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In the autumn of 2017 my husband got sick.

Not the kind of sick that comes and goes in a week. The kind that settles in without explanation and stays. Severe stomach cramps. Pain that would double him over. Diarrhea. Sometimes vomiting. At its worst it was happening twice a month, and over the course of six to eight months he lost nearly seventy pounds, dropping from around two hundred and forty down to one hundred and seventy. That is not nothing.

We went to doctors. Multiple doctors. He had colonoscopies and endoscopies. He had blood drawn and results analysed and opinions offered. He cut out gluten. He cut out corn. He cut out soy. He tried each for four to six weeks, noticed no improvement, and quietly went back to eating them. One doctor suggested his body wasn’t processing sugars properly, something like lactose intolerance but broader, affecting all sugars. He took enzymes for six months. They helped a little. Not enough to matter.

And then came the cancer diagnosis.

I will say this plainly. We knew it was wrong almost immediately. Not because we were in denial, but because we researched what they said he had and it simply didn’t fit. We still took it seriously for a couple of months, because you do. Our daughter was frightened in the way that only a young person who has not yet learned to sit with uncertainty can be frightened. She worried he would die. We did the follow up labs at six months. Everything was the same. At the one year mark we requested a new doctor.

The first doctor had not been someone you could talk to. Questions went unanswered. The second doctor was the head of the cancer centre. He was kind and thorough and sorry that we had been through it. And that was the end of that.

What stayed with me from that whole period was not the fear. I am not particularly given to fear. What stayed with me was the frustration. The endless prodding and testing and theorising that led nowhere useful. I could manage him being ill. What I could not manage was watching him go through all of that without a single answer that made him better. When he finally said he was done with doctors I understood completely. We were both done.

The attacks did slow on their own over time, spreading further apart, becoming slightly less severe. We had no explanation for that either. We simply noticed it and carried on.

Then, a year or two ago, we came across a video that stopped us both in our tracks.

The argument was straightforward. Unlike animals, plants cannot fight off attackers. They cannot run. They cannot bite. Their only defence is chemical:— releasing compounds when they are cut or broken that do not agree with the digestive systems of those consuming them. Every living thing resists its own destruction. Plants are no different. They simply do it quietly and from the inside.

I thought about our garden. When you snap a vegetable from its vine or cut into it, something is always released. You can see it. We had both seen it for years without thinking much about it. Suddenly it made a different kind of sense.

We stopped eating vegetables. Mostly. Our diet shifted toward meat, fruit, potatoes, and things that would naturally fall from a plant without resistance. For me it was easy. I had never been especially fond of vegetables to begin with. For him it was a harder adjustment. But we both noticed changes. He felt better. I felt better. And we both noticed, almost as an afterthought, that we smelled less. We still sweat. But the odour was different. Reduced. It seemed a small thing until we started wondering why.

That wondering is where everything changed.

If what we eat affects how we feel and how we function in ways that doctors never mentioned, what else had we been told or not told? We started reading labels. We started avoiding seed oils, refined oils, heavily processed ingredients, things with names that require a chemistry degree to pronounce. We switched our kitchen materials. Glass instead of plastic. Real dishes instead of paper. Stainless steel pans instead of non-stick coatings that nobody seems entirely certain about.

And we started looking backward.

There is a photograph from roughly a hundred years ago of an ordinary street full of ordinary people. They are not athletes. They are not wealthy. They are simply people going about their lives. And they look well. Not perfect, but well. Lean and capable and present in their bodies in a way that is harder to find in a crowd today.

We began asking ourselves what they knew that we have forgotten. What they ate, how they cooked it, what they reached for when something went wrong before there was a pharmacy on every corner telling them what to reach for instead.

We do not have all the answers. We may never have a complete explanation for what happened to my husband in 2017 or why. But we have found something that feels more honest than anything a waiting room ever offered us.

We are looking backward. And so far, what we find there is making us better.

— Kate