I was often ill as a child. It's not really possible to figure out why, but I surmise it was a combination of genetics and environment. The town where we lived was on a lake, and that lake, where we swam, fished, and dug in the sand, was unspeakably polluted with industrial chemicals like PCBS, benzene, formaldehyde, and dioxin. No one understood what that meant at the time, back then in the era of Love Canal and DDT, though later in the early 70's that part of lake was closed to human activites. I barely lived through my first decade. I have asthma, allergies, and a somewhat compromised immune system. As an adult, my thyroid functions poorly, my reproductive cycles stopped at an early age after a great deal of difficulty, and I began to have significant aches and pains in my thirties.
By 40, I was always exhausted. Pale, fat, dark circles under my eyes, anxious, angry, depressed. I reached a point where it was too painful to take a walk, and three years ago, despite a pretty healthy vegetarian diet, I tested pre-diabetic. Spring last year, I got an even more frightening diagnosis and decided to get serious about getting well. I quit a job I hated and took one that pays less but pleases my soul. I drink at least 1 quart of fresh juice a day, eat plenty of fruit and soaked nuts, plus one raw meal and one cooked meal a day. I have largely eliminated grains. Since I started juicing last April, I have lost close to 40 lbs. The weight loss was rapid at first but has slowed, to a rate of a couple pounds a month. Now, clothes I folded away more than a decade ago are loose on me. Strangers remark on my skin...and at 46, I got carded on New Year's Eve.
The funny thing that happened is that in a very short time, drinking juice changed my relationship to food. All my life, I felt hungry. It wouldn't matter how much I ate--I was always hungry. In an effort to control this, I have eaten a diet most people would consider healthy (vegetarian whole foods) since I was 16, yet still constantly, daily, hourly, struggled not to overeat. Within a few days of eating raw foods and drinking fresh juice, that gnawing feeling went away.
My new daily eating pattern looks like this: morning coffee followed by a quart of juice (mixed vegetables and fruits with ginger). I might have a piece of fruit or some nuts as a snack mid morning, and a meal--likely to be eggs with greens and roasted vegetables, or a kale salad--around 1 or 2 pm. Then dinner might be a stir fry or a stew, or if I've planned well enough, a raw extravaganza like turnip rawviolis filled with walnut & portabello pate, topped with raw cashew-creamy pesto sauce. If lunch is raw, dinner is more likely to be cooked. If lunch is cooked, I try to make a salad for dinner. And if I get home too late to properly digest a meal, I'll just drink another juice. Sometimes those evening juices are the best--I spoil myself with apple, ginger and cinnamon, or blueberry fennel beet, or whip up a soup like raw curried carrot or tomato fennel.
But even now, feeling relatively healthy and vigorous, sometimes I wake up in the morning and really wonder how I will get another 40 or 50 years out of this incarnation. These aching feet, these clogged sinuses, that creaking knee, wrecked more than a decade ago, that still won't reliably bear my weight going downstairs...or more distressingly, down a mountain.
What too do? Exercise. Sleep well. Enjoy the world, the fresh air, get outside. Rid your home and personal care of chemicals. Rid your environment of toxic thoughts. Eat good clean simple food that you make yourself, and to the extent possible, grown by you, or a friend, or a neighbor. Too often people are brutal and neglectful of themselves--care for yourself as if you were your own precious child.
For this New Year, the Last Year, maybe, of the old ways, let's focus on healing. Because the beautiful truth, the sublime synergistic reality, is that what is healthiest for people is also healthiest for our sacred planet.
