Profile by isabel owen

Happiness “You know, I am excited about life, even when it’s falling down. And trust me if I look the other way it’s falling all over the place, but you know what, I have no idea what’s going to happen tomorrow and as long as I stay connected to right now, I am happy. Even when things are looking awful and it isn’t the way I had planned it… it means that something else is here to happen for me… If I sit there and wish it was all different, I will be miserable, but if I sit in what is, right now, then I could be joyful and happy.” - Leah Putnam

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t is 4:30 in the morning, dark and dusky out. The Putnam’s house is just starting to wake up, as the spacious kitchen slowly lightens with the rising sun. The sound of wind chimes resonate peacefully through the garden and the house. Leah awakes to this gentle sound, fully rested with a clear and fresh mind. She quietly hums as she walks downstairs, letting her mind wake up to today’s possibilities. It is cold and brisk, but serene. There is something comforting about early mornings, Leah’s mornings – being up before life begins for the rest of the world.

She begins to slice open fresh lemons from her own garden outside her kitchen step, as she starts to make herself a fresh

cup of lemon water, a morning ritual that happens everyday in this home.

The tart smell of citrus fills the comfortable and cool air, as the sun begins to peek through the window creating soft speckles of light. The gentle sound of water trickling mixes with the softness of the wind chimes as Leah waters the sprouts and wheatgrass growing on a shelf in her kitchen. These fresh, raw, and homegrown ingredients will blend together to become the green juice Leah makes every morning, full of vitamins, enzymes, and minerals energizing her body for the day ahead.

Leah Putnam has been a healthy eater all of her life, growing up as a vegetarian then slowly drifted into the raw food and vegan lifestyles. From a young age she was parented by individuals who were passionate about cooking, and providing one’s body with a healthy nurturement through eating and exercise. Being surrounded with the restaurant business, she developed a strong passion for health and athletics – specifically raw food and gyrotonic pilates, a unique system

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“When I eat cleaner, I am more conscious. I am more alive, my energy is soaring.” -Leah Putnam of exercises using apparatus designed to increase stability through movement. Leah has become an expert and an educator in these fields throughout her life experiences, becoming a raw food chef and a personal pilates trainer.

Leah lives in a beautiful home that radiates happiness and simplicity, and is tucked in on a normal suburban street in Mountain View. This happiness comes from somewhere. Starting with the freshly pressed green juice every morning, Leah fills herself and her life with clean energy, ranging from the vitamins and enzymes in her raw food diet to her simple stressless state of mind, to her stability and strength. She is a raw food eater, a pilates trainer, a yoga practicer, a meditator, a free soul, and a cancer survivor.

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Leah has always held a different perspective about health. Perhaps she has been too extreme in some eyes, but more conscious than the regular individual would be the more correct term.

Leah explains, “I have always been interested in working out and athletics, and it just kind of became a natural progression...I think it’s something I’ve always done. I’ve always been a little off the grid, out of the box with food, thinking a little different. I became vegetarian at a very young age, and raised my children that way” (Putnam). Growing up around health enthusiasts and the restaurant business, food and its strong connection to the mental and physical health of our bodies was ingrained into her consciousness.

Born in Chicago, Leah attended Colorado Mountain College

with the intention of becoming an accountant, and moved to the Bay Area in 1984. However, her plan to become an account wasn’t engaging her and she changed course when her father started a new restaurant, Lally Wally’s Turtle, and asked for her help. From here, Leah’s life become revolved around raw food and pilates. Very knowledgeable in both of these fields, she officially became a raw food chef in 2003 teaching classes and spreading the word about eating raw. Why raw and what is raw food? Anything that is not cooked or heated over 118 degrees. The simple principle of thought behind it is being that it is cleaner for the body and contains rich minerals and vitamins. “Cooking food may diminish its nutritional value… Certain vitamins, such as vitamin

C and folate, are destroyed by heat” (Wong). Leah’s lifestyle is very in touch with these ideas.

