MEET BRENDA COBB
My Incredible Healing
By Brenda Cobb
February 1999 was a turning point in my life. I was in the film and television business and owned my own production company, recording studio and booking agency. I was successful and figured that I would always be in the entertainment industry. My husband and I were both actors. He was a casting director and I was a writer, director, producer and song writer. We were constantly attending one networking party after another, eating and drinking till all hours of the night. It wasn’t unusual for us to work 12 to 16 hour days on a regular basis. At home we just popped dinner in the microwave and didn’t pay that much attention to what we were eating or when. After every meal I craved sweets and if I didn’t have chocolate candy in the house I would drive to the all night grocery store just to buy my favorite Baby Ruth and Butterfinger bars.
It seemed there was always something wrong with me. I had headaches most everyday and lived off of aspirin, Tylenol, Advil, Motrin and Excedrin. I had the worse acid reflux, heartburn and indigestion that you could imagine. I was constantly taking Pepcid AC, Zantac, Tums and Rolaids and even had to prop up on pillows to sleep because the burning sensation was so severe when I tried to lie down flat. From the time I was a little girl I was plagued with allergies and pretty much lived on Actifed, Sudafed, Benedryl or any other latest, greatest allergy remedy. At 27 I was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis and as I got older every joint hurt and my fingers were so swollen that I couldn’t make a fist and had to have help opening jars and buttoning my clothes. I was always having problems with my skin and spent a fortune on expensive creams to try to clear up the acne, eczema and psoriasis. I stayed depressed, but instead of a prescription medication I turned to Godiva Chocolates to try to make me feel better. I had dark age or liver spots all over my hands and arms and tried fade creams to make them disappear. My hair was mostly gray and I colored it for over 20 years. I was tired all the time with barely enough energy to make it up a flight of stairs. I had terrible hot flashes, night sweats and mood swings from menopause and never slept through the night. I would get up one, two, three or more times to go to the bathroom every night and then I couldn’t go back to sleep. I was dragging around and constantly wanting to nap. Every year I had two or three colds and it seems that I always got the flu. Still, I never missed a day of work and just took medications to try to make me feel better so I could make it through the day.
Then in February 1999 I was having some very heavy bleeding and decided that I must go to the doctor to find out what the problem was. The first thing the nurse did was put me on the scale. I just about fainted when I found out I weighed 192 pounds. I had no idea how much I weighed because I had sold my scale in a yard sale for $2.00 when I reached 165. I was in major denial. The shock of seeing how much I weighed was just the beginning of the bad news. The worse news came when I was diagnosed with breast and cervical cancer. I had no idea at the time that obesity is linked to all types of cancers. In fact, smoking is the number one cause of death from cancer and the number two cause is from obesity. In the New England Journal of Medicine a study was published on April 24, 2003 linking obesity to breast, cervical, uterine, ovarian, prostate and a host of other cancers.
The doctor insisted that I have surgery and chemotherapy and he told me that if I didn’t do it right away that I would have only six months to a year to live. What a shock! My doctor was furious when I refused the traditional treatment he recommended, but I just couldn’t do it. You see, my mother and my aunts had breast and either cervical, uterine or ovarian cancer and they had the traditional surgery, chemo and radiation and I saw what it did for them. Not much. My aunt Trannie’s story was that she first had cancer in her left breast so they removed it and gave her chemo, but the cancer just came back in the right breast, so they removed the right breast and her lymph nodes and gave her more chemo and radiation. Then the cancer came back in her lungs and so they removed part of the lobe of the lung and gave her more chemo and radiation, but it just came back in her liver and she died. I knew that the traditional therapies were not for me. I knew that cutting out cancer and bombarding the body with toxic, poisonous chemicals was not the answer. There must be a better way.
