Silu’s Story

My wellness journey really began as a toddler. When I was a young adult, my mother would recount stories about how as a baby I would stuff food in my mouth to look like a chipmunk and then guzzle down bottles of milk, only to complain about stomach pains later on. We all laughed at the stories because they seemed funny at the time. For much of elementary school through high school, I was a latch-key kid with unrestricted access to junk food in the house. We had a well-stocked house of packaged food because it was non-perishable (more like it was so processed it could withstand a nuclear explosion) and it was easy to prepare with minimal use of the stove. I tried my hand at cooking a few times after acquiring some skills by watching my mother (who was an exceptional cook), but without steady practice, supervision, or on-demand cooking shows, my interest in cooking was put on the backburner. 

While this style of eating did not manifest as a weight issue, there was lots of inner turmoil: anxiety, depression, digestive distress (think inner tube feeling right above the belly button), hormonal imbalances, fertility issues, debilitating menstrual cycles, and sleep disturbances. Plus I was chronically fatigued, so much so that friends would regularly make geriatric jokes about me. 

As with many stories when you decide to reverse course in life, there is some event, some rock bottom that you hit and you are slapped awake in the face. My story is no different. I got the phone call that my mom was killed in a car accident and while it took me a couple of years to process the accident and all that it meant, my about face started at this moment. I wanted to feel energized and purposeful and I did not. (It did not help that I was shoveling in leftover bits of whatever it was that I cooked for the kids, which left my energy zapped.) 

I did a full tour of various doctors who all said the same thing: your blood work is normal. They came up short with answers for why I didn’t feel great. Now in hindsight, it is easy to connect the dots. Certain foods didn’t work for my body, they created inflammation, caused my gut to grind to a halt and paved the way for further digestion woes, anxiety, and mental fog. Traumatic and stressful events compounded the digestive distress and threw my life off balance. 

Life and health ends up being a balancing act because something is usually out of balance. After spending years cycling in and out of balance as life around me happened and realizing that all the parts were actually intertwined, I decided to make this my calling. People need help. They want to feel good inside and out and there are tweaks and adjustments that we can all make to help us in this pursuit. Cooking and eating is the cornerstone of good health, but sometimes there are a lot of other factors at play in our lives such as daily stress, families, jobs, relationships, social obligations, finances, environmental toxins, parasites, gut bacteria, and our attitude that can impact us. Weeding through all of this information is the new way to well. 

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