How to Heal Your Health Yourself with Dietary Changes

eating for healthFor over a decade, I’ve had a horrible skin condition that I thought was acne that was creating acne-like breakouts over much of my body. Horrible, itchy, unsightly, slow-to-heal breakouts. Absolute torture. On areas of my body that had NEVER broken out in my whole life.

Because the onset of this acne-like skin sickness was sudden and emotional – the result of a significant relationship trauma – it never occurred to me to look to my diet for relief. Unfortunately, looking at diet never occurred to my doctors, either. Nope, I spent many thousands of dollars on expensive and risky Western medicine “treatments” that did not work. And no doctor ever mentioned energy healing or diet as an option for me.

When I did find energy healing, I went to work on healing those emotional and relationship traumas. I figured those were the root of my skin problem. And they were part of the problem. Because after I had cleared out a ton of trauma, my skin got substantially better. Instead of having my entire back, chest, and sides, actively broken out all the time … now the breakouts were more sporadic and self-contained. But they were still driving me … absolutely INSANE.

So it took many years on the spiritual and healing path before I began to see how the emotional traumas that I have suffered in relationships were related to a very surprising and seemingly unrelated issue: MY DIET.

Betrayed by men and their broken promises. I was the VICTIM. Yet, I learned as I went along, the truth is we are never victims. We can only experience at the hands of other people that which we already feel guilty about doing ourselves. And so my animal- and planet-exploiting diet WAS one of the causes of these relationship traumas. Here I was, so angry that men would use me for sex. And yet here I was, using animals for meat, fish, leather, dairy, cheese, and eggs … here I was, abusing the Feminine in the worst possible ways (think dairy cows, gestation crates for pigs, laying hens) … here I was participating in a mainstream culture that continues to destroy the planet with pesticides, GMO, rapid destruction of the rainforests and the oceans … with our insatiable APPETITES and greed.

Here were these men claiming to “love” women while they lied, cheated, and stole to get a moment of ego-based conquest and pleasure. Using women to build up their status with other men. How horrible!

The mirror. Here I was claiming to “love” animals while I callously participated in a system designed to exploit and torture them. While I stole the flesh from their bodies, the babies from their mothers, and the milk from their breasts, and denied them the right to live.

Here we are destroying the planet because we refuse to look within, we refuse to consider the consequences of our actions. Our beautiful planet, pitted with scars and ravaged by disease.

The mirror. Here is my skin in a seemingly never-ending cycle of itchy, distracting breakouts. My back and buttocks and chest and breasts and neck all beginning to look like our pock-marked Mother Earth. With scars that seem to be beyond healing.

OH. MY. GOD.

By destroying the animals and the planet, we are destroying ourselves. Every human disease is a boomerang effect of our unethical actions toward others. And I was refusing to look at the impact of my diet as the cause of anything.

How could I be so blind?

I have cursed this skin affliction for years, and before my spiritual journey began … I attempted to have it lasered, Accutane, all kinds of topical treatments, etc. When I got into energy healing, it improved a lot but I would still get flare-ups on a regular basis.

My chronic pain had all but disappeared. I was able to do squats without pain, a miracle for me! I lost weight without having to work hard at it.

So why was my skin not fully healing? I. FELT. SO. F-ING. FRUSTRATED.

It’s not like I could ignore it, either. NO. This skin condition itched like a mofo, demanding my attention. Distracting me from focusing on anything else. Nagging at me constantly.

I was making lifestyle changes throughout these years, such as quitting my stressful job and working from home, I became vegetarian but was still eating dairy and eggs, beginning to become more aware of not eating GMO and choosing more organic. I started making smoothies. I started eating at home more often. I was also making ethical changes. More recycling. Less fossil fuel usage.

eft tapping for weight loss

Meanwhile, I had already seen many improvements in health, fitness, and beauty – EFT tapping for weight loss delivers amazing results

So much improvement in my skin and my life but it was obvious I was still missing something.

What was my blind spot? What was the missing link? It felt SO. FRUSTRATING. Clearly I was not listening to my messages from the Universe.

Well, over a year ago now, I went vegan for ethical reasons. I did not, at a conscious level, go vegan to improve my skin. That only turned out to be an unintended side benefit (more below). I’d already had the beginning of my “a-ha” moment. I had already gone vegetarian 2.5 years earlier because I realized that using killing animals for food was no better than my ex using and “killing” me for sex. They call it “men on the hunt” to refer to men seeking sexual conquest from women. Men who take what they can get and throw the sentient being away in the trash. I WAS DOING THE SAME THING TO ANIMALS.

So first it was vegetarian. As a vegetarian, I made other changes too. I began purchasing more organic foods. I lost weight with my 30-Day Health & Fitness Challenge. After that, I felt drawn to join the smoothie trend. Not juicing because I wanted to keep the fiber. I was eating more fresh fruits and veggies ground to a pulp in my blender.

