My Story
My kids tell me I am the healthiest person they know. None of their friends’ houses are stocked with seaweed, quinoa, collard greens and gogi berries. They find it hard to fathom that I spent the first 34 years of my life as a junk food junkie bingeing on sugar and processed foods. I wasn’t picky…ice cream, candy, soda, cookies, donuts, ring dings, devil dogs, you name it, I would eat it. When I wasn’t eating refined sugary junk food, I was eating processed white flour in other variations such as crackers, bread and pasta.
Green vegetables? Not a chance! My mother tried everything to get me to eat them to no avail. She would have me remain seated at the dining room table until 9 o’clock at night, a plate of cold canned peas in front of me, untouched. (I mean, what did she expect….canned peas? Did she really think I believed her when she said they came from our garden?) I did eat meat. Roast beef was a weekly ritual as was roast chicken and potatoes, but the mainstay of my diet was junkie carbs, refined sugar in all forms, and some fruit. My favorite breakfast was toast smothered in Cheese-Wiz (do they still even make that stuff?) and a cup of Nestle hot chocolate. Can you imagine?
By now you must be thinking that I was this morbidly obese child and I miraculously shed hundreds of pounds by changing my diet. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. I was rail thin throughout my entire childhood and adolescence. I finally “filled out” sufficiently to a size 6 in college to which I have remained to this day at age 40. Before you say “lucky bitch” or “I hate her”, hear me out. Since gaining weight was never an issue for me and I could eat a pint of Ben and Jerry’s chocolate chip ice cream without gaining an ounce, I never gave a second thought to the nutritional content of the food I was eating. Nobody ever advised me to make healthier choices because they were of the opinion that I could use a little fattening up. The connection between food and long term health was just not present in the mindset of my parents, my doctors, or my peers.
I blissfully continued to eat crap throughout my teens and easily transitioned from a sugar addicted youth to an alcohol addicted young adult. Binge drinking with my friends was my primary means of socialization all throughout college and my twenties. I stopped exercising after high school; I was thin so why bother. Everything in our beauty obsessed culture suggested to me that there was no reason to improve my diet or lifestyle because I already looked the part. 5’10”, 125 pounds, attractive…what needed to be changed?
Obviously, this lack of self-care eventually caught up with me. Looking back, it was a slow, gradual descent. Annoying symptoms kept popping up here and there, but nothing alarming enough to make me stop and take notice. Not until, at age 34, once I had amassed a page long list of what I thought were all unrelated health problems did I think that something might truly be wrong with me. I basically felt terrible. Debilitating headaches, overwhelming fatigue during the middle of the day (to the point where I thought I would get into a car accident driving my kids home from pre-school), dizzy spells, nausea, night sweats, brain fog, hair loss, inability to concentrate, constipation, indigestion, general lack of energy and ambition, and feelings of depression and anxiety plagued me on a daily basis. I would have to lie down and take a nap in the middle of the afternoon every day just to get through the day. Now this is not normal behavior for a seemingly healthy 34 year old woman, nor is it safe for the three young children I was caring for! I kept telling my husband I thought something might seriously be wrong with me, but he either didn’t take me seriously or didn’t know what to do to help. I put off going to see a doctor because I was afraid of what they might tell me.
