Article 3: The Brain Comes First

By late 2016 I had done decades of spiritual and emotional work. I had forgiven the men who abused me. I had forgiven my parents. I had gathered up the discarded child in the castle and taken her hand. I had written a book about all of it.

But I was also carrying well over 400 pounds.

If healing were purely a matter of the soul, the weight should have come off years earlier. It did not. Something was still holding on, and I could not reach it with prayer or journaling or counseling. What I did not yet understand was that the damage done to me as a child was not only emotional. It was biological. And biology requires a biological answer.

What Trauma Does to a Brain

Several weeks before my life changed, I stumbled across a seminar by Dr. Tim Jennings I had never viewed. His talk, the Modern Medicine Seminar, was given to a group of medical students and includes long discussions of drug therapy — not really my kind of material. But his earlier seminars on the brain had given me so many light bulb moments that I decided to wade through this one too.

What a gold mine.

Dr. Jennings explains how early abuse, neglect and emotional trauma physically reshape the brain. Not metaphorically but physically. Early trauma alters brain chemistry, damages neural pathways, and affects the way our genes express themselves. The child who learns to disconnect and hide inside herself is not making a choice. Her brain is rewiring itself to survive, and that wiring does not simply dissolve when the danger passes. It stays. It runs quietly underneath everything for the rest of her life unless something intervenes.

This explained something that had confused and shamed me for decades. Knowing what is right and doing what is right do not necessarily go hand in hand in a life that has experienced abuse or neglect during the formative years of childhood. I had lived that gap. I had stood in my kitchen at night knowing exactly what my body needed and eating something else anyway. I had called myself weak for it. I had called myself a fraud.

I was not weak. My brain had been injured, and I had never treated the injury.

The Nutritional Protocol

Toward the end of his talks Dr. Jennings offered several nutritional supports for brain health. He did not suggest dosages, so I played around a bit and came up with something that worked for me.

• Pomegranate juice concentrate — 1 oz a day, added to superfood or water
• Folate as l-methylfolate, 1000 mcg — one capsule three times a day
• N-Acetyl Cysteine, 600 mg — two capsules three times a day
• Vitamin C, 3,000 mg — three times a day
• Vitamin B-12 — 1 capsule two times a day
• Turmeric — two capsules three times a day

A word of caution from an herbalist. The best source for any vitamin or mineral is a live food source. Life has taught me that there are times when natural juices and food sources need to be carefully supplemented for the additional support necessary to heal a specific issue. But massive use of vitamin and mineral supplements adds a heavy load to the kidneys and liver. Find the best food source for the needed nutrients whenever possible, and do not stay on a heavy supplement protocol longer than the healing requires.

Because so much housecleaning happens on a regimen like this, do not neglect the foundational programs. Boosting with Echinacea. Bowel cleansing. Massive nutrition through superfood and juicing. And plan on liver flushing every few weeks. After my first two weeks on this protocol it was clearly time to flush my liver.

Joy Came Back First

Here is what I did not expect.

The regimen I began that autumn turned out to be one of the best choices I have made in a long time. Life started becoming fun again. Interest in my own life returned.

I have always loved my work and count it a privilege to know the members of H.E.A.L. But in the years leading up to this, I had quietly stopped enjoying the extra things that had always been a huge part of who I am. Photography. Cooking. Sewing. Writing. The creative side of my life had simply shut down, and I had not noticed it going. You do not notice the light dimming when it happens one degree at a time.

Within weeks of starting the protocol I was looking forward to those things again.

To understand what that means: before a single pound came off, before I had ever heard of Dr. Fung or read a word about insulin, the woman who had done all that healing work began to actually inhabit her own life again. The brain healed first. Joy came back first. The weight came later, and it came almost as a consequence.

Why This Matters for Anyone Trying to Lose Weight

If you have done the emotional work and the spiritual work and your body still will not cooperate, I want to offer you a possibility that no diet book will mention.

Your brain may still be injured.

Not broken. Not beyond repair. Injured — and injuries can be fed and supported and healed. The forgiveness was necessary. The counseling was necessary. The prayer was necessary. But learning to disconnect at seven years old left physical marks on the brain — the very organ that governs your appetite, your impulse control, your mood, and your motivation. That organ needs actual nutrients to rebuild.

I spent decades treating the soul and ignoring the tissue. When I finally treated both, everything moved.

Nine months later, in the last week of August 2017, I was ready to begin.

Dara D. Dietz is co-founder, with her husband, of H.E.A.L. Marketplace, a private natural healing association serving an international membership since 1998. She is the author of Whatever Good May Come (2009) and resides in Rutherfordton, North Carolina.