Alvas Health Journey

Alva, our founder, holds a bachelor's degree in Health & Nutrition and has studied alternative medicine. Additionally, she has gained experience working in various health-related fields and with wholesome recipe creations. She discovered during her years of battling illness, her job and studies that there are numerous competent persons all around us who possess knowledge, experiences, and a passion for health. Hence the purpose of VIDA VERDE: to gather all of this knowledge and inspiration in one platform so that people can easily find inspiration, knowledge, and guidance on their health journey.

Alva is sharing her health journey in today's post. She tells her story of suffering from mental illness from a young age, which subsequently led to her developing inflammatory bowel disease. This experience was the motivation for the creation of VIDA VERDE.

As a child I loved sports and the team spirit that came with it. Throughout much of my childhood I played soccer and handball. However, since I was 14 years old, I had problems with my calf muscle. I got some help with my injury and decided, for other reasons, to quit playing soccer and put all my focus on playing handball. My injury was still present, and the pain it caused affected my everyday life.

To make this a blog post and not a book, I went to countless doctor's appointments due to my injury, and eventually, I underwent surgery. Despite this, my calf never healed, and after three years, I received the final statement that I wouldn't be able to play handball again.

My life was falling apart at 17. Who was I if I didn’t play a sport? All my friends were athletes, many of them playing in my team, my whole school was filled with athletes. Except me.This was the first time in my life I started experiencing severe anxiety. For some months, I didn’t even realize it myself; that it was anxiety, I was just not happy. Going to school was a struggle due to my performance-based anxiety to get a good grade, because I had to be good at something…

However, this led to a couple of years of having severe anxiety, chronic fatigue syndrome, an eating disorder, and I got sick for long periods of time. The doctors called it a periodic burnout/fatigue. I experienced problems with so many things in my physical body: my heart, mouth, and throat, cysts, lack of my appetite, weight loss, hair loss, etc. (I was receiving help from an amazing psychologist during this period, which helped me a lot with my mental health).

One day, my stomach started to ache, and it did from day to night for about two years, non-stop. This together with my mental illness made me even more sick. Some days I couldn't even get out of bed; my legs couldn't carry my body. The pain I experienced during that time was so intense that I barely remember these episodes. I woke up in the middle of the night crying of pain; every time I ate, I got cramp attacks, and this went on and on. After over 1 year of investigations, in and out from the emergency and doctors' appointments without any answers to my problems, I got diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). After a while on a medical treatment that didn’t work correctly, the doctors couldn’t help me until I got higher inflammatory levels in my body, despite my severe illness. My family and I then came in contact with a kinesiologist, Lena. Lena was the first person since I was 14 that said, ”Alva, you are going to be okay.” I received her treatments, and she guided me with lifestyle and nutrition tools, and after six months, my stomach was slowly responding positively to the changes and the treatments. I could slowly start to live again.

This experiences made me realize that our body, mind, and soul are all connected. We are affected by everything around us: the people we surround ourselves with, the food we eat, our thoughts and mindset, the words we speak.I’m still learning every day about my body, mind, and soul. Life is always in motion, and so are we: always changing, expanding, experiencing, and feeling.

You can get healthy, our bodies are always trying to aim for balance, we just have to give it the right conditions to do so.

Much love, Alva