My Health Journey
You know that feeling when you wake up, jump out of bed, and just have so much energy to start the day?
I went through all of my 20’s without that.
I should have known something was missing, but you make all kinds of excuses to the way your new normal feels, until you feel something different. I was always a smart kid, valedictorian of my high school, but then something happened to my brain in college. All of a sudden, my brain wasn’t really working anymore. The best way to explain it was a dark cloud where everything was once clear. All of a sudden I couldn’t sit through my homework. I couldn’t work in groups bc I was embarrassed how slow my brain felt. I would stare at my blank paper and not know where to start. I was too embarrassed to go talk to someone about it or get help. I was ALWAYS tired. Engineering work was hard, but this was different. I couldn’t focus on anything for long. It wasn’t until a whole decade later, basically a month after my 30th birthday, that the veil was lifted.
All of these were major signs of gut imbalance, a hormonal disaster, and a liver screaming for help. But of course, no doctor could ever tell me that. At least, not the ones I would ever have talked to at the time.
I made it through engineering school, got a great job, but I still have dreams about not making it through. There are a few things that could have triggered my issues… parent’s divorce, losing of my mom at 16, a terrible post-college diet of pizza, sugar and booze, and feeling like I was pushing through someone else’s life.
It all changed when I bought myself a detox program for my 30th birthday. I had just moved to California, and within a month of clean eating, my brain came back to me. Well, the second week was kind of hell. I had the most crazy sugar cravings ever, what almost felt like a flu, had constant headaches (which are super rare for me), and just VERY little energy. Honestly, I mostly to lost some stubborn weight, not knowing my whole world would shift.
I felt silly for signing up for the program. But only as I quieted my thoughts and listened to people in tears as they talked of their symptoms, did I notice how bad my sleep was, that there may be a real (fixable) scientific reason for my acne, and that my energy levels were not normal. I realized that I should have been pooping every day of my life, and that I had no idea what “constipated” really was. To me, that word meant you had uncomfortable bowel movements. I just didn’t go more than once a week, which was more than fine with me! I had irregular periods my whole life, starting super late (which my doctors attributed to being active, running track, and just being a naturally skinny family). I had major cravings, terrible diet, and always thought you just had to work out to get rid of that sneaky weight. I always had a major sugar crash at 10am, could barely stay awake after lunch, and I was ready to pounce on any food anytime of day. But that also describes everyone I knew. I ate my cereal for breakfast immediately (if not would get a stomach ache), and snacked all day until the last moment my eyes were open. I also took birth control pills for 10 years (turns out it is was never meant to be more than 5), and drank almost every single night for more than that decade. Other than all that, I never really got sick, and I was always able to keep my weight under control. Those two signs were enough to let every doctor in my life let me go with a pat on my back.
Had I not made any changes, I was on a sure path way to fall in line with over half of Americans with some kind of chronic condition, requiring pills to manage symptoms forever. Being skinny only masked my symptoms. Fast forward to today, and my body feels stronger than ever in its 30’s. I now have several years of reading, writing, absorbing everything I can to understand how to take this beautiful, amazing life, brain and body I was given, and bring it to its optimal potential. And there is no end in sight of the things I want to learn. I don’t have to PUSH my body to stay skinny, instead I eat amazing food that fills me up, and I work out because I love it, because I love how clear it makes my brain feel, and I only work up to what feels right to me that day. I listen to my body, and I cherish what she has to say.
I realized how much is standing in our way of getting actually healthy, and how many incentives there are to do the complete opposite. I realized how simple it is to be healthy, and how many people out there know of how to do this! There are just much louder people looking for a profit to keep you exactly where you are, who want it all to sound confusing and contradictory. I woke up through my sleep walk through life. I just wish I could give my younger self a jolt of lightning, a touch of wisdom to wake up sooner. I was doing everything that was expected of me, checking off the boxes, living the American dream, but felt utterly unsatisfied and unfulfilled.
What would have gotten my attention sooner? I look back and wonder what excuses I was telling myself to not get help. A doctor or two wanted to give me anti-depressants bc they couldn’t figure out my sleep issues, but I refused. I never liked the idea of drugs (thanks mom), especially ones that would need to be taken daily, prolly forever, with all kinds of known side effects (and friends I knew growing up who committed suicide on them). I knew what depressed was (in momentary really low points in my life), but this was different. Why were all the doctors so wanting me to take drugs instead of telling me the more effective, simpler, and easier ways to adopt a healthy living so I would never get sick in the first place? That, in today’s world, is considered quackery: working on something that doesn’t exist yet, at least not in the modern world’s eyes, while so much is bubbling under the surface. Something is seriously wrong with our whole system.
So here I am, another health obsessed person who found the light. I found a way to hack my brain, and can’t help but sharing some of my favorite stories, and all the little things I’ve found along the way on my own personal journey to health.
And just a little more detail: I have been working as an engineer for the last 10 years, and most recently as Chief of Staff for a major company in San Francisco. I know how to take complex info and distill it down, mainly for my own enjoyment, but also for other busy, smart people who do not have time to read into all the details, unless they want to (or ask). I am an over-educated, suburban-raised, city-dwelling individual from a broken family. I know how to work hard, know how to push through, but have found more efficient ways to live a happy life. I’ve learned you don’t have to keep pushing to make it through. And only when you relax into yourself can you ever really reach your potential. You don’t always have to be pushing against a current, but can instead learn to ride the wave. You can live the same life, in the same places, in the same home, with the same people (if you want them to be there) and just wake up in a good mood instead of a bad one. You can expand your mind (with your upgraded brain power), make more money, but not have to surround yourself with more nice things to just distract yourself. I believe in investing in your own learning (mainly investing time, less with money), always doing something to get outside, expand your mind, and listen to others, as well as learning to share that info, if only so that you understand it better yourself. I am a major introvert who has learned to share her thoughts, leaving stories for anyone else who could find use of them.
