Today’s post is about the power of the words ‘Used to’ For example, I used to weigh over 300 lbs. I used to have chronic sinusitis, I used to have out-of-control allergies and I used to get 3-4 serious respiratory infections per year. I used to lay there at night unable to sleep because my lungs literally gurgled with fluids. I used to not be able to breathe at night cause my sinuses were so congested. I used to have an Afrin addiction, which damaged my sinuses permanently, just to be able to sleep. I used to suffer from chronic fatigue. I used to have depression and low motivation. All the above things are 100% true, of the conditions that used to define my life for over a decade, from my late 20s to late 30s. Here I was at my sickest:
But no longer. Whew! Not one of these conditions is present anymore, a fact for which I am incredibly grateful. It is very humbling and indeed a little painful to revisit this image and see where I used to be and to remember what it felt like. But it is also victorious to see where I have come from, and the challenges that I overcame. This is not to say I don’t have current health challenges. I think few people got through the pandemic unscathed, and my family and I took some significant health hits. I will be talking a great deal about my experience with COVID-19 in future posts, how it impacted my family's health, and how we treated it nutritionally. I sincerely hope that it will help you and your family if you have struggled with acute or long covid symptoms. That’s for next week. Today, I want to tell you all about how I created all those used to’s above.
I’m not going to dwell too much on why I got so sick. It really started when I moved to Tennessee, and after a few years of being here my childhood allergies for which I had been treated with biweekly shots for 5 years, came roaring back. My allergist said this is not rare, and oftentimes allergies return in someone’s 30s. The Nashville region is also famously bad for allergies, and they are more of an issue here than Arizona where I had moved from. I believe this is what led to the chronic sinusitis and lung infections and then I think my diet was iodine deficient enough to where I had mild hypothyroidism, which is why my eyes look the way they do in that photo, and I had such severe fatigue that I had to sit down and rest after getting out of bed in the morning and getting dressed. There was also the emotional stress of a failing marriage and a lot of self-dislike and feeling hopeless. I share these emotional struggles because I know that they are a very common part of so many of our experiences, and they contribute so much to our chronic health challenges. The bottom line is this-I was sick, exhausted, depressed, and didn’t see a whole lot of light at the end of the tunnel. This was at the end of 2014 and little did that guy in the picture know how much his life was about to change!
Around this time, my son was diagnosed with ADHD and mild ASD and my mom gave me a book by Dr Daniel Amen (thank God for mom’s!) Dr. Amen is a very interesting practitioner who specializes in nutritional therapeutics for ADHD and this book completely changed my life! He was talking about vitamins, minerals, and Amino acids to treat mental health. Never in my life had I heard of such things. I remember being so excited by this information. He recommended taking vitamin C as being important for neurotransmitter development (he’s not wrong!) and this led me to get a bottle of the cheapest possible vitamin C pills from Walgreens. I’m talking about the ones with no coating that get stuck in your throat and are hard to swallow! Nevertheless, I started feeling a little better by taking a small dose. This lit the match of my curiosity which ignited a firestorm of reading. I got the Mood Cure (which I can’t recommend enough for mental health) and then stumbled upon the immortal classic, How to Live Longer and Feel Better by the great master Dr. Linus Pauling which I got as a musty old paperback from the 70’s for like $1.50 and it changed my life.
As I read this book I felt like the secrets of health that my doctors knew nothing about, were being poured into my brain. I paid $100 and took Dr Andrew Saul’s Intro to Vitamin C course which gave me so many great how twos and depth of information. It was then got a bag of vitamin C powder and started taking 20-24 grams per day. I found a really great multivitamin and started taking vitamin D, iodine, and niacin-and a few other things. Within 3 weeks I was a new person. It was a miracle. For the first time in years, I could breathe! I could sleep! I should mention that by this time, I had already had sinus surgery a year prior in an attempt to fix my damaged sinuses and deviated septum, and I was back on very expensive allergy shots and drops. This all didn’t work worth a damn and cost me a fortune. Three weeks on orthomolecular treatment and my allergies were CURED! My sinusitis and lung infections were GONE. It’s been ten years, and these things have stayed gone. All from cheap, simple, vitamin C! I remember my depression suddenly lifting one day like my mind went pop! I could suddenly think clearly and feel like life was good again. It was a miracle. The fatigue dropped and I was inspired to change my diet and exercise and love myself enough to heal (this isn’t sentiment, I have found that you can’t change your life until you learn to love yourself a little more to endure the pain of change). I lost 60 lbs over the next year and found a new purpose in life-to help others find this healing and to share this knowledge with as many people as I could. I joined the big Vitamin C Facebook group and started trying to help everyone I could there. I enrolled in the Master’s Degree of Clinical Nutrition program at the University of Bridgeport, and spend the next 4 years completing this amazing degree which gave me so much knowledge of anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry. I learned functional and herbal nutrition as well as a deep knowledge of vitamins and minerals. I really wanted to have a profound depth of knowledge in this field, and make it my new career, after two decades spent in finance and business and trying to make it as a musician (lol) I also met the love of my life, my amazing Virginia, and we had a child together and went on a whole new adventure together. But it all started with simple ascorbic acid. The primal panacea as Dr Levy puts it. I also feel that even though COVID has hit me very hard, I might not have survived it if I hadn’t rebuilt my health with orthomolecuar nutrition, and then used my knowledge of it to get through it and recover. That’s for next time! Stay tuned for the new installment! And as always head over to my partner https://revitalizewellness.org/for all your vitamin C, niacin, and other orthomolecular treatments.