The Body Doesn't Lie (9 page)

When you start from a place of safety and confidence, you are equipped with skills that help you tackle any challenge. Whether or not your parents loved you, whether you grew up within a dysfunctional family dynamic, whether you ate fresh whole foods or lots of processed foods, whether or not you were encouraged to enjoy moving your body—all these issues factor into the resilience of your Adaptive Response, the ability of your body to rebound from stress in a positive way. A stable foundation allows you to maintain a healthy state more easily and for longer periods of time. But an unstable foundation left over from your formative years can perpetuate emotional pain and create physical pain—the kind of pain that brings many patients to my office—until you can learn a
new
way..

In many ways, I feel as if I were born to do this work. While I was growing up, Dad traveled to Australia and America, teaching tennis professionally for the Greek national team and setting up tennis camps. Sometimes we’d travel as a whole family and stay at the camp together all summer. Dad would teach tennis, mom would teach yoga, and we’d have a free holiday. Along with yoga, Mom taught classes on nutrition and was a massage therapist. She was a budding health guru at a time when those kinds of ideas were just starting to catch on in Greece. She had full faith in the mind’s ability to heal and control the body.

My positive relationship with my parents helped me to avoid many of the challenging problems young women encounter with fear or a lack of self-confidence. Surprisingly, though, it was this strong connection with my family that was a root cause of my first health crisis.

My grandmother was always there for us. I used to go to her house on the weekends, and I loved being there. Every time we visited, she spent hours in the kitchen. My mom would say, “Grandma is baking this cake with love for us.” And while I understood the spirit of what she was saying, those cakes from Grandma didn’t love my body in return. In fact, those cakes taught me a huge lesson about the power of foods to hurt—and to heal.

Grandma made her living by cooking. When I went to her house or visited her at one of the hotels on the Greek islands where she worked, I had multiple helpings of the big carrot cakes, orange cakes, and other goodies that she baked up. And then I would go home and get sick. The first time this happened I was sixteen, but it took a while before I finally made the connection: Every time I went to Granny’s house and ate those Greek cheese pies with all that cow’s milk and drank all that orange juice, I would end up with cold sores and eczema.

My mom had always made sure we ate extremely health-promoting food at home. A sugar treat was a major deal. (“It’s your birthday—oh, okay, you’re allowed a birthday cake.”) We would eat “naughty” things only at Grandma’s. Although Grandma had her own fruit and vegetables growing in the back garden, and she produced her own honey and olive oil, she always felt that we needed a treat. She was up early, at 4:00 or 5:00
A
.
M
., cooking cakes and pies for our
breakfast.

My mom knew that this gave her own mother tremendous pleasure. Food was love for Granny, and Mom wouldn’t dream of forbidding her mom to bake for me. What Mom did instead was help me understand what the food was doing to
me.

One method Mom used might surprise you: She weighed me every day. She didn’t do this to shame me. On the contrary, my weight range was essential health information, data that could help me get more in tune with changes in my body. As we stood together in the bathroom, Mom taught me a whole regimen. I was to look at myself in the mirror every day, then weigh myself, then use a dry brush all over my body—all practices I’ve been doing every day for over twenty years.

I didn’t know then how much of an impact this ritual would have on my life. Back then I was just doing as I was told. Now, though, I credit my mom with helping me know and listen to my body. The daily regimen has given me a close and vital connection to the daily ebbs and flows of my body. Doing the ritual every morning is like getting a status report on my body’s journey on the continuum between Positive and Negative Feedback.

Early on, I didn’t make (or didn’t want to make) the connection that the foods I was eating at my grandmother’s house were making me feel bad. Whenever Grandma found out that I was feeling sick, she insisted that I drink orange juice to make me feel better.

Bigger cold sores. More yummy cake.

My mom would simply state the facts. “Vicky, you’ve come back from Grandma’s and you’ve got cold sores.” I would wake up with neck pain and Mom would say, “You’re bloated and you’ve gained two kilos. What did you eat?” Well, pizza, pasta, spinach pie, and cheese pie, Mom—why do you ask?