I want to know how to optimize my own health, and would only love it more if everyone on earth could figure this out too. What would happen if we all did more than just barely get by in a continual sleepwalk through life?
I love finding modern science that backs popular beliefs of ancient civilizations: a modern explanation of what we intuitively know just feels right. This is "the simpler’s guide to life. And there is so much that our modern world is hiding us from.
My view of all this health stuff:
We live in an amazing era of information. We suffer from it. An overload of data freezes us in its wake; paralyses us into the status quo, the fundamental plan/flaw of any big data dump. But, if we are persistent enough, we can learn to take care of ourselves so we no longer have to contract out our health to someone else. We can learn to read our body’s signals, to make a few key lifestyle shifts to accommodate basic needs of all living things: how to feed our bodies at the cellular level. If we learn the needs of the most basic individual cells, their regrowth and regeneration ensures the best expression expanded outwards to every aspect of our lives. I decided to learn about the best examples of that expression: the longest lived humans, the happiest societies, the healthiest communities in history, not the fattest and sickest around us. They seemed to be more in touch with nature, and tended to eat very simply. They followed the basic laws of nature that turned out to be so brilliantly designed. So I decided to look through the lens of modern science to help internalize the brilliant web nature has already laid out for us.
I learned our “foods” were not nourishing us, it was more like they were slowly poisoning us. All of our modern health issues stemmed from blocking natural rhythms with “conveniences” and “advancements” that just continuously stressed and deprived our bodies of the few basic things it needs to survive. If we know enough to see that we created the problem, then we also have the solution right in front of us. Untangling that historical web and getting back to basics becomes the simplest solution (and there are some pretty juicy stories entangled in that web of how we got to where we are today).
We think we are in such an amazing state of health in America, which speaks to our incredible talent at mass marketing, a form of propaganda that promotes outward vanity (at a superficial level) and profit (for a few) over all else. We fail to see how many suffer from chronic issues, or even realize when we ourselves have an issue. It is not normal for 2/3 of a population to be overweight. (A major red flag: you will only find obese squirrels in Central Park eating human food). Our behaviors ensure our future is stunted in both directions of our future timelines: both when we get old, and to the genetic inheritance we pass on to the next generations. Our prescribed path is to pass away with several chronic diseases, while also perpetuating developmental problems in our babies (who are born with an inheritance of hundreds of toxins and heavy metals in their umbilical cords). We are stunting our species’ growth at both ends of our timelines. We might be living longer, but we are also spending more decades of our lives dependent on drugs that diminish our vitality.
And all this damage is not only being done to the human race. We are not an isolated system. This damage can be mirrored in the harm we do to the basic cells in our food, in our soil, in our air and water and in our earth. It is in our best interest to make sure our food is thriving when alive, growing in its most optimal environment if we want to see our most optimal selves.
A truly changed mind
There is no greater catalyst for change than a truly changed mind, and it only takes you struggling with an issue for a long time to realize our medical system gets you nowhere but frustrated. More and more people are seeing for themselves what it means to take control of their health. Our doctors and scientists are starting to see that what they are doing is not helping their patients, and especially when they become patients themselves! They become incredible catalysts for change by creating programs that allow themselves to truly heal. Our biggest opportunities for change come with consumer demand, more and more people expecting a different kind of food on their plate. But nobody can do this for you, and it can never come in a pill. The best thing we have going for us is the VIGOR that comes with those who have realized how incredible they feel after they change how they eat, and they become passionate about promoting a system that supports their new well being. Once this happens to you, you can never go back to supporting the old system you were born into.
Our modern systems are currently stuck in archaic frameworks, favoring profit over cure. This includes our medical, agricultural, scientific, and worst of all: educational systems. All of these programs rely on funding to survive, and those with the most money run the curriculums. They keep us busy enough just getting by to ever have the energy to try anything different. But, we are learning for ourselves to not need their systems. Once we get on top of the wave, we can surf smoothly. In the meantime, most of us struggle to ever get our heads out of water.
I will know we have gotten somewhere when people start to focus on prevention and optimal cellular nutrition, not just emergency care that allows people to live drawn out suffering lives, rather than living at the top of their energetic game. Our incredible hope lies in the fact that the same things that promote health also prevent and reverse the things we are most scared of:
diabetes (which makes us 10x more at risk for all the other diseases, not to mention body image issues)
cancer (read ANYTHING about how cancer works, to see that we already have the cure, which will never be a simple sexy pill)
heart disease (our #1 killer)
alzheimers (in the race to become our #1 killer)
ADHD (and all other behavioral issues)
These all have a few things in common:
These all stem fundamentally from cellular disturbance over long periods of time
These all take decades/generations to creep up on us
They are based on the environment in which we live our lives
They form in predictable patterns. They are not spontaneous or due to genetics (though we do pass down toxins and behaviors).
