Did Everything Right for 40 Years. My Body Kept Getting Sicker. Here Is What Finally Changed

Food, Truth & the Proper Human Diet
I Changed One Thing. Here Is What Happened Next

by Bunny Sings Wolf | IndigenousHealing.io

I want to tell you something I almost didn't say out loud.

Not because it isn't true. But because the truth of it is so far outside what we have all been told is healthy that I know exactly how it sounds before I even begin.

So let me start here, with what I know for certain:
I am nearly 78 years old. I live nine miles from Mato Tipila in the Black Hills of Wyoming. For most of my adult life I have been a Dream Song Carrier, a Stone Medicine practitioner, and a wisdom keeper, and serve as Ambassador for the Lakota Dakota Nakota Nation. For decades I have walked Nature's 4 Steps of Healing and coaxed others toward their own remembering.

And for decades, I did everything I believed was right — careful, thoughtful eating, supplementing more and more as research showed me what vegetables, fruits and grains alone couldn't provide. I looked healthy. Most days, I felt it too.

Deficiency doesn't announce itself. It accumulates quietly, in increments too small to notice, year after year of doing everything I believed was right — until one day it can no longer be ignored. That is what Balance, the first of Nature's 4 Steps, is always trying to tell us: pain is not the enemy. Pain is the alarm, arriving at last to deliver a truth that had been building in silence for a very long time.

Then, about a month before I was diagnosed with cancer, I felt my vitality leaving — and I told myself it was age. Or grief, after losing my husband. It was, in a strange way, both — and yet neither.

All I had to do was listen. And when I finally did, the next steps arrived from a direction I never would have expected.

All the while, the red-tailed hawk kept circling — a messenger that says: pay close attention. Look deeper.

Nature never stops showing us the way. Even when we have been deceived — even when an outside world has misread her ways for its own purposes, and sold that misreading back to us as health — the truth keeps circling overhead, patient, waiting for us to finally look up. We are given many chances to see it. Step One is the chance we almost always miss, until pain makes it impossible to miss any longer.

What 40 Years of "Doing Everything Right" Looked Like

I became vegetarian before it was fashionable — long before plant-based eating had a marketing budget or a celebrity endorsement. I did it from genuine conviction: that it was healthier, more ethical, and more aligned with the values I held at the time about life and relationship and the earth. I read every book available on the subject. It "looked" like a "clean" diet.

But looking deeper, I found that I would need to supplement consistently and carefully to get all the nutrients my body needed. Daily handfuls of vitamins, thoroughly researched, chosen for what I genuinely believed was optimal health. I followed doctors' orders. I took the medications they prescribed. I trusted the system.

And the list of what was wrong with me grew anyway.

Cancer. Hypoglycemia. Rheumatoid arthritis — extreme joint inflammation that lived in my body like a fire that wouldn't go out. Kidney stones so large on CT scans that doctors and nurses alike said the only way to fix them was surgery. Hypothyroidism, for which I had faithfully taken Synthroid for many years — until I researched its long-term efficacy and found what the studies actually showed. And a knee so damaged that my doctors said it needed replacing immediately. Both knees had needed it, but I could only afford to do one at a time. The first was replaced six years ago. Now the second was bringing pain, swelling, and an increasingly noticeable limp.

I was doing everything I had been told to do. I kept getting worse.

The Question That Changed Everything

Four years ago, the persistent pain — the inflammation — finally got my undivided attention. That is where Balance, the first of Nature's 4 Steps, always begins.

It happened, fittingly, in the middle of research I was doing for this very platform — studying how our ancestors thrived, generation after generation, in close relationship with nature's seasons, her cycles, her rhythms of availability. What grew where. What was eaten when. How every part of that relationship was reciprocal, not extracted. I was documenting that wisdom for others. I hadn't yet turned it fully on myself.

And then I asked myself a question the Steps had been preparing me to ask for a long time:

What if the foundation itself is wrong?

