CFDS Episode 003: I blame the sexy Italian

Clean Food, Dirty Stories

What happens when you leave a French hypnotist for a sexy Italian…and food that can help you breathe!

What you will learn

• How a ‘grey marriage’ might not be the best idea
• A simple food you can eat that can literally help you breathe easier

I actually blame myself as well, and my French hypnotist husband…but the sexy Italian is definitely the main culprit in this story.

At the end of this episode I’ll share with you a super common food that can actually help you breathe easier. (Yes, breathing plays a very important part in this story, as you’ll hear later on). This food is so common, you’ll probably be surprised.

Do you know what it is? Take a guess and see if you’re right. I’ll give you a hint: it’s very common.

OK enough hints from me…

On with the story

This story came about all because of a hot, sexy Italian guy that I moved in with 2 weeks after I got married to a French hypnotist (mentioned in Episode 2).

In my defence, first let me say that I didn’t marry the hypnotist just to get my French work papers. That would have been what the French call a ‘white marriage’ – a ‘mariage blanc’. I always thought of ours as more of a ‘gray marriage’. By that I mean, we loved each other, but we didn’t really want to get married. We really wanted to stay together, but I needed papers so I could stay in France.

It was basically either get married, or I’d have to leave the country. (Turns out I almost had to leave the country anyway…but that’s another story!)

So we got married. (My family couldn’t be there. A family member was on top of a tall building deciding whether to skip the elevator on the way down…and no-one told me. But that’s also another story!)

A honeymoon gone bust

My hypnotist-now-husband I call Dave. (Actually that’s so NOT a French name, I could have at least chosen David, but that’s my friend’s French husband. Even I wouldn’t steal a girlfriend’s husband, French or not).

Anyway, Dave decides that for our honeymoon he wants us to go to Corsica and camp out in a stationwagon. He figured we could sleep in the back while traipsing around the countryside to look for small trickles that could pass for waterfalls. (Dave needed a photo of a waterfall for a client).

Romantic, right? Clearly our marriage was totally on the right track. We were headed straight for marital bliss and happily-ever-after.

Well, we were in Corsica for two weeks. (I’m pretty sure I managed to convince him to skip sleeping in the station wagon).

Unfortunately though, by the end of those two weeks, I knew the whole marriage thing was a BIG mistake. But I just kind of pushed it to the back of my mind and figured I’d deal with it later(!) I thought ‘Come on, this is Dave, I love him, maybe I’ll snap out of it or maybe he’ll get more romantic’ – which in retrospect was just dumb. But there you go.

Enter the sexy Italian

So we got back to Paris, and that night I found myself in a café. (If you live in Paris you wind up in a café almost daily).

I was meeting up with some friends of mine I’d met through my singing class, and at the end of the table was this GORGEOUS Italian. The whole time everyone was talking he was saying nothing. His eyes were just like boring into mine the whole evening. I was like ‘whoa’….! Major heatwave!’

But in my defence…

It’s important that you know something else about my new hypnotist husband. He had decided some time ago that it was more spiritual to make love once a month because of some religious tenet or other. I really should have taken that as a HUGE billboard saying EXIT HERE, but you know, I figured I could talk him round, or get him to see the light some other way. (Actually that should have been a BIG clue he was ripe for membership in an extreme religious sect – but that’s another story).

So you know, after that oh-so-not-romantic honeymoon, plus Dave’s ridiculous ‘have sex once a month’ regime, I wasn’t the happiest new wife. Just to set the scene for you, OK?

Right, back to the café and the gorgeous Italian. He was just like staring at me the whole time as in ‘I’m gonna just eat you up’ kind of way, and he was seriously hot, so you can imagine my reaction, right?

I would live to regret what I did next

Long story short, an hour later I went home with him and didn’t go back to Dave. I did call Dave, I didn’t just not show up home. That night I called him and I just couldn’t lie, I said ‘Dave I’ve met someone else, I’m not coming home’.

Dave was shocked of course, but he didn’t say very much and I wanted to get off the phone as soon as possible because it felt really uncomfortable, as you can imagine. I stayed away for at least a few months. (After that I didn’t go back to Dave as such, just to his apartment. But I’m getting ahead of myself).

I’m not sure free pizza makes up for this

The gorgeous Italian – I’ll call him Mario so I can think about silly video games rather than what he was actually like – he worked in a pizzeria, making pizza. That was a definite benefit to our relationship – I could go anytime when he was working and he’d make me a gorgeous pizza and make me feel really special.

Mario liked showing me off when we were out. I was kind of like arm candy for a pizza guy, except I didn’t get to go to any Hollywood parties. I just got free pizza. As it turns out I was working in another restaurant just down the road making salads and getting paid a pittance – so the free pizza was great.

