Diary Entry 1- Sarah Chrystal

Sarah Chrystal is the founder of Improve Through Food, a traveling cooking school in the comfort of your own kitchen.

Find her on Ista @improvethroughfood

Born June 3, 1975 and the world became a better place :-) At the age of 10 my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was in and out of remission for almost 10 years and eventually died when I was 19 years old…This is when I can remember always feeling uncomfortable after eating. Bloated and gassy, I thought I was fat but when I look back at photos I was so tiny! Not fat at all. I remember being constipated for days and pooping would hurt. But I also didn’t know that this was abnormal. After all it was my normal…I also worked in a scratch baked bakery baking breads and muffins and granola and cookies. I also was drinking lots of alcohol and eating pizza every night. I was also using a lot of cannabis and starting to experiment with baking with cannabis and getting very little sleep due to an active social life…this went on for a solid 10 more years.

These are my earliest memories of feeling uncomfortable, sluggish, achy, moody, etc. The next 20 years of my life have led me to today…I became a single mom and really focused on a healthier lifestyle through food, but didn’t change much else about my lifestyle. I was still drinking and using cannabis (although much less since I was a parent), I definitely wasn’t getting good sleep. I was working numerous jobs to make ends meet. Plus maintaining a social life to keep my sanity. My diet was very clean (or so I thought) but I was still extremely bloated, achy and moody.

I have ended up in the ER twice in the past 6 years with very strange sensations in my body that happened after a night of celebration…only for western medicine to tell me that everything was fine…but I knew everything was not fine...I have now learned through detoxing that my triggers are yeast, sugar, alcohol, cannabis, emotions, lack of sleep, lack of movement.

GO FIGURE!!!

All the things I have been consistently doing for 30 years, when I first started to notice my dis-ease...