What was your life like prior to becoming sick?
I ask the question this way…”what was life like prior to becoming sick”, as opposed to “what was life like prior to breast implants” because I believe it’s important to take a broader look at the whole picture, not just what happened after implants. So I’m going to share my answer with you here to hopefully get you thinking and I’d love to hear your response.
Prior to becoming sick, I was quite happy and comfortable living the conventional life…eating and drinking what I wanted (Standard American Diet) and never really concerning myself with what I was putting in or on my body, lifting weights at the gym, doing things like skiing and hiking, going to sporting events, traveling internationally with my husband, making memories together, planning for our future, and so much more. I was thriving and I truly didn’t have a symptom to speak of. I was living in blissful ignorance.
There were many stressors my body had endured leading up to getting breast implants. For instance, my mom had many mercury amalgam fillings in her mouth while pregnant with me. I was born vaginally but was only breast fed for a couple of months due to insufficient milk supply, and I had colic. This definitely impacts immune function and gut health, and we know that toxic contamination begins in the womb. Beyond mercury from amalgam fillings, we are exposed to more than 230 different industrial pollutants in utero.
I grew up in a low-income family without a lot of access to fresh healthy foods so most of what we ate came from boxes or cans or was fast food. I had a lot of sugar in my diet growing up which led to a significant sweet tooth and a distaste for healthy foods as an adult. In fact, when I was working night shift as a nurse dinner would often consist of a burger, fries, coke, and a candy bar! Yikes!
I got sick with strep throat a lot as a teenager and as a result had lots of rounds of antibiotics – another insult to the gut and immune system.
Fast forward and I worked as a night shift nurse for 5 years before finally getting on a normal day-time schedule. For those of you who don’t know how bad shift work is for you, the National Toxicology Program released a report concluding that there is “high confidence” that persistent night shift work that results in circadian disruption can cause human cancer, and concluded that night shift work is “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
During this same period of night shift work, I was REALLY into fitness; some might even say “obsessed”. It started with P90x, which led to body building. I hired a trainer who solely worked with bikini competitors to help me get into the best shape of my life at 30. I didn’t want to compete. I just wanted “the look” and I pushed my body to the brink leading to what I would now consider body dysmorphia and disordered eating.
Since I was very young, I had always wanted larger breasts. I even remember stuffing my bra in the 6th grade. I can actually pinpoint the exact moment in my young life when breasts became important to me. Someone very important in my life unintentionally planted the seed when she said: “you’re going to be 4ft 11in like me, but don’t worry, you’ll have ‘the Johnson boobs’”. It was this pivotal moment that changed everything regarding body-image for me. Big breasts became important. This is what women were supposed to look like and what men wanted and found sexy. This memory drove my desire, but it was my newfound fitness lifestyle that finally led to making the big decision to get the breasts that I thought I needed to feel beautiful and worthy.
This decision changed everything in my life as I knew it. It was the trigger for me and all the other stressors leading up to this were setting the stage for the eventual fall. I believe these things are so important to consider because it’s never just one thing (even if the breast implants were the trigger). The stressors I most commonly see in combination are: toxic exposures, infections, and different types of traumas (physical/structural/mental/emotional/sexual) and they can all come together to create the perfect storm.
What was your life like prior to becoming sick? Feel free to hit reply to this message (or comment below if watching on YouTube) if you’d like to share!
Stay tuned for more to come in my next post in this series…
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