Not wrong in intent. Not wrong through malice on my part. But wrong in the way that a building constructed on an unstable foundation is wrong — not because anyone wanted it to fall, but because the ground beneath it was never right for the structure being built.

What if what I had been eating for decades — however carefully, however thoughtfully, however aligned with the best information available to me — was simply not what the human body was designed to run on? Not what our ancestors, in their own deep relationship with the land they lived on, and its seasons, and inhabitants of every variety would have recognized as food at all?

I began to research. Not food-company-funded studies. Not pharmaceutical literature. The doctors who had done their own deep research — often to heal themselves first — and were now speaking plainly, with their references clearly visible, about what they had found. And it was shocking.

Dr. Ken Berry. Dr. Anthony Chaffee. Dr. William Davis. Dr. Paul Mason. And many others — physicians who had once prescribed the standard treatments, done the research their medical training had not provided, and arrived at conclusions that the mainstream had no financial interest in amplifying.

What they were describing was not a trend. It was not a diet. It was a return to what the ancestral human body has thrived on for the vast majority of its existence on this earth:

meat, fat, eggs, water.

The proper human diet. What some call carnivore.

If I had not suffered so long, I might have overlooked this AGAIN. But THIS was research I was doing for my subscribers, who were joining me in circle for healing. After thoughtfully reading comment after comment beneath the YouTube videos on the subject, I just HAD to try it. I made the switch.

What My Four Years of Living Truth Looks Like

(You can't have healing without truth — Step 1.)

I want to be careful here. I am not a doctor. I am not prescribing anything to anyone. What I am doing is telling you my personal experience — plainly, honestly, in the spirit of Balance that is always the first of Nature's 4 Steps:

The willingness to see what is actually true, even when it contradicts everything you have been told, and truly believed, all your life.

The cancer: gone.
The hypoglycemia: gone.
The rheumatoid arthritis, the joint inflammation that had been my constant companion: gone.
The kidney stones — those significant masses visible on CT scans, flagged as a future emergency: dissolved. Confirmed absent on follow-up CT scans. No surgery. No medication. No procedure of any kind.
The hypothyroidism: resolved. I am no longer taking Synthroid.
The knee that two doctors told me needed replacement: I walk on it today without pain. No limp. No swelling. No painkillers, no prescription, nothing over the counter. Nothing.

These days I take iodine drops daily. Now and then, when I think of it, I take vitamin D, sometimes vitamin C, or a B vitamin. That B vitamin (choline, Inositol) has been my old faithful standby through 40 years of stress, "magic" for opening the blood vessels and reminding me to breathe. Once or twice a week, I add a trace mineral blend I mix myself (magnesium, potassium, sodium) to my occasional morning coffee. That is the entirety of my supplement routine now. I've gone from daily handfuls of expensive, "organically sourced," carefully researched pills to half-full bottles still sitting in my cupboard, and I still wonder why I keep them up there.

My energy is through the roof. I climb stairs. I dance. I walk without pain. I can circle Mato Tipila in less than an hour. This year I literally ran around it at 4:30 a.m. so I wouldn't miss the Summer Solstice sunrise ceremony, led by Arvol Looking Horse's brother, as has been his practice for most of his life as a traditional spiritual medicine keeper. Whenever I can, I walk the whole way around, up and down the hills, with barely a stop to catch my breath. I am more clear-headed than I can remember being since my teens.

The most weird and wonderful thing I can tell you now is that I am not a special case. I am not unusually lucky. The comments beneath the YouTube videos of the doctors I mentioned above are filled with thousands upon thousands of people describing the same journey.

They come from all over the world, from many nations, languages, and traditions, and each one decided to take their healing into their own hands. They describe years of illness: extreme obesity, dangerously high blood pressure, type 1 and type 2 diabetes, Parkinson's, painful persistent migraines, skin disorders, "incurable" brain injuries, Alzheimer's, and various cancers. They were told that drugs and treatments might manage their conditions but never cure them, and some were told their conditions would kill them. They hung on through pain and tubes and multiple doctors and hospital visits, sometimes for decades. Then they changed what they ate and watched conditions disappear that they had been told were permanent, progressive, and manageable ONLY through surgery, treatments, and lifelong prescription medications.

