Bernadette Bohan’s The Choice: The Programme: The simple health plan that saved Bernadette’s life – and could help save yours too

Rather than concentrating on what you can’t eat, this book concentrates on what you can eat. I feel there is no need to waste time preaching about what you cannot eat, as I strongly believe that nowadays we are bombarded with too much of this kind of negative information. Instead, I find it more useful to suggest that you should add more nourishing foods to your daily routine eating patterns. Furthermore, this way offers you the means to discover that when your body is nourished, the constant cravings for junk food and treats will all but disappear. Even if you believe you presently lead a fairly healthy lifestyle, I assure you that nourishing your body further will bring about even more energy, will keep you feeling fantastic, and will culminate in giving you much greater health.

Maybe you are happy with your quality of life, but I suspect the fact that you bought this book means you may not be and you are looking for some sort of change. You may well want to ‘clean up your act’, but whether your interest in food stems from problems with your health or with maintaining your health, I hope this book will spark your imagination and illustrate how easy these goals are to achieve. I hope to show you how I, an ordinary woman and mother of three, having twice faced cancer, managed to transform my diet and lifestyle without any great hardship. I also hope to show you that with some basic practical information you too can live a healthy life without becoming an expert or a nutritionist.

My motivation for writing this book is a direct response to the many requests I received for more information on what I have done to improve my own health. It is also in response to the countless requests for simple and easy-to-follow recipes – recipes for food that can both protect us from disease and comfort and nourish the body. I have included in this book my recommendations surrounding the four changes that I made to my own lifestyle, namely:

Juicing fruit and vegetables on a daily basis

Introducing powerful foods to my diet daily

Cleaning the water coming into my home

Switching to safe personal care products.

These changes are simple and easy to implement if you have the motivation to do so. The benefits for me were many and helped me to recover from chemotherapy and radiation cancer treatments. For me the motivation was easy to understand: when diagnosed with cancer for a second time I wanted to find how to treat the cause of the disease and not just the symptoms. I discovered that nutrition plays a big part in combating the effects of degenerative diseases that affect so many of us. Never underestimate the value of good food – it can do more than sustain life! All research, to the highest level of biochemistry, exemplifies the benefits of maintaining health rather than waiting until we have a problem that needs to be fixed.

Nowadays many of us eat for comfort, and believe me I’m all for a bit of comfort, especially living in a cold damp climate like Ireland! There is nothing nicer than a warm soup or a hot dinner on a cold wet windy day, but our bodies have certain requirements that demand we also eat for nourishment. When we meet these requirements we get the body’s defence mechanisms functioning properly and achieve optimal health.

We can readily accept that machines need oil, fuel and water to run smoothly and to prevent them from breaking down. Likewise it is imperative that we supply the correct fuel to our bodies.

I was touched and impressed with an e-mail I recently received from a 13-year-old girl who, having read my first book The Choice, decided that she was going to try to look after her health a little better. This young girl is not much older than my own daughter Julie. She is not suffering from any ill-health and yet has the foresight, common sense and responsibility to want to take care of her health at this young age.

For me, healthy eating has become a great pleasure and has opened up many new tastes and ideas. These simple practical changes are easy to implement in day-to-day life no matter how busy you are, to help you improve your health. Ask yourself:

How often have you stood in the supermarket and wondered what you could buy for yourself and your family that was healthy and did not take hours to prepare?

Have you ever visited a healthfoods store and wanted to buy some wholefoods but you were not quite sure how to prepare them?

Believe me, I know exactly where you’re coming from. I now find that having opened up my diet to a much greater variety of foods, many of the foods I used to like now taste rather bland.

My experience has shown me that many of us have become collectors of information. Yet very often we are not prepared to put this information into practice. Remember that actions speak louder than words, and if diagnosed with a life-threatening disease, as I was on two occasions, you no longer have the luxury of time and you soon learn to focus on the job in hand. If only we could use our natural instincts and a little common sense to eat the foods that make us feel good, many of our health problems would disappear.

This is not rocket science – so my method is to keep it simple and JUST DO IT.

You too can also do it!

My Story (#ulink_feb699b7-3788-59b2-a1b4-46535e95660c)

I was so determined in my quest to beat cancer that Iimmediately set about making some changes.

Whatever the outcome was to be, I was not about tosit around and wait until I got to the point of noreturn. I had to find a way to help myself.

A Food-fight for Life (#ulink_cc413392-b461-5bd5-927b-859c10f2eb74)

When diagnosed with cancer I thought ‘Why Me?’…Well, why not me?

I thought that I had been leading a fairly healthy life. I ate fruit and vegetables every day and I did not overindulge in treats or junk. OK, I’ll admit I had a glass of red wine in the evening, but wasn’t that meant to be good for me? And yet here I was – facing cancer for a second time round. How could this be happening to me?