Seems like a joke to me now—how could I not have seen the connection? All that dairy and refined flour (pizza, pasta, pies) was acidifying my system and triggering an inflammatory response that came out in cold sores, eczema, and bloating. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized that food made a huge day-to-day difference in how I felt.
The body doesn’t lie.

Fortunately, my mom knew what I was going through—not just the obvious things like my gaining weight or getting cold sores, but how I
felt.
The thing that had inspired her to learn about nutrition years earlier had been the intestinal problems she’d endured while growing up with the same diet that was now plaguing me.

Like her, I wanted to be a healer. And like her, I had to learn to treat myself first. But I didn’t fully realize how important nutrition was until I was twenty-two or twenty-three—and those yummy cakes were starting to seriously threaten my long-term health.

In 1993 I traveled to London to study to be an osteopath, first at the British School of Osteopathy, then at the European School of Osteopathy, where I was one of the first women to receive a master of science degree. A form of “manual therapy” that centers on the relationship between the structure and function of the body, osteopathy doesn’t use surgery or drugs, but instead taps into the body’s own self-healing mechanisms to treat illness and disease. I was drawn to holistic osteopathy because it’s about the
whole
body. I studied the research behind everything I’d learned at home: To be strong, you must exercise; for strong, pain-free muscles, you have to avoid certain foods; to be healthy and happy, you have to look after your mental and spiritual health.

I had been brought up with all those elements, and was thrilled to find a career that would combine my passions and my work. I couldn’t get enough: While I was busy with my studies, I was also meeting nutritionists, homeopaths, and Chinese herbalists, and immersing myself in the fascinating world of integrated medicine.

Yet—and you might think this is crazy—even while I was studying osteopathy, learning all these things, I was
still
going to my grandmother’s whenever I was back in Greece, and eating lots of cakes and sweets. Clearly, I still hadn’t
truly
made the connection. I certainly recognized good nutrition as the ideal, but it wasn’t until I endured major pain that I really changed my diet, and my life, forever.

My problems started with lower back pain and knee pain. I was gutting it out through long days and nights, taking classes, learning how to treat patients. I lived on diet soda and sugar-filled yogurt. At the end of each long day, my lower back would ache and my knees felt like they belonged to a sixty-year-old woman, not a vital woman in her early twenties. Gradually, I also began to feel a dull ache in my lower abdomen that became more regular and more intense.

I lived with the aches and pains, and their increasing intensity, for about a year before I went to get them checked out. My general practitioner from the National Health Service in London gave me a cursory going-over, told me that I was constipated and bloated, and sent me home with a prescription for stool softener.

I knew the problem was much bigger; this wasn’t going to help me. Finally, I did what I should have done months earlier: I called my mom.

“Vicky, please just fly to Greece tomorrow,” she pleaded. She wanted to take me to her father’s friend, an ob-gyn my mom had known her whole life. Grateful for her help, I hung up and bought my plane ticket.

Sitting in his office two days later, I learned where the pain was coming from. “Wow, you’re either four months pregnant, or you have a huge cyst,” he said, after examining me. “Let’s jump in my car right away. If you were my daughter, I would trust only one colleague—he’s an expert in laparoscopy. I’ll get you in to see him.” He shook his head. “If he can’t do it, I’ll need to operate on you myself. I don’t want you to lose an ovary.”

The treatment moved very quickly. The laparoscopic expert operated on me the next morning, and the cyst was removed. That wasn’t the end, though. During surgery, he discovered that I had other, smaller cysts. The two doctors agreed that they needed me to undergo a special medical treatment to stop my periods for five or six months. “You must have some injections; they’re very important,” the doctor and family friend said. “These hormones will mess you up emotionally, but there’s no other way. We don’t want those other cysts to grow.”

What followed was one of the most difficult times in my life, thanks to those injections. I had night sweats along with emotional ups and downs. I had menopausal symptoms at twenty-three years old! When I returned to the doctor, thanks to the hormone shots, the endometrial cysts were gone. But the doctor was certain: I had polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS.

