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...
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