Five Body Wisdom
Five Body Wisdom is designed to emphasize the deep connection between our five bodies—physical, energy, mental, wisdom, and bliss—and how they work together to promote a life of balance and fulfillment. Inspired by and for women over 55, this podcast delves into the specific challenges and opportunities of this transitional life stage, offering inspiration, guidance, and practical wisdom.
Each episode weaves together personal stories, insightful interviews, and practical techniques to empower listeners to embrace their true selves. The show is hosted by Delia Quigley, an experienced yogi, meditator, intuitive artist, and author with over 40 years of experience in helping women find clarity and purpose in their daily lives. Her compassionate approach and deep understanding of life’s interconnected aspects position her as a trusted voice in navigating change with grace and authenticity.
Listeners of Five Body Wisdom will gain valuable tools to restore balance in their lives, enhance self-awareness, and reignite their sense of purpose. Delia shares her personal journey and expertise, offering techniques for nurturing the body, calming the mind, connecting with intuition, and embracing spiritual growth. The show also features interviews with everyday women who have discovered their inner strength and wisdom, inspiring listeners to do the same.
By tuning in, you’ll join a supportive community of women dedicated to living with intention and joy. Whether you seek practical advice, soulful stories, or a spark of inspiration, Five Body Wisdom provides a roadmap for thriving in the second half of life.
Five Body Wisdom
Food As Medicine: Then & Now
Four remarkable women share their transformative journeys of healing serious health conditions by changing how they eat, proving the power of food as medicine over several decades.
• Andrea Beeman discovered macrobiotics while supporting her mother through cancer treatments and later healed her own thyroid condition by refusing conventional treatment in favor of dietary changes
• All effective diets share one thing in common: they eliminate processed foods and shift the body into a different energetic pattern
• Listening to your body's specific needs is more important than following any particular dietary dogma
• Delia shares a powerful story about a family whose severe arthritic "chicken feet" hands directly resulted from their daily chicken consumption
• Polly Pitchford's experience as a wellness coach taught her that healthy doesn't have to be hard—small changes can lead to significant improvements
• The body has remarkable healing capabilities, especially when supported with whole, unprocessed foods from nature
• Christina Campion experienced a profound transformation through macrobiotics, regaining her health and weight after severe hyperglycemia
• To begin your healing journey, keep a detailed food diary for a week to identify patterns and find a qualified holistic nutritionist or health coach for guidance
Please visit fivebodywisdom.com to learn more about our contributors and deliaQ.com for more health wisdom.
Welcome to 5-Body Wisdom. I'm Delia Quigley. Join me as I take you from my humble beginnings as a health coach and nutritionist to the Delia. Delia, what is it? You were a health coach and nutritionist.
Speaker 1:Yes, I was a health coach and nutritionist for 40 years, and today's episode is about one of my all-time favorite topics healing with food. Not just food for the love of it. Today, we're going to talk specifically about food that heals Food as medicine. You know, I've lived many lives in this one long, evolving life, and through them all, food has been a powerful constant. I've taught yoga, meditation and vegetarian cooking through my school of wellness, stillpoint Schoolhouse. I've guided people through real, lasting healing, not through fads or quick fixes, but through nourishing their bodies with whole living foods. And so for this episode, I've invited a few remarkable women who've done the same, women who've healed, transformed and empowered themselves by changing how they eat. Together, we'll explore what food as medicine looked like back in the 1980s and how it's shifted over time. This is the kind of food that clears your mind, energizes your body, balances your mood and yeah, still tastes absolutely delicious. So stay with me and let's talk about food that truly feeds you from the inside out.
Speaker 2:Come on, let's dig in Growing up as a standard American diet eating family in the 1960s and 70s and 80s, I had zero concept that food could be used as medicine, and it wasn't until my mother was diagnosed with cancer for the second time that I started to understand food. So in the 1980s my mom had a radical mastectomy. She was diagnosed with breast cancer. They took off the breast, they took off the lymph nodes, they did you know the whole thing. It was really radical. Radical meant exactly that it was radical. And then she did you know the radiation and the chemo and she was considered like after five years she was considered cancer-free. But 10 or 11 years after she was considered cancer free she fainted in the bathroom and we took her to the hospital. Well, the ambulance came, took her to the hospital and there they discovered that the breast cancer, even though she no longer had the breast, had now traveled to all of her organs. It was in her bones, it was in her liver, it was in her brain, it was in her lungs, it was everywhere. It was literally everywhere.