“The theory is you are holding on to all the nutrients available, all the enzymes that are the spark of life that help digest the food, which will help you bring in more energy from the sun. Bring in the highest quality energy you can bring into your bodies” (Leah).

Leah’s profession blossomed from the path of an accountant to a pilates gyrotonic trainer.

She personally trains clients one on one through a unique gyrotonic method of pilates. “Major muscle groups are worked in an integrated manner using fluid, circular movements. Specially designed exercise equipment provides free range of movement and enhances coordination, strength and flexibility… The motion patterns are natural, with no interruption, creating a bridge between contraction and extension through the rotating movement of the joints” (East Bank Club). Leah’s work is unique as she trains her clients at home in a beautiful studio built with the help of her husband Daryl where their garage used to stand. Her love and knowledge of this form of

pilates radiates. Discovering this unique form of excercise has “As soon as I started working in the pilates method I knew I was just in love with it.

It was giving me all the tools I needed to make a change in people’s alignment and posture and their movement, so it was really just a great gateway for me into my passion. My passion is really about teaching people how to really embrace their health and their wellness, and finding the tools to best fit them not only in what they eat also how they move and feel in their bodies, even how they think, their outlook on life” (Putnam).

Andrew Gaddis, a client that has been with Leah for three years talks about how specifically training in this studio with Leah has helped him grow as an athlete. “I was twisting my ankles left and right… When I came here and I started learning about how I can shift how I’m standing when I’m running, how relaxed am I, how my foot hits the ground; that was the biggest thing for me. Under-

standing these small movements to become a more efficient athlete.

That really inspired me... all these things helped me so much and that’s why I’ve become a successful track runner” (Gaddis).

In 2011, Leah was given a diagnosis of breast cancer,. which was a shock for her,. especially for Leah who appeared to be already living a healthy lifestyle.

“I was mad - should I say that? I was mad about the diagnosis. I didn’t have time for it, I didn’t find it fair. You know, you’re numb... when someone gives you a diagnosis like that… it’s a shock. And you just kinda go no no no, they’re telling you it’s positive, it’s positive - you have a positive test but positive wasn’t actually positive, positive was really negative” (Leah). It was as if this news had come out of nowhere, hitting Leah’s life like a storm. The connection between Leah’s healthy lifestyle and her diagnosis did not go hand and hand at first glance. Raw food?

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Pilates?

There is a connection between our mental health, (including our stress levels, our doubts, and troubled thoughts) and the physical health of our bodies. This is a belief that Leah had been exposed to throughout her entire life thus far, a simple truth she holds close to her heart. She recalls, “I was living a really stressful life. I was dealing with a property situation, my mother had died two years prior and I was dealing with her estate which had turned into a very stressful kind of a contentious issue with my brother… there was stress in that…. I was dealing a lot with it by drinking wine, I was using wine as kind of my dimmer switch to take the edge off the stress. And really wine is

itself but what triggered its existence in the first place. Leah’s views could be classified as subjective, and may not be relevant in every cancer diagnosis. However, her thoughts on the link between mental and physical have been expressed elsewhere.

The Canadian Mental Health Association writes, “The research linking mental illness and cancer has yielded mixed results.

Recent research has found significantly higher rates of cancer

sugar and sugar feeds cancer” (L. Putnam). Cancer and stress go hand in hand, and what kills cancer patients is not the cancer

among people with schizophrenia than expected. People with schizophrenia have been found in some studies to have approximately twice the risk of develop-

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ing gallbladder and bowel cancers” (Canadian Mental Health Association).

Andreas Moritz, author of Cancer is NOT a Disease” draws a connection between the mind and cancer. “Cancer is merely an indication that something is missing in our body and in our life. Cancer shows that our physical, mental and spiritual life as a whole stands on shaky ground and is quite fragile, to say the least” (Moritz 9). Rather than cancer being hereditary or due to bad luck, it is a sign that there is something off or out of line within ourselves or in our environment. Scientifically thinking, the body develops a disease in reaction to external and internal stresses. “Genes do not cause disease, but are, in fact, influenced and altered by changes in the environment, from the very first moments in the mother’s womb to the last moments in a person’s adult life. Cellular biologists now recognize that the conditions and occurrences in the external surrounds and internal physiology, and more importantly, our perception of the environment, di-

rectly control the activity of our genes” (Moritz 50). Genes react to one’s surrounding habitat, supporting Leah’s experience that cancer is developed in the body due to factors of change or high levels of emotion.

