Sheet Cake: How To Build Resilience From The Inside Out

By Tania Van Pelt

Time to discover and recover our own power and possibility. This book teaches resiliency. It’s this resiliency that gets us through depression, tragedy, trauma, and difficult days. 

Most of us want to know we're not alone, that there is a manageable, navigable path to a better life. We want to feel good

• Language: English
• Publisher: Optimal Life LLC
• Release date: Feb 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9780578682488

Tania Van Pelt

Writer, producer, and content creator Tania Van Pelt has been studying wellness, specifically diet-related health, since co-creating the popular lifestyle website Happiness Series in 2010. After years of research and practical application, she wrote, The Ageless Diet. She recently wrapped a new series, Practical Magick, exploring the more etheric realms, shot on location in Colorado, USA and in Cape Town, South Africa. Tania is an activist for climate justice at a local, state, and national level. She works tirelessly to encourage climate action. She writes regularly for Happiness Series and other lifestyle sites, some of which are still around. Sheet Cake is her second book.

Book preview

Chapter 1

HERE I AM AGAIN

About eight years ago I changed the way I treated my body. This transformed my life. I started on a path that ended with the The Ageless Diet , a book about how to fix yourself on a cellular level through diet and lifestyle. The book and lifestyle sent me on a journey. I became an evangelist for good living. Ageless Diet worked! I never felt so vibrant. I never looked as beautiful. I was smug in the way a rich person believes their good fortune is earned. Like any healthy and successful person, I assumed I would always feel good in my skin. I was proud of the work I created. I walked my talk. I lived agelessly until I didn’t. I stopped doing the things that kept me healthy.

One day a bad thing happened, then a second awful thing, a third, fourth, and suddenly feeling ageless was not enough. I made mistakes. People hurt me. I finally processed those painful experiences, and now I’ve been composting those scraps of hurt and shame into something life-sustaining.

I thought fixing my gut and making my skin glow was enough for long-term contentment. I never thought to examine why I thought and acted the way I did. When a person feels good almost all the time, there’s no need to delve deeply into why one feels good. When a person feels bleak, there’s nothing but time to analyze why.

The summer I turned twenty kicked my ass. I was severely depressed, self-medicating with gin and junk food, sleeping most of the day, and getting drunk at night. I dug myself up and out of that hole, but it took time and effort. Once I was mostly well again, I stopped wondering why I fell so easily into a depression. I never explored my self-destructive tendencies (car crashes, broken arm, bruised body, black-out drunken nights, and relationships that leached me of resources and energy). I never delved into the why behind my incessant negative thinking. Why I was a loser? Why were my flaws bigger and worse than anyone else’s? By the time I turned thirty-three, my mental state was less important than fixing the physical. I couldn’t bear the headaches, constant colds and sinus infections, bloated belly, roiling gut, and fatigue. I was young. Why did I feel bad more often than not? I was sick and tired of feeling lousy.

I began the years-long work of creating a lifestyle that addressed and fixed these ailments. One built on the foundation of real, nutrient-dense foods. I ate too much junk food, sugar, and dairy, and not enough plants. I changed that. I improved my sleep hygiene. I meditated daily, and I exercised regularly. I finally addressed my gut issues with the aid of probiotics. It worked. I felt better. So good, in fact, I failed yet again to look at why I sometimes, for no particular reason, found myself anxious and sad. I didn’t think to wonder why I sometimes hated myself. My childhood was something I revisited when I needed an amusing anecdote, not because it was the genesis of damaging thought patterns.

Several things went wrong these last few years. I was living my lush life, then a few major and minor setbacks, and I crumpled. I had more healing work to do with the way I thought and felt. Patterns created when I was a scared child needed to be looked at. Why did I react this way to trauma? Why do I think the things I do about myself? Why am I prone to anxiety? The time had come to look inside at the monsters in my head. Luckily, I’m a writer who enjoys research. Turns out some of the reasons I go dark so quickly are related to chronic inflammation, triggered by trauma from the past, aided and abetted by lifestyle choices that sent cytokines, which are known to promote inflammation, scurrying through my body.

