Personal Story
As many of you know, I wrote Making Peace with Food, a self-help book for people who struggle with eating and weight control. If you've read my book, then you may feel as if you already know me and, in a sense, you do. I poured my heart and soul into Making Peace With Food, so you've already had a glimpse into both. However, I wrote the manuscript over twenty years ago and, of course, I've changed a lot during those years.
I wrote Making Peace With Food because I had suffered through years of yo-yo dieting followed by borderline anorexia and had found a way to free myself completely from the struggle with food and weight. For many years I focused on helping others achieve the same freedom. I ran workshops, gave lectures at universities and eating-disorder conferences, and spoke on radio and television.
This was a wonderfully satisfying career, but over time I developed other interests and my intense desire to "do something" about eating disorders faded. This was primarily due to the fact that the memory of my own struggle with food and weight faded away. If I had continued to struggle with food or weight on any level, I think my intense interest would have remained; but I was free of food/weight issues throughout the 15 years that I worked in the field. Basically, I got bored with the very topic for which I was known as an expert.
One of my new interests was alternative medicine for the treatment of physical disease. At 30 years of age I was diagnosed with three supposedly incurable diseases: rheumatoid arthritis, bronchial asthma, and a minor but annoying eye condition. I saw three different doctors for these three different problems and they all said the same thing: each condition was incurable, so I would have to deal with it for the rest of my life. I felt like I had become old and sickly overnight.
The prognosis on the arthritis was the worst. The doctor said it was a progressive, degenerative disease that would gradually spread from the joints of my hands to the joints in other parts of my body—my feet, my arms, my legs. Eventually, he said that it would cripple me. He offered medications to manage the pain, but claimed that nothing would delay or stop the progress of the disease.
The prognosis on my asthma wasn't a lot better. I had watched my mother suffer with asthma throughout my life, so I was all too familiar with it even before I was diagnosed. Like her, I was allergic to many airborne substances such as dust, dust mites, molds that float off trees and plants, and grass. I was also allergic to a few foods, such as chocolate and coffee. I easily removed the offending foods from my diet—but I couldn't stop breathing the offending air.
I took two asthma medications, four times a day, as prescribed. Unfortunately, inhaling the medications in the usual way caused a chronic cough, so I had to switch from the standard inhaler to taking the medications through a nebulizer. This was a very time consuming process that my one-year-old daughter didn't appreciate. Worse, I continued to suffer with shortness of breath on a daily basis despite all the medications.
Meanwhile, I was finding that if I woke up during the night to go to the bathroom, I didn't have any night vision. I could see if I turned on a light, but I had never needed to do that before, so I went to an eye doctor. He said that I had developed slightly raised spots on my eyes, like tiny "hills." When my eyes got drier than normal, the tops of the hills became so dry that my vision became impaired. The solution, he said, was to use eye drops to moisten my eyes. In the past he had surgically removed the raised spots, but they always grew back bigger than before, so he had learned to leave them alone. He said that they were permanent.
After a brief period of wallowing in self-pity, I decided that I couldn't possibly be destined to suffer with arthritis, asthma and this strange eye condition for the rest of my life. I simply could not, would not, believe that. So I began to read books and articles (this was before the Internet), searching for some way to overcome these so-called incurable diseases.
In the end, I did three things:
- I performed a daily series of breathing exercises described in How to Become a Former Asthmatic by Paul Sorvino. (He recommended twice a day, but I couldn't manage that.)
- I ate ground up bone as a daily dietary supplement based on responses to a survey of arthritis sufferers in Prevention Magazine.
- I developed an Ayurvedic health program for myself based on Perfect Health by Deepak Chopra and followed it religiously. This included, among other things, going back to meditating twice a day, a practice that I had put on hold after my daughter was born.
Within one month of instituting the above measures, the arthritis in my hands was gone, my breathing was free and easy—without any medications—and my eyes had returned to normal.
This dramatic experience instilled me with a tremendous respect and thankfulness for alternatives to modern medicine. It taught me that although western doctors know a lot, and are good at treating a wide variety of health problems, their expertise is limited. Furthermore, many doctors are blinded by their training and egos. They tend to believe that if western medicine can't cure a disease, then the disease is currently "incurable." Fortunately, they are often wrong. A great many physical and psychological problems that don't respond well to western medicine respond very well to alternative forms of treatment.
Let me give you another example. For most of my life I have felt that my level of happiness was out of sync with my level of good fortune. I could see, very clearly, that my life was rich in every way one could possibly ask for, yet I was never an ecstatically happy person. I kept wondering why not. Sometimes I felt guilty for failing to be happier, because I felt it reflected a lack of gratitude for all of the wonderful aspects of my life.
I've known many people with this same problem, some of whom have been in therapy for decades attempting to solve it without success. They could all give you a map of every painful experience from their childhoods and how those experiences impact them as adults, but the insight doesn't seem to change how they feel to any significant degree. I felt the same way about the conventional therapy that I received, as well as all the co-counseling in which I participated. It was nice to talk about "all that stuff," but in the end I felt about the same as before.
Fortunately, my sister Jennifer introduced me to EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques). These techniques are very simple to apply and, incredibly, they quickly resolve negative emotions. Even better, if a negative emotion is brought on by certain types of triggers, you can usually resolve the problem so that the triggers no longer elicit the negative response. Hence, the result of using these techniques on your "emotional baggage" is that you gradually attain freedom from it. Oftentimes physical discomforts respond to EFT as well. The resulting increase in personal satisfaction and joy has to be experienced to be believed.
Over the years I have had to find solutions for many health issues that western medicine couldn't treat successfully, including: systemic yeast (caused by antibiotics), pre-menstrual syndrome, low self-esteem, chronic neck pain, severe performance anxiety (PTSD), and chronic headaches. Initially, all of these problems seemed like a curse—but now I see that they were gifts in disguise. For suffering has always driven me to learn more about alternative healing methods, which have not only led me back to vibrant physical and psychological health, but have also led to my current career.
One of the greatest sources of joy in my life is to use what I've learned to help relieve suffering, and to empower others to relieve their own suffering, and go after their fondest dreams. Therefore, I decided to go back to working with people who struggle with food/weight and, in addition, work with people who suffer from other problems that typically respond to EFT.
If you are searching for a way to feel better and/or to achieve goals that have been elusive, call to schedule a free initial consultation. I would love to hear about your challenges and hopes, give you a chance to get to know me and, together, determine if my abilities and services "fit" with your needs and goals.