Growing Up with a Broken Body
Ever since I was a kid, I felt like I lived in a broken body.
“Dad, stop the car! I need to puke!”
All I can remember from numerous car trips growing up was the feeling of queasiness as I sat in the backseat.
I was also puzzled by the fact that I can’t seem to be able to digest the same food that everyone in my family eats — because every couple of weeks, I’d be running to the bathroom after a meal.
Everyone else is ok but me.
When I emerge from the bathroom, I’d be drained and weak. Leaving me scared and worried about eating the next meal.
Living with chronic dizziness and chronic diarrhoea created a level of anxiety that I didn’t even know I had until I was 38. My chronic health conditions fused anxiety deep into my identity and my brain.
“What if I need to go to the toilet and there’s none around?”
My mind developed a radar for toilets. Everywhere I go, I’d be scouring for them just in case I need it.
I’d also constantly worry about any form of transportation I have to use, because I never know how long it takes before I start getting that nauseous feeling.
It could be anywhere between 15 minutes to 2 hours, depending on the conditions of travel.
In trying to circumvent this inevitability, I had to make sure I sat in the front seat of cars, buses, trains and planes as best as I possibly can. I’d also furiously rub peppermint ointment on my temples, forehead, under my nose, neck and stomach.
The smell of peppermint makes me feel like I can last longer without puking, but it doesn’t get rid of the nausea.
While I enjoy seeing different places, I hated travelling. It was never fun.
I don’t remember a long trip where I didn’t puke or get queasy.
The only thing I can do is cross my fingers and hope I don’t puke when I get on any kind of transportation.
My condition also wasn’t just “motion sickness”.
Queasiness would come on randomly for no apparent reason. Especially, if the space I’m in feels stuffy. Once nausea happens, my day is completely ruined.
I learned to always have peppermint ointment or mint stick on me — I never leave the house without it.
My brain goes into panic mode the moment I realise I don’t have it. When that happens, I had to calm myself down and hope that my body will stay normal while I was out.
When I became a teenager, I also suffered from chronic debilitating period pain. One day every month, you’ll find me either sitting or lying in bed for the whole day looking miserable.
Standing up was impossible without bending over with a heat pack over my stomach.
I’d feel like a useless human whenever queasiness or period pain strikes, and I can only wait until it passes.
Going to work was out of the question.
I tried everything to fix it — took pain killers, went on the pill, and drank a bunch of Chinese herbal medicine that tasted disgusting.
Nothing helped.
The worst part about living with chronic illness is that no one can help me — not my parents nor the medical community. I felt alone, trapped in a body that I cannot understand.
I believed there was no cure for my chronic health conditions. All I could do was learn to live with these conditions for the rest of my life, and accept it for what it is.
The Straw That Broke The Camel’s Back
The chronic stress my body was under was exacerbated by my constant need to achieve.
My work ethic became my badge of honour — I outworked my team mates in basketball, I outworked my classmates learning Japanese at university, and I worked 80-100 hour weeks for years learning about business and building businesses online.
I worked my ass off trying to get everything I ever wanted only to realise it wasn’t me who wanted it.
I tried so hard to avoid becoming someone until I looked in the mirror and saw them staring back at me.
I got the wake up call I needed when my life fell to pieces in 2015.
Everything I was and had done up to that point sent me down the dark hole of suicidal depression for the next few years when I realised just how lost I was.
The 3.5 decades of stress and anxiety my body had to process meant it could no longer regulate itself. The years of depression probably also accelerated the eventual malfunction I found myself in.
In late 2017, I found myself at the heaviest I’ve ever been.
I suffered from insomnia — It was the first time in my life that I couldn’t get any quality sleep.
I woke up tired every morning.
I couldn’t think due to brain fog.
I couldn’t do anything because I simply had no energy.
My legs felt like lead as I dragged my body around the house doing simple things.
Ultimately, the way I was living my life — in complete misalignment to how I’m designed to operate — inevitably led to adrenal fatigue.
When the universe gives you wake up calls, you pick up the phone and listen.
It was only then, that I started to learn my lessons and began to change my ways.
The Health Protocols That Changed My Life
I began to learn to take better care of my body in 2018.
Because I never enjoyed cooking, I was a lazy and lousy cook. I have always opted for convenience and eating “whatever is easy” until my life stopped being easy.
In order to get myself to eat better, I reframed cooking as a self care skill I needed in order to stop lamenting about my inability to cook, my dislike to spend time in the kitchen and the effort it takes.