Speaker 2:So we started the process again of chemotherapy and radiation and at that time my dad had read an article about a doctor that had healed himself from pancreatic cancer, which is unheard of. You know, pancreatic cancer you get diagnosed and, um, you know, three to six months that's what this doctor was given. His name was Dr Hugh Faulkner. He was given three to six months to live by his colleagues and he changed his diet and he changed his lifestyle and he healed his cancer, or I should say he lived for an additional 10 years beyond his diagnosis. So my father read that article and said to me he goes Ann, let's try this diet with your mom, because we already did the radiation and the chemotherapy and then the cancer came back. Well, let's, let's try and double down, let's do the again, let's do the chemotherapy and radiation, but also let's do this diet thing. So I started to read up on this diet back in the 80s or actually, no, it was the 90s and it was called a macrobiotic diet and I started to incorporate some of the things brown rice, vegetables, you know, things that came out of the earth rather than a box and we said, okay, we need a little more support around this, because it was a whole new way of being in the world.
Speaker 2:So we traveled up to, I traveled, my dad drove me and my mom up to the Cushy Institute in Beckett, massachusetts, and I spent a week there and during that week eating that food, macrobiotic food like whole grains, beans, vegetables, sea vegetables, fish once a week. During that week I noticed that some color came back to my mom's cheeks and I also noticed that I started to go to the bathroom on a regular basis, daily, which was uncommon for me because I was a chronic dieter, so I would go like once every three days. You know, it was always. I was always feeling constipated because I wasn't eating food. I was trying to subsist on diet Pepsi and fat-free cookies. But I noticed that within one week my mom had a little bit of energy and I had an energy shift. And then we went home after that one week at the Cushy Institute and we tried to incorporate as much as we could.
Speaker 2:We did the best we could with what we had, with the knowledge that we had, and my mom lived for about a year and a half and then she died and I'm a firm believer. I think that she died from the treatments of uh for the cancer rather than the cancer itself. It was the chemotherapy and the radiation. Uh, that was probably the thing that zapped her energy and took her life force away. And if I had to, uh, do things differently, I would have given her a little more building foods, because macrobiotics is very cleansing, which is great, but maybe not so great if you're doing chemotherapy and radiation as well, which is also depleting the energy of the body. That was my first step into understanding how to use food as medicine, and then, after my mom died, I kind of pushed all that stuff to the side and I continued on my life journey and I was diagnosed with thyroid disease about four or five years later.
Speaker 1:That was health and wellness coach Andrea Beeman sharing her awakening to the power of healing with whole foods, and we'll hear more from her in this episode. Delia, what's with all the macrobiotics we're going to hear about on this episode? I know when I started out putting this episode together and I invited these three wonderful, amazing women to share their journey, I had overlooked the fact that each one of them had found their start with macrobiotics. You know, back in the 80s, when people came to changing their diets, it was usually because they were pretty sick, cancer was considered terminal and by the time an individual decided to change their diet, they had been told by the doctor that they were done. Go home, make their will, say goodbye to their children. They had only so much time and either the children or their wife or were they themselves, you know decided that well, I'm going to give food a chance.
Speaker 1:One of the most powerful healing with food modalities at that time was macrobiotics. Well, there there was others and you'll hear from them because there's a lot of fasting. So that was me. I was fasting a lot, I was vegetarian, I was fruitarian, I was following whatever was out there. I was following it because I was really severely depressed and I had some health issues and eating disorder.
