on becoming organic and healing myself

have you ever had a particular moment or experience that instantly and permanently changed your soul? a few weeks ago i was laying in bed at two am writhing in pain from a horrible flu virus which had been made worse after taking a shot of nyquil. now let me stop here and apologize for chronicling every time i get sick. i don't know why i do this, but i'm aware that i do. i think i become extremely reflective while i'm sick and it's one of the rare times i am forced to actually slow down, think, and write.

so i got up and stumbled to the bathroom and i will just say it wasn't pretty. i barfed up the nyquil and felt instantly better. i then stumbled into the kitchen and grabbed a banana. i brought it into the bedroom and laid down on my back in a blurry haze. i peeled it open and ate each bite slowly but still without hardly tasting it.

my stomach was settled. my body was thanking me. i fell asleep instantly and when i woke up the next morning i was a new person. not just my body, but my spirit, heart, and mind. that banana was medicine. i don't know why, it was a rather insignificant moment unexamined, but there was something about that moment that shifted my body and mind into a heightened state of awareness regarding my health and it's relation to the things i put inside of it.

i have considered the idea of food as medicine before. i have walked the produce section of the grocery store selecting the items that called to me many a time, i have, over the last two years, been slowly removing unhealthy foods from my diet, and i have long valued fresh over packaged foods.

but until that night, my soul and body together did not yearn for earth's untampered organisms. something about that banana was extremely healing to both my body and mind. the next day i began researching the power of organic food. i never really understood why organic food is all that important. i knew gmo's were to be avoided but had never researched exactly why. i spent the next few days ravenously devouring everything i could read about organic foods. my mind suddenly wanted to be straight with the earth, the moon, and the stars. it's all cosmic and delicious and very good feelings.

here's what i've learned about why organic food is important: organic food is grown without the use of pesticides. most people know that. i had previously believed, based on some things i'd read, that produce with thick peels, like bananas, did not need to be organic because the pesticides could not penetrate their peels or shells. but organic food actually goes beyond ensuring people do not consume pesticides.

human beings exist thanks to a delicate ecosystem on earth and their role in the whole system. in fact, each individual is either a thriving and healthy ecosystem, within themselves, with a micro-biome made up of bacteria, viruses, and parasites, or an unhealthy and disturbed ecosystem that is out of balance and laden with disease.

pesticides disturb both the delicate ecosystem of earth as well as the delicate ecosystem within individuals. pesticides and herbicides destroy the microorganisms that feed on and enrich soil, which then transfer nutrients like vitamins and minerals to the food we eat. non-organic food, even fresh fruits and vegetables, are rather empty, and do not compare at all in quality or nutritional value to organic food. not only that, but genetically modified foods can transfer harmful viruses and bacteria to our guts that disrupt our delicate ecosystems.

i absolutely believe organic food is much better for the body than non-organic food. any organic unprocessed food is a superfood. any non-organic food can not be. have you ever tried to eat only fruits and vegetables for even a day? i had tried that plenty of times in the past, of course only with non-organic produce. it never worked out. i was always starving and empty within a few hours. the last few weeks i have been eating large amounts of organic fruits and vegetables. small salads stuff me to the point that i can't eat another bite. i'm satiated for hours.

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i have suffered a health issue the last few years that i haven't talked about much on my blog. i now know it was a food additive allergy, but i didn't know it for a long time. it came on some time during my mission (2010) and got increasingly worse the next few years. there were horrific symptoms. i will call them hangry symptoms. i would be feeling good at one moment and then suddenly ravenously hungry within minutes. it felt like bugs were crawling under my skin all over my entire body. i would experience flu-like symptoms from dizziness, nausea, delirium, confusion, and anger. oh, the anger. i would be deliriously angry, hangry, as if i hadn't eaten for days, sometimes seeing red with road rage because i couldn't get to a restaurant fast enough. but most restaurant foods didn't cure it. weirdly, the only restaurants that made it feel better were ute-mex restaurants like cafe rio or costa vida or large home cooked meals. fast food only exacerbated the symptoms. and once the symptoms had already set in, small healthy snacks like eating a piece of fruit or a larabar did next to nothing. if it came on late at night, there was no sleeping it off. it was like i had the flu all night until i finally ate a solid meal. the only cure was a giant, hearty meal loaded with carbs, protein, fats, and some fresh produce. basically, cafe rio.

