A Health Journey

It’s always interesting to have people over to our apartment for the first time. The inevitable “What’s that?” is asked in regard to the gallons of kombucha that are in the process of brewing, or mason jars full of sauerkraut. They look almost in awe of the homemade sourdough that hangs out on the counter throughout the week. And those three things, ten years ago, would have seemed so strange to me. In fact I know I hadn’t yet heard of kombucha, and my only interactions with sauerkraut and sourdough were very commercial products, far from the beneficial and nourishing food that sits on my countertops. And those are just three things, right on the surface, easily pointed out. What would 20-year-old Bekah think also of avoiding conventional medicine, bedsharing with my 2-year-old, breastfeeding past the typical American weaning age, making many of my own beauty and body-care products, eating butter like slices of cheese, consuming minimal to zero refined sugar, having regular chiropractic care as one of the most important health defenses, making copious amounts of bone broth (and turning very carnivorous), deciding against circumcision for Harrison or any future boys we have, not going to “well-baby” visits with my child, or staying far away from vaccinations in any member of our family?

In terms of this decidedly not mainstream lifestyle, how did I even get here? 20-year-old Bekah would have had that question, and so many people who know me in this present day have asked. Truth be told, there is no glaring answer. It started with food and it's led to everything else and it’s taken ten years to make these changes. They’ve primarily happened one at a time, with plenty of space in between to make them such a part of my lifestyle that I don’t even think about them, it’s just who I am today.

Who was 20-year-old Bekah? A typical college student. Going to class or avoiding it, depending on the day. A different color hair each month (or so it seemed). Painfully introverted but surrounded by a community of friends who loved me for who I was. Slightly rebellious against the strict rules at my college. Took Tylenol or Ibuprofen for menstrual cramps. Ate all my meals at the cafeteria- lived on pasta or sandwiches with loads of lunch meat. Became a vegetarian the end of senior year though rarely thought about the food I was putting in my body.

I became a vegetarian initially to save money- I was grocery shopping for myself during the last semester of college. Back at my parent's house my Mom was in the process of changing the way she ate and fed our family, and it was due to her influence that I decided that if I wasn't buying organic meat, I wasn't going to buy it at all. I had no intentions to stick with it. (But yet I stuck with it for 10 years.) I lived off of frozen Kashi bowls and canned soup that semester, and I still remember the “No Chicken Soup” throwing me for a loop with its pieces of “chicken.” I just wanted vegetable soup. To this day I can’t stand tofu, and for good reason anyway, it does the body no good whatsoever.

Living on my own a year after graduation was a time for learning. I was figuring out what it meant to cook for one (or two, as Jer and I were dating and we had dinner together most nights), and I ate a lot of organic food, in the name of health, that was definitely not healthy. Sugar-laden yogurt, processed pizza pockets, pre-packaged vegetables with unnecessary additives. I thought I was doing alright. At this point I was also still popping Tylenol for every menstrual cramp, but had started to learn the wonders of homeopathy for impending sickness in the form of Boiron’s Cold Calm. I’m sure I also discovered Oscillococcinum sometime around then, and I’ve certainly never looked back (don’t tell past-me that Oscillococcinum is NOT vegetarian.) 

I moved to Los Angeles, watched Forks Over Knives (a vegan documentary), and decided it was all true and I needed to cut out allllllll animal products. I tried and didn’t last more than a few days. I didn’t know how to survive without dairy. (And I’m glad I didn’t. I recently listened to this podcast and it was SO enlightening, so informative, and it just makes so much sense. Great info on why the vegan diet is not good for our bodies long term, and great info on why eating dairy and/or meat is necessary for the health and nourishment of our bodies, the health of our environment, and the only hopeful option for feeding the whole world. Take a half hour and listen!)

Jer and I got married in 2013 and little by little I became more domestic, primarily with cooking (I'm still seemingly incapable of decorating our home in a pleasing aesthetic, oh well.) I did a lot of meal-planning and started cooking from scratch more often than not. Cooking from scratch with real foods led me to start considering what else I was putting in and on my body. If I was so concerned about toxins in the produce at the grocery store, what about the ingredients in my shampoo, or makeup, or body lotion? What about the plastics surrounding us that leach BPA and BPS into our food? I am very thankful that I never considered using any sort of contraceptive that chemically altered my body's natural rhythm, instead I learned about my body through the Fertility Awareness Method (and have used it to positive effect, even now almost five years later). I stopped using Tylenol- the last conventional medicine in my cabinets- and cleaning up my diet over the years has meant that my body produces no symptoms for "needing" it anyway. I made small changes regarding all of those things in that time, and over the years it has turned in to using some homemade makeup; brushing my teeth with homemade toothpowder; no deodorant (occasionally coconut oil) (and no, I don't smell, diet has helped with that also); a kitchen full of glassware, stainless steel, and cast iron; a medicine cabinet stocked with items like activated charcoal, elderberry syrup, gemmotherapy tinctures, arnica montana, vitamin C, and colloidal silver, to name a few; baking soda followed by apple cider vinegar to wash my hair; and I have dipped my toe into the world of essential oils but I'm not quite there yet, aside from diluted Frankincense to aid with fading a deep scar in Harrison's cheek.

