I was born in Colombia, among many other things, top producer of cocoa in the world. It is natural, then, that I grew up drinking a cup of hot cocoa for breakfast every day. Little did I know, chocolate made me sick and also saved my life!

That's right! Chocolate saved my life in more ways than I can count. So here are the lessons I learned two hours after eating a small piece of chocolate.

Lesson 1: medications are often used as a “band-aid” approach to mask the symptoms of disease, not cure it.

At the age of six, I began complaining of headaches. The pediatrician and my parents attributed these to stress and, at the time, my somewhat bad temper. The headaches were mild at first and a simple pain killer would take them away. However, as I grew older, the headaches became intolerable migraines, sometimes lasting up to 3-4 days.

Lesson 2: medications come with side effects which can do more harm than good.

The OTC medications stopped working and we got more doctors involved. After trying some strong migraine medications when I was a senior in high school, I opted for living through the pain over the horrible side effects.I continued to suffer for many years without understanding the root cause of the migraines.

Lesson 3: there is a cause and effect relationship between food and body.

While on summer break from college, I tried a detox program for two weeks and my migraines went away. On the first day back to my regular routine, I ate breakfast and was down for the count two hours later. My morning workout ended when I threw myself on the floor unable to move because my head was about to explode. I connected the dots and discovered my trigger = CHOCOLATE! After testing this hypothesis several times, I knew for a fact that chocolate was the main trigger of my migraines. I stopped eating it and my life changed. This was a clear example of the food-body connection.

Lesson 4: if the liver cannot eliminate toxins from the body, it will look for other ways to do so.

I learned that my liver was not functioning properly and it couldn’t eliminate toxins efficiently, so these went into my bloodstream and manifested in migraines. My experience with migraines and chocolate ultimately became the first piece of a much larger puzzle to achieve optimum health. A healthy liver would play a key role in healing my body in the years to come (more on that later).

Lesson 5: the human body is intelligent, it doesn’t break overnight, and disease is simply a warning sign from the body that something needs to change.

Just like my mild headaches turned into unbearable migraines over the course of many years… disease is a process that doesn’t happen overnight. The body takes time to break down and it needs time to recover. It would be 10 years before I would eat chocolate once again.

The human body needs nourishment and loving care. Disease is a physical manifestation that something is out of balance… there are warning signs along the way and we must pay attention to them. It was thanks to my experience with chocolate that I knew what path to take in order to heal my body!

This is how Chocolate saved my life!