My Health Journey Part 3

This post is a continuation of the first two parts of my personal health journey. It would be best to read those two before this one. But basically, after eating highly raw vegan for 6 months, I began to reintroduce meat and more grains back into my diet.

As I began to eat more "regular" foods again, I had a new standard for what I would eat. Because I tend to be a more extreme person, my health journey was anything but gradual. But then God began to speak to me about process.

I had to learn that it was okay for this to be a JOURNEY, and a process…it didn't have to be an overnight arrival.

Eventually I learned that the important thing was to just be on the journey. It wasn't about reaching an end destination, but was rather about engaging in the process, learning new things at each bend, and moving forward. Some seasons have been full of a lot of forward movement - learning and implementing all sorts of new things. Then other seasons have been more about cruising slowly or even stoping at a rest stop along the way. And I had to realize this was all okay, and was all part of the process.

For awhile my process looked like figuring out which foods to add back in to my diet and which ones I wanted to continue to avoid. I will get into the details of a lot of these things in various blog posts, but the general sense of it was that I knew I wanted to stay commited to avoiding processed foods, sugar, and refined grains. I also knew that I was committed to eating organic whenever possible, and to investing in the highest quality meats. I had a lot of questions about grains still (like if gluten was something to purposely include in our diet or not), and the jury was still very out on dairy for me.

But as I embraced making this about a lifestyle and a journey and not a fad thing, I realized I no longer had to have all the answers right away. I began to see that I could ask God to teach me and to show me along the path what foods would be best to eat and which ones to avoid. And I chilled out a little about the whole thing and knew I needed to figure out how to do this without turning it into an idol.

Garlic and Its Amazing Benefits

I want to take a short break from my story to do a post that is simple and great information. During one of our first Holistic Health with Holly gatherings, we discussed the amazing benefits of garlic and how to get it into our diets more. 

I have a particular affinity for garlic because it has been one of my most faithful remedies in natural health. When anyone in our family starts to get sick, we eat raw garlic and it almost always does the trick to keep illness at bay. I have been known to put it in my kids' oatmeal in the morning. And my 5-year-old will ask me for a tortilla with coconut oil and garlic if he is feeling sick at all. 

The amazing thing is that it truly does work! It also has some other amazing health benefits, so read on for more inspiration for getting more garlic in your diet!

Garlic: The True Miracle Drug

Garlic has been used as both food and medicine in many cultures for thousands of years, dating at least as far back as when the Giza pyramids were built.

Hippocrates, Galen, Pliny the Elder, and Dioscorides all mention the use of garlic for many conditions, including parasites, respiratory problems, poor digestion, and low energy.

Garlic cloves are used as a remedy for infections (especially chest problems), digestive disorders, and fungal infections such as thrush.[81][82] Garlic can be used as a disinfectant because of its bacteriostatic and bactericidal properties.[4]

In 1924, it was found to be an effective way to prevent scurvy, because of its high vitamin C content.[83]

Garlic is excellent for:
*Cardiovascular health

*Anti-inflammatory benefits

*Powerful anti-viral and anti-bacterial benefits

*Anti-Cancer benefits

*Antioxidants

The sulfur compounds in garlic are perhaps its most unique nutrients. There are literally dozens of well-studied sulfur molecules in garlic, and virtually all of them have been shown to function as antioxidants. In addition, many provide us with anti-inflammatory benefits. 

Additionally, garlic is an excellent source of manganese and vitamin B6. It is also a very good source of vitamin C and copper. And garlic is a good source of selenium, phosphorus, vitamin B1, and calcium.

Garlic is very important to eat every day. It will help to normalise your gut flora and stimulate the immune system. It is important to have it raw with meats or cooked as a part of the meal. Work on using a whole head of garlic every day (not just a few cloves).

My Holistic Health Journey Part 2

During my first season of beginning to learn more about changing the way I ate and fed my family, I also began to feel very confused. My desire to eat healthy had really taken off, but navigating the world of conflicting information related to this was overwhelming. I would learn about food combining, then hear about the benefits of eating vegetarian, then learn about how great the Atkins diet was, and the confusion only mounted. I watched a video on Gersen Therapy, which was so enlightening and talked a lot about people getting healed from cancer using natural means and radical diet changes.

But this season ended with me having made progress in what we ate, like not eating refined white flours and sugars anymore, eating more vegetables, and avoiding high fructose corn syrup at all costs, but that was about as far as it got.

