Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. Oh my goodness, I wondered if I would ever shoot this vlog. I have kind of shied away from it, tiptoed around it, which is not really my style. And I guess it's just time. I guess it's just time. So I've shared in general ways that my shoulder in particular has not been good, that I've had some joint issues. And what I haven't shared, what I've been hesitant to share, because I really don't want to get into the politics of this at all. And in Bright Line Eating, we tend to really avoid contentious politics. But I'm not sharing this in a contentious way. This is just my experience. What I haven't shared is that my joints have been really messed up since I got the Pfizer vaccine a couple of years ago. And it took some joint issues, which I already had... Legit, I had some knee challenges walking up and down stairs because my knees really point in quite badly. And I had some shoulder impingement. And my joints since have just been horrific, could barely move my right shoulder. And all these issues with the joints and my knuckles of my fingers and my hips, which I've never had issues with, suddenly were locking up. Completely locking up on me and my knees as well.
So I'm like 48 years old, now I'm 49, but I was 48 years old and I had knee issues, hip issues, shoulder issues, knuckle and finger issues. And I'm like, "Okay, this is really getting ridiculous." And I mentioned just sort obliquely on a couple of vlogs a few months ago that I was having joint pain. And this woman wrote in to customer support and she said, "Please pass my name and contact information along to Susan. I can really help her. I've been watching your vlog for a long, long time. I would love to help her and I know that I can." And I'd reached the point in my seeking of health and solutions for this, where I pretty much, I bumped up against the end of the road with Western medicine. I was doing physical therapy and it just wasn't helping. And in fact, it was getting more and more annoying. Because every time I'd go in, they'd be like, "Oh, and you could do those exercises three times a day instead of one." And I'm sort of like, how much time do you think I have to be doing these exercises that frankly are not helping? How much can I go like this with my shoulder? And it was actually just aggravating it. It was not helping. So I was really at a place where I was open to a different road.
So I reached out to her. I don't usually, people write in to me with all kinds of stuff but I did. Her message really landed to me as something I wanted to follow up on. And when I first talked with her, I heard her story and it was kind of gobsmacking. She is from Australia, from Sydney, which of course endears me to her right away because I lived there for a couple of years. And she was in two car accidents, kind of back to back about a year apart when she was 28, 29 years old. The first one, she was sitting at a red light and a drunk driver smashed into her from behind. And then a year later, someone smashed into her from the front and she ended up with a neck fracture that never got diagnosed properly, and also just extreme excruciating pain, which she lived with for seven years, and also total paralysis of her left arm.
And she reached a point, 7 years later, where Western medicine had nothing left to say to her, "Except we can try this surgery on you, but it's got a 50/50 chance of leaving you completely paralyzed from the neck down. 50/50. And she said, probably what you and I would say, "I don't love those odds. That doesn't sound wonderful. I'll have to find another way." And she couldn't work at that point. She became homeless, became pretty much destitute. She made her way to Israel and was working in a shelter for developmentally disabled adults because it gave her room and board and would allow her to work slowly and do what she could because they were very sensitive to adults with disabilities. And there ended up being a nutrition workshop being held for a weekend and she went. And the teacher of the workshop told her story.
Sometimes it really just takes one to help one, it takes one to know one, and it takes one to help one. And she met this man leading this workshop who told a story of being in a wheelchair, completely musculoskeletal defunct, and had experienced getting his life back through the energetics of food. And he started teaching her the energetics of food. She got back to Sydney, she started doing Qi yoga. Actually, she pronounced it Ki yoga, but Qi as in the life force, right? And then she studied zen shiatsu, ancient Japanese energetics of food. And she apprenticed with someone who had apprenticed with one of these masters in Japan. So ancient Japanese food energy teachings around the meridians and food. I don't know, foodstuff that I'd never heard of.
So the first thing she did was she got me on this cocktail of herbs and extracts that was all sorts of stuff in there. So I started taking that and my energy balanced out, and suddenly I needed a little less sleep, which was super helpful. And I felt grounded and stable and more well. She said, "This will just give you a baseline of health that you can sort of heal from." And then she said, "Let's review your diet." And now I'm thinking, "Well, I eat impeccably, right? So let's review my diet." So we went through it with a fine tooth comb, and she had opinions right away. I'm like, "Well, for breakfast I always have the same thing." She's like, "Okay, that's a problem." And I'm like, "No, no, no automaticity. This is important for me as I heal from food addiction."
