My Mother's Death caused by poor food choices

My mother was obese when I was born, and had no understanding of foods and their effect on our bodies. While she loved her family and her 5 kids dearly, she cooked potatoes almost daily, and baked homemade bread almost every week. We had some sort of meat and potatoes, bread, rice, or pasta at every meal. We almost always had a dessert of some sort - ice cream, cookies, pies, cakes. Homemade fried and frosted donuts were her specialty. Mostly, I remember my mom always in the kitchen. Holidays were all about meals and food for her - and a lot of work! Food is love, right?

I could go on and on about how food, eating, and being overweight affected my mother, her marriage, and her life. While she was a loving, caring, ethical, intelligient, and hardworking mother, she ended up with diabetes, depression, and at the end, cancer. Yet, she never tired of telling us that her waist size was 22 inches when she was married. She blamed her overweight on "having babies" and never took responsibility for her food choices. She was ignorant of the connection between what she ate and the fat stored on her body.

I remember the Christmas when we learned my mom had diabetes. She was so sick she couldn't get out of bed. She had a huge boil on her thigh that wouldn't heal, and she couldn't stop vomiting. We took her to the hospital in Bottineau, North Dakota on December 24, 1970, and she was diagnosed with adult onset diabetes (NIDDM or Non-insulin dependent diabetes mellitus).

While she recovered from that acute episode and was given minimal education about food choices, she never really lost any weight or changed her eating habits much. She was totally addicted to her patterns and habits, and didn't have access to much education in our rural community. She began to struggle with anger and depression - mostly aimed at my father.

A few years later, I was in my first year of nursing school when my dad called to say that mom had "passed out" in the store downtown and he had taken her to the hospital in Grand Forks. All of her 5 adult kids showed up at her bedside, from all over the country. We learned a few days later that she had advanced colo-rectal cancer with mets to her lungs, liver, and brain. She died of an insulin overdose a few days into chemotherapy for her cancer. She was 62 years old.

I have struggled with weight gain my entire life. I have been on just about every diet there is, starting at age 15, with a cabbage and grapefruit diet. I have spent all kinds of money on every diet fad going - from amphetamines at age 16, to AYDS (remember those?), to Slim Fast, to the Adkins, South Beach, etc etc etc. The most help came from a program called "Thin Within" which helped to change my self image.

But still, I never felt I was at a healthy weight, and I always felt like I had to deprive myself to diet. Finally, at age 53, my son Jesse introduced me to a Raw Foods way of eating, and everything suddenly changed.