A Work in Progress
"If you eat so healthy, take nutritional supplements, filter your water, try to avoid chemicals, and do all these healthy things, why are you so sick?"
I get this question a lot. Especially if, out of concern for a loved one's health, I recommend something natural for a health problem they're suffering with. And if they don't say it, I still sometimes get a look that says, "Why should I take YOUR advice on being healthy? I'm healthier than you!" I get it. And if you've ever wondered that, here's my answer.
1. It took YEARS for me to get this ill. It's going to take years to undo the damage. I had health problems as a child and have had serious chronic conditions for over half my life.
2. The longer you go with an undiagnosed, misdiagnosed, or improperly treated health condition, the more damage is done to your body, the more health conditions you develop, and the harder it is to get a handle on them.
3. I wasted a lot of years doing the wrong things. These are some of those things:
...Letting traditional medicine doctors "practice" medicine on me by doing surgeries, giving me all kinds of pharmaceutical drugs to treat symptoms, run diagnostic test after diagnostic test, and just overall being on a "treadmill" of conventional medicine. Which made me more and more ill.
...Getting sick of traditional medicine and therefore ignoring it completely and trying to "heal myself" with my own knowledge.
...Trying every alternative method of healing under the sun like juicing, fasting, taking supplements, making drastic dietary changes, all without any supervision or knowing the underlying CAUSE of my health condition.
4. Everyone experiences setbacks on the path to wherever they're going. That doesn't mean you're on the wrong path; sometimes it just means you need to make an adjustment.
5. I don't know everything. Honestly, most of what I've discovered about my health conditions has been through my own research, not from what I've learned from medical professionals. There is a lot of misinformation out there, making the right information hard to find. I'm always learning and discovering new pieces to the puzzle. It's hard work and takes a lot of fortitude.
6. Look how far I've come! If you've known me for any length of time, you know I've been through a lifetime of physical suffering. And you also know that in the past few years, I've had some really big improvements. You won't see me on the cover of any health and fitness magazines, but my quality of life has drastically changed since I discovered the following:
...When you already have debilitating illness, you can't choose either traditional or alternative medicine to the exclusion of the other. I tried it both ways, and I've found that the best thing to do is use integrated medicine. That means you make wise decisions about everything you put into your body and try to choose things that are the least invasive and the least foreign to your body. Occasionally, that requires taking traditional medicines.
...When you have new symptoms, rather than look for a diagnosis and something to treat those symptoms, look for the CAUSE. Everything in the body is related to the body as a whole.
...No matter how healthy you eat, if you have untreated hormone deficiencies or organs in your endocrine system that are failing, you will not feel well because hormones affect everything. I've been blessed to discover some information that finally has me on the path to healing my hormone issues.
So be patient. Don't judge me yet. I am a work in progress.
"Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on..." Philippians 3:12