These are diseases of our own doing
These are all preventable and reversible
One of the most important things you can learn is that you effect the way your body physically looks and feels. Your health is under your control. Your decisions affect the expression of your physical and emotional body. You are malleable. You are a work of art, uniquely created under precise conditions in a world of competition for survival. We are also creatures of habit, and the beauty of patterns is that they become predictable. More on that below.
My story
I always thought of myself as healthy. I didn’t realize how much my body was suffering until I made some changes that completely changed my energy levels, and made it feel like my brain was all of a sudden working again. It was like sitting in a dull room and someone finally turning the lights on. It felt like my body was a machine that was finally given the right kind of fuel for the first time in over a decade. After a few years of eating clean, a doctor found some abnormal cells, precursors to Cancer, in my cervix. I also showed signs of liver distress, of more work I would have to do to make up for decades of pressure I had been putting on it without break. But through more attention to diet and lifestyle, even those abnormalities disappeared. I learned that you can make some changes to get immediate relief, but others take longer to work through. But most importantly: it is all within your control.
It all started when I tried something random… for my 30th birthday I bought myself a cleanse program. I felt it was a bit woo-woo (and a bit expensive), but maybe it could help me lose a few stubborn pounds. Maybe it was worth looking into something those “organic” foodie people seemed to be so passionate about.
Before this experience, I ate whatever I wanted, and knew how to change my workouts if I wanted to get in better shape. I hardly ever got sick. I didn’t believe there was a link between food and any physical effect on my body. I assumed so many things about my life were just they way it was, having no clue that I could change little things to supercharge my health. I was one of those people with no specific written condition, no signs of obesity or diabetes or anything really considered unhealthy in mainstream education. But I did have nagging issues that I recognized instantly when someone started reading out the symptoms that were all controllable. I had never lumped any of these symptoms in the category of fixable. I had all kinds of excuses for my little sufferings.
I used to think my mood swings were normal, just part of normal emotions. I CRAVED sweets and made excuses for my indulgences. I drank alcohol nightly, and slept terribly. I took pleasure in spending all day baking decorated cookies and cakes, and frying up foods for my friends. The only veggies I ate were canned tomatoes found in burger (when i didn’t remove them) or sold as a sauced up side. I remember thinking I ate a banana, so I hit my need of health foods for the week (for my total of fruits AND veggies). I would debate with myself about what made pizza so bad if it hit everything recommended in the food pyramid: bread, tomatoes and dairy. After the cleanse, I felt like a curtain lifted. I learned so much about my body, as well as the state of food in this country and around the world. I started to feel my energy change, my tiny muffin top went away (without exercising), I slept better, my skin and nails looked better. I didn’t have the 10am or 2pm crash anymore that I just thought was part of life. I mean, it happened to everyone else around me, so why would I not assume it was just normal? I started to list out the symptoms that were now gone, that I had chalked off as a me-problem:
Didn’t realize I was constipated (i didn’t see an issue with only going to bathroom once a week or so)
Brittle nails
Poor energy/motivation/sleep
I was wearing down my body with stress, always pushing myself and living a life that didn’t feel like my own. Always trying to please others. Trying to be perfect, but always feeling like I was trying to swim upstream. I could not focus on anything for long periods of time. (also some major personal stressors in here with family and relationships)
I was on birth control at that point for 10 years, without knowing about the negative side effects building up (or the warning that you shouldn’t be on it more than 5 years bc of the complications from hormone depletion, vitamin blockages, fertility issues, bone loss, immunity suppression, etc). Eventually, I finally decided to come off of this, with the encouragement of my partner. I had to make new slight adjustments, paying attention to my cycle with basal body thermometer, until I fully got the hang of it. I actually understood how the female, and male bodies worked! And learned we are not at risk of getting pregnant at any moment, and how important hormones are aside from making babies. Who knew?! (more on this in a separate article)
Completely abnormal period cycle, even while on birth control, many months skipped completely. One doctor even said I must be one of the lucky ones for not getting one! They checked me for cysts and found nothing, and gave me a warning to talk to a doctor when I want to get pregnant, but for now, I was fine. This was a red flag, and a bit scary, but the professionals were saying I was fine in the meantime. I was told there was NOTHING I could do to be in better health. (this kind of breaks my heart that other women are being told the same things everyday)
I had constant UTI’s (of which the doctor said it was just bc of drying up with age, at 29). These completely disappeared immediately after my month long gut cleanse and better diet.
Libido: NEVER wanting to have sex (in my 20’s!, when i had the courage to bring it up, doctors again said it was probably bc of age). FYI, another falsity. In my 30’s, this is stronger than ever!
Adult acne (this cleared up a bit, but I still had more work to do for the next few years… more on that in a separate post)
For two years after that, I felt better than ever. I successfully cut out almost all refined sugar (and minimal natural sugars, which I now brought back), and I even gave up my beloved cereal. I focused on organic meat and veggies, and was loving it. But some leftover symptoms still persisted. I realized that even though I did so much good for my body, there was still more I would have to do. I’ve heard it can take a month of healthful eating for every year of poor diet (and that is IF you know what foods/stressors are triggering you. This is the part of the journey that takes the longest). My body was so happy with me for the changes I made, and just asking for more of whatever I was doing. I made so many personal changes as well. A big move, a big job change, a big life change. I became very particular about who I spent my time with, not willing to sacrifice my still healing body by pouring energy into people that just depleted me.
