Kelis, 43, recently acknowledged that it’s been one year since her husband Mike Mora passed away from cancer, doing so in a series of Instagram videos. She used the moment to talk about how his battle had an impact on her and her wellness journey.
“Lately lots of people have been asking me how I got started with my wellness and my farming and all that stuff,” the singer said. She continued, saying that the journey started years ago when she was pregnant. “I just wanted to eat well,” she said. “When I got pregnant that’s when I really started to care and think about it.” But it became even more important as her husband battled cancer.
“And then, you know, my husband Mike got sick—this was a couple years ago right after we had our youngest Galilee—and he was diagnosed with stage four stomach cancer, which was just such a shock.”
Mike Mora died in March 2022 at the age of 37. The couple were married in 2014 and had two children together, including son Sheperd born in 2015 and daughter Galilee born in 2020.
She continued, “We were already eating well and really focused on what we put in our bodies. After like eight rounds of chemo, as we started to research more, the hyperbaric chamber just kept coming up and ozone therapy.”
Kelis said they began doing ozone therapy, which is something countries like Russia, Japan, and Cuba do coupled with chemo when someone is diagnosed with cancer.
“After we started researching, after the chemo, the tumor came back and started to spread. We ended up meeting with this beautiful, brilliant man who actually invented the hyper chamber. He gave us a recipe and it was a list of these mushrooms to start taking,” she said. She added that she’d already been using the mushrooms but his recipe was different.
Stomach cancer, also known as gastric cancer, affects about 26,500 people a year and more men than women are affected according to the American Cancer Society. Reportedly 11,130 of those diagnoses result in death.
Kelis then touched on how our food and the way we live impacts our health. As a result of these discoveries, the mom of three started making what she refers to as brain food. While it was unfortunately too late for her husband, she gives it to her kids and consumes it herself.
She also advises people against living stressful lifestyles.
“Just to add to that, every doctor we saw, every specialist, every nutritionist, every human being we found that had any expertise in this whatsoever was like, stress kills,” she said.
“I moved to the farm and we wanted to separate ourselves from all the silly things that had us stressed out and worried and angst and all these things that didn’t really matter,” she said. “So when you think about wellness and we think about health, it really is something that you can take control of with a little bit of thought. Just think a little bit more about it and always support your local farmers. Support your Black farmers. Why? Because we care.”
The couple bought a farm in 2018 with the intention of growing their own food. It is based in Temecula, Calif. and Kelis lives there with her children, including her eldest child, son Knight, from her first marriage to rapper Nas.
Kelis shared the clip with a caption that touched on Mora’s role in her passion for health and wellness while acknowledging that it’d been a whole year since he passed.
“It’s been exactly a year… that’s crazy to me,” she wrote. “I’m a very private person generally, especially when there is family involved . But there is no denying the impact and evolution my husbands passing has had on my life . I get asked all the time how I started this journey . It’s a much longer conversation but in short what we were dealing with here pushed me so deep into understanding our bodies and how our minds and emotions are so interlocked you can not treat one with out the other .”
She added, “Our thoughts and intentions are as powerful and key as our skin health and fitness . I want to live well and this is me sharing what I know to be true.”