an excerpt from her book Hands of Life (1998):
[I]n the summer of 1985, the Gilligans' only child, Patrick, was diagnosed with a brain tumor. It threw us all into a state of shock, and he was quickly swept up into the medical world of surgery and radiation. Michelle Clifton remembered reading a book about some kind of diet that had saved the life of a cancer patient, and I was soon in a bookstore, tracking down Anthony Satillero's Recalled by Life. Just beside it I noticed The Cancer Prevention Diet, by Michio Kushi and Alex Jack, and decided on impulse to buy that as well.
I read them both in two days and emerged from the glut of words and information hopeful, if a little stunned. Satillero's book recounted the story of his recovery from a near-fatal cancer, due to a chance encounter with some hitchhikers who turned him on to a strange diet consisting mostly of whole grains, vegetables, beans, something called miso soup, and (ugh, yes) seaweed! As an anesthesiologist and administrator at a major Philadelphia hospital, he was not at all temperamentally or intellectually inclined toward a dietary approach. But his scans had been getting worse and worse, his energy was failing, and he was desperate. He later returned to the health food store where he had dropped them off, to be inducted into the strange (and as it turned our, life-saving) practice of macrobiotics.
In Micho Kushi's book I read with horror all about what the great American diet (or my version of it, which inclined more heavily toward Diet Coke than Twinkies) was doing to my body and my emotional well-being.
Kushi puts forth the simple argument that cancer, like all forms of disease, represents an imbalance in the body. A tumor represents the body's attempt to limit the expression of that imbalance to one area, so the rest of the body can continue to function. The most effective way to heal is to restore balance, and the key to doing that is to have a diet that allows the body to function easily and efficiently, wasting no extra energy on getting rid of unnecessary, unnatural, and toxic substances.
Until that time I had blithely assumed that one of Nature's greatest miracles was the ability to take whatever I ate and magically turn it into more of me. My only concern, like that of so many American women, was that it sometimes made it into much more of me than I wanted to be carrying around. Now I was discovering that with almost every mouthful, I was slowly but surely shortening my life.
Never one to embrace half-measures, I threw myself into the rituals of macrobiotic cooking, starting with the recipes at the back of Kushi's book. I figured I could make myself do just about anything for three months, and at the end of that time, I could evaluate its effects and see if I wanted to continue. So after shelling out a couple hundred dollars for the requisite equipment (pressure cooker, stainless steel pots and pans, really sharp knives, and sushi mats), I launched into a regime that seemed at first to fill up my life with shopping for food, washing food, cutting food, cooking food, chewing food (at least a hundred times each mouthful), washing dishes, and then going out to shop for food again.
Within three weeks I noticed some remarkable changes. For one, my lifelong insomnia had vanished. I, who hadn't slept soundly for two nights in a row since childhood, was putting my head down on the pillow and drifting off almost immediately for a solid eight hours, night after blissful night. My swimming time had improved, and all kinds of little aches and pains I had developed from weight training just disappeared. I could actually lower myself into the bathtub at the end of the day without creaking. Finally, my mood swings were gone--the ones that came along out of nowhere, with little voices urging me to step in front of a truck on a beautiful sunny day.