Calif_Princess
Healing from the Inside Out
Nov 13, 2012
Well it’s been almost four years from my surgery date and I’m still about halfway to my goal weight. So much has happened over the last four years. My husband and I have both lost so many people that we loved to the horrible thief known as death. Losing grandparents, parents, a cousin, a brother and our beloved only grandchild had a devastating effect on us. To complicate matters even more we lost our home and have been moving almost every year from one place to another.
But with death there is also birth. The birth of our second grandchild: Bryar Quinn. When our daughter told us she was going to have another baby we knew he had to be close to them so we could be a big part of our grandchild’s life so we picked up and moved across the country to Louisville Kentucky. I hated Louisville immediately (culture shock coming from suburban Southern California) but was instantly enthralled by our new grandson’s huge blue eyes when he arrived a few months later. Little Bryar will be two-years-old Thursday and he is the apple of our eye. He can even melt his strict ‘ol grandpa with just a look or a funny sound.
I’m now staring down 45 which I will reach in a few months. It seems that life starts to make more sense in your 40s. Over the past four years I’ve morphed into several different people: I’ve gone from a quiet, obese, sad mother whose two daughters and newborn grandson had just left the nest; to a manic, mini skirt wearing, provocative thing that drank too much; to a stressed out college student who still drank too much; to a pathetic, emotionally crippled drunk.
It seems I’ve come full circle. Two months ago both my daughters and our new grandson moved back in with us. My house is once again filled with the noise of my family!
Fortunately, over the last few months, I’ve slowly been able to pull myself out of the dark hole I was in. Thankfully I have beat the drinking problem and have more or less kept my Bipolar in balance (not perfectly…I still haven’t found any medication that helps very much). I’ve also lost the 30 pounds I had re-gained after surgery and my weight has been pretty stable over the summer.
I have always been very interested in nutrition and how it affects our minds and bodies. If I wasn’t already working on two very different majors (and been any good with math…) I’d probably have wanted to become a chemist and researched how nutrition (or the lack of) affects our minds and bodies from the inside out. I’ve read countless books on the subject of nutrition (of which I have forgotten almost everything…my memory is almost nonexistent) over the years.
A lot of the books had contradictory messages but over the last year I’ve read a few books (and a documentary) that are in agreement with each other and seem to have the most common sense approach to eating and life style choices: eating an organic, whole foods diet of mostly fresh fruits and vegetables, with a some dairy and a little lean mean if you’d prefer.
Of course this way of eating isn’t inexpensive. Society has put quite a price tag on food that doesn’t come in a box, can, bag or other type of processed “food” container. It seems that if the “food” has a label on it it’s guaranteed to be less expensive, the price going down proportionately as the list of crap that no one can pronounce gets longer, creating a cesspool that our society calls food. Organic, whole food is a much superior way to nourish our minds and bodies, but society has made it difficult and expensive.
The book that I’m reading now is called “The UltraMind Solution” by Dr. Mark Hyman. He writes about how important GOOD nutrition is to the smooth running of our brains. I really had no idea just HOW important. I knew a little bit but I’m learning so much by reading this book. For the first time in my life I might be able to finally be rid of this Bipolar that has ruined my life and stolen my dreams. To think that what you put in your mouth (or what you DON’T) can have that great of an effect on mental illness and/or cognitive abilities.
He has a 6-week plan that detoxes your mind and body and replenishes vital nutrients with correct doses of vitamins, (which, by the way, is a lot more than the government says we should be taking) shows you how to eat right, encourages you to exercise, and shows you how to meditate and relax and get more sleep. All apart of healing your mind.
So I’m excited about starting that. Things are slow at my husband’s work right now and with the extra 3 people (well, 2 ½) in the house, money has been really, really tight—nonexistent, really—so we might not be able to start right away (my husband and one of our daughters is going to do the plan with me) which is very exciting!!! Like I said, eating organic, whole foods is pricey. But I’m confident that we’ll be able to start in the few weeks. I really need to heal the source of all my problems—my defective brain that has given me the “wonderful gift” of Bipolar—and everything else, my weight, my memory loss and mental and physical sluggishness will finally be under control.
We put our house on the market Saturday so I’m hopefull we’ll sell before the new semester starts at my old college back in California in mid January. I can’t wait to get out of Louisville and back in So Cali and back in school. I’m sure not all of Kentucky is this bad, but boy do I hate Louisville. But I said that already, right? *wink*