I eventually regained my health and energy by putting better food into my body, discovering WildFit, learning about nutrition and eating consciously.
Once I learned to eat a clean diet, the first major change took me by surprise.
Since my mid-20s, I developed strange sun rashes and I didn’t know why.
Whenever my skin was directly exposed to the sun, tiny red bumps would appear and it would itch for at least a week and annoy the hell out of me.
Slowly, the sun became an enemy when I connected the dots.
I started resenting the fact that I couldn’t enjoy the beach or doing outdoor activities the same way I used to anymore.
I finally realised the sun rash has healed when my flat mate pointed out to me that I got sun burnt after I had spent a day out with a friend in December 2018.
The idea of getting sun burnt became impossible when sun rashes started showing up, until it happened for the first time in over a decade.
That day, I totally forgot about my pre-existing condition since my skin didn’t itch at all.
The only thing I’ve been doing differently up to that point was changing my diet.
And that’s when I realised the importance of nutrition and the power of eating the right human diet.
I couldn’t believe that food alone could make such drastic changes.
By being more conscious about what I put into my body, I also lost the excess fat I was carrying and even went back to my high school weight.
Other weird symptoms I experienced over the years (dry patches of skin, yucky-looking thumb nail, sore left thumb, rosacea-like skin issue on my face) went away when I cleaned up my diet.
My period pain also diminished drastically and became shorter.
Then in 2019, I discovered the Medical Medium when my sister told me about Anthony William.
After listening to his podcast, and reading his book Secrets Behind Chronic and Mystery Illness and How to Finally Heal, everything about my understanding of health finally started to make sense.
So I committed to the morning routine of drinking celery juice followed by the heavy metals detox smoothie that helped others heal.
About 3 months later, I felt a level of calm in my body that I’ve never felt before. It was only then that I realised I had been living with anxiety all my life because it was a part of me.
I wasn’t even aware I had anxiety until it was finally gone.
Then, more miracles followed.
I knew my chronic dizziness has healed when I realised I sat at the back of the bus without feeling anxious and nauseous. I also realised I was finally able to look down at my phone in a moving car without feeling queasy at all.
I’ll never forget my sister’s reaction when she saw me eat a full meal on the plane for the very first time when I went to Bali with her on Christmas Day in 2019.
“OMG! You’re eating!!!”
I was even laughing and enjoying conversations with the crew in the back of the plane, when I normally would have preferred people to leave me alone in my seat, because I’d be miserable and sick.
Whenever I travelled in the past, I could only drink clear liquids (mainly water and apple juice). If I attempted to eat anything, I had to make sure a sick bag was within reach.
That Christmas day was the first time I was able to enjoy travelling like a normal human being, and I was grateful that I could share that with my sister.
Chronic diarrhoea also went away. I was no longer running to the toilet for no apparent reason (unless I knew I over consumed on food with dairy in it).
And when I do have diarrhoea occasionally, I’m not suffering from 2-3 hours of cramps before I could actually go. I also no longer feel drained and weak afterwards, and able to get back to whatever I was doing before instead of needing to rest my body.
I couldn’t be happier with the changes I saw with my own eyes.
Most of all, I no longer needed to suffer in the body I was born in.
Living a Quality Life
When you change what you put into your body, your body chemistry change, your sensitivities change and your experiences change.
It’s amazing to finally live in a functioning body.
I’m still experimenting, improving and optimising my health because “getting healthy” isn’t something you do for 4 weeks, stop and say “That’s it, I’m done”.
Health is an infinite game. The goal is to stay healthy.
While I’m not a Health expert, I have tried a bunch of solutions over the decades. I also believed in a lot of misleading information in the health industry for a long time until I found the truth for myself.
WildFit and Medical Medium philosophies are the life-changing principles I’ve found that has helped me go from where I was to where I am.
I also learned to take ownership and responsibility for my own body, and stopped looking for other people to “come and save me”.
If you’re also looking for lasting change in your health and wellbeing (more energy, better sleep, release excess weight, improved focus, feel vibrant, heal from chronic illness, prevent disease, boost immunity), I think the WildFit and Medical Medium principles can help you do the same.
Over time, I’ve developed my own systems and processes in order to make the work in the kitchen more efficient for myself.
If you want to know how I’ve integrated the Medical Medium protocols into my life, I’ve shared my processes below:
Wishing you a disease-free, vibrant and long life.