Now what's great is that she has been watching my vlog for years, so she really understands how I think about food and my food addiction. And she said, "I understand, I understand, but tell me what you eat." And I said, "Okay, so first thing for breakfast is one ounce of oats." And she said, "What kind of oats?" And I said, "Well, quick oats." She said, "Quick oats?" She said, "Don't eat those. They're very processed, right? Don't eat two minute microwaveable oats. Like really." She said, "Eat the whole oat, oat groats." And I said, "I'm not doing that. It takes too much time to cook. I'm a busy woman." And she took a breath and she said, "Get yourself a single serve slow cooker and every night set it up so that your oats will be ready for you in the morning." And I thought about it. I looked on Amazon. I found a cute little one actually that I love.
Oh my gosh, it came with a little thing, which I didn't know what it was at first. I put it on top like it was a hat because it's so cute. But it turns out it's not a hat. It's a potholder. It's a potholder to lift the lid off after it's all hot. So cute. So I got this little single serve slow cooker, and now I cook my whole oat groats overnight, and they're ready for me every morning. And then I said, "And every morning I eat blueberries." Feeling so proud of this, right? Blueberries are one of the healthiest foods imaginable. And she said, "Yeah, why don't you have a mixture of berries? Like don't always eat blueberries, sometimes eat strawberries, sometimes eat other berries." She said, "All the berries bring a different profile of nutrients and health promoting agents, and it's just way better if you don't just always eat blueberries."
So I made those two changes. I started eating whole oat groats, started mixing up my berries a bit like this morning. I had a delicious cocktail of blueberries and strawberries. It was wonderful.
And then she taught me how to cook my own adzuki beans. So I'd never been one to cook my own beans. They take too long from my perspective. But adzuki beans, she said, "No, no, no. They just take an hour. They just take an hour." And she said, "The key is kombu seaweed, you got to put a little bit, doesn't take much." She said, "Like postage stamp, just a little bit of kombu seaweed in there." I said, "What's that do?" She said, "It helps break down the oligosaccharides." The reason a lot of people have difficulty digesting beans is the oligosaccharides and the kombu seaweed not only helps break that down for you, but then also it's got all these great minerals, which are also really good for you.
She said that's the key to beans is kombu seaweed. So I now cook my own adzuki beans with kombu seaweed. She wants me to have that every day. She said that's an everyday food and she wants me to have it with what she calls pumpkin, which you and I know as squash, a winter squash. The best one is kabocha, which is a round, dark, green thing, kind of squat like a sphere, but smushed down a little bit. Bright dark, deep, forest green. And she said, "If you can't find that, butternut squash will suffice. And with a lot of fresh ginger grated on top." And she said that combination of the adzuki bean, she called it pumpkin stew or whatever, but just adzuki beans. So I have four ounces of that or six ounces of that, and then six ounces of the winter squash, lots of ginger grated on top. I do that every day for lunch.
And then she taught me how to cook brown rice. I thought I knew how to cook brown rice. She said, "You need to let it soak for four hours." I said, "Why do I need to do that?" She said, "Phytic acid." The phytic acid is a mineral blocker. It'll block the absorption of calcium, iron. Sure enough, my iron was problematic, calcium, iron, zinc. And in the olden days, the way rice used to be made, rice would be allowed out in the fields to bake under the sun for hours before it was bagged up and distributed off for use. And the sunshine would break down the phytic acid. But she said, "They don't do that anymore. They just put it right in the bags and ship it off." So now it arrives with all the phytic acid in the husk on the outside intact.
