Denise Kelly - The Art of Healthy Living

I have found that being happy with your life, including all aspects – work, relationships, and success – is just as important as what you are eating and how much exercise you are getting. However, it is a vicious cycle: it goes without saying that the healthier you are, the more strength you have, leading to more energy. Higher energy creates much better behaving hormones, happier and more uplifted feelings, and a more positive general attitude. It also contributes to greater brain power with more clarity, calmness, and focus. When you are focused and in control of your emotions and your life, you make better decisions, which will help you move forward in the way that your heart desires and create passion, success, and achievement in all areas.

Life is short, right? There is no replay, so live it to the fullest.

After all you only get one shot (I know everyone has different beliefs, but that is irrelevant right now, because you really do get one shot at being you, right now, in this lifetime) so why waste time feeling pants? If you are not fuelled correctly, you will feel tired all the time, lethargic, low in energy, maybe even a little depressed, foggy in your thoughts, and unmotivated. Maybe you catch colds really easily, or you have to take a course of antibiotics each winter season because your body just can’t cope and you spend wasted hours in bed feeling poorly? Or maybe you are suffering from an illness that you know you could help if you had a better diet? Migraines for example can be completely debilitating for some people and cause endless sick days. From my experience, and the way I have worked with many clients over the years, you need to clean up the condition of your blood, clear the toxins out and strengthen your liver function, and the migraine attacks will disappear. None of this is rocket science. Sometimes the simplest of things can completely turn your health around and give you back that incredible zest for life. It’s just down to knowledge and informed choices.

How would you feel if I asked you to create an existence for yourself that you truly love? Doesn’t that make the most sense? I meet so many people every day that dislike their jobs, or have fallen out of love, but they are hanging in there because they are scared to be alone, or struggling with debt, abuse, or not achieving their goals and feeling despondent and disappointed with life.

Well, I am here to tell you, with conviction in my heart, that you can, and you will, turn your life around if you really have the desire. Knowledge is power and once you know, it is up to you what you do with that information. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink!

Also, when you are newly equipped with information, it’s really easy to want to tell everyone that you meet and lecture them with your new‐found knowledge that’s going to change the world. I was like that when I first qualified as a nutritionist, and when I look back now I feel utterly mortified! I thought I knew it all. But of course, I didn’t. It has taken years to understand what works and what doesn’t and that everyone is different. We all have our own journeys to go on in this world of discovery. Some people are just not ready to hear information that could propel them into success, or a happy relationship, or becoming a leader, or the best parent in the world!

Changing the way your body feels and making yourself stronger and more desirable is a dangerous place to be … because it moves out of the comfort zone of ‘stuck’ and into the unknown zone of ‘amazingness’ and ‘anything is possible’. The sky is your limit, and this can be a very daunting place, believe it or not! The best way to share your knowledge is to lead by example. If you look amazing, ooze confidence out of every beautiful pore in your skin, and are glowing with enthusiasm and vitality, I can guarantee you that people will want a piece of you. Then, and only then, should you share your knowledge. Why? Because they want to be just like you!

So, you can party, you can eat out, you can drink a little if that’s what you like to do, but inform yourself how to put your body right the next day, and the day after that, until it’s so ingrained in your life that living this way becomes normal. You can get such a high from eating ‘clean’ that you will want less of the ‘bad stuff’ and be high on the more beneficial energizing foods that I am going to tell you about throughout this book.

My motto in life is: ‘Life is for thriving, not just surviving, and why would you want it any other way?’

My passion for health began in the year 2000 when my beautiful baby girl was born. Up until that point I had been relatively healthy all my life. No major illnesses and naturally in good shape. I was one of those that pretended to go to the gym, but really spent the entire time chatting to everyone and not doing much else! Shortly after my daughter was born, I started getting stomach cramps, to the point where, every time I ate, I felt nauseous and unwell. While all my friends that had babies were desperate to lose weight, I was shedding weight at an alarming rate. I had always been a curvy girl, as a teenager and in my twenties – an average UK size 10. I had boobs and a butt and was proud of them!

As the pain continued, and the weight fell off I reached out for medical help. Having grown up in a healthy family, with an average life expectancy (from the grandparents) of around 90 we didn’t go to the doctors much. My parents believed in homeopathy and we saw therapists for reflexology, acupuncture, and reiki if we felt unwell. So it felt kind of alien to me to have such problems that wouldn’t go away. That year I saw three gastroenterologists, had tubes up, in, and down to look at every angle of my intestines and they found nothing.

Don’t get me wrong, I think doctors are amazing. I have doctors as relatives, and know they perform miracles every day, working with the information they have, but in my case they couldn’t find out what was wrong. Having a newborn child would have been exhausting at the best of times, but I was up half the night doubled over in pain, unable to digest anything, and feeling tired and afraid. As regards my daughter, it is as if she knew, from the day it all started, how to behave in a way that was overwhelmingly supportive to me. From just six weeks old, she started sleeping through the night and has never been a moment’s trouble ever since.

So now, I had gone from a healthy size 10 to a skinny size 4–6. I had lost my curves and I didn’t feel like me at all. The doctor actually told me to go home and eat a ‘good pie’, but how could I when I literally felt like everything hurt? Telling me there was nothing more they could do gave me no option but to seek ‘alternative’ help. It’s a pattern that I am all too familiar with now, as most of my clients don’t see me as their first port of call. They see me because they are running out of options and are desperate to feel well. I like to spread the word that prevention is better than cure, but I guess not everyone sees it that way.