Eventually, I passed out cold on the tennis court and finally decided I couldn’t put it off any longer. It was time to seek help. This started a round of doctor visits and a battery of tests that left me completely drained and lacking all faith in our medical community. I was shuffled around from doctor to doctor without anybody bothering to take full responsibility for my health. They each wanted to talk about their specialty and the symptoms that pertained to their area of expertise only. Not one doctor looked at my entire health history to see what might be the underlying cause of all of my trouble. My heart was feared to be defective so tests were done to rule that out. When I got the thumbs up that my heart was working properly, a blood glucose test was ordered which indicated that I had a fairly severe case of hypoglycemia. I was relieved to find out what was wrong with me and that it was something that could be managed through changes made to my diet and lifestyle. I was given approximately a two minute explanation of what hypoglycemia is and was sent home to work it all out on my own with a suggestion that I might want to meet with a nutritionist. In the meantime, I was sent to a hematologist to determine why I had such a low white blood cell count. He couldn’t find anything wrong with me despite countless vials of blood, a full body cat scan, and six months of monitoring me. He eventually gave up and said I just have a benign condition where I have an unusually low white blood cell count. (He could have just written “I don’t know what’s wrong with her” on the chart, but I suppose “benign white blood cell condition” sounds better). I did go to see a nutritionist and she told me that she herself has hypoglycemia and she keeps a chocolate bar in her car when her blood sugar levels drop. She eats that and then follows it up with food. Okay, this is the advice I am getting from a nutritionist? Are you kidding me? Even in my weakened, sick state, I knew this was not good advice. (And what kind of nutritionist develops a nutrition related illness anyway?!)
I finally realized that I was on my own. If I wanted to be feel better, I had to take my health into my own hands and take full responsibility for my well being. Being the bookworm that I am, I immediately bought as many books on nutrition and hypoglycemia as I could get my hands on and devoured them all. The crash course I gave myself on nutrition was very eye opening. I was hooked. The realization that I could change the way I felt just by changing the way I ate, was revolutionary to me. I drastically changed my diet that very day, increasing my fiber intake, green vegetables and whole grains to the extent that my system went into shock. I became extremely constipated and my stomach looked like I was four months pregnant from being so bloated. I started to think I had ovarian cancer until I read somewhere in the fine print that drastic changes too quickly will have this effect on your body. Pwew…still not dying.
My body adjusted shortly thereafter and I started feeling better by leaps and bounds. My energy level went through the roof, I was able to focus again, the shaking went away and I started to feel like myself again. I hadn’t realized just how badly I had been feeling until I experienced true health. It was like a huge weight being lifted from my shoulders. I felt empowered knowing that diet and lifestyle changes alone could do this.
The lifestyle changes I made included adding daily exercise back into my life. Tennis and yoga became an integral part of my healing and I continue to do both as often as I can. Yoga calms my mind, improves my focus and shapes my general outlook on life. The physical benefits are secondary to the emotional ones. Tennis is an incredible stress reliever for me as well as a social outlet. One cannot make significant improvements to their health through diet alone; all the broccoli in the world won’t make you a happier person if you are stressed out, sitting on the couch watching television every night, working at a job you hate, or staying in a relationship that drains you. Self care and exercise need to be as high a priority as a good diet is.
Since the tennis court moment six years ago, I have been on a journey towards health. My diet has been evolving and changing along the way and I continue to reach new plateaus as I move forward. I have altered my diet many times since first discovering I had hypoglycemia (and I say “had” because I no longer suffer from it) to find out what works best for me. Initially I gave up red meat, then pork and several months later poultry. I experimented with being off dairy then back on. I tried really hard to like tofu and finally gave up. I experimented with being entirely vegan, then added fish back in…I missed it too much. Most recently I have turned to a raw foods lifestyle and am finding that I have never felt better. Who knows what lies in the future for me, but at the time I am writing this, I am enjoying better and better health with each passing day as a result of a high raw foods diet (“high raw” meaning about 80% raw). I feel like I am turning back the hands of time. My cravings for all of my favorite cooked foods are quickly fading; I am enjoying the new, intensely flavorful raw foods creations too much to miss the dead food I used to love. If at some point in the future my body is telling me I need to add back in more cooked foods or animal products, I will listen to it. One thing I have learned in this journey is to disregard outside advice and refer instead to my inner wisdom.
Thank you for reading. Namaste.
To contact Carol:
Email: carol@galantysgameplan.com
Phone: 631-235-3816
Snail mail: P.O. Box 1051, East Quogue, NY 11942