But vegetarian for me was not driven by health concerns or wanting to improve my skin. Later it turned out to be related, but in a roundabout way that I was not seeing at that time. I went vegetarian for ethical reasons. I did not under any circumstances want to be like my ex, who lied to women, used women, conquested women, and threw them away.

I had visions of dairy cows and laying hens at organic farms HAPPILY producing milk and eggs for me. Probably the same exact way my ex deluded himself into thinking he was HELPING women by lying to them and using them. More and more I was seeing the mirror, how I was exactly like him. I was the asshole. Just like him. I thought vegetarian took me a step up on the vibrational scale.

Ah … but then the more I learned about the dairy, veal, and egg industries … and I realized that’s exactly what the dairy, veal, and egg industries are … Enslavement of the feminine to be used, manipulated, tortured, consumed, and discarded. Just like my asshole ex.

So I went vegan. Fuck if I was going to be like my asshole ex in any way, shape, or form. I realized that my dietary habits made me the asshole. Just like him. No better than him. An exact mirror of him. And I started to fear the karmic impact of my unethical choices.

He was an asshole, and so was I !!!

Vegan. I had no freaking clue how to do this. I had been addicted to dairy and cheese. It was hard at first to stop eating those foods. I didn’t know what to replace them with. And it turns out that dairy is highly addictive. So most people go through a kind of drug withdrawal when they finally stop eating them. It was hard to stop eating cheese. I began making organic homemade hummus as a replacement. This felt good to me. It turns out that garbanzo beans, a key ingredient of hummus, are a good source of the little-known nutrient inositol. Inositol was probably helping my skin and helping me feel better. Among many other micro-nutrients that I was starting to get from eating brand new foods.

After I gave up dairy and eggs, my esthetician and I both noticed a significant change very quickly, that my skin was less inflamed. The breakouts I was getting on my buttocks nearly completely cleared within a few months. And I was having fewer breakouts around my breasts and chest (feminine tied to dairy and eggs, torture and early slaughter of female animals). Still problem not solved though – so frustrating!!

Oh, did I mention that the vomiting with my menstrual cycles stopped? Yea except for that one month when I messed up and ate some cheese again. Then the vomiting came back. Let’s see … abuse and destruction of the Feminine in the dairy industry … horrific menstrual cycles … are you seeing the connections, like I did?

Eating out became very challenging for me. I mostly started preparing food at home. For some reason though in the summer of 2014, I felt guided to eat at restaurants for a few weeks. I was mostly eating vegan sushi at a nearby restaurant. What I didn’t consider is that I was probably eating GMO, pesticide- and arsenic-laden rice and sake, non-organic vegetables, very high-glycemic and low-vibration foods by eating out …

This eating out at restaurants led to a mini health crisis.
The breakouts were increasing. My eyes felt weird. For the first time in my life, I broke out with something entirely new … some kind of eczema or psoriasis over both of my eyelids!

I did a bunch of research on the internet but still felt mystified about what was happening to me. Celiac, leaky gut, diabetes, systemic candida infection … it never became clear to me as my symptoms seemed to overlap with so many other conditions. Indeed, what did become very clear to me in this research that I was not alone in this horror. That a huge proportion of people in the Western world have developed some chronic disease or another, with mysterious and overlapping symptoms … and still very few people are looking at their diet as the cause.

Meanwhile, I had also done a bunch of research about non-organic and GMO food. Many GMO crops are engineered to RUPTURE the stomachs of insects! And we wonder why we have an epidemic of “leaky gut” type illnesses? I learned more about how pesticides are killing birds, bats, bees, fish, and countless other creatures by the millions.

I began noticing the “allergy” notices on food labels. Wheat, corn, soy, rice, dairy, eggs, shellfish … why on earth are so many people allergic to so many foods that are used as staples in our Western diets?

healing yourself with diet

Organic veggies now have a much more prominent place in my diet

All this time, I was tapping and tapping and tapping for Divine Guidance. I have not edited or released those videos and perhaps I never will.

Eating out would have to cease, because there was no way for me to ensure that I would be eating all organic and non-GMO foods. Indeed, I couldn’t possibly know what crap they were putting in my food at a restaurant, or even at a friend’s house.

Toward the end of last year, with still no clear answer, and beginning to experience a lot of fear about my overall health, I recorded the 30-Day Heal Your Shadow Self Challenge. It was not lost on me that most of the horrific diseases on our planet are diseases of INFLAMMATION and BLOCKAGE. My chronic skin condition was clearly inflammatory and blocking (of pores). I felt scared when I read that the liver when overloaded will use the skin as a detoxifying organ. For over a decade, my liver has been clogged up and using my skin to detox my body? If all this inflammation was happening in my skin, what was happening inside my body? I learned more about the long-term impact of a metabolic disorder that I had been diagnosed with earlier in my life. I did a bunch of research for my mother, who is diabetic. All of this coming to conscious awareness was absolutely terrifying.

