I guess it’s no surprise (given my story below) that I was chronically sick with tonsillitis my entire childhood. In the fourth grade I morphed overnight. One day I was a cute little kid of normal weight, the next I was ballooning. Although that period only lasted two years it established a self-image that stuck in my head for many decades. And when I look at old photos I feel for that little girl in the dirndl dresses with the tieback bows and chopped-off hair, just like I feel for overweight kids today. My grandma was my first influence on health. Her family emigrated from Poland in 1911, escaping an unavoidable future as impoverished farmers. Stella suffered from malnutrition and ended up losing all her teeth as a young woman. In 1942, at age thirty-nine, she accidentally wandered into a “health” lecture and was converted. From then on she had a very strong point of view about health matters, in particular the perils of processed food, going so far as to accuse a friend of murdering her husband by feeding him nothing but hot dogs. She was regarded as a “health nut” and a “kook” in our family, but she ignored the slights and went about her business staying healthy and dispensing advice. After her night shifts cleaning offices at General Motors ended, she came home and juiced and canned homegrown vegetables. She’d lie in the basement in the darkness on her slant board, blood rushing to her brain to improve circulation as she meditated. She regularly guzzled olive oil from the bottle to “Fix herself up,” and she knew how to deal with a myriad of conditions with various supplements and foods. Unfortunately my grandma was only a part of my childhood until age eight when my widowed mother remarried and moved my brother and sister and me from Michigan to California. So I missed a lot of the direct influence she could have had on my early health. My family moved to Japan when I was fifteen, and by sixteen I was modeling in Tokyo. Being skinny was crucial to my success as a model and to my self-esteem. I’d chain smoke cigarettes and eat a chocolate chip cookie before going to bed, feeling virtuous for starving all day. But still, my grandma’s voice stuck in my head when I saw that the Japanese ate only real food—sushi and veggies. I couldn’t help but think she was right about food because most Japanese were thin. After graduating from high school I went back to the states for a few weeks to wait for my eighteenth birthday. There Grandma introduced me to the books of Adelle Davis, who was the very first real-food advocate: Let’s Get Well, Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit, and Let’s Cook It Right. After my birthday, I left the states and flew to Europe. I toted Adelle Davis’s books with me to India for ten months. While I pondered my newly hatching philosophies about healthy eating, I smoked a lot of hashish and even more cigarettes. With less than one dollar a day to live on, I had very little choice about food, so my diet was the same subsistent diet of the street-vending untouchables, India’s poorest caste. When I returned to Europe I was malnourished and my hair was thin and brittle. But I was young and recovered quickly by eating the real-food diet Europeans ate. My Swiss-German boyfriend taught me about real food: “This is asparagus,” and “This is yogurt,” and so on. His mother showed me how to make my first recipe—olive oil, vinegar, and mustard salad dressing. I lived in Switzerland for two and a half years and learned how to eat the way Europeans ate. A few pics of me in India--the mud house was in Goa. Theres now a Four Seasons Hotel, probably where my mud hut stood!! It was an untouched paradise back then. The one of me with the palm trees is coming back from the outhouse which was a HORRIBLE experience because beach roaming pigs did the clean up (while you were going . . . I will not get into graphic detail, but ask anyone who was in Goa in the sixties and that is always the first thing they bring up!)
Posted on: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 14:21:53 +0000
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