The press does not cover this. The food and drug industries have no financial interest in your discovering it. But the research is there, the references are visible, and the testimony of human beings walking around, thriving, and healing themselves by returning to the food their bodies were designed for is simply undeniable if you are willing to look for yourself.

What This Has to Do With Nature's 4 Steps

Everything. All of it.

Balance — the first step — is the honest reckoning with what is actually true. For me, Balance meant being willing to look at 40 years of careful, well-intentioned choices and ask whether the foundation was sound. It meant being honest with myself about the evidence in my own body. It meant stopping the running long enough to feel the ground — and discovering it was not where I thought it was.

Harmony — the second step — is the restoration of right relationship. With your own body first. The human body is not separate from nature. It is nature. It has been working so hard to keep life going, in spite of how we "think" we are caring for it. When we accept it, love it for that effort, and feed it what it has hungered for through most of human history, something in it relaxes back into its original, natural function of ease and restoration, rather than barely surviving.

The inflammation quiets. The systems regulate. The body remembers what it has always been trying to do while being confronted daily with toxic, unnatural blocks that left it no time or energy to do what it does best:

heal.

Abundance — the third step — flows when the body is properly nourished. I had been living in physical scarcity without knowing it — giving my body substitutes for what it genuinely needed, supplementing the gaps as best I could, and wondering why the gap never fully closed.

Abundance in the body is not complicated. It is what happens when you stop working against your own biology. Nature's ways come back in a joyful flourish, in an amazingly short time, naturally.

Peace — the fourth step — the body at peace is not dramatic. It is ordinary. It is climbing stairs without thinking about it. Waking up without pain as the first sensation of the day. Moving through the world in a body that is doing its job without constant negotiation and management. That peace — physical peace — is the ground from which every other healing grows, and from which we discover new ways to thrive in body, mind, and spirit.

I've come to understand that one truly cannot walk the inner path on a body that is fighting its own foundation, puzzled and ashamed by it all at once. Physical nourishment is not separate from spiritual healing. It is the first, most intimate layer of it.

A Word About Wyoming's Ranching Families

Now, more grateful than ever, I live in Wyoming. My neighbors are ranchers — many of them fourth generation and beyond, families who have worked this land for over a century, who love their cattle with the same devotion that any of us love the living things in our care.

These families are under pressure the likes of which most people never hear about. The US cattle herd is at its lowest point since 1951. Billionaire investors are buying American agricultural land at unprecedented rates while also funding the profit-driven lab-grown and plant-based alternatives designed to replace what those ranchers raise. Generational operations are being squeezed from every direction. In this way, natural foods, and the caretaking relationships with land and animals passed down through generations of thoughtful stewards, are quietly being cut out of our options behind the scenes.

When you choose real beef — grass-fed, locally sourced, from a family operation — you are not just making a health choice. You are casting a vote for a way of life, for a relationship with land and animals and food that the industrial system has been systematically dismantling for decades.

I have come to believe that beef is not the villain it has been made out to be. For my body, it has proven to be one of the most complete, nourishing, and still easily available foods on this earth. The same is true of fish, poultry, and our four-chambered-stomach relatives: buffalo, deer, elk, sheep, and many other cherished sources of nurturance of life. For centuries, prayerful caretakers raised and hunted them with deep respect, honoring the relationships of the circle of life. Those lifeway practices are the very reason we are here, walking this planet, generations later.

To every ranching family in Wyoming and across the American West: you are heroes of a story most people don't yet know they're living. Thank you for staying. Thank you for raising real food for real people. We see you. We stand with you.

