Owning Cancer is a lifestyle for managing your cancer through a daily engagement with your mind, your body and the foods you eat.

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KEY POINT: The foods you eat and the thoughts you think change your body on a cellular level.

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THE GOAL:  Change your body chemistry  

We all have cancer cells in our bodies throughout out lives.  Why do they one day flourish?  One thing we know for sure, cancer thrives when it likes the chemistry of your body.  Change it.  As you know, when you undergo chemotherapy, radiation and others treatments, your immune system is greatly challenged.  But changing your chemistry through diet, meditation and stress reduction, strengthens your immune system and actually improves the impact of chemo and other medications and treatments. Following this approach, I've been able to slowly eliminate all prescription drugs save Metformin (which I write about in DIET). 

 

Before we look at Twelve steps to take…

 

OWNING CANCER KEY POINT:  You can’t be afraid of cancer.  If you fear cancer, it will destroy you.  How do you do this?  Simply inform yourself, make changes to your diet, meditate and then move forward each day with actionable items.  That's why I created Owning Cancer, to help you educate yourself and make changes.

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AND THIS: Don't look at your journey as a "fight" against your cancer.  There are no winners and losers here.  In changing your internal chemistry, you're seeking an emotional and physical equilibrium to harness your body's incredible, natural ability to heal itself. 

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#1    First, have a heart-to-heart with yourself.  Check in and ask yourself, do you want to live?  I’m not kidding.  Emotions play a huge role, affecting you on a cellular level; first in the development of cancer and then in your management of it.  So, do you want to live?  If not for yourself, are there others you are living for?  Are you willing to do the work to get healthy and stay around?  If so, then a big part of healthy living starts with love.  

 

#2    The person you need to love and care about the most is yourself.  And according to doctors like Bernie Siegel, that's often not the case with cancer patients.  Now's the time to concentrate on loving yourself and focusing on your needs above all others.  Can you look in the mirror and say, “I love you?”  Not everyone can.  And if you can’t, now is the time to work on that.  Do it every day until you get comfortable with it; meaning it and feeling it.  It took me a while.  I'm here to tell you, self love is where the healing starts.

 

#3    Self love happens, in part, through a willingness to forgive yourself.  After you’ve done that, you’ll need to develop forgiveness of others - or, at the very least, recall past feelings without going into the trap of despair .  This isn’t always easy.  Throughout our lives most people suffer from hurt(s) inflicted (intentionally or not) by ourselves or others.  To heal, you need to take the strong feelings associated with those losses and tamp them down and find in your heart forgiveness while still recognizing accountability of both yourself and others, so that you may practice self compassion.  (There are resources to help you do this -- and I'll recommend some personal favorites later on.)

 

#4    You want and need to break old mental habits of negative thinking.  This was part of the self-love and self-compassion I had to work on - and that I still check myself on from day to day.  It was and remains huge for me.  Meditation is the key to this as it helps you recognize in real time when you’re starting to go down “the rabbit hole” of negative thoughts and feelings.   (Anybody and everybody can meditate even if you’re someone whose mind races all day long.  More on this on the MEDITATION Page.)

 

OWNING CANCER KEY POINT:  It’s hard, if not impossible, for the body to heal under stress.

 

#5    Start with the stress that lives within you.  You can’t control everything that comes at you every moment of the day.  But you can control how you respond to it!  Best obvious example? Road rage.  Why? Because when you think about it, road rage is a choice.  In your day-to-day existence -- and in less obvious situations -- you can learn, though meditation, to recognize moments that stress you out so that you may see see them in the light of objectivity and respond in a way that isn't harmful to your health.

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#6    Do what you can to eliminate external stress.  If you’re a news junkie (I was!) turn that stuff off; it’s toxic.  I’ve heard of doctors telling patients after heart surgery to not watch the news for a year; it’s too stressful.  If it’s too stressful for heart patients then it’s too stressful for someone with cancer.  After about a year on a news “sabbatical”, I gradually allowed myself to read a few headlines and a couple of opening paragraphs of news stories.  That’s it.  

 

TRY THIS:  Everyday, take a moment to look at the world around you and ask yourself, what would this world -- this moment; this environment -- look like if there were no problems.  You’ll be amazed at how different, beautiful and stress-free your world will look like if only for a couple of moments each day.  Then make it a habit. 

 

OWNING CANCER KEY POINT:  When you have cancer it’s hard to gain and keep an emotional footing.  And yet I found -- even with a vulnerability I never knew before -- that it’s possible.

 

#7    Find emotional nourishment.  You want to keep your spirits positive.  Meditation helps with this but you should also seek information — books, films, YouTube influencers — that help  you see the positives in the world.  Everyday living can be tough but if you’re willing to, you can see a lot of the beauty too — and having a realistic yet positive perception is paramount for you and your health!