The ways our brains work don’t always help in healing trauma. The brain creates habitual thought patterns. Think certain thoughts often enough, you build neural pathways, and your brain will lay down tracks so you can more easily travel them.

At a certain point, it becomes all you think about. There were a good eight months when all I thought about was what a loser I was. I counted the many reasons why over and over until they were the dominant thoughts. I had to rewire my brain. I fixed myself again. Healing is an ongoing process.

How am I able to transcend and transform again and again? Resilience. This book is about cultivating resilience. I’ve been broken, beat down, anxious, scared, and deeply insecure. I figured out how to feel better despite everything I’ve done and that has been done to me. I know healing is doable and possible. I want to be a catalyst for transformation and self-healing. I can help you heal in part by reminding you how resilient you are.

Healing oneself is effortful. If you want a quick fix, this isn’t the book for you. If you need something more right now, please seek expert help. Sometimes you can’t meditate or eat your way out of emotional pain and trauma. Some of my favorite people are on brain meds, including but not limited to antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication. There’s no shame in getting the support you need to feel fully you.

As with the Ageless Diet, being well is an ongoing effort. It’s never one and done. There are meals to be planned, food to be cooked, exercise to be done, and trauma to be dealt with all the time. It’s never-ending. It’s also totally worth it. This book is my toolkit to support holistic health. What I know now is that feeling good in the body doesn’t mean much when you’re sludgy in the head and vice versa.

I’m mostly a private person and sharing personal stuff is hard and kind of embarrassing. I tried writing this another way so I wouldn’t have to share as much, like how I wrote The Ageless Diet, but it didn’t click. I became an expert in health and wellness by virtue of all that work. I’ve read studies about depression and looked at new and old research about inflammation, from symptoms to causes. I’ve talked with many people (and their doctors) who have dealt with various mental health issues. I’ll share that information and my story with you. You’re not alone. The truth is most of us have been depressed, anxious, overstressed, or panicky. If you’re in the thick soup of depression, it can change. You can wade out of it. Give it a minute, day, week, or year, and life evolves, even improves. I’m here to help you remember that.

There are good things I could celebrate every day for the rest of my life. My body works the way I want most of the time. I love the man I married. I do work I enjoy, at least half the time. I have four really great friends. Finally, in the last three years, I began to tell the truth. I stopped hiding who I am from myself and others. I mostly shook loose from those dirty, secret obsessions that held me back.

Ten years ago I got well on the outside, and life was so much better. The work of feeling good was fun. I loved taking care of myself. It was something to celebrate every morning, afternoon, and evening. I was healthy! I looked good! I felt great. Every night I made a drink and held up the glass in gratitude. I assumed all of this would last forever. I trusted more wonderful things would come my way. I had the innocence of a truly privileged person. I could easily ignore the injustices in the world because I wasn’t touched by them.

Five years ago, I sat underneath the widest canopy of a tree you ever did see and said, I do. Gleaming in a simple, long white dress I shone with something stronger, deeper than happiness. I made a vow under the long, heavy branches of the oldest live oak I know, on John’s Island. Afterward, we went to my best friend Lea Qualey’s house on Broad Street. Cake and champagne were served, roses everywhere. Lea in her wheelchair beaming at a dream she held for a young friend finally come true. She knew, eventually and for sure, that I would be all right. What more can you want for a friend? My mother says our wedding was the best day of her life. To me, it seemed to underscore in a big, celebratory way, how whole I had made myself and how lucky I’ve been. How healing was possible and beautiful beginnings, middles, and someday in the distant future, endings could be mine.

