The journey

Thought I'd post a little bit about where I've been and what got me here.

I've been struggling for many years with both health issues and weight issues...never fully getting that they were intertwinded. My health issues I think have been mostly kept private (I think), with only my husband and closest family members actually knowing the full scope of things.

From early on I had lots of child hood illnesses...I had my tonsils out at the age of maybe six...took anti-biotics for that. Had bladder infection...more anti-biotics...then a slew of strep throat incidents...one after another, after another through out my adolescence...and ofcourse along with the usual course of antibiotics. Lots of days off from school, very sedate life for a child...never really had the energy or drive to do what other kids seemed to be doing all the time. But life continued...and along with it labels like 'lazy' stuck.

Things seemed to go on pretty 'normally'...at least what I had been thinking of as normal until the early 90's when my mom became sick with cancer. I was working in Boston at the time with a very long comute to where I was living, I'd get home exhausted and VERY stressed. I started getting sinus infections pretty much constantly...and again put on antibiotics. The thing that blocked that track (thankfully)was developing an allergy to one of them (a sulfa drug)...I finally said enough and started looking towards herbal remedies to help me and discovered 'Echinacea'...a God send.

The last year of my mom's life (1997)was one of the most taxing years of my life. I was constantly in the hospital to be with her...eating whatever I could manage from the cafeteria and vending machines...not taking care of myself at all. My weight just sky rocketed, along with my health issues. I would experience moments of anxiety and panic at times, and severe depression at others.

The thing that got my attention though wasn't my health...but my weight. Sometime after my mom's death, I came across a book called 'The WeighDown Diet' and there started my 'non diet' journey. I lost incredible amounts of weight by simply waiting for hunger and stopping when full. I would eat whatever I felt like (mostly sugary sweets)and was thrilled that the weight kept melting. However I still wasn't feeling all that great physically. In fact my anxiety got so bad that I could hardly swallow my food...I couldn't even go to restaurants because that seemed to make it all worse...so the weight kept dropping.

I don't blame the 'non diet' approach for any of this...I still think that this is the way to go...that you need to listen to your body's signals and feed it what it needs. However, I believe that there are illnesses and situations that can prevent us from interpreting those signals properly. I now realize that the yeast in my body caused by all the antibiotics that I had taken, was what was calling for the sugar...it wanted to be fed!

I came to this conclusion when I started telling a friend of mine about some of the problems that I had been experiencing and she told me about food intolerances and specifically about Gluten Intolerance and Celiac disease. When I read the symptoms of Celiac, alot of it clicked for me...so I tried going gluten free for a little while and things did start to improve. However, I was also noticing that at times I would eat other foods and would still get very sick. I was just starting to see the sugar connection then. I already knew that dairy did a job on me...that was instantaneous...but other foods weren't so easy to recognize.

In the meantime I found an MD who practiced Holistic medicine and had her check for Celiac...all came back normal but she thought that I was on the right track with food intolerance idea. She perscribed probiotics and talked to me about doing an elimination diet...which we would talk more about the next time we met. I went home and started researching more on my own and came across the Yeast Overgrowth information...eliminated sugar right away along with some of the other stuff that I already knew made me sick (milk, bread...etc.) and started having marked improvements with my digestive system. The first week was very, very difficult since I had been such a sugar junky for such a long time, not to mention chocoholic. The cravings were really intense and I developed headaches for several days straight along with several other symptoms, as my body struggled to clean itself out.

So..the journey has now come to a new phase...I still want to eat within the boundaries of hunger and fullness...but when it is time to eat, I want whole, nourishing foods that are not filled with so much sugar and other additives that they make me sick. I want to exercise my body and take vitamins. I want to do whatever it takes to take good care of this body that God created in order to serve Him better. I still have a whole slew of symptoms that haven't shown much improvement yet...energy level is still very low...but there have been enough good changes to encourage me forward...improved bowel regularity, less gassiness and bloatedness, weight loss, clearer skin etc. So I'm hopeful that this is at least another piece of the puzzle. So, keep reading this blog and walk with me as I go forward towards finding the health and vibrancy that I need to live the life that God has in mind for me.