Speaker 1:That just was crippling me and I would go to the library as much as I could and I would read all the latest books on what to do or to diagnose myself. And then one day I found a book and in it was exactly what described me and my condition and their treatment was, at the time time, antidepressants or what they called Valium, and I thought, no, that's not going to be for me and I set upon, you know, exploring food as medicine. And then my journey led me, through all these diets to macrobiotics, as did most of the women you're going to hear from today. So I just wanted to give you just that little heads up, because you're going to hear more about it as we go on. So let's come back and hear from Andrea again.
Speaker 2:When I was diagnosed, my doctor said okay, you need to take radioactive iodine to destroy your thyroid. And I said I'm not taking radioactive anything. I saw what radiation does to the body. I'm not taking radioactive anything. I'm going to try this crazy macrobiotic diet that I learned about five years ago. I'm going to try this macrobiotic diet and see what happens. So I started that diet and, lo and behold, it took about 18 months but my goiter disappeared and my thyroid became normal. I was like, okay, food is really medicine, it just takes a little longer to work. It's not going to work overnight, it just takes a little longer to work. You got to be patient with it and since that time that was like I was diagnosed back in like 1995 or 1996, something like that.
Speaker 2:Since that time I've watched so many diet trends come in and come out. Every couple of years we have a new diet trend right. 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. You had your macrobiotic, your vegan, your fat-free, your low-fat, your right All the diet trends. And then more recently you have the keto and the paleo and carnivore right. So we have all these different diets. There's also the low oxalate diet, the dairy-free. I mean there's a diet for everything that you could imagine everything and anything that you could imagine. There's a diet and I'm going to tell you this all of those diets work at one point or another in your life, and one of the reasons why they work I'm going to say the main reason why they work is because, as soon as you go on one of the reasons why they work the I'm going to say the main reason why they work is because as soon as you go on one of these diets, you take out all the crap. You take out the junk food and the fast food and the soda and all of the other the crap. That's one of the reasons why your body shifts into a different energetic pattern and it can start to heal. So I think that all of the diets that are out there have some validity. They have something about them that will shift your body into a different state of being.
Speaker 2:And then I think that the job, the biggest job that you could have for yourself, right, the best job is to try to understand your body better and see what it needs. Do I need more fat? Less fat. Do I need more meat? Less meat. Do I need more vegetables? Less vegetables. Am I eating seasonally? Am I eating locally? Do I need more of the stuff that's growing around me? From my humble macrobiotic beginnings to where I am now, over 30 years later, I eat all foods from all categories, as long as it's local, seasonal, lovingly prepared, naturally raised in season, right In balance. Don't eat too much, don't eat too little, and when something feels off, I shift right, take something out, put something in so food really can be healing.
Speaker 2:It can be medicine when we know how to play with it. Take all the information that you can from all of the people that you can, maybe the people that don't have, I want to say, skin in the game, although that's hard. That's hard right, because all of the dieting gurus have skin in the game. But if you could find a trusted source, right, that'll just give you some information. Then have you check on your own body and your own wellbeing and your own health. Always check in with yourself, beyond anything that anyone says about any diet. Check in with yourself and literally ask your body is this what I need at this time in my life? Your body will answer you If you get quiet and you listen, chill out, get quiet, give thanks, and your body will speak to you, your body, mind and your spirit will speak to you. So, contrary to what modern medicine believes, food is medicine. Food, 100% can be medicine. It can be medicinal. It can also kill you. Right, take a look around at the world today. That's all I got to say about that.
Speaker 1:Acrobatics means big life or long life, and was begun by George Osawa, although there's going to be, you know, a little controversy about who started. It was come the Germans or you know. George Osawa took from his and that, but he was always into giving himself different illnesses and then healing them with food, particularly rice. There's a great story about how he went down to Africa and hung out with Albert Schweitzer in the jungle. I think he gave himself Ebola virus and then healed it with white rice and Schweitzer was like shocked, although I think Schweitzer was doing the same thing. Anyway, he came back and he started a school in Japan and his followers, his disciples Michio Kushi and Herman Aihara, came to America.
