Better Health & Living: Article: Recipe For Living

Issue: October 2007

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Recipe For Living

Local cancer survivor Meg Wolff shares benefits of good nutrition

by John Rolfe

Published in Portland, ME local spotlight | 0 Comments, Talk about this article »

“A lot of people want to make positive changes in their lives,” says Meg Wolff, “but they don’t know where to start.” Wolff has a suggestion for them: better nutrition. She follows a macrobiotic diet, and it’s a recipe for living that she truly believes in. Good nutrition is a cause she promotes through cooking classes, public speaking, and her book Becoming Whole, which details her two battles with cancer and her recovery.

Recipe For Living

“I believe it has saved my life,” she writes of the macrobiotic diet on her web site, www.megwolff.com. In turn, she says she feels “a moral obligation to share this information with people, in the hope that it can help them.”

Getting to that point was a trial. Wolff had lost her left leg to bone cancer in 1991. “Then, in the spring of 1998, when I was 40, I discovered a lump in my right breast, which was later diagnosed as invasive lobular and ductal carcinoma.”

She underwent a mastectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation, only to be told by her doctor that, in all likelihood, the cancer would return within the year. It was at that low point that Wolff went to see Dr. Devra Krassner, a naturopathic doctor recommended by her MD. “I asked, ‘Is there anything I can do?’ And as I was leaving, she said, ‘Some women with breast cancer have been helped by a macrobiotic diet...’ That was my ‘aha’ moment. I thought, ‘I will do anything.’”

Wolff started taking macrobiotic cooking classes and researching macrobiotic diets. “I was still tired and ill, but I read everything on the subject that I could get my hands on,” she says.

It was not long before the benefits of the change to a plant-based diet became tangible, she says. “I began sleeping through the night--something I’d had trouble with for five years. With my doctor’s OK, I weaned myself off heart arrhythmia medication. I lost weight, my skin got clear, and chronic sinus problems and headaches cleared up. Ulcerative colitis that I’d dealt with for four years came to an end.”

In 2000, with cancer behind her, Wolff went to Massachusetts to attend a Kushi Institute Macrobiotic Conference program on cooking for people with illness. In early 2002 she began to teach cooking classes as a volunteer at the Cancer Community Center in South Portland.

Recipe For Living

A Flexible Approach

Jeanne Goldschmidt of Hollis calls Wolff “an inspiration.” Goldschmidt, a breast cancer survivor, took Wolff’s classes at the Cancer Community Center and now follows a full macrobiotic diet four days a week, and a partial one the other days. “You feel so powerless when you’re ill, but then you’re given a way to do something good for your body,” she says.

“People love Meg’s classes in part because she’s not dogmatic,” says Cancer Community Center executive director Michele Johns. “I think people sometimes have all-or-nothing approaches to various types of diets, making students feel they’ve failed if they can’t stick to it. But Meg’s very good about making people feel that any change you make is great.”

That’s the approach Wolff took in her own home in Cape Elizabeth. Her husband, Tom, a runner and cyclist, “took to the diet pretty easily,” she remembers. It took children Francis and Cammie a little longer, but they made the transition to a healthier, if not an exclusively macrobiotic, diet. “Basically, I got rid of all the junk food in the house,” Wolff says. “In the beginning I was making meals just for myself. But as I started to feel better, I began to make meals for them. I started with a stir-fry that was half chicken and half tofu, marinated and served over brown rice. After I’d done that a few times, the kids actually could not tell the difference between the tofu and the chicken, and they just ended up liking the flavor.”

Wolff admits that her conversion came through necessity not choice, and she knows that changing one’s diet can be a challenge. So she encourages people to practice better nutrition in whatever ways work for them. “Try cutting back on animal protein,” she suggests. “Cut your portions in half. Make sure you include fresh vegetables. I found that when I stopped eating junk, the vegetables tasted better.”

Wolff appreciates the blessings that a macrobiotic lifestyle has brought her. “As I grew stronger, not only my physical problems healed, but also my spirit,” she says. “I really came to accept and celebrate my life, and to look at it as a gift and not a misfortune. How many people get a chance to make a huge difference in others’ lives? That’s what I’ve been given. And it’s very rewarding.”