My Healing: Depression and Health Issues
By the time I was 17, my health was falling apart. I had developed auto-immune problems, hormonal issues and chronic fatigue. I had such fatigue I could barely stay awake even after 10 hours of sleep. I had no energy, my skin and eyes were dull, and I felt terrible all the time. I felt like what I imagined I'd feel if I was 87, yet I was 17.
I had been eating a very standard American diet all my life, plus I was a high-performing athlete fueled by team pasta dinners and frequent fast food. Additionally, I was completely emotionally shut down and in denial.
I had been diagnosed with severe depression. While all my peers were getting excited looking at colleges to start the next phase of their life, I had a strange feeling that my life was over, or like the good part was over now. I had no optimism about my future, and no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Nothing got me excited anymore.
After visits to doctors who only proposed medications as answers to my physical problems, I began researching into natural health myself.
Luckily, I was going to a psychotherapist, who was a positive influence in my life at the time. He was the first person to suggest I wasn't being treated well in my family, and the first one to have an interest in my feelings and emotions.
I also began reading books about the emotional causes of overeating, something I'd done compulsively since as young as I could remember. I cried for the first time in years, and for the first time about the truth about what happened to me in my family dynamics.
I went vegetarian, and then vegan, and minimized sugar, flour and fried food. I kept crying and I started raging too. I got some stagnant, old, denied emotions out of me through feeling them.
Within a year, all of my health issues vanished, and I truly believe this was a combination of feeling suppressed emotions and feeding my body in a more loving way. While healing depression and food addiction has definitely taken longer than that initial year, it has happened and resulted in a normality with food I used to only dream would be possible.
This is where my passion for healing food addiction, for nutrition and health, and for emotional processing began: because I saw first hand that medications were not the only answer to my own physical or mental health issues.
These prisons of ill health and/or binge eating are not inevitable. We can heal, we can become people who do not struggle with these issues.
The thing is, these magical transformations that we hope are possible, ARE possible, but they are only possible through the kind of emotional work and action-taking that we often try to avoid at all costs.
The truth is: your body can heal, your body is on your side, it is not the enemy.
The truth is: overeating is not a disease, and your soul is never permanently broken. Your soul has the power and ability to heal from the most severe cases of food addiction.
Have faith y'all!
Photo by Katie Sue Photography