Speaker 1:Kushi, he took the East Coast and Aihara went out to California where he started the Macrobotic Center out there and it became very popular because basically it is a 19th century agrarian, rural farmhouse diet on whole grains, vegetables, seaweed, beans, lentils, some fish, miso, soy sauce, and research and surveys had already come out claiming that the longest living people in the world were from Japan, based on this diet. I believe it was more rural Japan and they lived longer than anybody. So once everybody found out about that, well off to macrobiotics. They went, but the way Kushi taught it there was more. There was more about the energies, the cooking, the energy, the yin, the yang. It was amazing. It was a really amazing experience, and one of the people I shared that with was Polly Pitchford, who studied with me. We would fly down to Miami once a month and all the macrobiotic teachers would assemble there and we just learned as much as we could. We were like sponges and to this day I still use all those methods to keep me healthy and strong. So here's Polly to tell her story.
Speaker 3:Well, fast forward through years of teaching cooking classes, putting those together on stage and talking as a motivational speaker about healthy eating and exercising, etc. It's time to get a paycheck. The position I got was as a wellness on-site wellness coach through Aetna. So I was hired by Aetna and in the state of Florida they were trying this new on-site health promotion specialist position, of which I was the first. I worked with a population of any county, government or school government. You have A to Z. You have the mechanics, the field workers to the admin and the executive branch and all of that kind of thing. So this was a microcosm of what the United States looks like. So it's mostly overweight, mostly on fit, mostly on medications. There were the smaller core people who we called scared fit or scared healthy. So they're the ones who are way overboard with not way overboard, I shouldn't say that but super diligent about working out five days a week, super diligent about the foods that they eat, which is great because everybody knows someone in their family, in their circles, who are overweight or sick.
Speaker 3:It's mostly the unhealthy, the unwell, who are taking medications to you know, diminish symptoms. People love coming to a cooking class, getting samples, even if they don't have any plans to eat those healthy things. They love coming to a cooking class. It sort of came down to distilled down to you know what, of all of these populations that we're bringing these wellness classes to, if I can affect one or two people, we've done our job. Because that's about the average of whose life you change, whose time it is, is just right to hear the message. It was a good reality check. So you can't know everything and be a good instructor and expect everybody to follow along. It's more realistic to know that it's really that one or 2% who hear it, who follow it, and that's enough and that's very gratifying. Follow it, and that's enough, and that's very gratifying. My magic, if I'm to pat myself on the back, was what I truly believe that healthy doesn't have to be hard. We can't walk around with that thought process, otherwise we're never going to make the first change. So that's why I would always just say, okay, you don't want to change the way you eat. What are you drinking? Start somewhere. You love desserts and sweet. Let's start with something healthier. Sweet, wise, you know just one piece. So I believe the body has the capability to heal Absolutely, but I think it would be really hard if you've gotten to a certain stage of disease and I just mean not healthy somewhere. On the other side of that, the farther you get into a disease state, the harder it is to come back. But you can always improve it.
Speaker 3:You know, if I were ever diagnosed you know, fill in the blank I would go straight back. Number one, I'd go straight back to macrobiotic diet for a bit, because what we learned was, you know, let the body rest from the massive digestive process in order for it to have the energy to heal. And you know, the food you give it. Can the body heal itself? You never know.
Speaker 3:But I feel for me personally, since I have decades of feeding it more whole foods than anything else, that it has a good chance of healing if something is caught early, and I know enough to go to good sources. To steer the body back on track, you have to take in organic energy in the form of whole foods, nothing that's been through a processing plant. You know nothing that's been through foods by Monsanto. That mucks up the true natural energy of these foods that come from Mother Nature, planet Earth. The least processed the better, and we never know the exact quality of it. But if that can be the foundation, the less processed from mother earth to our mouths is the best way to go. Our bodies recognize it and appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Okay, delia, it's story time. What do you have for us today? Well, I have a short story. Really it's not too long, but it's really impactful.
Speaker 1:As to my experience with macrobiotics, so many years ago this would be back in the 80s I was studying macrobiotics and had the opportunity to scribe for Michio Kushi. So he was one of the founders of the Macrobiotic Foundation in America, and scribing was to sit in on his consultations and take notes. And one day a family came in who had traveled quite a distance to see Michio. It was a father, mother and two older teenage children, and they all had severe arthritis in their hands. Their hands were so arthritic they were shaped like claws. They had each filled out the requisite forms and I could see they were a little uncomfortable being there. They had traveled a long distance to find an answer that the doctors had not been able to give them other than a lifetime of medications. They were not the kind of people who would necessarily do an alternative modality. I was sitting there, all eager to take notes and learn from Michio and from their condition.