I began searching for a natural way to heal my body when I discovered the Living Foods Lifestyle that Dr. Ann Wigmore had developed and taught for 35 years. When I read the stories of the amazing healings that people had through following this protocol I decided that was the method for me. So I went against my doctor’s wishes and adopted this as my healing remedy. What happened to me was truly amazing. I lost over 90 pounds in less than 4 months and the weight never came back. I had yo-yo dieted those same pounds on and off my body so many times I had gained and lost at least one or two people. All my allergy symptoms and headaches completely disappeared and I never had to take any medications again. I had no more pain or swollen joints from arthritis and I began sleeping through the night without getting up to go to the bathroom. I never had anymore hot flashes, night sweats or mood swings from menopause. My skin cleared up completely and all the liver spots faded away. Even my gray hair turned back to its natural color which totally amazed me and my friends. I had worn glasses since I was 12 years old and my eyesight improved so much that I never had to wear my glasses again for driving, watching television or the movies. All my candidiasis cleared up and I never had the symptoms of yeast infections. I didn’t even know that I had Candida or what Candida was until I was diagnosed with cancer. When I began to research I discovered that many of my symptoms were coming from the overgrowth of yeast in my body. The Living Foods Lifestyle healed that too. All my cancer was completely gone in less than 6 months!
My doctor was amazed so much that he wrote the forward to my book, “The Living Foods Lifestyle”. He couldn’t believe it when I healed without doing what he had told me to do. Now he tells everyone about me and refers many of his patients to my Institute so they too can learn about healing in a natural way. He tells me that he would send a lot more people to my Institute but that many of the people that he tells about it say that they would rather have surgery and take traditional medicine than to have to make changes in their lifestyle. We live in a world or instant gratification and we have become used to taking a pill for everything. The problem with this approach is that drugs create more toxicity in the body and many times a person who starts taking drugs ends up taking more and more of them. The number three cause of death in the United States is from taking prescription and over the counter medications. So, will drugs cure us or kill us? Just read all of the side effects associated with medicine and maybe you’ll think twice before taking it.
What began as probably the worse news I ever got in my life, being diagnosed with cancer, actually turned out to be the best blessing I have ever received. After healing myself I decided that I must tell others about this wonderful healing lifestyle and in Sept. 1999 I opened the Living Foods Institute in Atlanta, Georgia. Since that time I have trained over 2000 people in the simple principles or health and healing and people continue to amaze themselves and their doctors as they heal from diseases like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, lupus, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, obesity, Parkinson’s, chronic fatigue, allergies, arthritis, AIDS and so much more. It seems there is no disease too serious that it cannot be helped when a person is willing to make lifestyle changes.
What I have come to know is that all disease is caused by toxicity and deficiency in the body, mind and spirit and that to truly heal a person must address these issues and give the body what it needs so that it can heal itself. I have discovered that there are four reasons that people get sick and that it doesn’t really matter what the name of the disease is or what symptoms it creates, when a body is given the right stuff it can heal from the inside out. The number one reason that people get sick is because of how they think. Many people think that I will say that it’s from what a person eats, but negative thinking causes many more problems than poor eating. Every time a person is angry it stores in the liver. When a person is fearful it stores in the kidneys. Both of these organs are extremely important to detoxifying the body and keeping it healthy and just poor thinking and emotions can compromise their effectiveness. Negative thoughts and emotions buried alive create symptoms and disease and every type. For a person to heal they must first begin to think in a new way and to heal the emotions that may have been stuffed inside for many years. It is important that they forgive themselves and others so they can truly heal. The second reason people get sick is because of toxicity within the body. This comes from a toxic environment, toxic air, toxic water, drugs, alcohol, smoking and eating cooked, denatured food, preservatives, chemicals, additives, colors, and dyes.
Cooking kills the enzymes and destroys the potency of vitamins and minerals so even when people think they are eating healthy, if they are eating mostly cooked food, they’re getting little or no nutrients and the body becomes more and more deficient and eventually sick. Eating conventional fruits and vegetables is another problem because they are grown with chemical fertilizers and sprayed with chemical pesticides. You know that if a chemical can kill a bug then it can’t be good for the human body. Organic produce is the best choice and when we look at our food as our medicine and spend more on getting the best quality we can find, we will save an enormous amount on drugs and health care.
The third reason people get sick is because of the deficiency of enzymes, vitamins and minerals. This is because most food that people eat has been cooked and when food is heated to over 105 degrees the life-giving enzymes, vitamins and minerals are destroyed leaving the body depleted of the nutrients it so desperately needs to survive and maintain good health. Have you ever thought about the fact that the human being is the only creature on the planet that cooks our food? No animal has a frying pan, crock pot, or toaster oven out in the jungle. It is only our domesticated animals that have the same diseases that humans have and that’s because our own cats, dogs and other pets are eating cooked denatured food too. The fourth reason that people get sick is because of a dirty impacted colon. Elimination has become a big problem and food sits in the intestines and colon much longer than it should causing toxicity in the liver and the blood. Sometimes this fecal waste can actually eat holes in the colon causing “Leaky Gut Syndrome” and other bowel diseases. Poor elimination causes a host of problems and it is so important that a person clean out their colon with enemas and colonics if they really want to restore health. As a baby you probably ate and then eliminated shortly after, but as you got older you may have begun to have only one elimination a day, maybe less for some people. When you eat three meals a day and have only one bowel elimination, what happens to the rest of the food? It sits in the colon and rots causing gas, bloating and constipation. Just drinking more pure filtered water can help the body to begin to eliminate regularly.
