I forgot to mention in my previous "Where have I been?" post, I've been on a raw diet. This is a recent thing, only 7 days old. I also forgot to mention that I've been sick since...pretty much last fall. It's been varying degrees, but a few days after Valentine's this year it turned into a mysterious stomach problem and never left. Life pretty much was miserable. And then I learned about fungus. Candida yeast. Parasites. Things that cause inflammation in your body and cause a whole host of problems. When the worst of the problems started, all I could pin point any changes I had made to were getting off birth control (don't even get me started on that).
It's led me to so many other things. I went to doctors, they were all baffled. They all wanted to put me on drugs. One of them did. But they didn't really help. The drugs helped me sleep, actually, which wasn't what they were supposed to do but it was a nice side effect.
And all the while, I still felt like crap. On one of the last days before I cemented that I was going to go on a cleanse, I got in a fight with my husband which ended in me screaming at him "I feel like s*&! all the time!" in tears. Something had to change.
So I got a bottle of pills that would assist me in a parasite cleanse. I'd been watching a lot of natural health shows, who were talking about so many symptoms I had and said "Here is your problem--fungus."
Serious? I always had a feeling that some of what I was experiencing was related. But now I was finding out that pretty much EVERY health problem I've had through my life is related to one thing--my diet.
I'm a junk food addict. Proudly. Is it fried? Is it fake? Is it bread? Is it SUGAR? Gimmie. I want. I LOVE. As a child, I subsisted only on bologna, boxed mac n cheese and hot dogs. I was super fussy and also super skinny--my mom felt she had no choice. If I wouldn't eat it, she didn't make me. Sounds like a great start for a lifetime of bad habits, right? It was. Eventually I turned into a person who only ate chips, cheese, processed meats like bacon or salami, white bread and candy bars. Every meal was ended with dessert. Lots of it. Vegetables? Gross. Fruit, eh no thanks.
Needless to say, my digestive system was a mess. I suffered from IBS and Hypoglycemia, but it was manageable. Until I got off birth control. The sudden lack of synthetic hormones in my body threw it into a tailspin. It was the perfect storm for my bad eating habits to truly show what I had been doing to my body. But modern medicine had no answers. At one point, doctors questioned if I had thyroid disease. It was awful. Everyone was guessing and no one could help. One doctor wanted to do a scope because he wanted to know if I had celiac disease. But that cost $8,000 (or 20% of that for me--still outrageous). And then it started getting more disturbing--it started affecting my mind. I could forget things in seconds. I would stand in front of the fridge or in the middle of rooms for several minutes unable to remember why I was there. And memorizing dance routines? Forget it. Not to mention in the weakened, undernourished state my body was in it was impossible for me to keep up physically.
The doctors did have one answer for me, however. So this started when you got off birth control? Then get back on it.
Uh, what? Get back on the synthetic hormones that getting on and off started all this crap in the first place? No thanks!!! Not to mention the fact that we'd like to start a family. Taking birth control gets in the way of that, eh?
Traditional medicine, obviously, could not help me. So I turned to natural medicine. And a whole new world was opened to me that I never realized existed. A world in which, everything is connected. And you don't fix it with drugs from pharmaceutical companies.
In the last month, I've learned about olive leaf. Black walnut husk. Activated charcoal. And fungus, Candida yeast and parasites. I learned that when you eat products with yeast in them, well-what does yeast do? It expands. It expands in your body and causes inflammation and that in turn causes damage. And what feeds that yeast once it gets started? Sugar. Alcohol. Processed food. And what causes that yeast to just go gang busters, reeking havoc on your body? Oh...hormonal changes like getting off birth control.
Holy crap. Other symptoms of yeast due to bad diet? Excema. IBS. Hypoglycemia. Mental issues. Acne. Pretty much everything else I had. All this time, it was all connected.
At first I was very angry at doctors for not saying anything about this. Here I was, having digestive and endocrine issues and no one ever asked what my diet was!! (It was chocolate cake). But then I realized if I was going to fix it, I was going to have to treat myself.
Enter the cleanse. At first, it was scary, looking at that list. Pretty much the first thing on the list was NO SUGAR. Not even fruit. Nothing. Not one drop. Also, no processed food (chips, salami, deli meat), no alcohol, no bread, no yeast, no vinegar, no molds or fungus (cheese, mushrooms, most dairy), no fats that were solid at room temperature (ham, bacon, butter)--no to everything I lived on! My only food options were vegetables, legumes and lean meats like fish, chicken and beef.
It's amazing how many vegetables you can eat when the choice is eat vegetables or be sick. It's amazing how fast you can develop a taste for healthy food. I'm not saying it was easy. By the middle of the first day I wanted to break. I didn't know what I was doing. Not eat any of the food I loved? ANY of it? No chocolate? I can't do this. I can't. But I had to. Whenever I felt weak I thought of how sick I had been. That usually got me thinking healthy pretty quick.
It's now been 7 days. My stomach is better--not like it was before I got sick but I can tell that it's actually absorbing nutrients now and for 3 months it just flushed everything right out. I expect that if I did have a scope a doctor would say I was celiac. But in natural medicine, they don't call it that. And in natural medicine if you cleanse and let your body heal from the damage, then you can eat gluten again in moderation. It might be six months. But you can have it again.
Pretty much all of my other symptoms are gone too. I haven't had hypoglycemia issues--now I'm just hungry, not close to death. My skin has cleared up. It's stopped itching. I don't get exhausted after lunch. I'm not depressed. My lung issues aren't bothering me. I have more energy. I've lost seven pounds--and that's not from being sick. I knew something was wrong when I was so sick, and I didn't lose ANY weight. Now I'm feeling better and not eating junk and I'm losing weight without trying. Slowly, my brain is coming back to me. And my taste for bad food is pretty much gone. I tried to eat some cheese this weekend. It tasted like straight up mold. I had to eat vegetables to get the taste out of my mouth. Last night I made stir fry and it was delicious. A month ago if you had told me I would enjoy stir fry with only veggies, brown rice and beef, I would have told you where you could stuff those veggies.
I have also learned the joy of ethnic food--I've dined at Afghani and Ethiopian restaurants and they were wonderful. Most of the things they serve on their menus are things that are right in line with my diet and-surprise-they are delicious. Six months ago I wouldn't have touched an ethnic restaurant--I wouldn't even have drunk their water. I thought Applebee's was a safe place to eat. Now I know better.
Okay. One of my new blog resolutions was to make things shorter. Ooops. What I am saying is that if traditional doctors can't help you, don't think you're sunk. Keep searching yourself. Natural medicine is amazing. Your diet is affecting you more than you know. Go on a sugar fast. It's amazing how much better you will feel even after a short time. I can't wait to see how much better I feel in a month. Also, spend time praying to The Great Physician.
Good luck from a former sugar addict!
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