Unfortunately other aspects of our relationship weren’t so great – like the fact that his apartment was almost literally a pile of rubble, because he was redoing it. But because he worked a lot, he hardly did any work on it EVER. I mean I don’t think I ever saw him so much as lift a hammer in the three months or so that I lived there.

There was no shower – again, I don’t know what it was with me and showers in Paris! It was like I was destined to live in the local pool instead…The shower tray was in there but the walls were all cement, no tiles, no paint, just bare cement. We had a floor of bare cement, and there was basically just a bed in there.

So what was I doing there?

You’d wonder what I was doing there, right? Well…Mario was really attractive. For the first few days it was fun, because Mario was NOT a ‘have sex once a month’ kind of guy. Unfortunately the whole thing quickly degenerated, and I’d already told Dave at that point that I wasn’t going back to him because there was no way I was gonna just cheat on him. I felt like I owed Dave the truth. (Not the ‘I moved in with a guy who has no furniture just a bed on a cement floor because he’s so hot’ truth. More like the ‘I don’t think this marriage can work and I’m living with someone else’ truth).

Well, I’ve done a lot of things in my life, but I’ve never dated two guys at once. I’m a one guy at a time kind of girl. (Except for this one musician, we had a special arrangement…oh boy, that’s another story!)

Going from bad to worse

So! When I say that things degenerated, it was like Mario wanted me there, but more in the same way as he wanted a bed, food and shelter. I was a necessity, but not a person who had any value apart from what I could do for him. That’s the best way I can put it.

One time we went to Spain for a holiday. (He paid – we went on a bus with his best friend, which was a bit weird.) I remember he put his arm around me one night and said something like ‘You’ll never leave me’. He said it though in that spooky, ‘I’m actually a jealous bastard who will kill you if you try to leave me’ way.

You know that scene in the movie when you watch the guy say something like that, and you’re like ‘WOMAN, GET OUT!’ Well, that’s when I started to have serious doubts about the wisdom of my decision to be with Mario, gorgeous or not.

Just a few steps between me and the street

The other thing I have to mention in my defence is that at this stage I had almost no money. They paid us in cash under the table at my restaurant job, so they hardly paid me anything. I just had to take what I could get, and I had to be really careful with money.

To get to work, I remember I always had to jump the turnstiles at the metro. Going back home wasn’t so bad because it was after midnight in a bad part of town, so you knew you weren’t gonna get any ticket controllers because it was a bit of a dangerous trip. (It’s amazing what you can get used to when you have to.)

Basically, I was starting to feel desperate for more money to live on.

In fact on one particularly desperate day, I thought ‘I could actually just give up! I could go downstairs, sit down and just live on the street. All I have to do is walk downstairs.’ Fortunately though, the stubborn part of me was like ‘no that would be WAY too embarrassing. It would be like me telling the world that I can’t cope, that’s just NOT happening! And what if my family finds out?’

I’m grateful for my stubborn streak, because when you’re pouring water with a bit of chocolate powder over your corn flakes and you’re living in a pile of rubble, well, you start to wonder where things went wrong, right?

Oh – maybe you’ve never eaten corn flakes with water and chocolate powder? Lucky you, I don’t recommend it.

Making change happen

Anyway, the really good thing was that because I was technically married, I felt I could finally look for a ‘real job’, something that would pay decent money. Plus my French was way better: I was practically fluent. (Let me tell you there’s nothing better than having a couple of French boyfriends/husbands to pick up the language!)

At that time I was scouting for a better job EVERY DAY. I knew I was going to find something really good, mostly because failure just was NOT an option. Plus I was convinced that my working papers were on their way in the mail. (Or so I thought before a bomb went off – but that’s another story!)

My new attitude of ‘things are gonna change’ was VERY well-timed, because now we get to the part of the story where breathing becomes pretty crucial.

When your world changes in an instant

It happened very quickly, as these things do – it was one of those ‘the whole world changes in an instant’ kind of moments.

Mario and I were having a pillow fight, which was actually really fun…until he playfully put the pillow over my face, covering my nose and mouth so I couldn’t breathe.

Well, he left that pillow there just a little bit too long.

It was only an extra second or two, but in that moment I got the message.

My conscious mind finally understood what my unconscious had probably known for a long time: Mario was actually dangerous. How dangerous I didn’t know – but there was no way I was gonna stay to find out. He took the pillow away that time, but the message was clear – I was living with a bit of a psycho.

Take the job and run

Fortunately – and it just amazes me how these things happen – I had just gotten a call THAT MORNING saying that I’d gotten the most recent job I’d applied for! (I lied my way into it, but that’s another story.)

Suddenly I was going to be making like 4 times what I’d been making at the restaurant. Plus it was REAL MONEY paid into a bank account and everything, with REAL PAY SLIPS. Woo hoo! Right? Perfect, perfect, perfect timing. A life-saver, literally.