Even with the changes, I continued to struggle with acne. I started to think maybe there was something else I was missing, something was still not fully in balance. But I was not really sure what to do about it. Everything the dermatologists and facialists wanted to give me only degraded skin health (giving pre-mature wrinkles) or messed with the microbiome, which I had just learned so much about for being so important and so delicate. I felt like my diet was impeccable. (Spending a fortune on the simplest foods, the ones with no chemicals. Everything was organic produce and pasture raised meats, plus lots and lots of supplements). What was I missing?
Then I got a message from the doctor that I had abnormal cells growing in my cervix, millimeters away from reaching the blood layer that would officially allow them to use the label cancer.
First of all, I was shocked to find out that cancer was just a term to be used once these cells reached some specific point, in this case, the blood layer. That we could watch it progress, and one day say, ok, now it is cancer because made it to the blood. What about all the information we know on how to reverse these cells in their place? I know it because I found it in my research, later. I still had a month or two of shock, of deep grief, of being incredibly scared. Was my life about to change completely? In a way, it kind of had. Why are we not telling people that there is so much we can do, even if the only reason it works is the placebo effect? Why let anyone sit for ONE day without the knowledge that this scared feeling is one of the exact things that feeds the cellular disturbance that cancer thrives on? Talk about placebo, telling someone there is nothing they can do, that they are helpless, is a death sentence. We manifest what we believe in. Not to mention, we have way better evidence that certain foods (along with positive thinking) are way more statistically significant than chance or placebo alone. We can make the cancerous cells proliferate, or diminish, based on the food we choose to eat and the way we live our life. MIND. BLOWN.
I thought the big scary disease of our society moved in with no rhyme or reason, and this seemed to suggest there was this predictable nature of it. Certain things feed it, and others starve it. There are much better things we can do for our bodies than the medical communities allow us to know. I learned that sugar feeds cancer (check out how a PET scan works. doctors inject a sugary liquid and wait to see what parts of your body gobble it up the fastest, and that is how they pinpoint the abnormally hungry cells). Our western way of eating basically is the perfect diet to GET cancer. The cheap cooking oils (like canola) block mineral absorption, create free radicals and oxidation (making you age faster), and we stuff ourselves full of chemicals and flavorings, further starving ourselves of nutrients. It is not a gene thing, populations migrating to the US get cancer at the same rates as us within a couple years of living here, eating our food. We all have the same amount of “cancer cells”, but some things we do activate them, and others fight them. AND, we know the only way cancer goes away is when our immune system kicks in to fight it down. Any of our advances towards a cure attempt at kicking that innate system into gear. That is aside from chemo, of course, which only breaks down your immune system. Sure, chemo can kill cancer cells, but it also breaks down your immune cells, which are your best chance at really fighting it.
After doing tons of my own research, and 6 months seeing a naturopathic doctor, the abnormal cells diminished, simply went away to the shock of the mainstream doctors, who had wanted to cut it out (and leave me at risk of being unable to have babies in the future). They said my changes were due to spontaneous remission, dismissing any of my efforts, saying there was nothing I could have done, and it would have just gone away on its own (or of course, not). Either way, to them, I was a helpless bystander. But our science shows otherwise. We do in fact know how to manipulate those cells, but nobody can profit off of blueberries or fresh vegetables as a cure. There is no money to be made in food and positive thinking as a solution. All those billions, trillions of dollars in research lost out to plants and meditation.
The naturopath basically was able to affirm that all the symptoms I had been experiencing in the previous decade were all leading up to this, and a knowing ANYBODY could have prevented this, and a whole lot of other little energetic sufferings in the meantime. These were all symptoms doctors would be able to advise if they were told to pay attention, or if they ever thought to follow up with patients to see what or if, they every felt better. It felt negligent of doctors for not being able to see the patterns, passing them off as irrelevant, listening to their paychecks rather than doing any kind of investigative work outside of their prescribed curriculum script written twenty+ years ago.
I felt empowered, I felt angry, I felt insignificant to the medical community. I felt for all the women who I read about who felt cast aside for every woman’s issue cast off into the “gyno ghetto”. But it wasn’t just the women. I realized our medical system just doesn’t really acknowledge health at all, only the ability to just get by.
These misses were shoddy at best, negligent and manipulative at worse. I was upset at the doctors, one after another who consistently patting me on the back for years for basically keeping my weight under control not giving me any incentive to try any harder. I was upset for giving them so much control, putting so much power in their hands to expect them tell me when I was off track. I was confused at why i ever expected doctors to know about food, and that they should! I had real symptoms that are actually very common and had legitimate solutions. It felt as if by ignoring those facts, our system is hoping we end up diseased so we need to be taken care of. The mainstream physicians were not my answer to health anymore. They had no training in nutrition or HEALTH to begin with, instead being taught only to identify and label symptoms, and to get a paycheck for prescribing a literal bandaid, pills that cover issues but fix nothing. Our system incentivizes people to keep people coming back with the same condition for life. Modern doctor’s jobs had just become to numb something, bypass it, or cut it out. There was no such thing as “cure”. They were too busy keeping up with the needs of insurance companies to rotate customers in and out to be able to look at someone more than 15 minutes. Our microbiomes are just now coming into the picture, about the same time that you started hearing the word “probiotic” thrown around. And it’s amazing to see how much we still don’t know, are still learning, and that we get the front seat to watch. Bring out a bag of popcorn to watch the drama unfold as society pushes back on anything that shines light on potential issues with the current state of affairs.
