From bulimia, to excess weight, to cervical cancer, to a MRSA infection, I've battled and healed myself by a focus on real food and superfood supplements. Whatever your ailment, food can heal and food can harm. Learn with me how to kiss, heal and be vibrant.
Summer, 2009
I look at the spread of snacks in front of me, and reach for yet another handful of popcorn, pushing the kernels into my mouth. Some fall out and litter the front of my red Educarte tank top that is my teachers’ uniform, joining their friends to mix and mingle over my chest. The kids run up, grab some snacks and keep playing, but I don’t leave the food. It’s too good. And I’m too broke to be able to afford all this chocolate and cookies and cakes so I stay. And keep eating.
Later, as the kids still play, I go into my classroom, walk to the bathroom and shut the door. I shove two fingers deep into my throat, touch my esophagus and purge, throwing up all that I’d consumed, my belly distended, pulsing as it releases my shame, my guilt, my self-loathing into the bowl. I flush the toilet and go back to the spread of snacks, reach for another handful and keep eating.
So there I was, October 2011, and dealt a massive blow – at 26, I was about to be barren. A routine Pap while I was getting my MA in Brussels turned out abnormal and a biopsy revealed that yes, surgery was necessary.
“It’s scheduled for next week.” My doctor said after calling me to inform me of the biopsy results.
Immediately, I scheduled a follow up.
The second doctor was more nuanced. Indeed, I had 8 medium to severe cancerous lesions on my cervix, but I was young. Time was on my side!
A panicked call to my grandmother further grounded the decision to which I was coming.
“No, do not get surgery,” she said in her stilted Russian – Tartar was her native tongue, but Russian the only one we had left in common.
“You can’t grow back a piece of your body. Take x and y instead.”
You see, my grandmother’s mother was a healer. The only reason she wasn’t sent to the gulags upon her husband’s repression at the hands of Stalin was because she was so vital to the village. As the resident doula as well as healer, she brought life into this world, and her life was spared. My grandmother learned many of her practices, and passed them on to me.
A manic week of jumping into the online labyrinth and I had come to my decision. I attended the pre-surgery appointment, given a soap with which I was to wash my entire body, and was told not to eat. That night I cried, prayed, and then called my doctor.
"I can't do it. I can't get surgery," I told her. "I'm going to do it my way, and if the cancer is still here, I'll reschedule the surgery months from now."
My doctor disapproved, and tried to convince me that time wasn't on my side. That I needed the surgery, and now. But I listened to my intuition and stuck with my decision. I was going to heal myself, everyone else be damned.
Over the next five months, I changed my diet to mostly vegan raw, and also practiced and supplemented with nearly every remedy the online universe and my grandmother had suggested. My next follow up appointment with the second doctor just five months after that terrifying phone call discovered only one small lesion remained, and the doctor took care of freezing it off in the doctor’s office that day.
I was healed! And by listening to my intuition, not the doctors.
Years after, I heard a friend of a friend had gotten the same surgery. If by some miracle she could get pregnant, she wouldn't be able to carry to full term. Luckily, the woman already had a child and was not interested in having more.
But at 26, I was still yearning to one day have the chance to be a mother. And by listening to my gut, I had saved my reproductive capacity!
Food has been my downfall, but also my savior.
It has consumed my thoughts – the chocolate fairies dancing an incessant jig in my head all day and every day – in a negative way. I’ve spent countless hours, years of my life, pouring over diet books, and health articles and novels on healing, attending classes and workshops and seminars and certifications.
And food has healed my body and my mind in a myriad of ways, but first, it broke me and brought me to my knees … in front of the porcelain throne to which I had ceded all my autonomy.
You see, I was born malnourished, my stomach a distended basketball, my limbs long and lanky. My own mother had been malnourished, and her own mother survived Stalin stealing my great-grandfather and the ancestral land that gave us sustenance. My grandmother fed her younger siblings nettle soup and dandelion salad and the scavenged frozen potatoes left in a field that had already been picked.
Perhaps this is why my mother always plied me with food, encouraging me to eat a whole chicken and many potatoes at dinner and bringing me carrot sticks when I was devouring my books on the couch with no thought of anything outside the world I was inhabiting.
So when the seam on the skirt my mother had worn as she stepped foot in America at 34 ripped during 7th grade creative writing class, I shouldn’t have been as distraught as I was. My mother was never fed the way she fed me. I had larger bones, and a stockier build, much like my grandmother’s. But it was her willowy frame I coveted, and being larger than my mother as a teen decimated my self-esteem and, consumed with my own insecurities, I reached for food. And more food. And more.
But when I finally decided to use food as a tool rather than a crutch, I began not only healing myself and my history, but also all the ancestral pain of scarcity that has decimated generations before me.
During my adult life, I’ve oscillated between a hefty size 12, which on a 5’4” girl can look like double chins and muffin tops, and a measly 114 pounds in which my ribs stuck out like Gandhi’s.
