20181201 - Saturday - My story - Fay Berry

20181201 – Saturday – My Story

It was my birthday on Nov 28, 2018 and I was just one year shy of my 80th birthday.

My facebook friends inundated me with birthday wishes, but there was something else on my mind on this day.

My iPad had “given up the ghost” and I was without my usual means of writing my stories and keeping in touch with my many friends around Australia.

Why couldn’t I simply go out and buy a new one?

Well, 2008 I had a stroke, and from that day, everything in my “financial world” also changed.

I found that my current life-style was unsustainable.

30 years of “out-of-control” diabetes had come to its logical culmination and I could no longer sustain my “way of living.”

From that day on, it was a roller-coaster ride.

I lost my business, and one by one I lost my 7 properties in and around Adelaide.

I lost my home and all my savings and so I literally became “homeless.”

My ex-husband came to the rescue and I was able to live in his small 1-bedroom flat at the rear of his property.

And then came rehab to help me with my “losses.”

There was loss of money; I had to close down my telecommunications business.

I went from being a property owner on a fairly high income, to a 70-year old on the pension, and I promise you there were a lot of adjustments that had to be made to my thinking by that time.

Move on in time to February 10th 2008.

I was overweight, lethargic, and still with out-of-control diabetes, and I spent most of the afternoon and evening of most days in bed, watching Netflix.

When I began to fall out of bed from a prone position because of dizziness, I said to myself “enough is enough.”

Some 30+ years ago, my father had built for me a small camper trailer.

It consisted of a 6’ x 4’ wooden trailer with full-size car wheels, lined with aluminium, and with a 6’ x 4’ sprung mattress in its base and covered with a blue canvas canopy.

In 1985 I travelled with my youngest daughter, who was 12 years of age at the time, up the east coast on a memorable holiday together.

That was 1985, but in late 2017, my little trailer was sadly in need of renovations and repairs.

Around that time I put up an advert in “Gumtree” to sell a few unwanted items and the advertisement was answered by two “bogan” men who quickly made an offer on my beloved trailer.

I refused their offer, but they then suggested that they “fix” my trailer for me.

The long and the short of it is those two “bogans” drove off with my little trailer in tow.

I feared that I would never see it again.

However, they DID fix my trailer in the most amazing way.

They added an electric jockey wheel, a shelf on the inside of the trailer to store my “stuff,” and a place for my water bottles and several power points to charge my ipad and iPhone batteries via a solar panel on the towbar.

On March 10, 2018 I threw up my hands and said “what the heck” and I went on my first “grey nomad” adventure.

Well, that sounds easy, but in fact it simply was not.

My diabetes was still our of control, I now walked with the aid of a walking frame, and had absolutely NO energy at all.

But I told myself that since TIME was not a factor, I could take however long it needed for me to get from A to B, and it needed quite a lot of time.

All the energy I was using in the process of travelling up the east coast of Australia messed up the amount of Insulin I had to take.

After one or two “hypos” along the way, and I realised I needed to manage my diet on my travels with much greater care than I had anticipated.

My eldest daughter had been telling me of the benefits of a low-carb diet, and so I planned my food intake around that belief.

I carried a box on the passenger’s seat, and filled it with tins of fish and raw vegetables and fruit.

I ate everything raw and drank just bottled water.

Needless to say, I began to lose weight.

The combination of increased need to use energy at a rate greater than I was accustomed to, and smaller amounts of food, and unprocessed at that, well how could I NOT lose weight?

Another thing that had changed was the colour of my hair.

Because I was going to be on the move so much, I decided it would not be convenient to dye my hair.

So I let the dye grow out and to my complete surprise, I found that I had pure white hair, underneath that years of dye.

My hair now looked “like wool,” and felt much wiser for it!

I was booked into the “oldies” school Bible at Rathmines in NSW and so that was where I was heading, to the campsite by Lake Macquarie.

I was accommodated in a cabin on the property and was there for one week where I met lots of friends, old and new, and enjoyed myself immensely.

I stayed at the Morisset show grounds for a week after that and met lots of people there as well.

After that I was I went on to attend the conference in Brisbane.

Before I left for the conference I stayed at the but Alstonville show grounds in Lismore to recover some of my strength.

I was contacted there by a lovely lady from the Lismore ecclesia, Terrill C, and she invited me to a “cafe meeting” in Lismore.

I was feeling exhausted, but my friend was very persistent, so in the end I said “Yes,” and it was the best thing I have ever done.

At this “cafe meeting” I was introduced to a whole multitude of new brothers and sisters.

I was in pain at this time from what appeared to me to be a “frozen shoulder” and I was invited to visit for lunch at Pam and Norm S.s home.

Norm was a “Bowen” healer, and he said he could help me.

Well, this lovely couple invited me to live at their home until I had to leave for the Brisbane conference.

