Cooking Your Way To A Sharper Mind
By Susana Stoica, PhD
Twenty years ago, I suffered a traumatic brain injury with internal bleeding that completely changed my life. From a person who had been highly active, working long hours as an engineer on the forefront of technology definition and, after engineering hours, working in a medical practice as a medical intuitive and energy healer, I became somebody who was barely able to satisfy my responsibilities at work and at home. I had to learn coping mechanisms for everything and in the end, despite my best efforts and the help of many healthcare practitioners, I just could no longer function. Every minor stress led to serious health problems and completely shattered my ability to make sense of the world around me. I could not even prepare meals for my family like I once enjoyed doing. I had to figure out a whole new way of cooking, which eventually led me to write the bestselling series of cookbooks Cooking After Brain Injury: Easy Cooking for Recovery.
But first, let me explain exactly what is involved in a traumatic brain injury (TBI).
Brain trauma is one of the most misunderstood medical conditions. A large percentage of these injuries are not even diagnosed because they do not show up on any kind of diagnostic test. To make things even more complex, the symptoms are so diverse[1] that it is quite easy to mistake a closed head injury[2] for other illnesses, especially when the original brain trauma was never diagnosed by a medical professional, either because the person never saw a doctor, or because at the time of the examination the symptoms of brain trauma were not visible[3]. In my nearly forty years of experience as a healer, I saw people with brain trauma misdiagnosed and mistreated for allergies, ADD, ADHD, hormonal imbalances, fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, and epilepsy.
Many people with TBI do not even know something is wrong with their brain; they blame their lack of concentration, nervousness, and inability to sort things or establish priorities on normal fatigue or bad work habits. Some of the brain-injured suddenly start hoarding because they cannot sort the important from the unimportant. Others become deeply religious, rebellious, or even violent. I wonder how many of today’s young criminals are in fact are the victims of TBI received during childhood beatings?
While we know that early onset of Alzheimer’s is linked to head injuries, the effects of the TBI can also show up early in life, like in the case of a twenty-nine-year-old who had a trauma when he was four. He had no problems related to the trauma until he was under an extended period of emotional stress twenty-five years later. By the time he started having epileptic seizures, he no longer remembered he had brain trauma. Typically, when the trauma resurfaces in old age, the problem is generally branded as “normal aging” and treated as Alzheimer’s, as the person has no idea it might be related to a long past injury. (Sadly, failure to accurately diagnose the problem is tragic even in those cases, as energy healing can still improve quality of life.) I named these cases, in which the brain trauma is expressed years after the injury, Delayed Brain Trauma (DBT) or Delayed TBI. [See more information on this topic on my website at healingbraininjury.com/media under Publications.]
While DBT is not known to mainstream medicine, because there is no medical test that could connect old brain traumas to current health issues[4], it is a serious burden to society, especially now that people live longer lives. As DBT typically appears after a period of intense or prolonged stress and as few of us are immune from stress either at work or at home, the chance of its resurfacing is high, especially that our traditional family connections between parent, grandparent, and child are no longer as strong as they used to be, so there are less of the traditional sources of emotional support. As the work environment has become increasingly stressful too, people being expected to work long hours and job stability is not what it used to be, I am wondering how many of the people who started to shoot their coworkers did so because of a long-forgotten brain injury.
In my work as a healer, I have been especially effective in resolving the energetic imbalances caused by TBI. Because I have seen children and adults regain their capability to function normally after relatively few healing sessions, I thought any healer could achieve similar results. After my own double brain injury, I quickly learned that it was not true—and my own experience with TBI showed me how few alternatives really were available for effective treatment. They say that experience is the best teacher, and my own journey with TBI gave me the insight I probably could not have received any other way. One of the most frustrating aspects of my brain injury was that I was no longer able to do anything around the house. “Order” meant that I put things away and could never find them again. Shopping was an exercise in repeatedly buying the same stuff and forgetting to buy what I really needed. Cooking was virtually impossible because I could not follow a recipe or remember my old tried-and-true favorites. If someone distracted me by merely talking to me while I was cooking, I ended up over-salting, skipping steps, or forgetting the pot on the burner. I nearly burned down the house twice because I forgot I was cooking and left to go shopping.