Treating the cancer or the cause of her cancer became the next decision. The traditional therapies that cancer removal called for were aggressive and particularly unnatural. Daryl, Leah’s husband shares this experience. “Then we started looking for doctors, we found a few that were cutting edge but all were traditional in their approach. They all wanted to remove it first, you know burn it, and then radiate it, and use lots of chemotherapy drugs..”

However, the typical methods seemed to be the opposite of what Leah’s body needed during this time. Moritz writes about this idea: “Just imagine the holes chemotherapy creates inside your blood vessels, lymphatic ducts, and organ tissues when you undergo infusion after infusion! I have looked at the irises of patients (using iridology) who have gone through chemotherapy, and I saw the considerable erosion and damage of tissues throughout the body” (Moritz 67).

“I had known for many years, being in the kind of community that I was in, that food as well as stress had a lot to do with what was going on in my body, why cancer was actually showing up in my body” (Putnam). It became clear that raw food and lifestyle change through diet was “her truth”, as she describes. Leah flew out to Hippocrates Health Institute

in West Palm Beach Florida for three weeks, learning how to strictly adjust her body to eating completely raw, eliminating all forms of sugars, even tomatoes, and destressing all negative emotions. She describes the effects of this diet change.

“When you clean up your diet, and you eat more plants you are closer to nature. Stress has a way of not being there, there isn’t this kind of tension that is happening, that comes from heaviness in food. Food I think has energy, and it’s very clean energy that you are feeding your body, so you start to do all these great things for your body that in itself relieves stress” (Putnam).

A year and a half later, after following her raw food diet, Leah was cancer free. “ It was miraculous what took place after that. Her cancer was monitored by a Stanford oncologist.

They just watched the tumor shrink away - they called her their miracle child… t h e y didn’t know what t o make of it, it had to be there b e cause they didn’t cut it out. But it was gone” (Daryl).

Leah’s knowledge has spread like light, teaching and uplifting others. Her clients have been affected by her lifestyle .

“It was cool because I came here

and I only knew about pilates and I didn’t know about the other side and Leah’s story, how she battled cancer. And that was cool to see what she went through and the cleanse was a snapshot of that, her lifestyle…

How you treat your body physically and mentally, it’s all intertwined. ” (Gaddis).

Leah’s energy is infectious. She continues living cleanly, training individuals through gyrotonic pilates in her own home, cooking raw, enlightening others, and practicing yoga and meditation. “My future is now, it’s the present.

So I am always a spiritual seeker. I meditate everyday and it’s a big part of my life and my inner work… it’s a big part of me … The other is sharing the gift I got from cancer. Being able to express why I eat what I eat and do what I do and it’s become this gift that has opened up for me.

Was it life or death, who knows, but it became something that

I couldn’t do half way. I had to be really serious and it required a certain discipline which has opened up so many doors for me. So that is my future, I am a seeker and a teacher” (Putnam).

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Works cited

East Bank Club. Fitness & Sports / Pilates and Gyrotonic.

Web. 10 November 2015.

Gaddis, Andrew. Personal interview. September 2015.

Moritz, Andreas. Cancer is NOT a Disease. Ener-Chi Wellness Press, 2009. Print.

Putnam, Leah. Personal interview. September 2015.

Putnam, Daryl. Personal interview. September 2015.

The Relationship between Mental Health, Mental Illness and Chronic Physical Conditions - Canadian Mental Health Association, Ontario Division. Canadian Mental Health Association Ontario Division. 16 Dec. 2008. Web. 22 Nov. 2015.

Wong, Kathy. About Health. The Raw Food Diet, 7 Jan. 2015. Web. 10 November 2015.

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