My story is in no way unique, nor is it a story of doom and gloom. On the contrary, it is simply the story of an ordinary mother who tried to take responsibility and reshape the life that she so desperately wanted to hold on to. Rather than resigning myself to my fate, I luckily came to realize that where there’s a will there’s a way.

Eighteen years ago, when I was 33 years of age and married with two small children, I developed cancer of the lymph system. I was pregnant at the time and subsequently lost my baby. I was advised by doctors not to have any more children, as it might well have been the pregnancy hormones that triggered the cancer. At that stage I took the medical advice and treatment and did as I was told. I went home with armfuls of drugs and felt completely helpless.

After seven years free of cancer I believed that I was cured…I made the choice to have another baby. It dawned on me that in the eyes of the medical profession I may have appeared irresponsible, but for me it was a compulsion stronger than sense. I knew I was rocking the boat and that it could well work out to be a reckless decision, possibly jeopardizing my comfortable existence with my two children and husband Ger. The longing for another baby, however, was so deep and instinctive that I decided to take that chance. After all, life is for living, and where would we be in life if we never took any risks?

Unlike my other pregnancies there was no rush of congratulations – it was like I had been selfish and reckless in my decision. My oncologist had been telling me for many years to put the thought of another child out of my mind and that I was better off than most other people as I already had a boy and a girl. Thankfully for us this was one piece of advice I didn’t listen to, and the decision turned out to be a blessing. My third child Julie, the joy of all our lives, was born safe and sound. The happy times and everyday dramas of motherhood took over, and concerns about cancer receded into the background of my family life. But, like the predator it is, the cancer was merely biding its time.

Here was I, 12 years after the first time, and the cancer had now returned in my breast. I can still remember back to that first time when my son Richard was seven and my daughter Sarah was only four years old. How frightening it was then, as a young mother looking at my beautiful children, to face the possibility that I might not live to see them grow up! With the same disbelief I experienced on that occasion, I could not believe that I was back in this situation again. Julie was now five, and it was like history repeating itself – déjà vu! What had I done to deserve this disease a second time? This was too cruel for one person in one lifetime! If only I’d had the foresight in the first place to learn how to prevent it!

It was then that I decided to get to the bottom of the problem and educate myself. I had to find a way to fight back. By examining the fundamental role of nutrition and diet, I discovered they had a huge role to play in combating the effects of this cruel and frightening disease – a disease which is now affecting one in three women and one in two men in the world today. A number of questions stood at the forefront of my mind:

Why have so many of us become so susceptible to this deadly disease?

What made my immune system so weak that it had lost the ability to protect itself?

Why has conventional medicine avoided the whole area of diet and nutrition?

Why wasn’t there a more integrated approach combining Western medicine with complementary therapies?

I was desperately looking to find answers to these questions. Surely there was some rational explanation? Despite not having the answers, I decided I would pursue the subject in depth. I soon discovered that there was information everywhere I looked, and surprisingly it was not all that incomprehensible or particularly complicated.

I learned that this disease is caused by deficiency and toxicity. Each of us have cancers growing inside of us from time to time. What stops their growth getting out of hand is a healthy immune system. I also learned that, given the correct tools, our own body has the remarkable ability to heal itself, but that if we don’t provide our body with the correct building blocks we can seriously impede its function. Symptoms get worse with time and eventually our health will degenerate. The body will fail to protect itself from disease when we do not provide it with the correct nourishment to make healthy cells. So in order to help the body recover and thrive, it is imperative to provide a regular supply of food that is not stripped of its immune-boosting nutrients. Fresh, raw, unprocessed foods provide us with the best essential components for health and are the finest medicine that nature can provide.

I was so determined in my quest to beat the cancer that I immediately set about making some corrective changes. These changes were intended to support myself through the six months of chemotherapy, the 25 radiation treatments, and the operation that now faced me. I was also hoping these changes would insure against future recurrences of the cancer. Whatever the outcome was to be, I was not about to sit around and wait until I got to the point of no return. I had to find a way to help myself.

Initially I realized that these treatments were going to be very debilitating and I worked hard to try to counteract the effects on my immune system. What happened next amazed me! I had never experienced healing to this extent on a physical level before. As I switched to more nourishing foods, I first began to notice the disappearance of the arthritis in my right hand and shoulder that had plagued me for many years. This was really significant for me, as I could see the benefits happening in front of my eyes. I wore reading glasses and I realized I was picking them up less and less. As an added bonus I also lost my middle-aged spread!

