Neither does help or healing always come from sources we expect. My guess is that most of us hold some picture in our minds of what we imagine health or healing to be. Probably we conjure some list of things to deny ourselves (like sugars or carbs), or things we feel should be added to our routines (like more exercise or more water). Some of us may even give our image a name - like "veganism" or "colonics" or "raw foodism". In some cases, our image is actually a living, breathing person whom we consider to be "the picture of health".
But on a subject as immediately personal and inevitably emotional as that of health, it's no wonder we come to identify ourselves so strongly with some particular method or ideal. It can become our mission, our purpose, our fight, and even our activism. Such goals may in fact be quite noble and well worth the education they can bring to ourselves and to others, but what I seem to be learning these days - both from what folks share with me, and from my own experience - is that real health and healing don't always conform to the ideas we impress upon them. And if there's one thing that health is NOT, it's cookie-cutter. (Mmmm, cookies... See what I mean?)
I bring this up now, before posting any additional blogs on the changes I've made that helped me go off synthetic insulin, because I wanted to take a moment to address something about which I had been feeling a bit awkward for a few weeks - the fact that I went from whole-heartedly consuming pretty much ALL raw foods (including veggies, fruits, meats, dairy and other unheated, unprocessed foods) to consuming only some raw foods. I must have felt convinced at some point that raw foods - and raw foods alone - would be my road to recovery; otherwise, I would not have entitled my blog what I did.
My perspective has shifted a bit now, however, and while there is much I've learned since embarking on my healing journey, I'm beginning to understand now that raw foods are to be only a part of that journey - a markedly significant part, mind you, but smaller than I had originally thought. While my healing process had mostly plateaued on an all-Raw foods diet (I wasn't ever able to come off that final 5 units of basal insulin per day), what I learned from the experience brought me hope, among other things. All the reading and experimenting I've done in the last year and a half have opened my eyes to possibilities I hadn't considered, and to truths I didn't want to see but cannot now forget. With absolute sincerity, I can state that I've no intention ever of returning to any kind of routine or regular consumption of conventionally farmed, mass-manufactured, processed foods. In fact, where they may be avoided, I fully intend to avoid them.
And even with those seeds of knowledge firmly sown for me, my having veered somewhat from my former course of an all-Raw foods diet felt, at first, like something of a betrayal. But whom or what was I betraying? The only goal I had ever really declared was healing. And having come off the synthetic insulin certainly was a big step in that direction... So what loyalty had I, then, to my former course?
The answer, I soon realized, was none. No loyalty at all... Not if I what I really wanted was to get better.
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