Even on a great day like that I’m still a broken down piece of furniture. I’m strong enough to be functional but far from perfect. I’m shattered in my own unique way. I’ve reconstructed myself and the seams show. All those imperfections. They’re also my story, who I used to be and who I’ve become. Everyone is broken in their own special way, and this is part of what makes us powerful. We make something new out of our broken bits. We create things, a life, because of what’s shattered. The flaws and differences make us wild, weird, and so fucking gorgeous. Let’s celebrate our shattered and reconstructed selves.

I laugh when I think of how many times over the years I’ve had to kick and re-kick the same bad habits—overeating, lying, endless self-pity, negative thinking, self-abuse, soul-sucking lethargy, and procrastination. I’ve needed to relearn the good ones, how to adapt, trust, grow and evolve, how to think more positively, how to celebrate everything and nothing, and how to be grateful. Today I tell myself that I’m fine just as I am right here, right now.

It was not easy getting there. I took about twenty-five years to fix myself, inside out. A long, circuitous road. Last summer under a sky hazy with fires raging miles away I thought that maybe I knew a secret. Despite the fires and fears, I broke bread with my friends and neighbors. I looked around at the sweaty, smiling faces, took a big bite of my burger, and figured this might be joy, the destination we should all be heading towards. The world was melting, bad stuff was happening, and still, we gathered at the table to celebrate life, a hot summer day, a cold beer, the shade from an apple tree, friendship, our survival despite it all . . . We were celebrating anything and everything.

EXERCISE

Trust Yourself to Heal

A big part of self-healing was trusting I could heal, learn, and expand. I trusted without knowing the outcome. I wanted to feel better so I needed to trust I would if I made changes.

Trust is a precursor to change, otherwise why would you ever take risks? Trust also plays a role in resilience because it diminishes the focus on uncertainty. Rather, it banishes uncertainty and anxiety, especially if your trust is not attached to an outcome. This exercise is designed to help you uncover your relationship to trust and how deeply your anxiety is rooted in distrust.

Write down three times in your life something went awry or wrong.

• What happened?

• How did it end up? What did you learn from these times?

• To this day, how have these times helped or hindered you?

Recall a time in your life when you’ve totally trusted yourself, a higher power, or your instincts. How did it work out for you?

Is there one thing right now you want to do you’re hesitant to try because there’s no guaranteed outcome?

Chapter 2

DON’T BELIEVE IN CIRCUMSTANCES

I’ve had setbacks. I’ve made colossal mistakes. I’ve avoided work, and it has cost me. I’ve given into temptation. I’ve failed. I’ve wrecked cars and relationships. I’ve succumbed to despair at the mess my life had become. I’ve also surmounted crippling disappointments. Despite the tricky childhood, low self-esteem, and poor life choices I’ve occasionally made, I’m still here and I’m still creating. This is all true, and it was also not always true. There have been two times in my life when I’ve fallen into a pit of hopeless despair. The most recent one was three years ago. It took that stumble to help me realize resiliency is a practice, and I need the strong underpinning of good habits, emotional and physical, to support me in times of trouble.

In 2016, I hired a woman recommended by a trusted friend. She had a very impressive résumé. She stole thousands of dollars from me. Worse, she took away my hope. I say she stole, and she took, but actually, I was culpable. I gave her the money. I willingly, blindly pinned all my dreams on her promises. Even when I had doubts, I kept paying her. Even when she failed to deliver, I’d still willfully believe her stories of promised success. How did this happen? Why did this trigger depression?

I had no faith in my own abilities, despite some good luck as a writer. I was still negative about my prospects as one person going it alone in the lifestyle industrial complex. My confidence in myself was low enough to greedily lap up lies and false promises. See when I created Ageless Diet, I focused on the external in my quest to heal myself. I made myself hard-bodied. I had energy, but I still had gaps. Holes in my heart and pathways in my brain pushing me in directions no one should ever go. I was vulnerable. I walked into our first meeting feeling like a badass, but in reality, I was a sensitive, wounded person, hoping to be liked and treated well. I was willing to accept significantly less. I was an easy mark.