On the other hand, I thought, the skin condition was at its worst years ago now. If I’ve managed to reduce so much inflammation already with my holistic healing method … well, it must be that I’m just missing something.

So as I continued to tap for guidance, I got that intuition to create the 30-Day Shadow Self Challenge. And one of the metaphors I used in that Challenge was the skin on my back. It was the perfect metaphor for our Shadow Self because it’s the part of us that is hard to see.

The combination of my online research and the 30-Day Shadow Self Challenge led me to begin a series of elimination diets. This process felt extremely frustrating because isolating which foods were causing the problems required a ton of trial and error. And then when I made mistakes, breakouts would take a while to heal. I seemed to be caught in an endless cycle of this.

But …as I started to pay closer attention, I noticed it was not true that the breakouts were breeding for weeks and appearing “at random.” No … they were appearing exactly about 1-2 hours after eating certain foods. And when I stopped eating those foods, my skin would get better.

The foods that were causing my remaining breakouts SHOCKED ME. I had been brainwashed my whole life to think that whole grains are “packed with nutrition and good for me.” Ah … not so.

It quickly became apparent that GRAINS were the main culprit for my remaining breakouts.

sugar addiction

It turns out that many grains act in the body just like white sugar!

Oh how I have always loved bread. And did you know that most breads have a glycemic index and effect on the body pretty much exactly like … yes … WHITE SUGAR.

Non-organic grains were far worse than organic grains, but all of them were making me itch and break out within a couple hours of consuming them – on a fairly regular basis. When I tapped this inflammatory reaction, it improved somewhat. I could eat organic grains sometimes with no problems. But the more I researched about wheat, corn, and rice, the more I felt inclined just to let them go. It turns out that even whole grains (especially non-fortified whole grains) are NOT packed with nutrition … not compared to what I can be eating instead … Nuts, seeds, legumes, mushrooms, algae, sea vegetables, veggies, and fruits.

Hopefully, you can see by now that all of this is less about biology than it is about ethics.

I’m still ferreting out the ethical reasons why I might be called to cut out all grains. One may be that grains have been so manipulated and contaminated by mankind’s misguided GMO and other unethical efforts … that they simply have to be eliminated. I don’t know … more inquiry is needed.

I also cut out nearly all sugar, though I can eat some sugar without breaking out. The more I learned about the inflammatory nature of sugar, the more motivated I became to find alternatives such as dates, bananas, and blackstrap molasses (much lower glycemic index than sugar). I have not yet tried coconut nectar but I have a bottle of it on the shelf to try.

Technically, honey is not considered vegan by many vegans but I am still undecided about whether it has a place in my diet.

As I went along, more skin-destroying culprits became clear. Agave nectar, nearly all processed foods, and soy to name a few, all made me break out. I experimented with a few kinds of vegan “cheese” but every single version makes me break out. They tend to be non-organic and contain soy, “modified food starch,” agave nectar, and sometimes all of the above :(

So here now are the foods I’ve cut out. I find it interesting that I have now seen posts by people who beat their cancer or other chronic disease with diet. They made similar changes to their diet.

Foods that I have eliminated:
Meat
Fish
Dairy
Eggs
GMO
Non-organic food
Processed food (including store-bought vegan “cheeses” – if it has an ingredient like “modified food starch” or is not organic, RUN)
Wheat
Corn
Rice
Soy
Miso
Anything with weird or “modified” ingredients
Hydrogenated anything
Almost all sugar
Agave nectar

As I cut all of these things out of my diet, my skin stopped breaking out. If I make even a tiny exception, my skin lets me know I made a mistake by breaking out again almost immediately.

Again, I ran into addictions. I absolutely was addicted to wheat, which apparently acts like an opiate in the body. And I was emotionally addicted to many of the other foods I’ve listed here. Fortunately, my holistic healing method allows us to break free from our addictions so we can embrace a healthier lifestyle.

Now, I am waking up more days than not with happy skin. And when my skin does break out, at least now I know where to look for the cause of it. If there is so much less inflammation and blockage in my skin, imagine what is happening at the deeper levels of my body …

I thought my skin condition was “one of the worst things that ever happened to me.” But perhaps it has saved my life.

Maybe one day I’ll say the same thing about my ex, because the long-term impact of that relationship is for me to embrace permanent celibacy. And don’t think for a minute that all this abstention from food and abstention from sex are not related … but that is WAY TOO MUCH to get into in this article. Maybe by making the aftermath of sex SO AWFUL THAT I NEVER WANT TO HAVE IT AGAIN … just as my skin has made the aftermath of wheat SO AWFUL THAT I NEVER WANT TO HAVE IT AGAIN … maybe my ex saved my life.

How’s that for a cliff-hanger? ;)

All right, boy this article got long … Now, please don’t think I’m going to leave you hanging. God never asks us to make big changes like this without offering us a better option to replace it! So probably I need to write a part 2 about the new and exciting foods that I have added to my diet.

Stay tuned … :)

Love,

erika awakening