I will freely admit that having arthritis and wearing reading glasses are not such major problems when one has been diagnosed with cancer. But my positive attitude and actions were rewarding me with some very positive feedback from my body. So I began to look seriously at the bigger picture. I was hoping to heal myself from cancer and the side-effects of its treatments. Of course I couldn’t see the cancer itself, but I could see these welcome and apparent changes to my body. This was confirmation to me that when you give the body what it needs, it will speed recovery and reward you by supporting the natural state of health. I realized then that by boosting the immune system my body was back in charge.

I remember thinking to myself: ‘If only I had learned all of this information earlier in my life! Why had I waited till my choice was so desperate?’ I was truly amazed at the incredible intelligence inherent in the human body…when we take care of it.

In this book I will share with you the simple changes I made to support, sustain and improve my health throughout this challenging and difficult time. It appeared that the only option open to me where I could make a difference was with what was going into my shopping basket. After all, I had no time to waste wondering if it was the environment or some other unknown reason that was giving me the cancer. Neither my mother, who lived to the ripe old age of 93, nor either of my sisters had ever developed cancer – surely it could not be hereditary?

It was very frustrating and disappointing to discover that none of my doctors was able to give me the answer to why I had developed this disease for a second time, or indeed why I had developed it in the first place! It still baffles me how so much money has been spent on cancer research and yet the medical profession cannot tell us what the cause is! How can this be? Thankfully, evidence is now available that clearly points to a connection between diet and cancer. This evidence is available from the Bristol Cancer Centres database.

Encouraged by these positive changes to my body and coupled with the strong notion that nutrition was the bottom line when it comes to good health, it seemed a logical and natural step for me to investigate this area and learn how to improve my diet. How difficult could it be to switch to foods which, according to what I was reading, could fight this disease? I will admit that at times I found a lot of the information I got from reading and attending lectures confusing and a minefield of contradictions, nevertheless I was determined to press ahead. After all, when on holiday don’t we experiment with different foods all the time? I also know that for many of us, when we think of health foods we automatically assume they will be tasteless and awful. One reason for this is possibly because we don’t know how to prepare them. This was another area where I was keen to learn more. I wanted to find delicious and better ways to prepare food.

From all the lectures I attended and experts I spoke to, the most astounding fact I learned was that when food is cooked or steamed above 43°C (115°F) it destroys almost 100 per cent of the enzymes in these foods. I also discovered that the enzymes destroyed in cooking are vital for breaking down foods into smaller, more usable nutrients, and this in turn helps the body absorb these nutrients from the foods more efficiently. Our health pays a significant price when we eat foods without these enzymes. This was when I realized that there are some foods we eat largely for comfort and others we eat largely for nourishment.

As I learned more and began to prepare these foods, it was natural for me to want to pass this on to my family. Like every wife and mother I wanted to give the best nourishment to my husband and children. Let me assure you this was not met with open arms and there was an argument almost every evening around our kitchen table. Changing eating habits can be very challenging, especially for teenagers and children. This is why adding good foods, rather than eliminating poor ones, can be a better way of proceeding. You don’t spend all your time feeling hungry or thinking about the foods you cannot have, and – trust me – as you progress you naturally begin to stop buying expensive, convenience junk foods.

Although not an easy task, in the end I decided to get sneaky and find ways of disguising these nourishing foods and sparing myself the arguments and the opposition. I even managed to make Sunday dinner with gravy that contained millet without them noticing. It may not sound very appetizing, but believe me it certainly passed the test with my bunch. They already suspect that I sneak as many nourishing ingredients as I can get away with into their food, but now that my secret is out it may not be so easy in the future.

Where foods and nourishment are concerned, the evidence is neither black nor white. I often think of the millions that are spent on general education for our children, and yet very little of that time and money is put into educating them on the one thing they must do for the rest of their lives – EAT. Must we wait until scientific evidence proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that poor diet leaves us with a vulnerable immune system which can allow disease to develop?

Some of us may simply not have the luxury of that time and cannot afford to sit around and wait until there is conclusive scientific proof. Waiting until we’re ill can sometimes be too little too late. Of course I understand that it is difficult to make large amounts of money from encouraging people to eat fruits and vegetables, and I strongly suspect that the financial motivation does not exist to fund research that proves the simple connection between good foods and health.

One of the most important steps we can make towards better health is to take responsibility for our own nourishment. I know we all have a list of excuses why we can’t make juice, drink more water, or prepare some real food, but please don’t immediately dismiss these suggestions. Better to make one change than not try at all. Moderation is the key to success when making lifestyle changes. The truth is you can do it if you want to. The choice is yours.

Over the past six years I have seen many people implement these changes into their lives without much difficulty, and believe it or not 80 per cent of these people were already healthy! It is not just cancer patients who are seeking changes to their lifestyles. The changes I made have certainly improved my life beyond measure.