In the early 1960’s when I was about 5 years old, I remember asking my father to help me mash up a One a Day Vitamin in a spoon with some water so that I could take it. The pill didn’t dissolve like the Bayer aspirin that my mother sometimes gave me and the taste was incredibly bitter, like nothing I’ve ever experienced. But there was something about consuming a substance that was supposed to be good for my body. How I knew this could be true by taking vitamins I have no idea. I don’t even know how a vitamin bottle appeared in our household of smokers and parents who relished the amazing fast and processed foods that were becoming all the rage in the midst of our industrial and prosperous nation.
And this was really my first indication that one of my prime interests in this life would be consumed with body health.
Fast forward past the deprivation of good foods in my household during my preteen years when I used to have the feeling inside I was starving for greens and foods not laden with sugar–and where the only drink, besides milk, that was plentiful in our house, Pepsi Cola, seemed to give me the worst taste in my mouth as well as stomach aches. I hated it but that’s just the way it was or was supposed to be.
I was 16 years old, just a few years, dozens of miles, and an entire culture away from the steel making area where I grew up. My mother, my sister and I left our dad for good and moved to a small, mountain community in western Pennsylvania with my mom’s sister and her family . It was a difficult time getting accepted in a place where generations of families held their own and where none were part of the wave of immigrants like my grandparents who came across the sea to work in America’s thriving steel and glass industries. Having a Spanish surname and coming to live in a town with a newly divorced woman was met with discrimination far beyond anything I could have imagined. Yet, I grew to love the people, was eventually very well accepted, and it seemed that my search for something deeper was met in a place where nature was more evident and respected and harsher. I started to find that something in the wind that blew the leaves in the trees and in the sun coming up over the horizon and in the dragonflies that hovered above a pond not too far from my home. I loved the land and the woods and it seemed, as corny as it may sound, to love me back.
One day after being totally acclimated with everything about my new home (and I could never imagine moving back to a city at this point) I was in an old mom and pop owned hardware store in town..the one that had seeds and wrenches and cards among other items of the general merchandise family. There, I came across a little book low on a rack in the middle of the store. The title was ‘How to Get Rid of Cellulite’ or something like that. I bought the book for cheap, mainly because it talked of foods and of a series of exercises called yoga–a strange, but intriguing name I thought. I was fairly happy with my body, as happy as a teen who never sees herself as perfect could be, but I thought the connection between eating apples, breathing consciously and getting rid of lumps that appear on the top of the leg when you squeezed the flesh together was interesting.
And this book changed my life.
“Mom, I’m quitting meat, I’m going to buy myself real orange juice, and find some yogurt.”
If I would have told her that I was pregnant with triplets I would have received the same look.
“What you eat has nothing to do with your health! ” she quipped. And that was the end of the story with her.
But I was working that summer and had the extra cash..enough to buy myself a bicycle, some cool jeans, a few shirts, and the kind of food that I thought would be healthy for me.
And that’s where my story begins.
