Gloria Halim - Healing Foods - Healthy Foods: Use Superfoods to Help Fight Disease and Maintain a Healthy Body

I would like to begin with two quotes by Wayne Dyer: You dont know the value of good health until you lose it and Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change. Illness has the tendency to change the way you view life and yourself.

About two years ago, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I was at the peak of my career as an IT consultant, enjoying my work, living the city life in London and it all came to a screeching halt when I was diagnosed. I couldnt help trying to figure out what the culprit was did bad diet play a part in it or was it down to genes? I obviously cannot change the latter but right then I wished I had been more careful with what I ate. Looking back, I realised that my diet was quite bad, in fact so bad that I had started to call myself the junk food queen. My vice was sugar. I have a sweet tooth so at any given opportunity I ate chocolate, cakes of any kind, ice cream if it was sweet I ate it. I didnt eat too much fast food and I have always eaten fruit as part of my diet so I remember thinking that as long as I ate fruit, drank loads of water and did the odd bit of exercise here and there, even though I drowned myself in loads of sweet foods I would be fine. How wrong I was. I have since found out that cancer cells feed on sugar to multiply; boy, did I have a lot of sugar in my system. Im not saying that was the main reason for why I got cancer, but it might have been one of the factors that contributed to it.

During the course of treatment, I carried out extensive research on good foods (herbs, spices, grains, fruits, vegetables, seafood, etc.) that boost health and energy (as chemo really got the best of me). At the time, food was revolting to me and tasted really bad as you lose your taste buds during treatment. They tell you that you need to eat to keep your strength up which was easier said than done. I found the only foods I could stomach were salads and sometimes soups, which wasnt often. Its all about going back to basics and nature: cutting out fast foods, junk and processed foods. I came up with some really good recipes (yes, tasty too), which helped boost my immune system and increase my energy levels. I also tried a lot of good recipes from the Mediterranean and Asian regions, which have been highlighted as the healthiest diets in the world, as well as from the African region. I made some of these recipes my own by changing some of the ingredients and sometimes cooking methods to suit my taste. I chose these recipes because of the ingredients the use of a lot of herbs, spices and super foods.