Donna's diet of sugar and junk food took a toll on her immune system throughout her childhood. When she gave up her sweet tooth to lose a little weight, she freed herself from an addiction she didn't even know she had.
Donna's Story
"Sugar made me feel high, happy and really amped up and loved. I couldn't get enough of it."
As a kid, I would stockpile all the sweets I could possibly afford and eat them. Typically, on Halloween I could eat my whole bag of candy in about three days. My favorite was my mother's famous crepes, loaded with butter with maple syrup and powdered sugar, I mean the works. I was quite the junkie and, eventually, it caught up with me.
"I realized that sugar's a drug, and I'd been hooked for a long, long time."
The pivotal moment was when I realized I'd put on a few pounds from consuming so much sugar over the years and decided that I had to take off the weight. I completely dropped sugar out of my diet, just to lose the weight. All of a sudden, I started feeling better, and I realized there must be some correlation here. I got off the sugar, added a lot more vegetables to my diet, and suddenly my whole world opened up. I realized sugar's not so great after all.
"Because I'd grown up eating such an excessive amount of sugar, I had really damaged my body."
I started to feel a little bit better when I cut sugar out of my diet, but not great. I still felt sick and really out of balance. Certain things were bothering me, and I had all these weird symptoms.
I finally got tested and it turned out that I had a really bad case of Candida. Everybody has Candida, but this was a really bad case of systemic Candida, which means the balance of yeast in my body was really off.
"I found this amazing book that taught me how to eat healthily and how to add probiotic foods to my diet."
I learned about probiotics by reading The Body Ecology Diet. Probiotics are fermented and cultured foods, healthy strains of bacteria and yeast that are put into food forms - acidophilus is one example. Good bacteria and yeast keeps your system strong and balanced. Once I started taking probiotics, my health just skyrocketed. I started feeling great, my skin cleared up, my body felt better, everything got better.
"When your digestion is weak, usually your immune system is weak."
Health begins in the colon. I know a lot of people probably don't like talking about that, but when you have a healthy intestinal system, everything else feels so much better. I've become a big advocate of cleaning out toxins inside of your body, adding these probiotic strains into the body to help balance out what's going on. I used to get sick and have colds all the time and today, I can feel a cold coming on and I start taking all of my healthy foods and literally it's gone the next day. I know there's a definite correlation between what I'm eating and how I'm feeling.
"I find sweetness in my life today."
I know how to take care of myself, and I know what to do to get back in balance. Giving up sugar was really hard because I was definitely hooked. I played around with all the sugar alternatives, thinking I was getting by. The truth is, it kept wreaking havoc with my immune system and I kept feeling awful. Adding good, quality fruits and vegetables and all that was really helpful, but taking the sugar out, though it was really challenging, has been paramount. Putting the sweets down has really changed me. It's given me a whole new outlook.
