Deciding to eat healthy was not about loosing weight, but the result was the same.

Eating healthy leads to new business

Driving down St. Peter Street, across from St. Peter’s Catholic Church, is Ms. Marla’s Bridal. The slogan, “The Perfect Start to a New Beginning,” nowadays applies to more than marriage. It’s a new way of eating and helping others start a healthy lifestyle that reduces stress and helps the body heal, naturally. Marla Moore didn’t start out to be a nutritionist and is not a licensed one. Her experience came practically.

“Clarence, my husband, has diabetes. He had a leg amputated then later on, two kidneys are gone. He’s still doing dialysis,” Moore said.

For nearly six years she has watched her husband’s health decline but the more she researched trying to help him live heathier by eating the right things, the more her own life changed.

“What God showed me, ‘I don’t mess with nobody’s will, how can you mess with their will?’ When you’ve eaten bad all your life, you don’t think right. You think what you know is right,” Moore said. “He would only eat right when it was something major that came up in his life. When he was feeling good and more relaxed, he went back to the same bad habits.”

Moore said a lot of people don’t understand and don’t know, when you eat starches it turns into sugar and then turns into mucus on the brain, therefore you can’t think right. She doesn’t like to call her new way of eating a diet, rather a lifestyle change. She was formerly a size 24, she is now wearing size 10 or 12.

“I feel so good, I feel healthier, younger. I go in the gym now and do four miles on a tread mill, 10 miles on a bike and my stomach crunches. You have so much energy. The fruits and vegetables are giving your body what it needs,” she said.

She has not dieted but rather changed her eating to an alkaline menu which more closely resembles what she learned from her Aunt Alzina. At the time her aunt was 98 years old but her younger siblings were dying of cancer. Moore went to her elder auntie who told her, the only things she ate were God’s herbs and the things she grew in the garden. The morning she passed, at 108, Aunt Alzina was in her right mind, Moore said. She had no sickness. Her time was up and she was ready to go.

“That’s how I want to live. It has everything to do with your food, what you’re putting into your body. That’s why I always use to hear my grandmother say, ‘Let your food be your medicine,’ ” Moore said. “And my grandmother always kept a garden, all the time, and she never went in a store for anything. She didn’t want to eat no type of meat. I haven’t touched meat in a long time, just fruits, vegetables and herbs, things like that. I only do Brazilian nuts and walnuts.”

Moore did a study and decided other nuts have too much oil that can clog up the pores. She has consulted herbalists, read books and researched online before deciding alkaline was the way to healthy eating for her. Even the seasonings she uses have benefits she has come to understand. Her recipes are featured today.

“Knowledge is power. I use to hear my grandmother say, when you have a lack of knowledge you perish. I used to wonder what she meant but that’s why people are dying off,” Moore said.

Moore’s family is from Sorrel, a small community of less than 800 people, according to the 2010 census, situated between Jeanerette and Baldwin off Louisiana 182 at Louisiana 318.

“Every morning if it is not raining I sit in the sun, take my shoes off and walk on the ground, get connected. A lot of people don’t understand, way, way back in the day, people didn’t have shoes and that’s how they stayed connected to the ground, to the earth,” Moore said. “It energizes you. That’s just one thing I do also. There is so much knowledge out there, I’ll never go back to the way I use to eat.”

Ms. Marla’s Bridals also is now a place where people have found help with their eating plan. Customers are stopping by or visiting her website, AlkalineCuisine.com, for nutrition ideas and what it means to eat alkaline. She references TheAlkalineDiet.org, as well.

“I had this woman stop by who was diabetic. I gave her everything I had, the kinds of food she could eat, on an alkaline diet,” Moore said. “I also do studies. See, ‘What Is an Alkaline Diet?’ And also, it’s about your body.”

Moore agrees that every person has to find what is right for their bodies, but she is living proof to the benefits of eating alkaline.

“This was so helpful to me. I had to understand, whatever God had something to do with, it has seeds. If it doesn’t have seeds, man had everything to do with it. You don’t want that,” she said. “You have to understand how the body is formed, how God made it. Alkaline is like the PH. If you have a PH balance of 7, you’re neutral. If your body is fully alkaline your body is fighting sickness and diseases. Having 7.3 and above, that is good. In an alkaline body, there is no way diseases or parasites can live. Isn’t that beautiful.”

Moore has a nephew in Atlanta who helps her with understanding eating alkaline. He even sent her drops to test the bottled water she drinks. The only ones that she has found to be alkaline are Evermore with an 8.8 PH and a bottled water at Dollar Tree.

“If you keep your body at an alkaline state rather than an acidic state, you’re going to be healthier, age slower, your organs are going to work right. I love to teach people about that,” Moore said.

And she’s eager to share her experience and knowledge with others. Moore will be teaching a class on eating alkaline Nov. 10 at the Iberia Parish Library St. Peter Branch. Keep reading the Wednesday Food section for details.

Through the course of trying new ways of eating, Moore got tired of pulling down various spices from the cabinet and formulated her own mixture. It was tested by the FDA and found to be PH7 balanced. She is selling the product mostly in California and other western health-conscious states, locally at Mac’s in Jeanerette or BiLo in New Iberia.

“It’s going crazy,” Moore said. “My goodness, I think we’ve sold 98,000 so far. The guy that was helping us said where you live is spice country, take it further away. When you go to those places and eat their food, you say it is bland because you’re from here. People are health fanatics (in other states). We’ve been hitting trade shows. On the weekends, we’re gone.”