A Word on ADHD

If you observe a wild cub, or even a domesticated puppy, they run free like the wind, jumping, chasing, racing and stopping only intermittently to observe something with great intent. This is the way children are designed to be: spontaneous, excited, impulsive, curious and free. I am sitting here reading my guide to review for the pharmacy boards and I came across the chapter on ADHD. The first sentence says it is a behavioral disorder characterized by inattentiveness and impulsive or hyperactive behavior. I read a lot of things, but every once and a while I read something that just sparks me and inspires me to write about it. As soon as I scanned this sentence, a tiny jolt of anger shot through my heart. This is so ridiculous. We are taking the normal, fun loving state of children and diagnosing them with a disease because they don’t want to sit properly behind a desk for 6-8 hours a day. Somewhere along the evolutionary line we decided that today’s society should be a certain way, and rather than let nature and freedom run their course while using teachers to facilitate the ability to master our hearts and our lives, we have decided that children should act a certain way, starting, in my opinion, far before they are ready and that they should be confined to 12+ years of school to study what the government deems important. When kindergarteners would rather roll in sandboxes or put frogs on their best friends or focus on topics that they excel in, we decide they have a disease. How should we fix this? Logic would say to determine a child’s strengths and work with them to use these to their advantage but instead we give them no choice on what to learn and then when they go nuts reading about famous artists and photosynthesis we decide they need a drug to change them so they will fit better into our societal mold. In my book I came across a sentence that says Canada has suspended marketing of Adderall XR after reports of sudden death and strokes in patients taking the drug. When people ask me if there are controlled trials on the raw food diet I just about fall on the floor. Not because it is a silly question, but because thousands of parents run to the pediatrician begging for some fix for their child who wants to play instead of read history books and the last thing that enters their mind is to ask what controlled trials show about these drugs. (Keep in mind that the root of absolutely irrational behavior stems back from generations of poor eating, stress, genetic mutations, etc and that is a whole other topic of discussion.) I do know that some children’s’ behavior is so out of line with the physiological norm that they are limited in their ability to function in today’s’ society, and for parents who deal with these children I do not set out to belittle the situation. This is just a reality check because I see parents come in to my pharmacy with prescriptions for Ritalin or Adderall for all three of their children. All three of the children needing to be medicated tells me there is something that needs to be worked on environment-wise (diet, relationships, emotional conflicts, etc) or parentally speaking. This is not corrected by Adderall. Never has and never will be.

New Day

Well I got up this morning and made my green smoothie.  spinach, broccoli, apple, banana, 3 strawberries, and a bit of mango.

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OK new here

Well I am going raw.  I am excited about it.  I have been working on it for a few weeks and it is really much more difficult than I thought it would be.  It is amazing how much I am comforted by food.  I have been doing a lot of research and I know that raw is the answer to my life.  I really believe that the whole lifestyle will make a huge difference for me.  I am currently 334lbs, 5′4″.  This is unacceptable.  I have always been trying one diet or another.  I have always been overweight.  I cannot remember a time that my weight was “normal”.  The first week that I started doing raw I felt a huge surge of energy.  Same with the second week.  The third week I got a cold and everything began falling apart for the last week I have been eating the same old foods and feeling terrible.  I mean really terrible.  So I went shopping with my very limited budget.  I hope I got enough food to last me for the week and then I got food for the rest of my family.  I feel bad because I am constantly telling them to stay away from the healthier food because I do not have enough money to feed all of us healthier.  Well some weeks are better than others.  Is this horribly wrong.  I feel like once I understand how to prepare food and buy the better, healthier food then it will be easier to budget in those foods for the whole family.  All I do know for sure is that if I don’t figure out something I am on my way to an early grave.  Over the last couple of years I have began to feel awful, sluggish, aches and pains, depressed (which I have battled my whole life) and old.  I hate the way I feel most days.  That is why I decided to go raw.  I am not sure about how I am going to transition.  I am not really all that concerned with vegan or vegetarian, however I could not even imagine eating raw meat.  So because of that I guess I wont be eating meat.  My son is a vegetarian so he is quite happy with this.    So I hope my journey will interest you and you come in and comment, I would love the feedback.  I look forward to the journey I have ahead of me and know that this is the way for a better quality life for me.

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A Pharmacist Goes Raw?

Hello! I can’t tell you how excited I am to have the opportunity to post on this site! What makes me unique? I just graduated from pharmacy school! Yes, you got it, I’ve been trained which poison fixes which malfunction. And despite all the information on clinical diseases and their drug bandaids, I am 100% RAW! Did we ever talk about nutrition in school…? Sure, a few times, about diets for high blood pressure or high cholesterol (the classic “limit cholesterol to X percent of your diet” or “don’t drink more than two beers a day”). To be honest, after throwing myself head first into countless books on nutrition, the raw food diet, fasting, mucousless eating, conscious eating, eating only before 2pm, not eating til 3pm, you name it…I CANNOT believe how little the medical professionals know about nutrition and how it affects our entire being. Almost daily I learn some nutritional correction or important link for a disease that I dispense thousands of pills to treat, and I wish I could sit everyone down and transfuse my knowledge into them. I, myself, am still a work in progress, but that is what this lifestyle is about: progress. I’m not at a point where I can stand in front of a crowd and self-proclaim raw guru status, but I’m insanely excited about publishing a book where I approach raw foods from a new angle: through the eyes of a pharmacist. I hope by blogging here I can get the ball rolling even faster and get comments about what interests readers the most. I get so excited when I come across something really interesting or mind boggling about the raw food diet, and here (and in my book) is where I’ll share these things. Welcome to my journal!