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#8    Develop a routine that allows you to take meds, rest, meditate and prepare/buy the meals that will support your immune system.  I made up an Excel file, listing my daily meds — what time of day and dose — that also includes and all the cancer-killing foods I can take each day -- which is a surprising amount.  (More on this on the DIET page.)  Exercise is important but nowhere near the top of the list.  I encourage some form of daily movement -- but what you do has to be based on what time and your current condition allows.  If you're limited, then walking and/or gentle exercises like Qigong go a long way toward helping you both physically and mentally.       

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#9    To heal, seek an equilibrium to help you throughout the day to be both mindful and grateful without taking yourself on an emotional roller coaster — because that’s where stress likes to live. 

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#10   To gain equilibrium, find an “outsider” to talk with.  That can be — and I think should be — someone who doesn’t know you well, a professional who you can talk with about your deepest fears and hopes and how you can go about “remaking” yourself.  Talking with someone once a week helped me focus on unconditional love (for myself and others), gratitude for our world and others, plus the small, good things I can accomplish on a daily basis; and then the tricky ones: love and forgiveness of self and others.  

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#11    No matter what else is going on in your life, make healing your #1 every-day priority.  Learn to say “No” to many of the things that can distract you, including some of the daily surprises that come up in our busy, busy lives.  For me, managing cancer has caused a funny and welcomed liberation.  While still honoring friends and family, I’m now able to more easily prioritize what’s important and know which things and which connections I needed to let go of.

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#12    Get in touch with your spiritual core.  Science has proven that we are vibrational beings -- it's that cellular thing -- and as such, we are connected.  You don’t have to believe in gods but it’s so beneficial to see and understand that we’re all part of nature; that we have unseen and unexplained connections with one another.  Perhaps this is what's meant by the "collective unconscious."  Embrace those connections and the healing power of your body.  In the process of having cancer and choosing to own it, you just may find a wiser, more truthful version of yourself.

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OWNING CANCER KEY POINT: In The Will to Live, Arnold Hutschnecker wrote, “…cancer is despair expressed at the cellular level.”  I believe that's true.  So does Doctor Bernie Siegel (author of Love, Medicine & Miracles) as does Anita Moorjani (Author of Dying To Be Me - see below) If you reduce the stress that may have caused you despair and then change yourself on a cellular level through a healthy diet and mindset, cancer doesn't have to kill you.

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DO THIS:    Face cancer as a challenge to inform yourself and move forward, daily, as you set your life straight.  I was fortunate; my PCP challenged me to inform myself.  In doing so, I stood up for myself.  I challenge you to do the same! 

 

BONUS:  When fear rears it head in those unexpected moments of vulnerability, here’s your mantra: “I’m fine.  I’m fine.  I’m fine.”  Then get back to work.

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LIFESTYLE RESOURCES

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Wanna dive into healing now?  Here are some links — and there are many, many more out there for you to find — to give you real-world emotional nourishment, and keep you thinking in a positive framework.  

 

My Approach Isn't the only Approach

Other people have successfully learned how to manage their cancer.  If  Owning Cancer doesn't "speak' to you, check out chrisbeatcancer.com, or kriscarr.com or baileyobrien.com for the stories of people who have found ways to manage cancer.

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BOOKS:

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The Hidden Messages in Water by Masaru Emoto.  If words of either love or hate, written on a sticker placed on a beaker of water can change the water's structure as seen when it's frozen, what damage can we do to ourselves on a cellular level given that water is a major component of our bodies?  If you're a skeptic -- or if you just want to be amazed at the forces of life, check this book out.  I keep a copy of it on my bookshelf as a reminder for when I'm feeling vulnerable.

 

I'll be adding more books soon.

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VIDEOS:

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NB: I have no financial affiliations with the people people highlighted in the following videos.  I'm embedding these because I want to freely share emotional nourishment that will help you face the vulnerability of having cancer.  

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* Video#1: Dying To Be Me.  Following my terminal prognosis, one of the first videos I watched - suggested by my PCP - is one I’ve returned to several times.  In 2006, suffering from an aggressive cancer, Anita Moorjani, had a near-death experience before consciously returning to this life.  Miraculously, her body then healed itself within a few days.  Anita became the author of the NY Times best-selling book, “Dying to Be Me.”  Below is her TEDx Talk from 2013

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* Video#2: Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof You Can Heal Yourself.  Dr Lissa Rankin is the daughter of a physician who, after becoming a doctor herself, practiced traditional western medicine for over a decade before asking if there’s a better way for patients to heal.  She DOES NOT eschew or reject modern medicine but sees the need for the whole person to be at equilibrium in order to heal.  In effect, she is urging patients to own their disease.  The video below is a 2013 talk she gave at Google

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