the psych hospital (with a cocktail of prescribed meds, mind you) I figured out I needed to make a change to my life- or rather, lots of changes. My brain was still a complete carnival of crazy and the prescriptions I was taking didn’t help, they only muted the feelings so that I couldn’t reach them to deal with them.

You have to feel it to heal it, friends.

When you hit the point of a complete nervous breakdown, there are only two options, y’all- surface, or drown. Yes, it’s harder work to kick for the surface with lungs full of carbon dioxide. Of course it is. It’s WAY easier to just succumb to the darkness, I won’t lie to you. It comes down to what you want for yourself though. What’s your legacy? That you gave up and wasted away, like Layne Staley, or that you ditched the substances and started “lifting things instead” like Trent Reznor? The dude is nearly 60 and has arms nearly as big around as my head. He’s still making music that rocks because he cleaned up his life.

(I did mention I’m 40. The musical references should make sense given my age.)

Thanks to an extended camping trip I took with my husband a few months after the hammer episode, I forgot my psych meds at home, and I just decided not to go back on them. They weren’t doing me any favors anyway. *not medical advice. This worked for me, mostly because I hadn’t been on them that long.

Around this time my beloved husband (who I don’t give nearly enough credit to, he is my rock, my salvation, my calm in the storm, and the reason I survived) suggested I take up martial arts. He has a black belt in ITF Taekwondo and is very physically fit. Not surprisingly, my husband is also extremely mentally sound. Healthy inside, healthy outside.

I did some some research into how exercise can really help jumpstart your mental health, and that had been an area I’d been sorely lacking in. I worked desk jobs most of my life, relatable to so many people out there, I know. I also hated running. Exercise, ew, right?

Ah, this is where we learn something, young grasshopper. Exercise is about far more than making your muscles hurt. Exercise builds mental toughness as well as muscle. Can you do one more when your arms are tired? Can you run one more lap? How hard are you willing to push yourself?

Mind over matter, kids. You can choose to be sore, or you can choose to simply hurt. One of those options gives you mobility and range of motion when you’re 70. The other confines you to a chair.

I did Taekwondo for about a year. Around the same time, I started running. I went to the gym. And then, after stumbling into a Christian church locally and beginning the journey back to spiritual health (and apologizing to God for all the messes I created when I was miserable) I finally began looking at what I was eating.

Obesity in this country is at an all time high. It’s insane, and quite frankly, it’s disgusting. I could write a whole other novel on the evils of the food industry and how we’ve been pitched food “products” that don’t actually have any food in them, but this blog post will suffice for now. Let’s just put it this way- mentally healthy people don’t gorge themselves to 300+ pounds. They just don’t. Remember- the medical industry profits off of us being sick, overweight, and depressed. They can’t sell pills to happy, healthy, normal-weight people. If you weigh more than 275 lbs and you’re not a 6’8 Icelandic bodybuilder named Bjorn, you are unhealthy. Period. I don’t care what lies you want to tell yourself, they’re lies.

I began researching the best diets for mental health, and one kept popping up- the Ketogenic Diet. Reading into it, there was a study done on an elderly woman with debilitating schizophrenia, and a keto diet gave her 90% quality of life back. Stanford University did a very good study on keto diets and improving severe mental illness.

I decided that would be the direction my life took me, but failure is part of the process.

Since I’ve always enjoyed cooking, I didn’t have too much trouble with the food prep necessary for a keto diet swap, but given that I still cooked for my extremely hungry carpenter husband, it was very hard at first to stick with it before lapsing back to my old diet of heavy starches and sweets.

I finally kicked the refined carbs for good over a year ago- barring a handful of minor exceptions, which is why the cookbook I have planned for the future will be called “Mostly” keto. For me, the usage of honey, medjool dates, and dried fruit in general is kind of a gray area, and I must occasionally taste jam that I make from scratch when my husband isn’t around to taste it for me. I also enjoy the occasional brown rice and sweet potatoes as treats. If you’re getting to a place with your diet where brown rice is considered a “treat”, well done, you don’t need my advice anymore.

Whether you believe in a higher power or not is up to you, but if there are laws to nature, there has to be a lawmaker, that’s all I’m saying, and I finally hit a place where I went , “Okay, God. I don’t think I can fix me. I think only you can do it.

It is in the fixing that you realize just how real God is. I am a living testimony to it. You don’t have to believe it, but I guarantee you, if you ever get to a low enough place, and ask God you help you… God will send you what you need.

As further proof of a simply kick-ass Creator, there are so many delicious foods made by the planet. You can literally plant a seed in the right part of the world, and you’ll end up with pineapples, which is one of the most delicious things anyone can ever eat. I mean, mind blown, right? Pineapples! Oh, and let me tell you a little secret about pineapples. If you take the outside peels of pineapples and the cores you cut out and boil them in some filtered water for about 10-15 minutes and strain it into a jar for your fridge, that juice apparently has an enzyme named bromelain in it that supports joint health. Um, what? That’s not just trash? No, it’s not. Nature is so beautiful, there’s a way to use nearly everything we pitch into the garbage. It’s why I currently have like twelve baggies full of dried spaghetti squash seeds, because I eat so much of it and I can’t bear to throw the beautiful seeds away.

I will be a crazy lady in my 50’s with a spaghetti squash farm at this rate. Ask me how devastated I am that this is bound to be my fate.

Spoiler alert, absolutely tickled pink about it.

On the subject of “nature provides everything we need” why are we ruining our health ingesting engine grease (seed oils) toxic waste runoff (fluoride) addictive white poison powder (refined sugar) and why do we rub dementia under our arms every single day? (If you do nothing else, please, I implore you, buy aluminum-free deodorant if you want to be cognitively healthy past 60 and stop cooking with foil)

Realizing all of this, I took it a step further. What if I only began eating foods that exist in nature?

This was the beginning of my food journey, and I am happier, healthier, smarter, and more free than I have ever been. This is why I decided to create this blog and help others- because I know most of you have no idea where to start, and don’t have three years to read endless medical journals and balance it with what people like me know doctors lie about. For example, ever notice that doctors will tell you to eat less butter, salt and eggs before they tell you to eat less french fries?

That’s just the tip of the iceberg, people.

The average person wakes up in the morning and stumbles for their coffee pot, ingesting molds that linger on coffee and impact their kidneys. Then the average person will either eat a starchy breakfast pastry or worse, a sweetened one, or they get a McDonalds breakfast meal. The average person has just demolished any chance of gut health for the day, and as I came to find out, gut health is intricately tied to our overall health.

The average person might bring lunch from home (a bright spot of salvation in an otherwise depressing food routine) or maybe eat a salad from the cafeteria and pat themselves on the back for making a “healthy” choice. Then the average person might go home to a home cooked dinner, but might as easily swing through Burger King on the way home.

The average person doesn’t know what a probiotic is, how to count carbs or read labels, or how to recognize that trisodium phosphate (found in some children’s breakfast cereals) is an industrial cleaning agent you can buy at Home Depot. The average person has heard of adaptogen mushrooms, maybe, but looks for them in the produce section.

The average person is in deep trouble.