And, as a side nugget, women are not just little men with lady’s issues, and should not be treated as such by the medical community. Even in all the studies we have on every drug or program, women had been left out until the 1990’s. Maybe it was because the whole pregnancy thing is just so complicated, but in the interest of science, have we really left out HALF of our population this long?
From there, I became interested in doing my own research about my health. I wanted to learn how to clean up my skin, which was still an issue. I found more online detox programs, ways to clean my own liver “gently”. I learned the liver has SO many functions, and shares and competes for the same nutrients as the skin, so the skin basically always loses out if the liver is in trouble. I learned how to treat my gut as a dynamic garden. I was interested in anything that was NOT western medicine, because I felt like they had not only failed me, to warn me or help me, to acknowledge my efforts to bring myself optimum health, but it was honestly just daft, archaic. If I did ever have questions for a doctor, they would show me the list of pills they could offer me, which never seemed like the right answer. Plus I had all this energy to put into reading and writing in my own spare time, that I never had when I had a ton of gut issues!
After a few parties of bringing cauliflower pizzas that were major hits, I earned a new nickname, and the CauliQueen had taken her throne.
But I also discovered a whole new world of people that were looking into this stuff. As a species, we had answers, and we have had them for a long time. We understood the importance of soil health, of ways to grow food over generations. It started to make sense as to why our bodies were so out of balance. I learned about the connection we have with our food, which was never meant to be scarfed down and wasted. I learned there are patterns that allow us to live a long healthy life without the burden of chronic issues. I discovered how much was covered up by lobbyists and big companies who were intentionally trying to confuse the average person, to muddle the science, manipulating the data to confirm a hypothesis that suited their needs, rather than every trying to let a real cure become known. All of this info is available to us at our fingertips, we just have to know to look.
Teaching myself how the body really works
I love to learn how we got to where we are, and how it all works. I started to research:
How the human body is supposed to run
What inputs allow our body run at its best
What programs were running inside my head, entrained intentionally or unintentionally. what programs are suggested by society? which do i think are crap, which are helpful?
What incentives exist in our society to lead us down certain paths? What are the easiest traps to fall into? If we had no conscious thought or resources to make changes, where do we end up health-wise?
What were the comforts of our society leading us towards?
What does it mean to feel out of alignment? This is something hit hard for me, but couldn’t put my finger on what it meant. It was as if I was out of my skin, living a life that wasn’t meant for me.
This became a more spiritual search, diving into what I think drives us. (short answer… I believe in Mother Nature over all else). I believe in an innate instinct in every single cell of every living things to survive. I think we have a certain set of things engrained in us, a set of incentives and red flags that allow us to adapt and grow in a world of competition. As complex as we get, we all follow the same set of rules, from an earth worm down to an amoeba, or a blade of grass. Slow down time a little bit, and see how nature reacts and moves according to the things around it. Tell me there is not an intelligence there. Watch a puppy play and tell me you do not wish for the same simple things in life: to be loved, to be pet, to be taken for walks. I crave the simplicity that babies expect. We are all similar. We all deep down crave the same things. Some just give more of a certain kind of thought to things (which i can say about a lot of people i know).
This is where I love learning about religion, all kinds of religions, in search of what they believe drives us. What was the initial spark that wrote our genetic code? Why does it work so perfectly? How did it all learn to be so complex and fit so perfectly together? I am fascinated by the different explanations, all beautiful and complex. I listen to the stories, and compare them to the ones I grew up with, loving the new stories infinitely more. For one, they didn’t treat women as hateful creatures that lost paradise for all of men. Instead, I found loving stories, ones of connection and loss and strength, of POWERFUL women, women who were adored for their life giving abilities. I read about the ancient wisdom in nature, plus lots of fanciful stuff that was quite creative. All of it beautiful and different and thought provoking, written with some intent in mind for their people in their moment in time. But most of all, I love the ones that give SELF a sense of power, not trying to steal it away for subservience.
In our modern world, it is as if we have stepped backwards in the fight for evolutionary advancement, giving ourselves every obstacle to achieve real health. To feel great, we have to fight the urges in our society constantly, always being convinced it is normal to be riddled with all kinds of dis-ease and stressors we don’t yet have a name for. All these issues were ones that we unknowingly (and sometimes knowingly for profit) caused, and perpetuated with our own popular systems (agriculture, food, marketing, law making, education, medicine). This is why there is such a feeling of general unsettling. How could we have so much and be so unhappy, so chronically unhealthy? Why do we spend the most on “healthcare” and get the worst outcomes? Because we as a country make a ton of money managing the symptoms, and never look to treating the cause. Because we don’t have a guiding light, a united conscience. We are all riddled with our individual chaoses, looking for a way out of the pain in all the wrong places.
Our food
Once I saw my own changes in health, I finally opened my eyes to the fact that mainstream science and medicine were not going to help me reach my optimal health. If anything, all the popular stuff around me was aiming to do the opposite.
I started to ask myself some fundamental questions around food:
What does health mean? ( a healthy person is… void of dis-ease? content? glowing? just living, regardless of experience?)
How do I optimize my experience? If I have access to everything, what do I pick?
What aspects of our ourselves are we in control of?
What would need to change to become a country that incentivizes health?
What is food, and how does it affect us? (a plant? an animal? a weed? a root/branch/leaf? a drug? something that sustains you? anything you put in your mouth?)