Speaker 1:Now, michio had a Japanese accent that was pretty hard to understand for the most part. Consequently, when he spoke he was often very succinct and to the point. What I remember very clearly was Michio. He looked up at all four of them after having glanced over their forms and he said you eat lot of chicken. They looked at him with surprise delight. Well, now he was talking their language. Why? Yes, the mother said we love chicken. We eat chicken every day, sometimes several times. It's our favorite food. Eat chicken every day, sometimes several times, it's our favorite food. You know we argue over who has the best chicken, popeye's or KFC. Then they looked at each other and laughed at the family joke. Michaud just nodded his head and smiled. Then he said yes, yes, I see you have chicken feet. And he made his hands into the shape of their arthritic fingers. Now it was part of my role to just remain passive, but I know my jaw dropped, as did theirs, and we all looked at their hands. And they looked at Michio and he said yes, yes, no more chicken. And well, that kind of ended the consultation right there. I knew they would have a really hard time eliminating chicken from their diets. They weren't quite sure to believe what he said, but they'd been to the doctors who had no cure. So they decided to follow his advice give up chicken and follow this odd diet of grains and vegetables and seaweed and beans. But once they did, their arthritis began to clear up. I thought, holy shit, the body never lies. All you have to do is pay attention to what it's telling you.
Speaker 1:Christina Campion came into my life in the oddest of ways. I was in the kitchen chopping up some vegetables. I was doing home delivery of macrobiotic meals both myself and Polly Pitchford and there's a knock at the door and so I go to the door and I open it and there standing in front of me is the thinnest, most anorexic woman I'd ever seen in my life. And I don't remember exactly what she said to me, something about hello. She introduced herself and she was interested in she could help me out in the kitchen. I was the president of the Microbotic Foundation at that point in Sarasota and it took me a moment just to kind of gather my wits around me because I was so shocked. But once I did I said, absolutely, come on in. And from there that's been now a 40-year friendship and I've watched her grow and change and heal, and she did it with macrobiotics. So here's her story.
Speaker 4:I actually remember that moment of walking coming to meet you, delia, and prior to that I had in fact already gone through a big experience of exploring macrobiotics on my own, having been introduced to it by some very wonderful friends in England in about 1984, I think it was the food they gave me that first time wasn't totally what I was looking for, but because I was living in Florida at the time, eating lots of mangoes and you know all the tropicals and enjoying a vegetarian tropical diet. Basically, they had given me a little book by Georgia Sauer and said you might be interested to know more about macrobiotics. But that very first meal they gave me when I stayed with them was pressure cooked aduki beans, pressure cooked brown rice. Kab was in the midst of doing sort of carrot juices and some weird kind of things for helping keeping the colon healthy and all of that, and recently had done many controlled juice, fasting and high colonics. This book I said, wow. Well, number seven sounds like the ultimate diet and it's promising enlightenment. And as I've been practicing yoga and meditation for the last four or five years since my daughter was born, I thought, ok, this sounds good, I can do this.
Speaker 4:George Osawa's idea about the number seven diet was basically very large amount of grain and vegetables, sea vegetables, the way of life. Part of that was to make sure that you chewed every single mouthful until it was liquid, so a hundred times at least. This idea of enlightenment, which I didn't fully understand, sounded very interesting. Plus, george was recommending in his book, george Asawa, that you could actually heal yourself of certain conditions by eating only brown rice for 10 days. Nobody had ever suggested this before. Also, this business of chewing every mouthful 100 times, which in itself was also very interesting, because as a child growing up with my grandmother, she had insisted that I hurry up and eat. I was a slow eater and if you didn't hurry up and eat, no treat. So I learned to rush so I wouldn't be punished. So off I went. I dropped my daughter at school, went off to the nearest health shop and got some short grain brown rice. He said short grain brown rice. He said short grain brown rice, Bought store-made gomasio, which is roasted sesame seeds with salt. And because I hadn't had my menstrual cycle for two months, he particularly said that if I drank moo tea number 16, which was a herbal mixture, that would help bring back my menstrual cycle. So I thought, wow, this sounds great.