Then about 2 or 3 years later my husband bought me a fascinating book called "Why Christians Get Sick." Knowing what I now know, I can't say I actually recommend this book unless you are over 50 and have a somewhat serious disease like cancer or an autoimmune disease like fibromyalga. But for me it was the catalyst of my health journey going to the next level. It makes a strong case for a raw, vegan diet and shares many testimonies of people getting healed of all sorts of diseases by radically changing the way they ate. I was convinced and immediately began to implement what I was learning. I began to feed my children raw vegetables like crazy, making them veggie blends for lunch that I would serve them on a corn tortilla. One night I served raw pasta (which is zucchini sliced like linguini) with a raw tomato marinara sauce. Because my taste buds had changed so drastically in the two weeks I had been eating this way, it tasted delicious to me. But the rest of the family were not fans. I stopped eating all meat, and ate highly raw vegan for 6 months. For awhile, I felt amazing. I had more energy than I ever had in my life. I started to feel better and stopped having the stomach problems I had had for so long. I was able to get only about 5 hours of sleep and feel incredibly rested. I think my body was going through a much needed cleanse and began to heal itself in that season.

But the shortcomings of this way of eating began to surface after about 4 months. The amazing energy I had began to wane and I began to feel cold a lot of the time. I had often wondered if this way of eating was truly sustainable and what was best for someone in her childbaring years that was nursing a baby. In my research I learned about warming foods, and realized because I was eating very little cooked foods, I was not getting enough heat and energy in my body, hence the feeling cold all the time. I also knew that when you do not eat meat you are missing B vitamins and some essential amino acids. I knew that the fact that my energy levels were dropping were most likely because of this, which meant I needed to start getting some meat back into my diet. I also heard about a friend of a friend who had eaten this way for years and ended up getting very off balance and sickly from not having animal products in his diet for so long.

So, I began my journey into balance. But this time with much stronger convictions about what was acceptable and not acceptable to put into my body. One of the major changes was the quality of the food we ate. After learning about the downsides of meat, I decided that if I was going to eat meat, I only wanted to eat high quality meat in the best forms, like organic grass-fed beef, organic pastured chickens, wild caught Alaskan salmon, etc. I knew it was going to be more costly, but since our meals were centered around vegetables and not meat now, it wasn't going to have to cost a ton since we didn't need lots of meat to make the meal.

This post is starting to get pretty long, so I think I will have to stop for now. And I have to say that the story is far from over. It took me a number of years to "balance" out a little more. And I am still learning all the time. But the rest of the story is still worth telling, so until next time...

My Holistic Health Journey Part 1

Many who know me would say I am one of the more extreme people they know. Not necessarily in personality but more in actions. I don't FEEL extreme, I just feel normal. But I think my normal is a bit extreme for most people!

Anyway, my extremeness (according to others) definitely plays out in the way our family lives and eats. But I have some really good reasons for this, and I will share some of those reasons as I write my personal story of my journey into health.



I grew up with healthy values when it came to eating and lifestyle. My parents did a great job of feeding us healthy food and teaching us what was healthy and what was not, to the best of their knowledge. However, I also grew up during the era of margarine being healthier than butter, low-fat being healthier than full fat, whole wheat bread being the healthy option as opposed to white bread, and the list goes on. As long as you have your veggies on your plate, it doesn't matter if they come from a can, and organic was not a word in almost anyone's vocabulary. However, despite a lack of accessibility to truly healthy food and the information we really needed to implement true healthy eating, the values were instilled and I have benefited my whole life from those values.

Fast forward a few years, and I am now a teenager often making my own decisions about what I eat. I did not have a picky palette at all, and was not very educated on food and its health value, so I ate what some now refer to as the Standard American Diet. Pretty much whatever was available was what I ate. And I also had stomach problems, but of course I didn't know enough to connect the two!

In college my stomach problems only got worse. My diet coupled with strong antibiotics after a surgery, then exacerbated by food poisoning on a Mexico mission trip, caused me to have really painful episodes of stomach cramps, bloating, and diarrhea.

But it wasn't until several years later when I had my first baby and moved into a community living house that I started to finally learn a few things about healthy eating. In our community living home I met my now good friend Camille Macres. She had grown up with a mom that was very into holistic health and healthy eating, so knew a ton about this. She was also in the middle of starting her own business as a personal chef with a bent towards healthy cooking that was also delicious. She was reading tons of books on health and different types of diets, and would teach me what she was learning. She introduced me to a diet focused on vegetables, eating things like sprouted bread, and higher quality food. We began venturing into the local food co-op and got a membership there. (I have found that simply walking around stores like these can help you learn a TON about healthy eating).