She knew all the big players in the media world, these kingmakers, but she never tried. Never called, or only rang once, and never followed up. She disappeared until the check came due. Thousands gone—poof—via electronic transfer as the months went by, my contract never honored. All I did was worry and stew in agitated anger and bitter hope. Bitter because I knew on a gut level nothing would happen. I was wishful in the same strung out way as when I skipped studying, took the test, and still had a crazy hope I’d pass. When the reality settled on me, I got high and then super low on fury and despair. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it felt awful. Darkness seeped into my veins like thick oil, and I wanted to cut them open and drain it out.

There were signs every month that this woman was not doing her job; she was not honoring our contract. Still, I paid her because if I didn’t then what would I do? I would be all alone with nothing. Paying into a lie felt more comfortable than facing the truth. She committed fraud. She lied and stole. My role in the fraud was to believe the lies. At a certain point, I was willfully blind to the truth. I had a responsibility to put the facts together, and I didn’t until all the money was gone. I knew before I acknowledged I knew, and for that, I felt a great deal of shame. The whole boondoggle was partly my fault. Things never go well for me when I’m willful because it means I’m ignoring reality.

All my negative thinking, all those old and dangerous neural pathways activated, and I fell down. Losing all this money and worse, hope, was the trigger. It was also the reminder I had unfinished business. I won’t be able to handle the hard stuff until I deal with my inner workings. I returned to my past to figure out how the groundwork for self-sabotage got laid. I had two choices: sink into despair or let the darkness bring me to purpose.

It took a while, though, to choose to heal. Feeling hopeless without a purpose was my breaking point. To heal myself the first go around I started with diet because it was a simple thing for me to control, relatively quick, and easy. I changed my lifestyle, followed those four golden Ageless Rules. (Eat real food: drop added sugar, dairy, processed foods. Meditate. Exercise. Sleep.) This second time around, I went inside. I needed to forgive myself. I tackled fear and acknowledged I was angry. I finally dealt with the uglier, scarier things in me and life.

I was the girl who didn’t live up to her potential, the one who had so many opportunities and blew them all, the kid who couldn’t seize a moment if her life depended on it, the waitress who couldn’t get a real job, the woman who wouldn’t grow up. I know what it’s like to disappoint friends and family. The thing is none of the fear and disappointment are fatal. It’s actually easier to evolve into the kind of person you admire than you can imagine. A lot of it depends on how you feel, from the inside out. That’s something I can help with.

My well-being comes down to what I eat, how I live, and what I choose to see and think. I’ve had hard times, and they’ve lasted longer than I ever thought possible. They do pass. The trick is not to marinate in the bitterness, anger, and resentment. The bigger trick is to reframe the traumatic events in life as an opportunity to learn and grow. It’s not always easy, but then neither is life.

George Bonanno, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University’s Teachers College, heads the Loss, Trauma, and Emotion Lab. He studies resilience. He says one of the keys to resilience is perception. I perceived this woman as my only hope. I had very little confidence in my abilities to do much of anything besides read, write, and cook (and even those skills I questioned at times). I needed her. When she betrayed that trust, which I aided and abetted, I saw the whole thing as a disaster. This was my reaction to fraud. I’ve had friends who run businesses, and they’ve had employees steal from them, independent contractors defraud them, and they’ve barely flinched.

Dr. Bonanno, in an article for Psychology Today, wrote something that may help explain my reaction to fraud versus someone else’s more poised response:

The unavoidable truth is that events are not traumatic, they are only potentially traumatic. This is because trauma is a subjective phenomenon. An event can be experienced as traumatic but the event itself is not traumatic. More importantly, and this is actually the crux of most of my research, not everyone experiences the same event the same way. Trauma for one person is not trauma for another. And no event is traumatic for everyone, not by a long shot.¹

We don’t have to react the way we do. Even a devastating event in life, like the death of a dear one, can be