The good news is that the body was created to heal itself and given the right support it can do this completely and beautifully. Many doctors, nurses and health care providers have now come to my healing center to learn the simple principles of healing because many of their own patients that they were sure would die from serious diseases didn’t when they changed their lifestyles. The medical community is becoming more interested as they see their own patients heal when they thought there was no hope.
I believe that it is never too late to heal when a person is willing to learn about their own body and to make the lifestyle changes necessary to support good health. Time and time again people who seem to be going downhill quickly will respond wonderfully when the body, mind and spirit is nourished on a cellular level. Even people who are convinced that their diseases are hereditary get better. I tell people to stop blaming their family tree for their problems. People don’t inherit diseases from their parents or other relatives. They inherit poor lifestyle choices and it is these choices that lead to health problems, not something that someone caught from another person.
When we are willing to become self-sufficient and to learn what to do and how to support good health in the body, there is no problem too big that it can’t be resolved. The first thing that a person must do is to have belief that there is hope and then a willingness to learn what to do to support their own individual body. Most people know more about the octane of gas their cars require than the proper nutrition for their own bodies.
It has never been more important for people to take back their power and to become educated in what they really need to do to support health. The choice is up to the individual and poor health can’t be blamed on other people. We’ve got to take responsibility for what we created and then do something to support healing. It’s all to easy to point the finger somewhere else or to make excuses for why we’re in bad shape, but actually it’s all up to us. When a person is ready to heal the information is available and the help and support is there. What you don’t know can hurt you. Learn about you and which foods best support your health. Not everyone can or should eat the same thing. What may serve one well will be detrimental to another. The more knowledge that a person has about good nutrition, not the food pyramid that is taught in school, but the real truth, the better the chance for living a long, healthy and happy life. Many times people try to do better but because they don’t really understand what to do to best support their own individual needs they may think what they are doing is a good thing when actually it is causing more problems. A good example of this is when people with Candidiasis eat fruit. They may think that eating fresh, raw fruit is healthy, but the sugar in the fruit can feed the Candida yeast causing an even bigger problem. People with cancer should not eat nuts and oils because this clogs up the body and slows down healing.
With so many children being affected by diseases that we used to see only in senior citizens, now is the time for all of us to wake up get busy educating ourselves and our community about healthy eating and healthy eating. There are more children on drugs than ever before. More kids are overweight and have diabetes, depression, attention deficit disorder, cancer, and a host of other health problems they shouldn’t and don’t have to face if they just took better care of themselves. It’s important that parents take a pro-active role in helping their children. Drive-through fast food restaurants have become a major source of poor nutrition and the average child going through the lunch line a school eats 5 to 8 pounds of French Fries every month. This is just at school and doesn’t account for all the fries, burgers, pizzas, soda pop, candy bars and other dead foods that children and adults eat. Many young people are now infertile and if this trend continues in just a few generations no one will be able to have a baby. I have had so many infertile couples come to me looking for help. It’s interesting that when they detoxify their bodies and rebuild them with wholesome, fresh, organic raw produce, they can then conceive and have a healthy baby. The future of our planet is a stake and there is hope to bring healing to individuals and to the planet when we learn what to do and then put it into practice. It’s never too late. There is always hope! Now is time to take action. Become educated about what is best for you and then do something good for yourself.
Brenda Cobb is founder of the Living Foods Institute in Atlanta, Georgia and author of the book “The Living Foods Lifestyle”, with recipes and directions for sprouting, blending and healing the body, mind and spirit. People come from around the world to take Brenda’s 10-Day Living Well Lifestyle Course and a 4-Day Basic Get Started Now Training to detoxify and rebuild the body, mind and spirit. For more information visit www.livingfoodsinstitute.com and www.fountainofyouthnow.com or call 800-844-9876.
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