Processed ‘Food’ Almost Ruined My Life
by Dennisse Lisseth
About four years ago I would wake up with my tummy being it’s regular size. I can’t say a ‘flat tummy’ cause at the time it wasn’t necessarily flat since I needed to lose a few pounds. LOL… Anywho, as my day would go by I would feel fine but at some point in the mid afternoon my stomach would balloon to what seemed 100 times it’s regular size and it looked like I was literally 9 months pregnant. I thought I maybe ate something that didn’t settle well with me but I didn’t know what it was. I would go to sleep with an inflated tummy and thank goodness to my relief when I would wake up the next morning, it would be back to its regular, normal size.
I got those often and therefore called them ‘episodes’ and I would get them on and off. I decided to see a doctor to see if anything was wrong. I was given several tests and the doctor told me that everything came out fine so he didn’t know what could be causing this. I probably should have looked into this some more but since a doctor told me that everything was fine, I decided to just let this go.
Time went on and for months this never happened again. But in those months I started experiencing other symptoms. I used to be a heavy soda drinker and whenever I would drink orange flavored soda (such as Sunkist, Fanta, etc.), I couldn’t even finish drinking the 12 ounce can because I would start to feel sick. I got the ‘I feel like throwing up but can’t seem to literally throw up’ feeling. It also gave me these horrible headaches. And it started to happen often so I simply gave up orange flavored soda and switched to Diet Pepsi. After the switch I started noticing that drinking diet sodas would give me diarrhea at times. But by then I was so addicted to the sodas that I dealt with having weekly diarrhea.
In this same time period I also developed mental fog. I would literally not remember things. For example, I would have a conversation with a friend and in the middle of a sentence I would stop talking since I couldn’t remember what I was about to say. And this started happening everyday. It was actually pretty embarrassing.
Fast-forward 3 years later and my ‘episodes’ that I used to get came back and this time with a vengeance. My stomach ballooned up to this massively HUGE size and out of nowhere it felt like I was getting stabbed from the inside out. It was screaming pain. Literally. I couldn’t sit, stand, or lay down. No matter what I did it would hurt and I couldn’t find a comfortable spot. And to make it worse, the pain lasted about 6 straight hours.
Again I went to the doctor and again they couldn’t find anything wrong. This time I knew something was majorly wrong and decided to go the holistic route. It turned out I am extremely sensitive to gluten. So now I understood why my tummy would swell up and why it felt like I was getting stabbed from the inside out. I decided to cut out gluten from my diet and finally my stomach never hurt again and the size of my tummy remains its normal size throughout the day.
Going the holistic route has been such an eye opener. I now know the importance of eating whole, organic foods. I learned that the food coloring ingredients is what gave me that sick and nauseous feeling when I used to drink orange flavored sodas. I learned that the reason my body got diarrhea week after week was its way of fighting of the highly processed lab-made ingredients found in diet sodas. I learned that the mental fog I experienced daily was a combo of hardly drinking water and eating lots of ‘food’ that came out of a box, frozen, canned or in a bag. Notice that I put the word ‘food’ with quotations. The reason being is that those things that I thought were food really weren’t. We may think they’re food because they look like food but in reality it’s man-made ingredients made in a lab. That’s not food and our body knows it. That’s exactly why it fights back in the form of headaches, body pain, constipation, diarrhea, throwing up, etc.
Real food is grown in the ground. It can be purchased through local farmers, in a farmer’s market, you can grow it yourself or you can find it ONLY in the outer section of the grocery store. Almost everything that’s found in the aisles of the grocery store is NOT real food. It’s processed junk packaged and marketed to make you believe it’s food.
As I dug deeper in my holistic research I learned that eating mostly raw foods has the ability to heal the body. It also has the ability to reverse a lot of diseases and to prevent them from even happening. I have seen a huge difference in my health, body, mind and attitude since I decided to let go of the processed food and instead consume real food.
Written by Dennisse Lisseth
Dennisse recently started her journey on choosing to live her life centered around health and fitness. Feel free to join her on her FB Page, Green, Healthy and Fit. On there you’ll find daily tips on living a healthy life, a daily dose of motivation, delicious recipes, and different types of workouts. https://www.facebook.com/greenhealthyandfit
