Healing Through a Raw Foods Diet
by Shelly Borsits
My nightmare began at the end of 1996. At 25 I was what society would consider healthy. I ate what I thought was a well balanced diet and I was fit and very active. I felt good, had a great boyfriend, now husband, and life was good.. How drastically everything would change.
I started to fall ill. Terribly ill. It began with a migraine that came one day and never left. Accompanying the migraine was a pain at the base of my skull and severe muscle tightness, and pain. My muscles in my neck and shoulders became as hard as rocks and nothing would relax them.
Over the next six years I would bounce from various types of doctors and specialists in the allopathic medical community (conventional medicine). No doctor could help me and my list of symptoms kept getting longer. Added to the debilitating migraines and muscle tightness, fatigue and pain was 50 lb weight gain, extreme excitability, and nervousness, panic attacks, shortness of breath, great loss of libido, painful intercourse, fibrocystic breasts, irregular heart beat, chronic sinus infections, yeast infections, lowered immune system and more.
My body was falling apart. I felt like a 20 something trapped in the body of an 80 year old - but not a healthy 80 year old, a dying 80 year old.
I was taking all of the drugs the doctors were prescribing to me but none of them helped me. In fact, they only made my condition worse. I was suicidal from the pain. I was merely existing, not living. All the while I was trying to 'pretend' to family and friends that I was 'alright'. I had to go about daily life. I had to function.
No X-ray, MRI, CT Scan or blood test could find anything wrong with me. Every test said 'you are not sick', but I was in torturous pain.
If I had to go around family and friends I would take Excedrin migraines, make my appearance, and then come home and drop in exhaustion from the pain and pretending. Sometimes pretending to feel 'good' was harder than living in pain. My husband watched me cry every day from the pain. My muscles were so hard, so sore, he couldn't even touch me to massage me to try and alleviate some of the pain.
Thank God for a wonderful man! He stuck by me every step of the way and helped me with everything. Normal every day chores, like washing the dishes caused me terrible pain. I would have to the dishes sitting on a stool because my legs were to sore to hold me up. I could not bend over to tie my shoes without an intense feeling of strangulation. I would start to black out every time I bent over. My husband would tie my shoes for me many days as just tilting my head downward would cause me to feel as if I was going to pass out.
I also started to lose feeling in my face and extremities. One day it was so bad my mother thought I was having a stroke and rushed me to the doctor. After about 10 minutes in his office the symptoms started to subside. This loss of feeling would come and go over a period of a couple of years but my doctor could never find a 'reason' as to why it was happening.
I was eventually told by a doctor that he thought I had Fibromyalgia and that it was incurable. He said he could give me drugs to make it a little more 'livable', but that it could not be cured. I turned to the Internet to do research on Fibromyalgia and I found a story of a women who had fallen ill after having taken the birth control injections of depo provera. That made a light bulb go off in my head.
The doctor who told me he believed I was suffering from Fibromyalgia said: "Shelly you've been coming in her since January 1997 with these exact same symptoms. Did you have a car accident or a fall, blow to the head, anything around that time?" I told him "No", but then it hit me. I had started the injections of birth control around that time. I found out when my first shot was by calling the doctors office who had given them to me years earlier.
My first shot was in November of 1996. By January of 1997 I was already at my third doctor with complaints of migraines, pain at the base of my skull and muscle pain and tightness. All three doctors told me it could not be the shots making me sick so I never thought of it again. I should have trusted my instincts, but hindsight is 20/20.
I put my story online at:
www.abcinternetmarketing.com/depo-provera
Almost instantly women all over the world started to email me, telling me their horror stories about what happened to them as a result of the birth control related injections of depo provera.
At that point I turned my back on conventional medicine. I refused to believe Fibromyalgia was incurable. I couldn't continue with life if it meant dealing with this severe pain on a daily basis. I did leave conventional medicine, but very unfortunately, I jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire.
I decided to try alternative therapies, but there too I was lost. Nothing was working. I was lost in the maze of alternative healing. I spent thousands of dollars but I never got well. I tried homeopathic remedies, whole system health scan, cranio sacral therapy, deep tissue massage, etc., etc., but nothing worked. The pain was still there and on the homeopathic drops I was once again getting worse.
I told myself at that point 'You have two choices, 1) get well or 2) die'. Again I was suicidal from the pain and the frustration that nothing I did would alleviate the pain.
God answered my prayers and got me in the hands of a nutritionist named Paula who put me on a 30 day raw food diet, followed by a two week juice fast. After those six weeks I went to a vegan diet for months which was 'high raw', at 80 to 90% raw.
Currently I am 100% raw and feeling MARVELOUS.
I don't know if I will go back to cooked vegan foods ever, it is too early to say. I had to make more than just dietary changes - I also had to make strict lifestyle changes.
I have incorporated daily exercise, fresh air, with at least a 1/2 hour outdoors daily, sunshine, rest, both physical and mental, and I had to let go of all negativity. I had to let go of any anger or hatred that I held towards others. I also had to remove myself from being around negative people.
You can all probably relate to this. Do you have anyone in your life that puts you in a bad mood just because they are always so negative and in bad moods? If so, you will have to stay away from these negative people. It is an entire dietary and lifestyle change that must be made.
I had a lot of 'un' learning to do. Everything I had been taught about nutrition and health was wrong. The doctor's drugs are not safe. The doctor's drugs do not cure, only our bodies can cure, and they can only do that if we set for them the proper conditions to do so.
While depo provera was by far the worst thing that has ever happened to me in life, it was also the best thing to have ever happened to me too! Had I not fallen so desperately ill I do not know if I would have ever made a change to this new lifestyle of natural hygiene (plant-based vegan diet, raw food, exercise, physical and mental rest, sunshine, pure water, fresh air).
I believe everything that happens to us in life happens to us for a specific reason. I wholeheartedly believe that God intended for me to learn the lessons of natural hygiene, and that is why I had to take the journey I did.
Whether it was just to help myself, or whether it was for the purpose of being able to share my information with others, I'll never know. One thing is for certain, I'm thankful for it.
For more information on Shelly's book Dying To Get Well, the detailed, step-by-step accounts she took to CURE her so-called, 'incurable' disease, go to her web site:
http://www.dyingtogetwell.com
For free online support about the raw foods diet, natural hygiene principles, fasting, etc. please go to her message boards at:
http://pub41.ezboard.com/bdepoprovera
To view Shelly's dramatic before (while sick) and after pictures please go to:
http://www.rawandjuicy.com/shelly.html
To view Shelly's Depo Provera Horror Stories web site please go to:
http://www.abcinternetmarketing.com/depo-provera
