Dr. Kelly Brogan – “I put down my prescription pad.”
I don’t know how Dr. Brogan finds the time to do everything she does. According to her bio, “she studied cognitive science at MIT, received her MD from Weill Cornell Medical College, is board certified in psychiatry, psychosomatic medicine, and integrative holistic medicine. And she’s a mom of two young girls. It makes me tired just typing all that. Her practice mainly focuses on getting women who deal with depression off medication, and thriving through natural foods, and a detoxed lifestyle.
Her medical practice changed when she got Hashimoto’s disease after she had her first baby. She couldn’t get better, and the doctor she was seeing wasn’t able to help her, in fact, she thinks that the medicine the doctor put her on made her more sick, and she didn’t like the indefinite sentence of being on a medication for the rest of her life. She started doing research and found a natural way to heal herself with food. Then she started thinking about her patients. She specialized in treating pregnant women who suffered from depression, how to prescribe drugs to pregnant women.
Brogan is now vocally skeptical about medical school and the pharmaceutical industry, saying that although she learned how to treat people with drugs, she didn’t learn how food and nutrition affect the human body. She says through her personal learning journery she, “put down her prescription pad.” She created a diet for herself and her patients that protects against depression.
Dr. Terry Wahls – “I became a modern day hunter gatherer.”
Dr. Wahls was practicing medicine when her body started to break down. She “developed a chronic disease for which there is no cure.” She got Multiple Sclerosis, a disease which shrinks the brain, damages the myelin sheath on the billions of neurons in the brain, and harms the mitochondria (the powerhouse of the cell). Her body digressed until she was wheelchair bound and having nightmares that her chief of staff had pulled her clinical privileges. She says, “for seven years, I got the best care, and the newest, latest drugs, but continued to get more disabled”. She couldn’t sit in a normal chair, she had to sit in a zero-gravity reclining chair. She could walk only short distances using 2 canes.
Since she wasn’t finding the help she needed from the medical professionals around her, she started researching the nutrients she believed her body needed. She started supplementing, and then ended up crafting a food plan to get her nutrients.
3 months after starting her dietary protocol, she could walk between exam rooms, using one cane. A month after that she could walk through the hospital without a cane. At 5 months, she got on her bike for the first time in 10 years. 9 months into her new way of eating, she pedaled 18 miles. The following year, she did a trail ride in the rockies.
She healed herself! She got her life back.
Mary Shenouda of the Paleo Chef – “Eat, Play, Crush”
Mary Shenouda is the daughter of Egyptian immigrants, and was very healthy as a child. When she went to school here in America and started eating school lunch, she got sick. She was still very high functioning, and as an adult, had a spectacular corporate career going, but discovered she had celiac’s disease and started healing herself by preparing paleo meals. Her discovery of self-healing led to her career as a personal chef to the stars and the creator of my favorite bone broth, and a wildly successful paleo running goo.
Canaries in the coal mine
These women are healers. One thing I want to highlight with these women’s stories is that they fought through major hardship and worked to find a way to turn their circumstances into major successes. And now they share their knowledge with the rest of us.
These women were sick and tired of being sick and tired. And they took their health into their own hands and healed themselves. Dr. Wahls calls herself a canary in the coalmine. I think each of these stories are a warning to the rest of us. Our beloved American diet is poisoning us, it is imploding the empire. But we can change this, for ourselves, for our families, and for our communities.
What about us?
Do you have a story of how food has changed the way you feel? I sure do. I didn’t grow up eating fast food, but I did grow up eating a lot of bread. I don’t know if I believe everything I’ve read about modern wheat, all I know is that going low carbs changed my baseline, it gave me a new normal, and I felt better than I knew was possible. I’m always looking for ways to improve my health and cognitive function. Alzheimer’s is pretty prevalent in my family. And having energy is important to me. I will do whatever I can, I will even eat liver and follow Dr. Brogan’s strange detox recommendations, if I can continue to improve the way my brain and body perform.
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