Where can I find unbiased information? (so much medical science has been funded by either big pharma or food lobbyists protecting mega food processing companies)
How can I become educated about real nutritionally packed food, as opposed to flavorings for confused calorie zombies?
I saw two issues, one, that our society was messed up. And two, I had a lot to learn about my body, and how to support it. I also learned that food is just the start. True health also comes down to following your body’s signals, reducing stress, doing things you love, and surrounding yourself by a community of people (who you feel genuinely like you, and that you like back). It was all about calming this inner being inside, that I had neglected for a very long time, because I didn’t really realize she existed. It came down to convincing this inner being that the greater outside environment that she cannot see is safe, non toxic, loving, and supportive. Your cells basically have two modes: and if you are constantly in defense mode, you can never fully growth/regeneration (and all of your cells are constantly turning over). Your cells, as incredible as they are, needed to either be on defense or offense, and I needed to let them chill for a bit.
Only then would I be able to live my life worry-free, no longer feeling like I had just enough energy to get through the day.
You start to see that your body as kind of separate from you. It is like a partner in this life that you are attached to, (some explain it is the elephant you are riding), that you can influence, but not completely control. Understanding what your body thrives on is a game changer.
Your physical, energetic, and genetic expressions are all dictated by what you focus your energy on. Once you see how much control you have over the way you feel, your daily decisions may start to change. Over time, you start to see the programs you have been subscribed to, and allow yourself to think critically if they are ones you want to keep.
If we will inevitably be living most of our lives on repeat, let it be a replay of the things we want to be doing/eating/thinking/feeling that serve us in the long term.
Everything about your life is basically living out prescribed programs, many of which you have the incredible ability to rewrite. Most of your life is on repeat, with only maybe 10% of it making new, conscious decisions. Any of our functions, from breathing, to minute aspects of your daily routine, have been set up for some reason, some set with more intentionally than others. The goal is to remain conscious so we avoid fully sleepwalking through a life we don’t want.
You can dive into understanding how those systems work, start pulling out the information most relevant to you to help you on your own unique path. We live in an incredible time of information sharing that allows us to learn about whatever we like, to take what is relevant to you so you can live out your best expression of this life. You get to take that info and decide what your rewrite looks like, armed with new mental models of how to play out your daily structure.
The first visible change that noticed of food effecting my body was how strong my nails became within days of taking a collagen supplement. Somehow a lightbulb went off. All those lessons of “my body is a temple” started to make sense. Then I saw how other choices changed my energy levels and the quality of my brain function, giving me clarity I hadn’t felt in a decade. When your body is getting what it needs, you feel good.
The easiest things for us to visualize is that working out changes the physical appearance of your body. Our collective society believes this, making it easier for us to see that movement matters. What other inputs make a difference? We know that drinking coffee makes us feel a certain way, and getting a certain amount of sleep can affect our mood. Maybe we have even noticed a kind of food, even a supplement (just a distilled version of food), has some predictable effect on us. For some reason, it took me a long time to understand that the kind food I eat has a physical effect on my body (aside from weight gain/loss), and even stranger, certain foods affected how I felt throughout the day. This is contrary to the way our society treats food… explaining it as simply a need for a certain number of calories in and out, not kind of food you eat, and especially disregarding quality of it. If all food decisions were based solely on getting blanket calories, it wouldn’t matter what we ate, whether fat, protein, meat or veggie or cookie. We know eating a diet of only cookies would not be a good thing. At least we can agree that proteins and fats and carbs play some role, although this is far from the whole picture. We are in fact complicated species that can survive in the wild on all SORTS of foods, but are there certain foods that make us feel our best? Here we get food wars. We debate all day about number of protein, fat, calories, carbs, while missing the important relevance of food quality, the fact that food provides energy, a sort of information to your cells about the outside environment that it cannot see. Food can give (or deprive) you of basic building blocks the little cells inside you need to continue to regenerate and grow, giving you the best skin, muscle, organ function, and brain development.
How did people (or animals) ever feed themselves before knowing this breakdown of scientific components? They relied on their body’s signals to tell them what to eat. Animals still do it, and it turns out to be an incredibly sophisticated system of instincts and cravings. If our body doesn’t like a food, it sends signals, sometimes immediately, sometimes delayed. Our problem is we have manipulated our food to give us the essence of a thing, while giving our body something completely different. We trick our senses. We flavor our foods with chemicals, strip it of any real nutritional value, and become addicted to the flavorings. We make a ton of money by doing this. We stuff ourselves with empty calories, but we do not really feed ourselves anymore.
In reality, changing input A affects output B (and C and D...). This applies to everything aside from food, including the quality of water we drink, the quality of the air around us, and the type of thoughts that flow through our mind. Inputs we allow into our body today impact the way our individual cells are able to function tomorrow.
In today’s world, an apple is not an apple. An organic apple is what we used to know as an apple. An apple today is a sterilized pesticide covered mutant robbed of its nutrients.
An “organic” apple is almost entirely different creature than a standard genetically modified apple, modified to favor shelf life over flavor (which in turn also means nutrition), to select for color and size, to be able to withstand layers of pesticides, sitting on a store shelf for 9 months (on AVERAGE) without rotting. It also has a completely different nutrient content. Our meat is not simply meat anymore (ill spare you the details here). We completely disregard quality of anything, assuming an apple is an apple, a carb is a carb, and a protein is a protein, distracted by the offerings on labels that avoid what is really in the product. Dont pay attention to the fact that all of our mainstream, easily available food may not even really be considered food anymore. Sprinkle on some of this chemcial, mix it with a little of this. Take out the nutrients to make it look puffier and brighter. Sacrifice nutrition for vanity. We forget about nutrients, about phytochemical diversity.