“Vicky, I’m sorry, but we can’t get rid of these—they’ll just keep coming back,” the doctor said. “You have to go on the Pill.”

I was scared. I didn’t want to go back to those night sweats and that emotional roller coaster. My mother knew I didn’t want to take the Pill—the hormones had really messed with my life when the doctor had tried them earlier, and I wasn’t eager to be on them every day—so she thought about other options.

“Well, hold on, Vicky,” she said. “What about that person who did a study on endometriosis? Check out what he said about a food sensitivity diet. You love your dairy and sugar, but maybe they’re triggering the cysts. What about stopping them? Maybe we should request a food sensitivity blood test.”

Mom was, again, far ahead of her time. Everyone knew about allergies, but not many people had heard about food sensitivities in the eighties and nineties. Mom, though, had been avoiding common trigger foods for my entire life. I’d been brought up in a nearly pristine food environment, thanks to her—but those lessons had left me as soon as I left home. I’d gone to university and fallen into most of the same bad habits as my fellow students. I was depending on diet soda and Kit-Kats to power me through late nights of studying. As a result, the same things were happening to me at school that had often happened to me in Grandma’s kitchen.

We had the testing done, and when I saw the results, I finally had proof that the dairy, wheat, sugar, and other foods were giving me eczema, allergies, skin problems—and now PCOS. I tried my mother’s advice: to dry out my system and stick to a nonreactive diet. I knew I needed to do
something
, and her approach seemed as good as any.

Six months later, I went back to our family friend, the Greek ob-gyn. He was elated. “Hey, all the cysts are gone! You must’ve been taking the birth control pills after all!”

I said, “Well, no—I’ve done this diet, and . . .”

I started telling him about food sensitivity and inflammation, and avoiding wheat, sugar, oranges, and balsamic vinegar. I wanted to share with him that I’d gone to see an acupuncturist, a nutritionist, a reflexologist, and a cranial osteopath.

He held his hand up almost immediately. He couldn’t wait to cut me off. “Well, you go ahead and do your witch doctor stuff or whatever you call it. Your magic food stuff.” He shook his head and muttered to himself.

I respected him—he had saved my ovary!—so his dismissal stung. But only for a second—and after that, his reaction strengthened my resolve to study these other fields. I’d been studying the research, and now I’d seen and felt firsthand what these other modalities could do. Now it was my turn to help let the world know how much of a difference alternative approaches could make, not only helping people feel healthy on a regular basis, but also providing drastic improvement in the face of a painful health condition.

I sometimes still see this kind of knee-jerk negativity when I mention the power of food to my patients. That’s always the best time to tell them my story: that I healed my PCOS with food. PCOS afflicts between 5 and 10 percent of young women, sometimes as young as eleven years old. Until we find the cause and the cure for PCOS, the only medical treatment being used to manage symptoms is the birth control pill. Many women would gladly avoid the Pill if they could, so I tell them that a nutritional approach worked for me, and most have to admit that healing themselves with food seems like a pretty good deal.

Pain is a tremendous teacher. Pain is an urgent message that we’re not living the lives we should be. Pain is a signal that points to our past—and urges us toward the future. My own pain became my internal compass, pointing me in the direction I needed to go. I developed the Positive Feedback program so that you could have the same kind of epiphany, so that you could learn how to understand your own pain, read its signals, and use it as a map toward a better life.

The pain that I felt with that large cyst was really the turning point in my life as a healer. Before that, my eczema and constipation had been uncomfortable—but they weren’t enough to
change
me. I had the cold sores, sure—but the connection hadn’t really sunk in yet. I was still young. Mom had told me when I was sixteen, but I didn’t listen. But the first large cyst—that was a big deal. That lower back pain was my signal, my message—and I finally realized it was time to pay attention.

The worst cyst was seven centimeters in diameter. After the surgery, the doctor said, “We’ve just removed a big orange.” (Which was a cheeky joke from my body, because I clearly had developed a sensitivity to oranges!)