The idea of what it means to be healthy can be an elusive one at best. We see people who appear to be in good health, yet their lives are a mess. Or, there are those who do everything "right," show no signs of illness, but have something go wrong inside their bodies anyway. Is it physical? Is it emotional? There's lots of debate about that. And then of course, there are also the folks who abuse their bodies, at times to an inconceivable extent, and seem to be motoring along just fine. It's a mystery, for sure, one in the middle of which I recently found myself.
A little over a year ago, I got sick and was forced to redefine "healthy" after I had some issues come out of nowhere. Things got bad before they got better and then they got even worse, no thanks to the drugs and so-called treatments against which my body revolted. I could tell a long drawn-out story here about the doctor who decided to reclassify me as a "new" patient (which I wasn't) which changed the cost to see her from less than two hundred dollars to over five, the doctor who wanted to put me on medication for symptoms I did not have, and finally a third who would not tell me what was in the herbal medicine I was ingesting which he had concocted and prescribed. These were Eastern and Western practitioners alike, covering both natural and synthetic remedies. But more importantly, these are the people who represent the whole concept of health and belong to the industry that is supposed to care about just that - our health. Clearly, this was not the case.
I always thought I was "healthy," or I should say I tried, and to a certain degree I was. I ate well, or so I thought, am very active, get lots of exercise and plenty of rest. I've worked on myself personally and professionally in an earnest attempt to balance my internal and external worlds. What I have come to realize in the process is that while the notion of healthy may come easily to many people, the actual practice doesn't, and that's because being healthy is not an automatic state in which one finds oneself. It requires a lot of learning, raising consciousness and making choices all day long, everyday.
For me, this meant having to revisit my relationship with food, which it's worth noting, is a complicated one. For most of my life I didn't understand it, probably in large part due to the fact that I spent my
childhood,
adolescence and beyond training to be a dancer. (I know, that in of itself explains a lot.) Food was the enemy. I was afraid it would hurt me and take away the thing that I loved in life most. Luckily I outgrew the crazy things we did, like starve. Even so, when I became an adult and was over the psychology of needing to feel light enough to fly, I still found myself fearing food. I didn't trust it - again - and resented having to put it in my mouth. But now it was because of what the food industry does to it without what I consider, "full disclosure," and the way the FDA makes up its own definitions designed to mislead and
deceive,
again, giving food the power to hurt, not heal.
I needed help. Even though I thought I had been doing fine by avoiding all of the harmful, chemically treated, toxic, artificial foods, I wasn't. I'd tried everything and wasn't getting better. Next stop had to be a nutritionist.
The first thing on the agenda was ordering diagnostics to check everything from food allergies to vitamin and mineral levels to digestive track functioning. In the meantime, while we waited for the results, the nutritionist started me out at ground zero by putting me on an anti-inflammatory diet. This meant that pretty much everything I had been eating was now off the menu. Corn, soy, peanuts, dairy, bran, yeast, wheat, rye, oat, caffeine, anything made from flour and raw food, all had to go. It was a whole new world for me, one that was going to teach me to think about food differently. No longer could I be obsessed with all the bad things I was keeping out. This time around I had to become educated about what needed to go in, which was an entirely new way of thinking for me. Had I not felt five thousand times better within the first twenty-hours, I'm not sure I would have been able to adapt as well as I did. Telling, it was. I felt better and better and better and the "disease" that the doctors wanted to "fix" turned out not to be the problem at all. So much madness looking for answers in medicine that weren't there, while it appears as though the mystery is going to be solved with something as simple as my body not liking what I was putting into it, even though it wasn't "bad," per se.
An eye opener this was, for sure. On many levels, the whole experience really made me think. I found myself reflecting on how it felt to be bounced around from doctor to doctor and the extent to which we put our faith in people who don't necessarily have the answers, despite how strongly they believe they do. I am struck by the difficulty in finding the right balance between knowing when to look for answers from others versus when to look for answers from ourselves. Clearly, we don't know everything and need help from people who can offer it. But at the same time, no one knows what is right for an individual better than the individual him or herself, as is evidenced in the frequency with which the "experts" are oh so wrong. So I think the exercise here is not in learning how to eat according to what the health industry says is "right," but rather about learning what your body needs and responding to it with the right foods.
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