Sometimes you gotta save your own life.

Sometimes you gotta save your own life.

Do you believe in miracles? To what degree do you think you are capable of healing yourself? Do you think that how you think could be affecting your ability to feel better than you feel today?

There have been a lot of people I can credit with saving my life through 3 life-altering auto-immune disease diagnoses and two heart surgeries. There’s the 3 endocrinologists I saw, the nurses, diabetic educators and dieticians, the 3 gastroenterologists, the 2 cardiologists. It’s not easy to keep this girl healthy.
But do you know who I give the most credit to? I give credit to a woman I’ve never met, whose documentary I had seen years before I had been diagnosed with any diseases. Her name is Kris Carr. Maybe you’ve heard of her. Back when I began following her in 2007, nobody knew who she was. Now-a-days, it seems most people know of her. She became “famous” when she created a documentary about her cancer diagnosis; a cancer with no known cure or treatment. A woman whom most of the nation’s most credible physicians say she essentially cured herself.

I read all of Kris’s books and really admired her for her zest for life and her spirit, and her never-give-up mentality. After my 3rd auto-immune disease diagnosis in July 2010 and on the verge of being diagnosed with a 4th, I dug out all of her books and started taking notes. My immune system was on an acute attack- attacking itself- and there wasn’t a doctor on the planet that could stop it. I had literally been told there wasn’t anything that could be done to stop my immune system from attacking and killing off all of my organs. Being on the cusp of a 4th auto-immune disease diagnosis, I realized the wait-and-see approach wasn’t going to work; I was going to die if I didn’t do something.

Not knowing where else to turn, I started taking notes from Kris’s books, which focused on clean eating and lifestyle management (getting rid of “stinking thinking” is what she liked to call it). I knew needed a full mind cleanse; I needed to believe I had the ability to turn things around. I knew I had to try something to calm my immune system DOWN. I started seeing a wellness dietician (a wonderful woman who was a master’s program graduate from the Univ of Michigan) and started eating an immune-system calming diet, which included cutting out sugar (even the good kinds) and eating only certain whole foods. I ate the same foods every day. I started meditation at home, reading ONLY positive thinking books and watching ONLY positive thinking tv (I stopped watching just about everything, try finding “positive” things on tv!). Anything that was toxic in my life, from food to people to reading material was OUT.

And when I told my doctors what I was doing, they looked at me with puppy-dog eyes and heads tilted to the side, as if to say “poor girl; she thinks she can do something about this.” A few doctors didn’t even try to pretend; they flat out told me that what I was doing wouldn’t help.

But guess what, they were wrong.

After a full year of declining health and poor blood work results (blood work that was tested every 3-4 weeks for an entire year), I decided to make some changes. And after one full month of turning my life upside down with diet and lifestyle changes, my blood work came back CLEAN. Absent of auto-immune disease markers. For the first time in a year, all tests for new diseases came back negative and even my doctors were nothing short of amazed. I was just told again last month in January during my visit at the Mayo Clinic that still, almost two years later, I am the only patient they have seen like me; that had 3 auto-immunes diagnosed in a 5-month period; a patient whose severe blood work markers, present for a year, literally disappeared.
Nobody has to prove to me that there is a God. I believe in miracles. And I also know that what YOU believe you are capable of, and what your body is capable of, affects your healing. Garbage in, garbage out!

I know everyone has their beliefs but mine is that we have the power to change our health. Maybe that won’t always come in the form of a complete cure, but maybe in the form of improvement and prevention. I’m wondering if anyone else believes the same way.