I also began to think about food in a new way. As I was feeding my baby his first foods, I began to grapple with the reality that this child who had been born with this perfect digestive system and been fed the perfect food for him (breastmilk) for the first months of his life, was going to now go from eating pureed green beans (homemade of course) to somehow eating pizza and cookies one day. I couldn't fathom the idea of putting those things into his body and wanted so badly to protect him from anything impure going into his precious unadulterated system. This idea made me really start to look at the purpose of what we eat. If I want to protect my baby so badly, why aren't I paying more attention to what I am putting in MY body? If I can so clearly see the purpose of feeding my baby was to promote health and growth, why do I not see it the same way with what I am feeding myself?

TO BE CONTINUED...

What Will It Be?

For now, Holistic Health with Holly will be gatherings of women who want to grow in healthy living. It will be times of sharing, teaching, and discussion. It will be personalized to the needs and interests of those who come, and will consist of me, well as others, sharing about the various things we have learned over the years that have made such a difference in the overall health and wellness of our lives.

Topics that I want to include are:

-clean eating (one of my top passions that I want to share A LOT about)
-organic shopping in Santa Barbara/Goleta (including farmers market tips)
-natural resources for treating illness and ailments (garlic anyone?)
-how to recognize and eliminate unnecessary chemicals in our life
-cleaning our homes naturally and organically
-organic, natural products for our skin
-a natural approach to our medicine cabinet (including essential oils)
-what are we cooking our food on and how?
-the science of our drinking water

And last but certainly not least, how do we live organically on a budget?

Why Holistic Health with Holly? - Part 2

Over the last 10 years, especially the last 5, God has blessed me a tremendous amount of information regarding natural health. So many things have come across my path that continue to add to my knowledge and understanding of healthy living.

In reality, the true basis for this began many, many years ago, when I began to learn that our "health" starts with our hearts and spirits being right with God and learning to live the abundant life He wants to give us.

Within this reality there is so much, the ability to live in peace no matter what our circumstances are... To be able to live full of joy and thanksgiving, and to be able to live free of sin and bitterness and unforgiveness.  These are the foundations from which abundant life flow from.

But there is also the physical world that we have to deal with this side of heaven, and that world consists of many many daily choices that I believe we need to make from a place of wisdom and discernment. God desires that we would steward our bodies, and has put in place a very real "moral law" in that we reap what we sow.

That being said, what we put into our bodies, on our bodies, and around our bodies really does matter. We are a temple of the Holy Spirit and are not to defile our temple.

It is in this that I have found such a passion for healthy eating and healthy living. And as I have learned a tremendous amount that has made such a huge impact on my own life and the lives of my family members, I have such a passion to help others in this same way.

Hence, the dream of Holistic Health with Holly was born. It is my desire to educate and resource people in all things health and wellness related. The mission of Holistic Health with Holly will simply be to help people grow in healthy lifestyles. It will be to share from all I have learned and help people feel equipped and resourced to live out the healthiest choices possible.

Why Holistic Health with Holly? - Part 1

When I was in high school, and at the beginning of college, I wanted to be 3 things:

1. a stay at home mom with lots of kids
2. a missionary
3. a doctor

In my heart of hearts I figured all 3 of these things wouldn't really be possible, but I still had my dreams. I even started college doing pre-med. After about a year and a half of working on fulfilling the pre-med requirements, I realized I did NOT want to be in school for another 7 years, and therefore didn't really want to be a doctor. I loved learning about the human body, loved health, and wanted to help people, but decided I needed to find another way. I started working towards going to grad school to become a nurse practitioner.

However, God had another plan. I met my future husband, got married, and a few years later had my first baby. The kids kept coming, and somewhere along the way, God solidified a call to be "missionaries" in America, in the college town of Isla Vista, where my husband and I had already spent several years ministering before we got married.

Number 1 & 2 on my list were coming true. There was just still that doctor thing...

Eventually I realized what a blessing it was that I had not gone to medical school or even nursing school, because I am not a fan of pharmaceuticals in any way, shape, or form, and that is obviously a huge part of western medicine. I also began to realize I was way more into natural medicine, and using things like food, herbs, and natural remedies to treat ailments and illness.

To be continued...