The Art of Redefining Food

In June 2017 I had an epiphany.

It was a painfully provoked one but that appears to be a theme in my life. And NAH, I’m not being dramatic or posing as the victim, I’m merely stating facts.

This particular epiphany happened after spending about a week with an inflammation pain in my right knee from a releasing piece of calcinosis. It was bad. I didn’t feel pain like that in some time. And I’m used to pain. As someone who has calcinosis from my Polymyositis condition, I know daily discomfort. That was way beyond my threshold. Again, not being dramatic, I’m just stating facts.

I didn’t have many options to treat my knee but to wait it out, at least that’s what my previous doctors always said. I was taking medication for pain (which I hardly do, unless it’s extreme) and things weren’t getting better. When I had these episodes in the past, I stayed in strong pain for 2,3 days until my body could deal with the inflammation on its own, but the medicine took most of the pain away. That definitely wasn’t the case this time.

I was scared and lost. I didn’t know what to do. That was one of the moments when I cried for help in my prayers. It’s important to note that this happened before I was guided to the missing links of my early spiritual teachings, like I talked about on this post. That being said, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I just knew I couldn’t do it alone and I didn’t know where to start either.

That was the second biggest moment of Spiritual Surrender I had, even though I didn’t know it back then. The first one was when I said: “F*** everything, I’m gonna be happy!” and The Art of Redefining Yourself was born.

What’s interesting, though, is that while I stopped giving so much energy into walking again and let life pass in front of my eyes in the process, I started to discover and unravel layers of myself that automatically brought me back to think about Wellness and Health. I just didn’t act on it as a whole. I acted on the green beauty and conscient + inclusive fashion spectrum but I didn’t act on the food. I was repealed to go back to that old story of being healthy.

And in June my knee gave me a not subtle communiqué that my body didn’t agree with my decision.

What I didn’t realize then but I do now, it’s that I don’t need to be walking to be healthy. Sure, I’d love to walk, run and dance again but right now I can just try my best with what I have available. I wanted to eat better because I wanted to feel and do better. And that’s what I’ve been doing for the past year.

The Universe listened and brought help in form of Gerda, my husband’s granny, who’s 86 and a typical witch granny. Full of her homemade recipes and ancient knowledge. And she was so pleased to be helping me with her homemade tinctures, teas and nourishing recipes. That’s how I started.

On the day of my epiphany, the first thing I did was actually writing my dad to tell him the news. My whole little life he wanted me to eat my veggies and fruits and let go of the sweets. But I was such a rebel! I hated veggies (I only liked broccoli) and I’d argue to death if someone forced me to stop eating my sweets. However, there I was willingly following my dad’s advice and I was happy to do so.

But first, I needed to kill the inflammation. And Oma Gerda did it with her homemade tincture. Since that day, I drink 2 spoons of it with my last tea of the day and I don’t know what’s an inflammation pain in over a year! I finally understood that our body is a perfect machine which can self-regulate and heal itself, but we need to feed it with the right stuff. Otherwise, it’ll break down.

I was IN! I’ve started researching more and more about food, nutrition, essential oils for health (not only beauty) and I was implementing it the best way I could. I was undergoing a complete food re-education until I got stuck and overwhelmed with so much conflicting information. I read many things but some of them just didn’t feel right — during this time I was already into my spiritual learning so I knew that was an intuition sign. That’s one of the reasons why I never wrote something on the blog up to this point.

There’s a huge and heavy responsibility with sharing information, even more about food. We live in a world where the industry behind food and healthcare don’t want us to be healthy, on the contrary. And they delegitimize everyone and everything who comes with different findings. They want to keep us ignorant because that way they can control us.

While I could write about these issues here, I decided I won’t. However, if you’re a part of the LL Collective, you’ll be receiving resources to read about it. I encourage you to because here’s a list of a few things I discovered:

We aren’t what we eat. We are what our food eats.
And what our food eats affects directly our health and the planet.
The number one cause of global warming and deforestation is the agribusiness industry.
Our food choices are killing us and our planet.
BUT don’t despair, the good news is we hold in our hands (or even better, our forks) the power to heal and regenerate (yes, you’ve read it right) our bodies and this big blue ball we call our home.

The first one is what made me completely change the way I was eating last month — funny enough, one year after my first food epiphany. In the first year, I mostly introduced healthier things into my diet. This year, I’m cutting off and replacing the crap. I’m very privileged to be living in a small town in Germany, where this process has been smoother than I thought it would be.

Another reason why I was so reluctant one year ago to share my Food Redefining Trek was that most places you read articles about diet and healthy eating are because Earthlings — especially women — wanna lose weight. And I don’t want any part on that. Just like I believe that I don’t need to be a Walker to be healthy, I don’t believe you need to be thin to be healthy. Unfortunately, back then I was scared of being misunderstood because I thought that eating was a particular choice that only affects myself. Now I know better. It affects the whole Earth.

You can do your part when you’re buying organic, drinking green juice, not buying processed food, eating grass-fed meat only occasionally, cutting refined sugar, recycling your garbage, buying less plastic packages, fewer clothes, and so many other things, but if I and the rest of the world don’t do our part, what you can do for yourself is limited. Because the oceans will be contaminated along with the air and our soil and guess what? The sickness will reach you sooner or later.

What I can — and will — do for you here on My Cuisine is take you with me on my Redefining Trek of healing my relationship towards food and some scientific data on how food affects our health. However, as I mentioned before the environmental effects from our food choices I’ll pass along by email to the LL Collective on 15th July. You can become a member HERE, it’s free.

The first thing my dad said when I told him “I was going to be a brand new woman” (an inside joke we have because that’s what my mom would say every Monday before starting a new diet) was:

“Now you’ll get better.”

And yes, daddy, now I will. I’ll get better and do better, too.

One of the biggest reasons why I decided to make such a radical change last month on my food was to actually fuel my body with energy to keep doing what I love doing: creating content for this blog. It turns out that this inspired action was another Redefining moment for me.

I needed that time in the past to not think about my physical body’s health. I needed to heal from that obsession that was slowly damaging my mind. And now I feel I can restart my journey. Not with walking as my final outcome but with an overall health for my body, mind and spirit. I figured out I can only serve others (YOU) with the best of my abilities if I take care of myself, too. It isn’t egotistic self-care, it’s preservation self-care. And Food is a part of it.