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Wednesday, August 17, 2016

Healing from NYC

Hi Everyone,

I just though I'd update you all on some stuff about my life.  In March of 2013, I got really sick from moving into a new apartment in Queens that had been heavily dosed with pesticide.  But the truth is, living in NYC AND having a diet that was wrong for me had been gradually wearing away at my health since I moved there.  After almost 2 decades in NYC, I moved to a cottage on a beautiful 5 acre property 75 miles outside NYC in order to detox, heal my body and learn to eat according to what my individual body needed.  It's been a long journey.

The first thing was to detox out all the pesticide, car exhaust and other poisons, mold and other things I had encountered since moving to NYC. I had been forced to live in substandard apartment buildings in the borroughs that had not been properly maintained, due to the Bohemian District of NYC that had been in the East Village being dismantled.  Your body is like a sponge, it can absorb toxins UP TO A POINT.  When it is fully saturated, that is the "tipping point" when you fall ill. But it has actually been building for a long time previously.  There are many ways to get the toxins back out of the body, such as sauna, exercising and sweating, drinking fresh vegetable juices, and the use of "binders" like Chlorella.  I learned to do all this and more.  Clearly, all those years of buildup will not be taken care of in just a few months - after a year of living in the cottage, I was still not fully healed.

One of the problems I had developed was the beginning stages of asthma.  This is clearly detrimental to a singer and bodybuilder like myself.  I have now reversed asthma and have no further problems breathing or singing, and run easily.  It took about 16 months.  When a problem like this reveals itself, it is essential that you take time off from whatever you were doing in order to reverse the disease process.  Being on "inhalers" and so forth is clearly unnacceptable to the body and unnacceptable to a health concious individual.  I now need not a single medication and have zero problems, just as I was before.  But it took a lot of research and time to figure out how to solve the problems.

I also had to learn what diet and supplements my individual body needed.  This took a lot of study and sifting through a lot of information.  Diet and supplementation is NOT "one size fits all".  I drew heavily from The Weston Price Foundation, Drs. Gonzalez, Isaacs, Beard and Kelley for information on traditional diets to formulate my perfect diet.  Now I eat a lot of surprising things such as highly purine meats like beef and lamb, Bone Broth made of these animals, organic grass fed butter and cream, sardines and herring, seaweed, and organ meats!  In NYC I had been lead to believe that I should live on vegetables, chicken and tofu.  This weakened my body and nervous system considerably over the years and caused me to have "brain fog".  In the past I responded to weight gain with "going vegetarin or vegin".  Although this caused me to drop several dress sizes, it weakened my skeleton, muscular system and nervous system.  I was teetering on the edge with a really weak body when I moved into the pesticide and mold apartments.  It's no wonder I had trouble.

In NYC it was difficult for me to run, due to street harrassment and nothing but pavement to choose as a running surface.  Because of this, I had only done Eliptical and Yoga, etc for many years.  I had to re-learn how to run and correct physical problems that I now call "Urban Joint Damage" using Pilates and Gymnastics moves.  It took almost a year before I could actually run again.  This was one of the most scary experiences because here in the USA, women need to be able to run.  It's a dangerous place and running is one of the most basic things you can do to defend yourself.  There are lot of people in NYC who have lost the ability to run, and that is very unfortunate for them.

These were by far not the only problems I experienced from living for an extended period of time in a heavily Urban environment, but they are examples of all the things I've been correcting in the past year and a half.  I'm happy to say that I joined my first Ballet Barre class in the past week, and added that to my exercise programme of Pilates, Running and regular calasthenics.  I will soon be starting Voice and Acting again, as the area I now live in has excellent classes.