And so if you just soak it for four hours, it gets rid of that. She said, "Also rinse it and massage it really well, like multiple times. Massage, rinse, massage, rinse, and then soak it for four hours and put the salt in there. With beans, you salt them at the end. With the rice, you salt it at the beginning. And then cook it the way you always used to cook it. But notice with the oak groats overnight, it's also got the phytic acid issue but I'm soaking it all night, right? Because I set up the slow cooker at night and then she just taught me about variety with my greens. She definitely wanted me eating whole, leafy greens every day, but a variety. So I started having dandelion greens, which I'd never had before, and beet greens, which I'd never had before, and just a whole variety of greens. And my health, I just started to feel more and more well, more and more well.
And it's interesting because I've always had the sense especially in Asia, that there were ancient... In Asia and also in indigenous societies, wisdom about food and about health that has mostly been lost in our modern times. And it was an amazing thing to tap into someone who had been trained by people who'd been trained by people who'd been trained by people about the ancient energetics of food. So I have almost full functionality back in my shoulder. My joint inflammation is way... I don't know, what's the minuscule, just as come way down. And what I'll share is there were things that she suggested that really irked me or that I rolled my eyes at. And almost invariably when I looked deeper, there was solid science behind it.
So one of the things she said, she really got into my bowel movements, "How are your bowel movements?" And she wanted descriptions. And I got so joyful giving her the descriptions of my bowel movements because they became so amazingly good. Every day I was so excited to report to her what my bowel movements were like. And she said, "Well, how are you sitting when you have your BMs? And I was like, "What do you mean how am I sitting?" She said, "Well, how are you sitting?" I said, "I'm just sitting on the toilet." She said, "I want you to put your feet up." I said, "Put my feet up. What?" She said, "Yeah, put your feet up. You need to be squatting. The squatting posture." And so I was sharing this with a friend and I'm rolling my eyes. She doesn't want me to just sit on the toilet. She wants me to put my feet up. And then my friend was like, "Oh yeah, you should do that. There's a Squatty Potty. It's a thing." And so I googled it, and then there's all this scientific research about how much better your digestive tract is when you put your feet up. And so I ordered a Squatty Potty and I love it now.
I don't even like going to the bathroom anymore with my feet flat on the floor. When I'm in an airport, I take my roller bag suitcase and I turn it on its side and I put it under my feet and I put my feet up if I have to go in an airport bathroom. So anyway, it's that old saying, contempt prior to investigation, right? You never know what you're going to end up agreeing with.
I'm sure there are people, maybe somebody listening here who initially thought Bright Line Eating was just ridiculous in its suggestions. And then you try it and a little while later you have to admit like, "Oh, this really actually works. Amazing."
So anyway, I know people are going to write in about the vaccine thing, and I just want to say Pfizer has put out their own report about this. My joint issues, I am not alone. Thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people have had this issue. And Pfizer's actually put out a report about all the challenges that people are reporting long term. If you want to read that report, we'll link to it down below. This isn't just quackery or anti-vax madness.
And I also know that people are going to write in wanting to know who this woman is, especially people who have just come to the end of the road with Western medicine. When you're really suffering and your doctor looks you in the eye and says, "I don't have anything more for you, just take more Advil or whatever." Then I guess you get to the point where you're willing to look into other things. And so I am going to put her contact info down below. I was talking with her last night and I was like, "Are you serious? You want me to put your contact info down below?" She said, "Don't worry. Very few people are actually willing to do what it takes to heed my suggestions and invest in their full recovery. So I might be overwhelmed by inquiries at first," but she said, "Yeah, not really. Not really over the long term." And I said, "Funny. I sort of feel the same way about Bright Line Eating." Many, many, many come to the door and very few actually open it and walk all the way through and then sit down for the long term. Come all the way in and sit all the way down. Precious few.
But she was one of the people who doesn't do Bright Line Eating, but listens to my vlogs long-term and is here listening, enjoying, learning, partaking part of the community. And if you're one of those people who's here listening, not doing Bright Line Eating but partaking anyway, I just want to say I'm so glad you're here. I'm so glad you're here. And thank you to all the people who reach out a hand and say, "I've been through something like what you're going through. And I found healing.
I found wellness, and I want to help you. Let me help you." If everyone in the world did that, found their biggest challenge and found a way to help others get better after they got better themselves. What a world we would live in. What a world we would live in. So that's the Weekly Vlog. I'll see you next week.