And forget all our nutritional studies of the last 50 years… anything from before the last decade doesn’t take into account the microorganisms that we were not yet aware of: our depleted gut microbiomes that make us more closely related to sick animals in the zoo rather than wild animals in vibrant health.
Our cells
My latest research dives into understanding where we came from, both ancestrally and in a more modern historical context, to learn about the greatest examples of vitality.
My favorite stories tend to lean towards understanding how we are connected to everything else. We feel our best when we are in balance, when we get the needed sustenance, including breaks, at regular intervals. Everything works in a cycle, and our energy follows a pattern that we want to support in order to be expressed optimally.
I tend to be interested in seeing our similarities to other organisms, finding examples that we can learn from to understand ourselves better. I like learning what makes each individual CELL flourish, since the rest of us is simply an expansion of that simple organism. It all becomes increasing simple when you see everything as a simple repeating pattern with basic fundamental properties and needs. I like looking into the natural cycles and seeing how we can help support their unimpeded flow.
Expanding this thought, we make up a single component of a larger organism (ecosystem) on this planet. Our planet is only one of many in a larger solar system, in the larger universes. None of it could not exist on its own in isolation. As complex as it is, as WE are, (and as each cell is), we are a complex set of a bunch of other little things following the beat of their own drums. The human species is just one component of life of this planet. We need food, air, water to survive. We are constantly interacting with the environment. And there are endless examples of cycles on this planet to look at. The plants take in our carbon dioxide, the mushrooms take in our decay, and we take in their food and byproducts just as they take ours (whether that waste is natural, or beneficial, or not). We all rely on each other doing our own jobs, even if we don’t know of them, or their functions.
Any single cell inside us is only part of the greater whole that makes up our bodies. My heart is my own, but i don’t tell it to keep pumping. It has its own drumbeat, each of its own cells having their own drum beat, infinitely smaller, but the same), all functioning very aside from me telling it to do anything. This is similar to me creating a life inside my body, an offspring that will one day grow from me, that has a mind of its own, one that i cannot control, only influence). I can command my hand to move, but not to GROW. It somehow knows to do that, all I do is provide the energy, the right environment for it to do its thing. And some things that i do are better for it than others.
The most significant image is seeing that we are all based on the same basic structure that keeps replicating itself, replaying its same set of instructions (every cell replicates in tune to the Fibonacci sequence). All of life acts out (branches out) in the same ways, only differing based on the competition for resources around it. After a long time, life becomes increasingly complex, but continue to follow the same basic patterns.
Once you see everything runs on a basic pattern, the solution to figuring out how to optimize your growth becomes increasingly simple.
This is were we see this pattern play out in life and death, where energy is neither created nor destroyed. If we only look at humans, the energy seems to just disappear. But we know energy is never created or destroyed, only transferred. We have to look to our greater environment to see that one being’s waste as another’s fuel. Our physical bodies decay, but we may never know how the energy of our “spirit” gets transferred. At least at the physical level, humans cannot not exist without plants (at the very least, plants feed other animals), and plants cycle back into life with the help of mushrooms, who start the decay process which brings nutrients back to life in another form. When in balance, there is no waste, just a constant wave in and out, each life just energy passing through in different forms. One life effects all others, but in the same respect, is as insignificant as the next, and will decay like all others. To understand optimum growth is to understand what it means to be in homeostasis, in perfect balance with the greater environment.
Our history
We were born into a specific time and place, as if dropped into a movie already playing midstream. We know what to do by following the existing culture around us, at least initially. We are amazingly complex creatures who continue to follow patterns in our daily lives, just as each cell in us has their daily routine. Yes, we can change, but it usaully takes some kind of push to do so. We crave routine, but we also have to continually evolve/adapt to survive (and our individual cells follow this same behavior). We do it by slightly changing some engrained habit, by following a process, which in itself is a pattern. We wake up, eat, expel waste, attempt to survive and procreate, and sleep. Then do it all over again, and “live” in the in-between moments. What are our cells doing when their jobs are done?
I love to dive into different schools of thought, of stories of the past, ancient traditions from all over the world, especially those that have been almost forgotten. Countless societies, unwritten languages and libraries gone, so many ignored or disgraced for being different. I want to hear the stories of the longest lived civilizations, what they taught their children, their favorite foods and remedies, not a list of dates and names and vitamin percentages and caloric breakdowns that encompass our education. I want to know the stories of how to heal yourself with real food, with plants, with stories of excellence and the power of belief. I want to learn how natural systems support one another, to learn the evolutionary benefit of why certain things feel right and wrong to us, why certain colors look so beautiful together, why certain things tend to grow so perfectly in nature. To understand the innate wisdom embedded inside of us. To understand our basic incentives and repulsions. To learn some detail of how and why animals and plants communicate. To learn why we connect with some people and hate being around others (is it energy, pheromones? a bodily sense that our genes are not compatible?). To learn that humans can actually be good for plants and this planet if we learn to be patient enough to listen and learn. To seek out or create a local garden or forest we can easily play with, or someone/something to learn from. To learn what and why certain things are so soothing to us.
