Beautiful award-winning actress, mother and everybody’s favorite Empire TV show star, Taraji P. Henson recently used her voice to reveal she went through a health scare and wants to protect other women from it. Specifically, Taraji was suffering from a condition called gastritis.
“Recently, I had a health issue where it was because of food that was causing me to have really bad gastritis in my stomach, so I was forced to make better choices. And then once I started learning about what was happening to me physically — knowledge is power, and I found out that it was the food choices that I was making that put me in this predicament,” the Empire star tells People.
Gastritis is a general term for a group of conditions with one thing in common: inflammation of the lining of the stomach. The inflammation of gastritis is most often the result of infection with the same bacterium that causes most stomach ulcers.
Gastritis may occur suddenly (acute gastritis), or appear slowly over time (chronic gastritis). While in most cases gastritis can be managed with minimal effort and lifestyle changes, gastritis can also lead to an increased risk of stomach cancer.
One form of gastritis, autoimmune gastritis, is a type of gastritis that occurs when your body attacks the cells that make up your stomach lining. This reaction can wear away at your stomach’s protective barrier.
“My mission is to save women from being in the position I was in. You don’t want to wake up one day and you can’t keep water down. Those food choices led me to the emergency room and I just don’t want another woman to have to go through that,” says Henson. “When it’s all because of me, that can be prevented in what we choose to eat and what we choose to put in our bodies.”
Henson, 46, has teamed up with Kellogg’s Special K to encourage women to #OwnIt by combating any self-doubt about their food choices and eat with confidence.
“Ownership in life gives you confidence. If you are confident about the choices that you’re making in your food, then you can own it. I know I can own something…
…that I feel good about. You can’t own it if you feel guilty about the choices that you’re making. But once you take ownership, then you’re taking control of your life – you’re taking control of your health and that’s a better position to play instead of letting the food take control of you,” she shares.
“It’s all about choices. If you make better choices for yourself then you feel better about yourself. If I choose a Special K bar that has fiber, folic acid, vitamin A and D over a Snickers bar, it’s a better choice for me so I don’t have to beat myself up all day long about that Snickers bar or feel bad when I go to my trainer and have to admit: ‘I had a Snickers bar today. I know it wasn’t the best choice.’ So in conjunction with my workout, if I’m making great and healthy food choices, then I’m going to feel better about myself. I’m definitely going to see better results in the gym,” she shares.
According to a survey conducted by Kellogg’s, “90 percent of women in the United States question or doubt their food and spend 61 minutes second-guessing their choices – every day” and “59 percent of women say they spend more time thinking about what they eat than what they wear.”
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