Fast forward to August 2015 when I learned I was pregnant (thanks to everything I learned from the fertility awareness method), and I began considering even more what living a healthy lifestyle meant. I was in good health and took care of myself fairly well throughout those nine months, though I also still had plenty of Doritos, and other processed foods and refined sugar. I broke my vegetarianism and ate a little bit of chicken during my pregnancy, took fermented cod liver oil, and took desiccated liver capsules for a few months (probably not enough to be beneficial.) Looking back on my pregnancy, there's much that I would change in terms of how I cared for myself, and I have those notes tucked away for any future pregnancies. Being pregnant brought on many questions about how Jeremy and I wanted to care for our baby after its arrival, and these questions caused my journey into healthy living to travel much more quickly than the previous meandering years.

Little Harrison, once he was born, rocked our world. Of course we only wanted the best for him, and his arrival put me on a fast track for figuring out what lifestyle I really thought was beneficial. I came across this blog post that had so much curious advice, and the biggest take away was information about the Weston A. Price Foundation's nutrition guidelines for pregnant and breastfeeding women. This was the first time I heard about WAP, and now three years later I have just become a member. The information that the Weston A. Price foundation has to offer (the linked post is only the tip of the iceberg) has truly changed my perspective on food and nutrition, and I appreciate that it is backed my both scientific knowledge and anecdotal evidence from generations upon generations upon generations past.

While I am still a long (long, long, long) way away from following the WAP guidelines for pregnant and nursing women, over the past few months I have started eating more and more meat, to the point that I can't call myself any sort of vegetarian anymore. Chicken and turkey are something, but I have indulged in bacon, hot dogs, and ground beef at this point (of course I'm very careful about sourcing it well). We drink raw milk daily and take at least a half a teaspoon of fermented cod liver oil each day (Harrison included- Harrison especially!) I sooo sooo miss being able to walk out to my parent's backyard in the morning to gather fresh, pastured eggs for breakfast, but we buy the best we are able to find here, and eat them with runny yolks (Jeremy eats them raw for the most part). I eat slabs of butter in crazy amounts on sourdough bread, and Harrison loves to eat it straight (and maybe I've done that too). I cooked chicken liver for the first time the other day (fed it to Jer and Harrison, I'm not quite there yet), and I'm just about ready to to start buying it in bulk instead of relying on what is inside the whole chickens I purchase. Of course kombucha and sauerkraut are consumed in large amounts in our household, and I am about to start making milk kefir. We avoid sugar almost 100% at this point, and there are plenty of nourishing alternatives so we won't be going back (ok so occasionally it's still a nice treat, but it's so much easier for me to stay away from mindlessly eating it now). 

The information in these two podcasts (here and here) as well as Kelly Brogan's book, caused Jeremy and me to make a dramatic shift in the way we look at food and the way we consider every bite that we eat. These days I am ALL ABOUT GUT HEALTH. Everything I put into my body does something good or bad to my gut, and every system in my body requires a healthy gut to function correctly. All physical and mental health relies on gut health. I cannot understate that, I cannot understate how much I fully believe that. I can't look at a sick person anymore- minor cold, major short-term illness, lifelong autoimmune disease, whatever it is- and not wonder about their gut health and if they have tried altering their diet to relieve symptoms and heal their body from the inside out. The GAPS diet can turn physical and mental illness around, and the AIP diet can be a major help, while pharmaceuticals will mostly just cover symptoms and make life tolerable at best, all while damaging the gut further. This is my current soapbox. This may be my forever soapbox.

Do you know what else damages a healthy gut? Vaccines. Is that why we have chosen to forgo vaccines in our family? Not initially, but it's absolutely one of the many factors now. Our journey to that decision is four years in the making and requires its very own blog post, to be published in the next few days once my thoughts are coherently gathered together and my sources are linked. I'll leave you with this- the very first reason why we decided against vaccinations for our growing family was that we hadn't researched them enough. We knew that administering a vaccine could never be undone, and if we decided they were beneficial, waiting on them was not going to be harmful.

Ooooh this post is getting so long. So many things I still haven't touched on, but here's a blog post I read before I was pregnant that opened my eyes to the world of breastfeeding and bed-sharing and a type of attachment parenting that felt so right for our future family- and has become a large part of the way we've raised Harrison and it's worked so well for us. Our style of parenting is not something that was modeled to us, and I am thankful that I was able to learn of this perspective before Harrison was even conceived. 

And the circumcision debate! Oi, I think that one requires its own blog post as well. We didn't know Harrison's gender until a few moments after he was born, but obviously we did some research to have a decision about circumcision made before that moment. We decided against it initially because we just thought it was unnecessary. We didn't give much more thought to it. But now. But now you guys. I am armored with far more information I had in those late months of pregnancy and early months of caring for Harrison, even through his first year or more, and I am so sad that it is considered a routine and acceptable procedure in such tiny little beings who have no say in the matter. More on that in a later post, but like with vaccinations, circumcision can never be undone. If it's decided that it is beneficial or necessary, waiting on it is not going to be harmful. Research first. In all things. Maybe that's my soapbox. 

So here we are. Here I am. 20 year old Bekah is probably a bit flabbergasted at who 30 year old Bekah has become, but the 10 years it took to get here have made this lifestyle seem so normal. It is normal. It is my normal. Who knows where I'll be at 40? Earthing? Taking steps to avoid all the radiation in our environment? (Well I do have this phone case, to start.) Taking the plunge into essential oils? Owning a goat farm and selling milk and kefir and cheese and sauerkraut and kombucha at farmers markets (life dream you guys!) Who knows. We'll see where this journey continues to take me. I'm always open to learning about the best ways to maintain whole body health using what nature has provided for us. In this world that is ever the opposite, I want to continue to take it all in and pass it down to Harrison and his children and generations after that. Someone needs to.