When you start out as a teen mom, and you've got to figure out real quickly how you are going to not get your car repossessed ... and so you have to figure out, "What are my gifts, and how do I sell these gifts so that I can provide for another mouth?" while you are still carrying a backpack around every day. That's a pretty intense situation. What I've seen is that I was forced, and chose, what life handed me as an opportunity to figure some of this stuff out quickly.

The tobacco industry has been brilliant hiding the truth about nicotine in dictionaries. What nicotine truly is, is it's valued as an insecticide. It's one of the most lethal substances found on earth. When a person is smoking or vaping or chewing, or chewing nicotine gum or wearing the patches, all they're doing all day long is insecticiding themselves.

What people really need to do, they need to know the truth about what do you need to know about physiology? What do you need to know about dieting? What do you need to know about nutrition? That's what I put in the book. First, as I introduce things, I point out these diet programs and supplements are really bogus. I can give you a little bit on that and what you really need to know. I go through the physiology, nutrition, things that you need to know, and it's written for a layman.

And the big thing is there's so many things out there that they're enticing people to do this or that in order to lose this weight and be healthy. One thing that people I think kind of pulls them the wrong way is they think the science has nailed this. That there is some magic chemical that's going to come along that it's going to allow them to sit on the couch and watch TV and have the exact weight they want and be perfectly healthy. They can eat whatever they want and that's just not reality.

This is really important because when people have had some kind of trauma and it could be a one-time trauma like a bad car accident or it could be chronic childhood trauma, you grew up in an abusive family. When you've had trauma, your brain stays over aroused and that keeps your body over aroused and there's a lot of research that says people who have had a lot of childhood trauma in particular are much more likely to become ill.

That is one reason why I am as transparent as I am, because I need people to know that I was not always like that. That I was so damaged and so broken and I made some really, really, really bad choices in my life. But that I overcame that and so can everybody else.

But the thing was that you try to find those things to help you through the pain, but what you're doing is you're just really making it worse. Because you're now more lost. Because you know that this is wrong and you know that you're doing damage, but after all the abuse it's something you're so used to and at the end of the day you are starting to abuse yourself

Well, I attempted suicide. I took pills and overdosed after my mom basically didn't want anything to do with me and then she sent me really hurtful emails for a few weeks and I just felt alone and hopeless, and that with her being the only family I was really in contact with, I felt that there's no reason for me ... I felt I was hurting so much inside, and I just felt that there was no reason to live anymore. So I overdosed.

I want authors to be able to publish their books through us. I want them to be able to have this home, I want them to be able to publish their books, I want them to have a support network. All of our authors support each other, they advertise for each other, they market each other. We're there to encourage each other and that goes for our vendors as well that we have on our site, because we do have vetted vendors.

He basically transitioned from traditional Christianity into an exploration of all sorts of things that might be called collectively metaphysical movements, and which eventually became the new age movement in the 1980s and 1990s. So that's what I found fascinating about him, was that he had this whole kind of spiritual side that most people didn't know about.