i would experience these episodes at least once a day for about three years. jared and i both just thought i was extremely sensitive to hunger. bless jared's heart suffering my presence through it all. he drove to cafe rio many times because i was truly not capable of driving. i just thought i was weak because basically everyone else could go hours before eating from the time they first felt hunger. i knew something was wrong because life hadn't always been this way and i could go hours and hours without experiencing these symptoms if i hadn't eaten anything that day. but because the issue came on slowly i didn't immediately recognize that something was really, truly "wrong".

about a year and a half after the symptoms had been present, i began eating a tad bit less packaged food. for example, i would eat plain oatmeal with natural peanut butter and local honey for breakfast instead of an instant oatmeal package. i was still eating plenty of packaged foods, but at least some part of my daily meals had less packaged food. i began eating larabars between meals. i began snacking on hard boiled eggs a few hours after a meal before i felt hungry or any hangry symptoms. this helped immensely, but it was impossible to always be prepared with a healthy snack prior to symptoms setting in, so i still had attacks multiple times a week.

during this time i saw an endocrinologist because i was certain i was hypoglycemic. i was devastated when i found out i had absolutely perfect, healthy blood sugar levels (after lab tests on my blood and thrice daily monitoring of my blood sugar levels). i know that sounds silly and backwards, and of course now i appreciate i am not hypoglycemic. but at the time i just felt invalidated in my experience and silly for having such a strong reaction to something everyone experienced daily: hunger. it felt like i was just broken and weak and there was no way to really get a handle on this part of my life.

i explored "eating healthier" in a general way as time went on, rather untethered to these hangry symptoms. i figured cafe rio is healthier than mcdonalds, right? so why don't i feel great? i figured that dark chocolate is better than gummy worms so i should feel good, no? but that was wrong. on top of that, i still regularly ate out, occasionally had fast food, would munch on jared's potato chips, and would eat a bar of chocolate at least once a week or more. but with an allergy, any exposure to the allergen is enough to trigger a response, so even that handful of chips in the middle of an otherwise healthy eating day could send me into an episode later in the day.

it's been about a month since i have been strictly eating only organic, non-gmo food. i have been preparing my meals at home, shopping at farmer's markets, eating mostly produce, eating some raw produce at every meal, and eating only grass-fed, organic, humanely raised, antibiotic-free, hormone-free meats and dairy products. this hasn't been a difficult change, partly because i was already eating fairly healthy, and partly because that banana flu experience altered my soul into craving and yearning organic food.

last week it dawned on me that i was hungry, and had been hungry for at least four hours. no hangry symptoms had set in. do you know how thrilling that moment was? i had conquered my demon, doctors hadn't helped me at all, drugs or pills hadn't helped, the only thing that changed was me. my body was doing it's thing just the way it was supposed to. i almost started crying. never would i ever have imagined being so thrilled to feel hunger.

my stomach was hungry with minor hunger pangs. but my body was fine. no abnormal symptoms. no panic. no delirium. no nausea, no bugs swimming in my blood, and no red hot anger. i was hungry and i was level headed. finally it was proven: i was not extremely sensitive to hunger, i was having an allergic reaction to a food additive. i was not a weakling or a spoiled baby, i was simply having an abnormal allergic reaction to a food additive. i was normal.

the reason i have pinpointed my allergy to a food additive is because the symptoms only totally went away once i completely eliminated all packaged foods from my diet for more than two weeks. if i had journaled more specifically what i ate and kept all the labels and ingredients, i'm sure i could have determined what specific food additive was triggering my symptoms. but i don't need to.

eating organic food is a lifestyle that i crave and deeply enjoy, one that improves the environment, the economy, and our future. it has greatly improved my life. i love this new life. since eating organic is coming so easily to me, my new year's resolutions are: one green smoothie a day and jog one mile per day. so far, so good!