THE THIRD METRIC
bedroom in their apartment. Then
they unwind (further) by watching
Portlandia or The Daily Show before heading to bed.
It wasn’t always this blissful.
Meghan held eight successive jobs
with eight different advertising
firms in her first three years of employment, working 10- to 11-hour
days that started at 5 a.m. There
was huge demand in her specific
field, interactive advertising, in
2004 and 2005, so headhunters
called her constantly. “They would
offer me more money, and I thought
that was what I was supposed to
want, so I would take the jobs,” she
said. “I thought, maybe if I was getting paid more, it would be more
enjoyable.” It wasn’t.
While logging those long hours,
she was battling a painful and
mysterious digestive illness that
ultimately rendered her unable to
work. She took a leave of absence.
“I was fortunate that I was making a lot more money than 24- and
25-year olds really need to have,
so I had savings that I could live
off of,” she said. “I had my parents’
support as well. If I could no longer
afford to live on my own, I could
move back home with them. I had
that fallback.”
Soon after she was diagnosed
HUFFINGTON
08.18.13
with Crohn’s disease, which
causes inflammation of the lower
gastrointestinal tract. She was
prescribed medication and told
that she might have to have her
intestines removed.
“My priority was 100 percent
to make sure that didn’t have to
happen,” said Meghan, who began
a regimen of acupuncture, yoga,
meditation, a lot of rest and a diet
of completely unprocessed food.
After six weeks, she was symptom free and wanted to “learn from
a more formal perspective what I
had done that made this work.”
Meghan decided she was done
with advertising and the lifestyle
it required, and enrolled in Toronto’s Institute of Holistic Nutrition
where she met Josh.
They quickly discovered they had
a lot in common; both grew up in
loving middle-class families near
Toronto, their mothers are artists
and both sets of parents have been
married 40 years or more. But what
binds them most is their commitment to health and well-being.
“We make a conscious choice every day to be happy,” said Meghan.
“If we don’t, we ask what we can do
about it. I don’t think there’s been
a single day that I’ve known Josh
where either of us wakes up and
says, ‘today’s gonna suck.’”
That’s not to say that their lives
are completely stress-free. Josh’s