I told myself there had to be a better way—a way to write up recipes that would let me and others with TBI follow simple, logical steps. In my effort to find workarounds for the way I had once cooked, I devised my own new way of cooking. I refined it again and again until I arrived at what I shared in my cookbooks. Here is what you should know about the dishes in these books:
The dishes were cooked many times following exactly the same recipe.
The foods I prepared from these recipes were repeatedly critiqued by people with no known brain trauma.
Every recipe is rated for complexity, so a person is able to pick out a recipe to cook on a specific day, depending on how he/she mentally feels that day.
Even the most complex recipes are relatively simple to cook using the tools provided in the books.
The book has several “basic recipes” that were changed only slightly to result in several different dishes, thus enabling an easier approach to cooking.
Because people eat different amounts of food, it did not make sense to define the number of portions in a dish. Instead, the recipes are rated on their relative caloric content.
Detailed preparation and cooking steps are listed, so one no longer has to worry about over-salting, forgetting steps, and so on. Simply checking off the steps already done, while preparing the dish avoids cooking mishaps.
As eating a nourishing diet is even more important for those with brain trauma, I decided when learning to cook again to focus on healthy dishes. As a result, the recipes in these books are rated on:
Whether they are vegetarian or non-vegetarian
How caloric they are
· The relative glycemic index (the relative rise in the blood glucose level two hours after consuming that food)
Whether they contain the most typical allergens.
I know from my own experience that being able to cook anything successfully was and is a great morale booster, but having too many choices was literally painful, so I decided to split the recipes into groups of about fifteen and I also rated them for relative cooking complexity. This enables one to start cooking using the simplest recipes and, when ready, can “graduate” to the next, more complex recipes in the next book in the series.
I am the best testimonial of the usefulness of cooking through the books. As I wanted to make sure that all the recipe ingredients were correct, I recooked every one of the recipes before releasing each book. As a result, I went from being able to cook one dish a day with the food shopping done the previous day when I started, to cooking multiple dishes simultaneously on the same day by the time I released the last book in the series. This tells me that the book is useful not only for those with brain trauma but also for those who are getting up in years.
I sincerely hope my book will give people like me, who have suffered brain trauma, the opportunity to feel once again useful to themselves and their families by being able to cook tasty healthy meals.
Testimonials
By Neurologist Dr. Mitchell Elkiss in the Foreword to the book:
“In this book, Susana has taken the lemons that were handed to her by her traumatic brain injury and turned them into gourmet lemonade…. She has taken her love of good nutrition and cooking, combined it with her frustrations and limitations following her brain injury, and created an easy-to-use and follow cookbook for others with brain trauma. In her quest for her own healing, Susana Stoica has lit the path for so many others affected by brain injuries who are struggling with producing a good meal and finding a pathway toward wellness.”
Midwest Book Review:
“The emphasis on step-by-step processes that breaks up typical cooking directions for easy absorption and understanding by those who may not be able to concentrate or quickly process steps, makes this series a top recommendation. These books [the “Cooking After Brain Injury” series] should be in the toolboxes of anyone recovering from brain trauma and the therapists helping them regain their independence through brain-exercise therapies.”
Susana Stoica, PhD is the author of nine books on emotional and physical health and healing. She is an engineer by training, having worked all her career on defining new technologies being on the forefront of computer and, later, integrated technology development. She is an inventor, and also a born medical intuitive and healer.
For more information about Susana’s work and links to many audio and video interviews, please visit: https://healingbraininjury.com
Her books are available at Amazon.com.
[1] The symptoms depend on which part of the brain was affected.
[2] Closed head injury is a type of traumatic brain injury in which the skull and dura mater remain intact. Closed head injuries are the leading cause of death in children under 4 years old and the most common cause of physical disability and cognitive impairment in young people. [from Wikipedia]
[3] The brain typically swells up after a physical trauma and causes what is know as “secondary brain injury”. If the swelling is not bad enough at the time of the test to be visible on an MRI, and it goes undetected by cognitive tests, the person is diagnosed as being well and not needing additional help.
[4] The only way to detect Delayed TBI is with the help of healers specialized in working with the brain.