I spent the next two months in their beautiful home and I was simply amazed at their hospitality.

I was not feeling well for the whole time I was there, but they looked after me so very well.

They opened their home, their swimming pool, and a bedroom to me, and they were so very kind to me.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, all this time I was still losing weight.

In all I had lost 7 kg of weight on this “low carbs” diet, and yet I did not feel well.

I attended the conference at the Kelvin Grove University in L’Estrange Ter, Kelvin Grove, Qld, and once again met loads of people.

When the conference was finally over I had to decide whether to go on to Darwin or return home via Melbourne and where my daughter lived.

In the end, because of my frozen shoulder, I decided that I would go to Melbourne instead of Darwin.

I visited with my daughter for a few days and then finally made the return journey home.

When I arrived in Adelaide I was very depleted in health.

It was a friend Darren, in Darwin, who suggested I should watch a film called “The Magic Pill,” and it was this film that changed my life.

It was about a court case between a Dr Tim Noakes and industry.

He was prescribing to his patients a low carbs diet, and industry had taken him to court over it.

He decided to defend himself, and to everyone’s amazement he won his case.

He actually took on all the big guns and WON.

This was not what industry had expected.

But the results of their prescribing of a High Carb, Low fat diet and its consequences in the obesity of the nation could not be hidden any longer.

So he won his case, AGAINST, all of the big food industry companies who produced and advocated every “high carb” product as being BEST AND HEALTHIEST for their customers.

Dr Noakes theory is as follows:

He took for one of his examples the aboriginal peoples of Australia, and how they used to be hunter gatherers.

As such they did not disturb the topsoil of the land but just ranged over it hunting and gathering their food.

They had originally been a healthy people, only dying of things such as spear wounds and such.

Now since the coming of the white man, they had become riddled with diseases such as diabetes and obesity.

Dr Noakes asked the question, “Why is this so? How did it happen?

He then answered his own question by saying that all the statistics on the value of food were derived from “industry driven” research, which was all based around getting people to buy their products.

There was no way they would fund any research on such things as “Low Carb” food, because there was no money in it.

Industry effectively raped the land by clearing large tracts and planting high carb products such as grains and legumes.

Their cattle instead of being grass fed, were confined in feeding lots and fed grains which were never intended for their consumption.

They fattened their livestock in this way and then when they were FAT they killed them and they became the meat that we eat every day.

What they DON’T tell us, is that grain-fed cattle can only LIVE a certain number of days before they simply DIE.

So they kill them before they are due to die and that is the meat we are expected to EAT!

Not only is this bad for US, the eaters, but it is also bad for the soil on this planet.

So in every way we are being deceived by big business who chase the almighty DOLLAR, in believing that we will be healthy by so doing.

Instead, everywhere we look, EVERYONE is fat!!

I watch the waistlines of my friends and they are every expanding from day to day.

Diabetes is rife. EVERYONE seemed to have diabetes.

Well, I tried an experiment as soon as I understood this.

I had been on a LOW CARBS diet, and lost 7 kg.

Now I went on a NO CARBS diet, and recorded everything that I ate and took my sugar levels throughout.

I started this NO CARBS diet on 12th October and have been on it ever since.

From my weight at that date, I have since lost 4.4 kg.

I have got my sugar levels down each morning to between 6 and 10.

I have reduced my intake of Insulin down to around 30 units of Lantus Insulin and 30 units of Novarapid each day.

This is instead of a HUGE 100 units of Insulin in the morning and 60 units of insulin at night!

So I have proved to my own satisfaction, from my own experience that LOW/NO CARBS is good for me and HIGH CARBS is bad!!

Since then a friend from my travels has contacted me telling me that she now suffers from bowel cancer.

She had been following my blog posts and reading my stories about my NO CARB diet, and had decided that instead of chemo she too would follow a NO-CARBS diet as a way to heal her gut from her cancer.

She said that she might still need to have an operation to remove the affected parts of her bowel, but would use to diet to help her recover her health.

I have been telling all my friends about the benefits of LOW/NO CARBS, because I BELIEVE that is a SUSTAINABLE diet, that both loses weight and restores health.

I feel so GOOD now, and contrary to my past experience, my bowel movements are healthy and pain-free, and I no longer suffer from incontinence.

Everything I now eat is unprocessed food and I feel as though I have “Come back from the dead.”

We have been destroying this beautiful earth with our current farming practices of ripping off the top soil. It was never intended that we do this.

That is why our soil is now contaminated and our very seed that we plant in the earth is being genetically modified.

Our water supplies are diminishing.

We will eventually become like Rapanui where there are only idols remaining.

All the trees were reportedly cut down and used to transport these idols for placement.

By destroying all the trees on the island, the whole source of food on the island was also destroyed.

It is unbelievable that we are all so utterly stupid in the use of our limited resources.

Why are we not focused on sustainability?

Why?