So after he removed the pillow and let me breathe again, Mario left for work. I wasn’t working that afternoon so he left by himself. And as soon as he went out the door, my mind screamed LEAVE NOW, DO IT FAST, MAKE SURE HE CAN’T FIND YOU.

And I did.

When you’ve got nowhere else to run to…

I packed my bags – actually only one bag by this time, most of the stuff I’d come to Paris with had gotten waylaid in all the moving I’d done. There wasn’t that much left, which was just as well.

But I didn’t know where to go. I mean, I had to find somewhere else to stay that night, so…I called Dave.

On the phone I was like ‘can I come back and stay with you for a while till I get something sorted?’ (I didn’t tell him about the pillow stuff, I figured he’d only worry.) And Dave was like ‘yes of course’.

So this might make you think he was a bit of a doormat, but we did still care about each other. In his heart he was a really nice guy. It’s just that the physical side of our relationship sucked. Plus his whole religious thing was getting way too freaky for me. (It got even more freaky later, but that’s another story!)

Dave wasn’t living in his apartment at that time anyway, so I had the place to myself for a while. And with my newfound, really good job, I was finally able to relax. (Until I met a couple of teenage gangsters, but that’s another story!)

What would you have done?

Before we get to the food portion of our program, I want to invite you to get “raw and real” with me for just a moment.

Does anything in my story resonate with you?

I know it’s a bit of a crazy story, but let me just ask you: have you ever had one of those moments where suddenly you know that nothing in your life will ever be the same again?

For me it was when the pillow hit, literally. But what about you? And what do you do in those moments?

I mean, I could have cried, right? And I think I did cry, but only once I was safe. It was like the adrenaline took over until I got my stuff out, got to Dave’s place, put my bag down and knew that I could relax and just let myself feel what had happened. I cried then, yes. Then I was angry, and then I felt like a failure…but I kept reminding myself that I’d just landed a great job, and things were gonna get way better.

I have a feeling I’m not the only one…

What about you? When you have tough moments like these, do you give yourself time to feel what happened? Or do you push the feelings away and never think about it again?

Let me tell you, I find it’s way better to let that stuff out – better out than in, as they say. Even if it means punching your own pillow. At least you’re the one doing the punching, right?

That’s just something I wanted to throw out there for you to think about. And if you’ve got anything to say about it, I’d honestly love to hear it – go ahead and pop it in the comments, cause I know you guys, I KNOW I’m not the only one with stories like these. YOU’VE GOT ‘EM TOO. Right?

On to the food!

OK, so on to the food portion of our story. I mentioned that I’d share with you a super common food that can actually help you breathe. So let’s do that now.

Are you ready? When I tell you you’re probably gonna be like ‘Are you kidding?’ But I’m not. There are studies and everything, and I’ll link to them in the shownotes for this episode.

The super common food is…

The humble apple!

Did you know that? Isn’t it weird?

Apples can actually help you breathe easier!

Now if someone’s choking, you obviously don’t give them an apple. But a British study shows that apples can help prevent wheezing. Researchers gave kids a glass of apple juice a day, and they found that those kids cut in half their likelihood of developing a wheezing problem, compared to the kids who didn’t have apple juice as often.

Does that sound crazy? The studies are real, and I’ll post a link to the British study in the Resources section below so you can read it for yourself.

Researchers also found that pregnant women who ate apples regularly were less likely to have children who suffered from asthma or wheezing. Isn’t that incredible?

So how does that work?

Here’s why this works. Apples are very rich in antioxidants, and particularly in those that are known to help reduce inflammation in the air passageways. And that type of inflammation is precisely what happens with asthma and wheezing.

So, how do you eat apples? Well that’s easy, right? Pick one up – preferably organic and with the peel still on – and dig in!

If you want to know more…

So if you’re more of a dessert person and you’d like a recipe for an amazing and super healthy Upside Down Apple Pie, you can check out my 5-Minute Desserts recipe ebook.

And if you enjoy my stories and want to hear more, subscribe! I share one crazy yet true story a week.

Got a question, or a comment?

Got a question, or a comment? Pop a note below in the comments, that would be awesome. You can also subscribe to the podcast to listen ‘on the go’ in iTunes.

Have YOU got a story to share?

Last but not least, if you’ve got a crazy yet true story to share (and you’d like to know what food could have saved the day), I’d love to hear it! Send it to me! I change all names to protect the innocent, the not-so-innocent, and the oh-so-totally guilty.

I hope you have an amazing day. Thank you so much for being here with me to share in my Clean Food, Dirty Stories. Bye for now!

RESOURCES

5-Minute Desserts recipe ebook (and others too): http://rockingrawchef.com/5-minute-recipes/

British study on apples and breathing easier: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17301090

Other studies and information about apples: http://www.bodybuilding.com/content/top-10-inflammation-fighting-foods.html

The post CFDS Episode 003: I blame the sexy Italian appeared first on Rocking Raw Chef.