An Invitation to Look With Fresh Eyes

I am not asking you to take my word for any of this. I know it's a lot to take in at one sitting. At another time in my life, I might not have read this far. Next to all the "information overload" of the advertising world, it sounds too good to be true.

I am asking you to do what Balance has always asked: look honestly at the evidence available to you, including the evidence in your own body. Watch the doctors. Read the research they cite — the actual studies, not the summaries. Read the comments beneath their videos and meet the thousands of people whose bodies have told them the same story mine told me.

And then — when your body is well nourished, when the inflammation is quieting, when the fog is beginning to lift — come walk the rest of Nature's 4 Steps with us at IndigenousHealing.io. Yes, come walk with us, the way our ancestors walked for centuries! Trust nature's circle of life. Trust that love created the circle as our teacher. Our bodies renew and recycle themselves in whole, circling systems, echoing within us what nature does all around us, an elegantly designed, eternal circle of living, thriving resonance.

Healing is invisible, an inside job. But the inside job is a lot easier when the body doing the work is given what it was actually designed to run on. Then healing unfolds over time, the way a seed does underground. Nourished by soil and water, it follows the instructions written in every growing cell, reaching toward the warmth of the sun until it becomes visible as its intended self: a living tree, naturally!

Healing is built into every system that sustains life. That is the miracle, and the simple, amazing truth of it all. We are indigenous to life! When we remember this each day, even through the pain, nature's honest healing path opens before us, one of four steps at a time, repeated in every part of our lives that calls for healing. It always takes time, patience, and trust to grow. And an old truth from my many years of Bible study has proven itself in my own life, more beautifully than I ever imagined: we are "fearfully and wonderfully made" (Psalm 139:14).

Two Videos Worth Your Time

A word of warning first: this next video is an attention-getter. Some might call it click bait, but for a good cause. It shares some hard-to-swallow facts about what is happening behind the scenes of our food supply, and it may leave you feeling a bit sad or unsettled. Watch it with the honest eyes of Balance.

But in this circle, we revel in health, gratitude, and love. So as a bonus, here is THE HAPPY HEALTHY VIDEO that inspired me to make the conscious choice our ancestors thrived with, to be fed and nourished naturally to live on meat, bacon, butter, eggs, and occassionally my own home-cultured, gut-enriching fermented dairy:

Dr. Ken Berry's interview with Kelly Hogan, who had been carnivore for 14 years when this was filmed and has since become a powerful voice of healthy living by example in her own right.

Dr. Berry teases the question — what does a woman look and feel like after 14 years of eating this way? — and Kelly answers it simply by being her radiant, joyful healthy and continually healing self.

Over the years I have watched literally hundreds of videos by these two, who have changed so very many lives by telling it like it is. They have only grown healthier and more radiant since this was filmed, and their healing circles ripple out across our global human family, helping people discover indigenous, life-honoring WELLNESS for themselves. THIS will make you smile!!!

P.S. If last week's Calling All Healers (at the end of Black Hills Series, Part 4) spoke to you, the Founding Circle is forming now at IndigenousHealing.io.

Note: Nothing in this post constitutes medical advice. Please do your own research and consult with a knowledgeable healthcare provider about any changes to your diet or medication. The doctors referenced — Dr. Ken Berry, Dr. Anthony Chaffee, Dr. William Davis, and Dr. Paul Mason — all have extensive YouTube channels and published work with full research citations available for your own review.

Come walk with us in wellness, with and for all our relations.

Mitakuye Oyasin 🌿

Bunny Sings Wolf is a Dream Song Carrier, Stone Medicine practitioner, and Ambassador for the Lakota Dakota Nakota Nation, descended from Chief John Grass. She lives nine miles from Mato Tipila (Devils Tower) in Hulett, Wyoming, and is the founder of IndigenousHealing.io — a free global healing community walking Nature's 4 Steps together toward the Circle the Walk of Peace Path, Summer Solstice 2028.

Come walk with us in wellness, with and for all our relations.

Mitakuye Oyasin 🌿