Food Saved Me

The book Food Saved Me was a balm to my weary worn-out self.

I finished this book and took this picture sitting at a surgery center for the second surgery my family has dealt with recently. My family’s third surgery in the last eighteen months and probably the twelfth ( or more ) in the last six years.

Outside of current events, my family has had a long draining six years of one medical issue and diagnosis after another. Just as we get through one thing, another issue comes up with someone else.

I wrote this post out and have since debated if I should share it.

I let my husband and kids read it before I posted it. The struggle of what to share and what to keep private is often so hard online. But I know how lonely this journey can feel, so I want to help others on a similar journey feel less alone

I bought the book Food Saved Me not really sure what to expect. I know who Danielle Walker is and that she writes grain-free, dairy-free, refined sugar-free recipes, but I have not followed much of her story.

Because of my daughter’s nut, peanut, sesame allergy, most of her recipes don’t work for us, but I do know the importance of food and health and decided to give the book a try.

I fully expected this book to be heavily anti-medicine and very pro-natural medicine.

That wasn’t at all what the book was about. I actually think they got the title wrong on this book. This book is about so much more than food.

More than once as I read this book, I had tears streaming down my face. I felt like the author understood. She shares hope in the midst of a painful disease. She admits food has saved her, but she also admits medicine has to.

My family has often felt so out of place over the years. We have realized that food plays a big part in how well we can live life, but we aren’t anti-medicine.

I can’t even begin to say how alone we have felt in this journey.

I have left so many conversations with well-meaning family and friends feeling discouraged. The guilt that we were not doing the right thing or eating the right thing or relying on God enough, was brought on by people, who were convinced they had the right food, supplement, or some other natural remedy that would help us.

They were convinced their knowledge would help cure us, and often a lecture about all we were doing wrong followed.

My personality is such that I often listened, saying little, and left with a heaviness that is hard to describe. This is exactly why this book was a balm to my soul.

Danielle Walker gets the balance my family has tried to walk over the years. Food can help make your life better, but there are many times food won’t cure you.

This book reassured me that you can use food to heal certain things and to live a better quality of life, but it is also okay to rely on medicine and medical providers.

This book made me feel less alone on this road of mixing food and medicine.

The reality is that food can make us healthier, but there are many things it won’t cure.

Food can help my kid be healthier, but it won’t cure a genetic heart condition or connective tissue disease that they will have to deal with for life.

Eating gluten-free has improved my health and made my asthma manageable, but the reality is that I would have died a long time ago without the medication I take daily for it.

Eating gluten-free, dairy-free, and/or sugar-free helps manage the chronic pain that some in my family deal with, but it won’t cure the disease that causes the pain.

Eating a certain way can help improve my child’s digestive tract, but it won’t cure the autoimmune disease that affects the digestive tract.

Food may help improve the quality of our life living with a disease, but most of the time it won’t cure it.

There will always be flares. There will always be difficulties. They might happen occasionally. Or they might occur often. But they will happen.

The disease doesn’t disappear just because it is being managed.

I posted recently on Facebook and Instagram how challenging, and at times discouraging, I have found the online food and health world. It is harsh and critical.

It lacks grace and understanding. It is often one extreme or the other. One side discounts the importance that food and lifestyle can make while the other side often trashes medicine and the doctors that save our lives.

What I have realized is that God has given us both food and medicine to navigate the path he has given us.

I might never understand the path that God has chosen for us, but I do know that He gives us the means to navigate it with both food and medicine. And for that, I am thankful.

For us and many others, it is a balance of food and medicine. I have learned to be okay with that, and if you are navigating a similar path, I want you to be okay with it too.

I don’t want to just travel down this road God has given us, I want to learn to navigate it well. I want to grow from it. I want to find joy in the journey, because yes, there is joy even in the pain.

What this book, Food Saved Me, reminded me of, is that I want to be helpful and not hurtful. I want to listen more than lecture. I want to share our journey while realizing that yours might look different.

I want others to know that they are not alone. There are others out there walking the road of letting food and medicine help them because both are gifts from God that we can be thankful for.