I love to learn about our greater food history, religions and stories of our we evolved and how our civilizations formed, and because it all says a lot about how we got to where we are today. We were dropped into a certain period of time, prepped with current popular ideas of how the loudest people of the time think the universe works. This is not to say i agree with any of it, or like where it’s gotten us, but I love to learn about it so I can form my own opinion of how it all works.
Acupuncture, eating greens, why broccoli is beneficial to you... now we have real reasons to explain why they caused such a stir! And if you can think about how something is benefitting you while you engage with it makes it all the more powerful. If we know placebo is in fact real, let’s use it to our advantage. If understanding the why behind something makes us more willing to do it, then let’s dive in, and allow it to be part of the mainstream understanding. Folk remedies used to work, and they didn’t have to make anyone feel dumb to make it work. In fact, they did the opposite by empowering the individual to learn about themselves and use the materials available to the human race (which is indeed vast! much of which we can grow or find for ourselves if we were so inclined).
How much wisdom and progress have we lost in the egotistical squabbles of scientists, of politics and government and religious authorities? Each generation, a new set of laws were created for control, not to enhance its people, but instead to keep them in line. I continue to find more examples of generations of societies perpetuating profit and power over wisdom, punishing people for becoming wise, or for using plants on people (cough, witch hunt) for finding the only cures that ever really had an effect on our underlying problems.
My continuing education
I’m on a mission to create my own educational program. I want to give myself easy steps to follow, and if anyone wants it, I’d love to leave it available to others.
Aside from just being interested, I love the science, and I love the innate wisdom that has made it through generations. There is always an intelligence to the mass knowledge. I love looking the process flow of complex items and breaking them down into digestible pieces. I like to see the data, the raw information, as well as the interpretation given by the scientists before potentially faulty or biased conclusions were published (there is often a sense that the scientists are unbiased, just interested in the objective information most of the time, but someone has there hand in the edited form of the published output). I like to hear from breaking scientific studies, before politics gets involved, too afraid to share bc of potential repercussions. I love that we can hear from the smartest around the world before the two years of review of biased societies to decide if the conclusions are relevant to their personal interests and deep pockets, or the 15 years it takes to make itself into any textbooks or curriculum. If you can understand your body for yourself, you don’t have to rely on someone’s soloed interpretation. You can seek the information you’re looking for with confidence, especially knowing that someone in history has probably at this point documented some real relief, and not looking to profit off of keeping you sick. In fact, most people who have gotten woke are so passionate to share their stories, just because it feels wrong not to. Too many professionals and patients alike are seeing the major flaws around us and know we can do better. It seems impossible to directly fight this now invisible mega bully. But we can learn about all the different aspects of it. We each have different value to share, a new perspective we can infiltrate, and every new changed mind is another member of our new grassroots team to fight popular opinion from the ground up. We can just strip this invisible monster of our support by seeking information elsewhere, by doing anything but using their product or system.
I look at anything published in the last fifty years with a critical eye, at risk of manipulation for financial gain. I pay close attention to those sources that acknowledge the microbiome exists, because I know it is recent enough to be relevant. It seems we crossed some invisible line of morality around the chemical era of the 1950’s, which included major changes our food system, allowing more chemicals into our products, and even major food company decisions to give into the cheaper chemicals as a way to stay competitive. It was a slow, insidious process that we now have to find our way out of.
Mainly I’m doing this for my own study, but it can be fun to try and relay that message to anyone that’s interested in hearing it. The funny thing about trying to help people is that you have to let them come to you. Nobody has ever convinced anyone of anything by preaching at them that what they are doing is wrong. Nobody wants to hear what they are doing is not doing them any service. It’s incredibly difficult, but everyone thinks they are healthy until they realize they are not. We all have enough to worry about than to think about this earthy hippy stuff about being similar to plants and animals, until we realize it’s completely the vital to our vitality. Our goal should be to leave the world in a better place than where we started, not worse, and that can be for completely selfish reasons for all I care. Anyone can see that our current model is the least beneficial for ourselves, for our cells.
My medium has been using podcasts, summits, books, herbal studies and weekend and weeknight classes to learn about from local self-proclaimed witches, healers, herbalists, botanists, gardeners, plant/animal/cell /soil/neuro biologists, other life long learners and teachers. I listen to doctors and neuroscientists who found issues with their own education, usually through their failings of being able to solve their own or their patients ailments with the tools they were trained with. There is something missing in our modern understanding of health and vitality, and food is just one aspect of that. I love hearing from people who studied the old traditions and texts and humans who respected all of life, not just humans (especially men) from the neck up. As a society we focus on vanity at such a superficial level, but if we nourish ourselves, we wont need cover ups. You’ll never get to your optimal state by ignoring what your body needs. I am giving myself an education money can’t buy. Most of our educational systems around health and nutrition are painstakingly irrelevant, or outright negligent in the view of the new understanding of the microbiome.
I started out with just wanting to know how to eat. But now I am deep in it. I set up a curriculum for myself, including only the homework and book reports that I love and want to know more about. I want to learn where my own genetics come from, to find out what foods my genes may have thrived on for thousands of years, to understand the struggles that may have inevitably been passed down to me in more subtle ways I could have ever imagined.
My only worry is that there’s much more to read than I can ever imagine. I am thankful for so much to sift through, and for the the modern anxiety of freedom and choice.
If I could make one change, it would be to give my jolt of lightning to everyone else, so that people in the world would not be pointlessly suffering in their daily lives.