(photo of me in Costa Rica in March 2019, at about 118 pounds, much too skinny on my athletic frame.)
I have clothes that span size 1-12 in my closet as we speak, though I haven’t gotten quite that large in years. But I still keep the lot, both as a warning and as a Plan B. If I ever get consumed by a depression so deep the only light is at the bottom of a cupcake, I know I won’t have to subject myself to fitting rooms as I outgrow size after size.
And yet, I also know that I’ll never get there again.
I was 23 when I first tried bulimia on for size, addicted to both food and looking slim. And now, more than a decade later, I can honestly say I’ve healed not only the bulimia, but also the anorexia that followed.
I’ve healed anxiety and depression by focusing on the brain and body nourishment that food can provide, rather than viewing it as stop-gap measure to fill the hole where self-confidence should have been.
And I've gotten to my goal weight, feeling and looking my best at 34 years old, without working out (look for my blog post about why I hate gyms and think they're caustic, coming soon). Without depriving myself of the foods I loved to eat, and only eating them sporadically, I'm at my slimmest, ever. And I've even started to model. At 34.
Who would've thunk?
I now look like this:
And this ... a completely untouched and non-airbrushed photos. Yes I have cellulite, and yes I've stopped stressing over it, loving my body as it perfectly is.
(Photo credits for the top two photos: Matthias Busche, of @krautcreative)
And this, taken in September of 2019.
Instead of as the following photos, taken in 2011, just months before I was diagnosed with cancer. I was an au pair at the time, living in rainy Brussels and eating the pop tarts and sugary cereals the American kids begged me to buy by the tons, isolating, depressed, overworked.
Pictures, mostly 2011 unless specified, from left to right: March in Brussels. April in Hvar, Croatia. May in Cairo, Egypt writing a paper on technological inclusion and exclusion three months after the Facebook revolution. Celebrating my birthday in July in Brussels. Doing MA thesis research outside Almaty, Kazakhstan at the end of July. In Sienna, Italy in August. With my grandfather in Ufa, Russia in December and my cousin on NYE 2010. February 2012, in Brussels. August 2011, in Cyprus. August 2011 in Naples.
Needless to say, I was plump during my European days. I would binge, then diet. Diet and lose weight, then gain it all back. It was a yo yo year of weight instability, and it took getting cancer for me to reframe the way I ate, the way I thought, and the way I interacted with food.
Cancer was the end of the line of a long-term and terrible relationship to food. As you can see by the below picture, taken in 2009, when I was in the dregs of bulimia and bingeing and purging. Then, living in Costa Rica, I was just as plump, if not more so.
And this was me in November of 2011, getting a handle on my health. I'm drinking a ubiquitous green shake, something that would become my daily norm for the next 8 years.
By the time I left Europe, in July of 2012, I had not only healed my cervical cancer, and saved my reproductive capacity, but I had also shed weight and was at my thinnest ever. Below are photos taken the weeks before I left, top row taken in Paris in July 2012 and bottom row taken in late June in the south of France while completing a two week intensive French immersion: Monaco, Saint Paul De Vence and Nice, from left to right.
Since, I’ve healed staph infection sans western antibiotics, persistent hemorrhoids that left me bed-ridden, ear infections, bronchitis, gut issues, and yes, cancer. And that’s just in my body. I’ve helped countless others achieve their health goals and dreams they couldn’t even envision before we started working together.
Chronic migraines – poof, gone with one supplement.
An ex who moved in to my apartment with a large shopping bag filled with stomach medication didn’t take one pill while he was living with me and eating the foods I cooked each and every day.
I was 25 when a man wrote me a $1,000 check and told me I was hired as his personal nutritionist just off one conversation about food, and in a short time he was keeping food down, though prior to us working together he would throw up after each and every meal, and not willfully, as I had, but uncontrollably.
But though concentrating on what you should and shouldn’t put in your body is a large part of health, it isn’t everything. It wasn’t until I focused on healing my mind and my traumas when the crappy food let go of the tenacious grip it had on my life.
My biggest, long-term gains and full mind/body/spirit health came after I started using a cognitive behavioral and emotional release approach based on The Work by Byron Katie weekly and even daily.
”Face & Feel” and heal.
That, coupled with intermittent fasting, regular cleansing, and reprogramming my relationship with food to one focused on the long-term benefits food could give me rather than short-term pleasure has made maintaining a healthy weight and thin frame nearly effortless.
(Apples, my favorite snack.)
But it took a lot of work, and much trial and error, to get here.
And now, I wish to share with you the fruits of my labor. You needn’t take 15 years to heal yourself fully, as I did. Health can be a near-effortless realization, and I’m here to help.
Join my 3-month Kiss F8 cohort and I guarantee that together, with minimal effort and a few habit changes, you will be in your best shape ever, with the best health ever, and the happiest you've ever been.
Join me. I can't wait to work with you.
X,
Kisses
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