We are co-founders and life partners Sarah Dal Balcon and Rebecca Dixon. The story of how our business started is really a much larger story of how we began to heal ourselves. Sarah has been living with Crohn's disease her whole life, but was diagnosed at age 27. At 27 years old she was told she would need to be on steroids and immunosuppressants for the rest of her life to deal with the chronic inflammation in her intestines. Luckily Sarah - like me - is stubborn and determined and rejected that as what her life had to look like. Healing From Foods was born out of the mantra that food is medicine, and that healing comes from foods. A year after Sarah and I met, we were both working full time jobs and struggling to just pay rent and bills. Needless to say, this was a stressful time, and our bodies slowly took a toll. Sarah had a flareup of Crohn's, and simultaneously I dealt with constant nausea, headaches, vomiting and exhaustion. Zero desire for food in any form. But we kept getting up every day and going to work anyway. We were too out of touch with our bodies to recognize that something was wrong. Fast forward 3 months, and both of us had lost significant amounts of weight and could barely function from brain fog and fatigue. Sarah ended up in the hospital, and we knew we needed to make some big changes, and fast. We had to completely overhaul our whole relationship with food to see it as nourishment and medicine, not just fuel we had to consume. We began learning more about the medicinal properties of herbs, and nutrition, and Sarah formulated an herbal tea blend to help soothe her digestive tract from the inflammation which also helped my stomach to be more settled. This became our first product, Happy Belly Tea. We threw ourselves into a totally new lifestyle and dedicated our energy to self care in all its forms - meditation, yoga, spiritual work, you name it. Because it was life or death. Either we chose to learn how to take care of ourselves, or die. We chose the former, obviously, and began to heal. Another consequence of that time was that our bodies began to reject coffee because of its acidity and caffeine, so we began searching for something that not only tasted similar to coffee, but was actually good for us, too. We tried all kinds of coffee alternatives, but it wasn't until we moved to Vermont and our neighbor brought us a sample of ojoche that we found exactly what we were looking for. We were excited to find ojoche just for ourselves, but our neighbor told us the only way to get more was for him to pack a suitcase and bring it back with him from Central America the next time he went. The more we researched ojoche and learned of its health benefits and sustainability, the more enamored we became with it. Finally, Sarah and I decided that if it wasn't available here yet, we would start a business that would make it so, and incorporate everything we had learned on our healing journey as well. What we have learned and experienced is that our bodies are incredibly intelligent: they know what they like and what they don't like, and if we can learn to listen to them, we can truly heal. The foods we choose to put in our bodies on a daily basis directly correlate to our overall health and wellness, and the more we choose foods that our bodies like, the better we feel. We created Healing From Foods in March of 2018 as a means of offering what we have learned in our own healing journeys to our community. We have a vision of building a sustainable business that supports the Earth and its inhabitants, and want to help build a better more sustainable future for us, the planet, and humanity. We have come a long way in our own journeys and are just starting out in our business. But we can't wait to see what the future brings. "Paz y amor por todo el mundo." "Peace and love for the whole world."
