About Me
I’ve created this blog to document my journey to better health, in hopes that it may someday help someone else on a similar journey, who is just as frustrated and confused as I am (was?). You see, I’ve seen no fewer than a dozen doctors over the past few years who all told me the same thing:
“All your labs are normal. You’re in perfect health. You’re probably just tired and stressed from being a new mom.”
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This I heard time and time again, inevitably after taking 30 minutes just to tell the nurse all of the symptoms I was experiencing, which were:
- extreme fatigue
- inability to do my job (I’m a professional classical singer–it takes a lot of stamina)
- swelling and tightness in my thyroid region
- gagging feeling
- heartburn
- abdominal pain
- abdonominal swelling
- abdominal spasms
- gastrointestinal cramps
- gas
- night sweats (I’m talking like waking-up-in-a-puddle drenched)
- lightheadedness
- dizziness
- shortness of breath
- anxiety
- depression
- joint pain
- headaches
- brain fog–an inability to focus or remember anything
- full body aches, like the flu
- full body hive outbreaks
- sudden onset of sensitivities to many foods, including: poultry, dairy, wheat, bananas, legumes–peanuts, beans, soy, and corn (I can’t eat any of these without experiencing the above symptoms tenfold)
Does that sound like a normal tired mom to you?
If you said yes, I’m sincerely sorry, because somewhere along the line, some doctors probably dismissed you as another hypochondriac who needed to “de-stress.” This is just “how it is.” This is part of aging, part of life, this is the new normal, and “have you ever thought that it could be psychosomatic?” (There’s nothing more depressing than hearing you’re crazy for feeling the sickest you’ve ever felt in your life.)
I was so down and out, I was considering a career change to…well, nothing. I was honestly hoping I could just find a way to do nothing, because I had no energy or motivation or hope to do anything.
Then I visited an integrative medicine practitioner, and this doctor told me I was not crazy–that I had a condition called Leaky Gut Syndrome, which is currently unrecognized by modern medicine. The only treatment, he said, is to eliminate all the “reactive” foods for six months to a year (!), take some supplements, and eat some fermented stuff. Then my gut might repair itself.
I had already made a lot of dietary changes based on process of elimination, but I still despaired after this appointment, because I felt like I had already tried to eliminate so many things, and yet symptoms kept popping up. I resolved to eat more fermented foods and switch to better supplements.
Around the same time, this gem of a book was published:
Get the book HERE.
I ordered it, read it, and screamed “That’s it!” no less than two dozen times throughout the book. It annoyingly reads like a sales pitch for an MLM product sometimes (“Just wait until I reveal the secret formula to you 200 pages later…”), but this book has been the answer to my prayers. Despite the sales-y tone and the cringeworthy sense of humor, Dr. Gundry is pioneering a form of medicine that has nothing to do with pharmaceuticals.
Would I believe it if I weren’t personally going through it? Not sure. There is a vicious anti-Gundry campaign because “I eat chickpeas and I’m fine!” But some of us can’t eat the chickpeas, and no one could give us a theoretical explanation on a molecular level until now.
I’m all in. I’m completely changing the way I eat and the way I approach my own health. I’m taking charge of my own body, and this blog serves as a testament to how I’ve eaten (or not eaten) my way back to vitality.
UPDATE
To see an update on how I’m doing, watch my video HERE.