Speaker 4:I cooked the rice in the pressure cooker, sat down with a very small, maybe four ounces of this brown rice, and I made the tea and I put one chopstick full into my mouth and started chewing A hundred. I was counting every single mouthful and the most extraordinary thing started to happen, definitely on the second mouthful of rice. Most extraordinary thing started to happen definitely on the second mouthful of rice. I suddenly had this sensation that, even though it was a pouring rain and gloomy day outside, I felt like an opening was happening in the top of my head and golden sunlight was pouring down into my body, flooding me with this extraordinary sensation of warmth and well-being. It felt like it was coming out, going down my spine, my whole body, down through my feet, across my shoulders and down my arms and out my hands, and it kept on happening and I kept on chewing and counting and this sensation just went on and on and on and I felt like I had maybe died and gone to heaven. Something extraordinary was occurring. Now this beautiful, beautiful music is playing, and then angelic singing, and then I'm sort of uploaded or downloaded with what I called universal information, and it included things about my family and the world and poverty and what was going on and the world and poverty and what was going on, what was wrong with the human condition.
Speaker 4:This was my first moment of getting into macrobiotics. I didn't really know anything about it. I was hooked. It took me two and a half hours to chew that little tiny bowl of brown rice, but I was high as a kite. I thought I was just floating down the sixth floor walk-up apartment all those stairs. That was the beginning and I wanted to do the 10 days. So I kept on doing it and on the fifth day my menstrual cycle started again. So that, I would say, was the beginning of my trying to balance intellectually what I was reading with what was physically going on within me.
Speaker 4:Intuitively, I had already gone to see Denny Waxman, who was the first person who diagnosed my condition accurately. He basically said has anyone ever told you you've got severe hyperglycemia? I said no, I never mentioned. And he said well, I want you to do this, this and this. So that was my beginning of applying a carefully suggested, recommended modern day macrobiotic diet.
Speaker 4:Well, it was a bit like night and day really, because after the first consultation I had with Denny and at that point I weighed about 75 pounds. Five foot seven, and everyone thought I was dying. You know they all cried when they saw me. And I went to see Denny and he said Okay, I want you to go home and do this, this and this, and I'll see you in three months. And he said it's going to take a while, you're going to go through many changes. I would say it was about two years later. I weighed 140 pounds. It was a very simple, simply delicious diet. Everything cooked by me, everything just fresh. He wanted me to do everything fresh for every meal for the first three months. I don't think I would be here if I had not met and followed Denny's advice. Simple as that.
Speaker 1:So, Delia, any final words for your listeners. I have to say they've gotten some really good advice and stories from my guests today, but I think if you're having a health issue, then the first thing you want to do is keep a food diary for a week. Write down everything you're eating, you're drinking, everything you're taking each day, Each meal, snacks throughout the day. Just write it down Supplements, medication, all of it. Write everything down on a piece of paper and then take a look at it. The adage you are what you eat is for real, and what you eat is the root cause of many of the problems in your body. Find a good holistic nutritionist or health coach, like one of the women on my show today. A good holistic nutritionist or health coach, like one of the women on my show today, because it's best to have a guide, someone who's been there and knows the way. So I want to thank my wonderful guests today Andrea Beeman, Polly Pitchford and Christina Campion and you can read all about them in the contributors page on fivebodywisdomcom and I want to thank all of you for being here listening on Five Body Wisdom interviews with ourselves.
Speaker 1:This episode concludes my season one and I'm going to take a little break, take some time to plot and plan season two, which I will debut in September. Thank you so much for listening. Please pass the word. Check out my website, DeliaQcom, and if you have any questions or anything you want to ask, please don't hesitate to get in touch. I'm Dewey Quigley. Until next time, Thank you.
