Quit now, you'll never make it. If you disregard this advice, you'll be halfway there.
David Zucker
US movie director (1947 - )

I’m starting this blog hoping to connect with other people who are raw, trying to be raw, or generally interested in their health. This is a record of my journey so far, and the transformative events that have occurred in my life as a result of drastically changing my diet.

Most of my life I had been really healthy, or so I thought, until 1999, after my first year of law school, when I got my first real migraine. Until then, I had “regular” illnesses like colds and flus, but in November of 1999 my life completely changed. I got my first major migraine, my whole body hurt, and I got my moon for a full two weeks, ending up at the end of that episode passing out on my kitchen floor – not really knowing why. Not knowing what was happening, I went to a gynecologist who found a hard lump in my breast that concerned him enough that he made an appointment for me to have a mammogram. By the time I got the mammogram done in January of 2000, the lump was miraculously gone, but life as I’d always known it changed completely, unbeknownst to me.

Migraines became a regular occurrence in my life that year, as did body pain, especially around my joints. In the winter of 2000, I slipped on ice and broke my arm, ripped my rotator cuff, and damaged the nerve bundle in the front of my chest. It took me 7 months to finally heal from that. In the meantime, by Winter 2000/2001, I had started to have severe abdominal distress, with constant diarrhea. After six months of doctors, tests, hospitals, and severe weight loss, I was finally given a diagnosis by a doctor that found something in one of my blood tests – Systemic Lupus.

By this point, every part of my body was in so much pain that it hurt to have a sheet on my legs or feet, and every movement was excruciating. I was emaciated from the chronic diarrhea, and living in a state of complete exhaustion had become my new “norm.” Getting a diagnosis made me a bit hopeful, because I thought that I would be cured, until I was told that there is no cure for Lupus, and that instead, my life would now revolve around constant medication.

From 2001 until 2008, my life was a revolving door, in and out of emergency rooms and doctors offices. I gained and lost weight, depending on how I felt, finally reaching 194.5 pounds in the Fall of 2008. I lived on a constant variety of medication – narcotics, barbiturates, steroids, malaria medication, and non-steroidal anti-inflammatories – and one small bottle of Advil every day. I managed to get to work most of the time, but was out sick often, including 3 weeks in 2007 from pain so horrible that I couldn’t walk without crying.

I was severely depressed, coming home from work every day and lying in bed staring at the television until the next day came to go to work and do it again.

Christmas of 2007, I saw a friend that I hadn’t seen in a really long time, and she looked so different that I couldn’t believe it. She was glowing, and her eyes sparkled with light. When I asked her what she was doing, she told me that she was on a raw food diet. I asked some basic questions, but really had no idea what she was talking about – only knew that she looked totally amazing. Over Spring of 2008, I was reading an article online, and the person mentioned that they had healed themselves with a raw food diet, and that same year, another friend of mine was doing a modified raw diet. I had been reading quite a bit by this time, and was interested, but it still hadn’t clicked. I was still as sick as ever, but ready and willing to try anything, so by the end of that summer, I went 100% raw overnight. At the time, I had read so many articles advising that when you go raw not to worry about how much or what you are eating, but just that you stay raw, so I did just that – eating a ton of raw food all of the time basically – and mainly super high fat.

Even though I had quit smoking and wasn’t exercising, I gained no weight – which is completely miraculous really. All I really did was eat and sleep and poop. Like a baby. The raw food was working for sure. My skin started glowing and I had a ton of energy, even though I was absorbing mega-fats. There are so many already-prepared raw foods now, and I live near a few Whole Foods Markets (an amazing place to get things raw) and Arnold’s Way, a raw café and store. People were commenting on how my skin glowed and how my eyes shone all of the time after only a few months, but I was starting to get disillusioned.

I had read so many articles and books where people that were raw said they ate whatever they want and lost weight, or that you could eat as much as you want on the raw food diet and lose weight, and I had not dropped any weight at all! Slowly and slowly, I started to eat vegetarian cooked food again.

Then the weight started piling on fast – all the way to 194.5 pounds. I was horrified, and mortified, and couldn’t stand to be inside of my skin. Not only was I fat, but I felt horrible again.

I got an email that our work was putting on a “Biggest Loser” contest, and decided to enter. I started working out every day and eating a super low-fat and low-calorie diet, which did include low-fat Moosetracks ice cream every night. Even though I was eating “junk” food, the weight started to drop, and I went down to around 173 pounds, but I was in trouble again.

I had started to feel an occasional pain on my right side that would come and go, or be more painful or less painful. All of my Lupus symptoms were back, and I was back on all of my meds. I was missing time at work again, and exhausted most of the time. And I was depressed. Over the next couple of months, the pain in my right side became more profound and stayed for longer intervals of time. I ended up in an ER on my birthday the January of 2009, was diagnosed with gas, and sent home after a whopping shot of Demerol that had me thinking I was going to die from a hospital-induced drug overdose.

The pain did not go away, and by the end of that week, I was in an emergency doctor’s appointment. The doctor put me straight into the hospital on heavy pain medicine and they started running tests. I’ve had that many tests for sure over the last few years, but never that much dye. Everything they did seemed to have some other kind of dye in it. I was not being allowed to eat anything but clear liquid (which I now believe was likely making my symptoms more pronounced because I was cleansing, and being pumped full of toxins). Within a couple of days, they had determined that my gall bladder was operating at 12% normal capacity, and through an emergency surgery, removed it on a Sunday early in February.

I was devastated. I knew better. After everything that I had read about being raw, I could not believe this had happened. I could not believe that I had gotten this sick again, and believed that I had created this situation, and that it was my fault that I had lost an organ.

It took me about a month to heal from the surgery, and longer to heal emotionally. I knew the answer, but was so devastated emotionally to have lost an organ, that it took me a while to get into “solution” mode. I still don’t fully understand why I was as upset as I was, but the emotional backlash from that surgery still haunts me today.

It took me until July of 2009 to get the determination and strength of will to try my hand at being raw again. I had done a lot more reading at that point, and was reading Angela Stokes-Monarch’s blog every day, where she lists what she eats – very low-fat and very green. I was also watching “The Raw Food World” with Angela and her husband, Matt Monarch, and learning a lot of new information. Through this reading, I stumbled on the concept of Juicefeasting, and signed up for the Juicefeasting website, where I started reading about even deeper cleansing, eventually completing a 144-day juice feast.

I am still very much a work in process. I don’t do this thing perfectly by any means, and I am still learning, but one day at a time, I have become a different person. This blog is my attempt to share that experience with you, and in so doing, help keep myself motivated for health.

Blissings to you!!

Kelly