Hello and welcome to my blog! I have been interested in starting one for a while and decided that I finally had enough to say, so let’s start with my story and what I want this blog to be all about.
I am a 35-year-old female who was living nice happy life with my husband, working in a nice job and living in a great house until about 8 months ago when everything went upside down. I was traveling in South-East Asia with a good friend when I got hit by a car while taking my luggage out of the trunk. The person who hit me drove off never to be seen again. To make a long gruesome story short, my right knee got crushed and I lost a lot of blood in the process. I don’t remember much of what happened other than being in a lot of pain and hearing the words infection, blood transfusion and amputation. After two surgeries to save my life and my leg, I ended up surviving (obviously as I am writing this!) but I lost my right leg above the knee.
I returned home two weeks later to a stunned group of family and friends who didn’t really know what to say or how to act around me. Not sure how to cope moving forward I fell into a dark fog very fast. Feeling so helpless I ate my way through a month of hospital food and 9 big chocolate gift baskets. In two months, I gained 20 pounds.
One day I was lying in bed in the hospital and my dinner showed up. I was looking forward to eating my sorrows away for the third time that day. There was a small white dinner roll with two blocks of butter, a container of meat and mashed potatoes with gravy and 4 green beans, a fruit bowl with bits of fruit floating in some kind of syrup juice and a orange drink cup. I decided to dig right in and start with the meat and mashed potatoes… I opened the container and had a bit of a hard time cutting the meat but I managed eventually. Put the piece of meat in my mouth and started chewing. At first I thought it was chicken, then I realized that it was more like pork. Hummm, interesting, I never tasted pork like this before… it had a little too much texture to be chicken so it must be pork. Yes, that’s what it must be then, a pork chop and that is why it was a bit hard to cut. I ate the whole thing, gravy and all, bun, desert and orange drink. As I was arranging the waste on the tray, I couldn’t help but notice the label on the bottom of the container that described what it was. I thought, okay, I will just check to see if maybe I was wrong and it was chicken after all. I brought the label up to read it and it said “GROUND BEEF PATTY”. I had to read it again… I just couldn’t believe my eyes. It didn’t look like beef, it didn’t taste like beef and here I ate the whole darn thing. I felt so sick after that I threw up all my dinner.
I refused to eat the hospital food anymore, and I couldn’t take another day there, I decided to check myself out. I took a pair of crutches and was out of there.
As I began to adjust to my new life as an amputee I couldn’t help but feel sad. Looking at myself in the mirror was bad enough as an amputee, now I am an amputee with 20+ pounds extra on my body. My family doctor prescribed anti-depressants to me like they were the only thing that could help. I remember one afternoon I was sitting on my couch in my living room looking at the bottle of pills I had to start taking to ‘feel better’ and I started crying. Okay, so for the record I am not saying that anti-depressants are bad, I completely understand that many people have abnormal levels of serotonin in their blood and need it to be regulated. I just know that I never had this problem. Everybody kept telling me that my depression was okay and normal and was there because of my situation. Not once, did anybody even think that something else could have been causing it.
You see deep down inside I wasn’t depressed, I was actually relieved and grateful to be alive. I am one of those annoyingly optimistic people who laughs out loud and lives in happy land. I was honestly just really happy to be alive, I wanted to get back to enjoying my life, I was sick of feeling crappy inside and out.
I remember this day like it was yesterday – as I was just about to take my first pill, almost admitting defeat to the mental illness gods, all of a sudden a super bright ray of sunshine came through our bay window and landed across me. It felt so warm, reassuring and calming, like God telling me that everything was going to be okay. I just sat there and soaked in the energy from the sun imagining it rejuvenating my cells and then I realized right then and there that I needed to make a huge change.
I grabbed my laptop and did a search for natural ways to cure depression. It didn’t take me long to come across my now favorite health guru David Wolfe and his outlook on superfoods and eating raw vegan food (more about David and Raw Food as this blog matures). I got up from the couch, threw my pills in the toilet, wrote down a list of ingredients I needed from the grocery store and when my husband got home from work that day I ran up to him and said “Hun, we NEED to get a really good blender”. This is the day my real transformation began.
Here I am now, 6 months later, feeling the best I have ever felt my entire life. I have completely changed the way I eat, how I view food and my relationship with eating. My depression is completely gone, I have lost all the weight I put on and even more, feeling slim and healthy. This whole experience has been life changing for me and there is so much that I want to share with the world.
I am not a nutrition expert, I am not here to give anybody advice or guidance on their own personal journey, but I do feel that by sharing my story I may be able to help others, especially those of you suffering from depression looking for a natural way out. I can tell you from my experience there is hope and it is possible to heal depression naturally. As David Wolfe says “We are what we eat is way more powerful than we are what we think.” The way I see it, health and wellness comes from the inside out. It comes from having healthy cells in your body. One of the first things I noticed as I made this dramatic change in my diet was my skin. It was so soft and moisturized and I wasn’t using any cream. I then realized that my cells were being hydrated from the inside, not from adding cream on the outside.
Everything starts by planting a seed of thought about an idea. If the seed gets enough water and love it will sprout and grow into a plant. The best gift you can give yourself is to properly nourish your body. Give it everything it needs to function properly and everything else will fall into place. You will feel better from the inside and be able to achieve things that you weren’t able to before. Learn to love yourself and you will be amazed at the results.
I will write soon with more about the first steps I took and where I learned some of the most amazing information about nutrition. Stay tuned and I hope to see you back!
Also, please feel free to share your stories with me; if anybody out there has inspirational stories about getting through a rough patch in your life, I would love to hear them!
Peace & Love to everybody,
June
