Becoming a believer

2 weeks into going Gluten Free and I have to say that this has been an eye opening experience. Not only in how gluten is in EVERYTHING but in how much happier my stomach has been. I no longer suffer from painful bloating, which I honestly thought I only suffered when I ate dairy. This explains why despite being dairy free for 10 years I still would suffer bouts of severe stomach pain and rude gas. To the point that it would take my breath away (not the gas but the pain).

I feel normal. Or as normal as I have in years.

I am not suffering. I had my ice cream and brownie sundae this evening. I will miss the textures of some things, but I am finding recipes that can be tweaked and if not, well I really don't need to eat them anyway. Bread has been hard though. I've never been a big fan of toasted bread sandwiches but toasting it seems to be the only way it stays together. 

As far as my Lupus symptoms are concerned. The biggest difference is my face. 

The skin on my face was part of the reason why I caved to take the medication. Yes, my vanity shined through like a light in the dark. I have always taken pride in how I was never ridden with a pizza face and how I never needed layers of makeup to cover anything other than a random zit. 

My face was rough, pimpled, itchy, and embarrassing. People I worked with kept asking why my face looked so bad. Family and friends asked too, but were a bit more polite about it. My uncle jokingly asked if the fleas were bothering me, I shot back that it was only the howling that bothered me. 

But despite my joking. It did bother me. I've never been model thin and have always had self esteem issues to boot. But my face was my pride and having it suddenly plagued and ravaged was a deep blow. 

Having said all this, being GF for 2 weeks has done more than almost 5 months of medication has. My face is scarred now, yes. But it doesn't itch, there is no scaly build up and it isn't a mess of pimples or swelling. 

This is my face pre pregnancy. The flash made me a bit pale here, but I've always had rosy cheeks. My great grandma said it was because I ate too many strawberries.

This is me after having my son. They got a little more rosy, but I thought it was due to weight gain.

My silly face while pregnant with my daughter.

My cheeks were always pink/rosy after having her. Once again I thought it was just because of weight gain.

So, a determined me started to work on my weight. It flared out worse. This was when it was borderline unbearable. Dry looking, bumpy, red and itchy as heck. (My hair was also at it's thinnest here.) This is how it looked when I started the medication.

This is it a four months later. The bumps are still there, I was still battling the itchy dry skin and never ending zits.

This is a week into going GF. The red is still there, but the dry skin has subsided and the itching is gone.

This was this past weekend. My cheeks are scarred now, I'm sure of it. But the micro zits, itching, dry skin build up and pain are gone. It is still sensitive, like when I scratch it absent minded, but it is so much better than it was. 

I am convinced that I may be a carrier for Lupus or it might be enough of a blip to cause immune/intestinal issues. But I am starting to doubt if what I have is really Lupus or if it is just a side effect of my forcing my body to digest foods that it cannot handle. I never really had these problems when I was younger but having two children has probably changed my body in more ways that I previously thought. My next test will be when I switch to a more holistic minded Rhematologist. I am curious to see how I do without the medication, but I am positive that unless I find a more holistic minded doctor, it will be a self run experiment. Which I don't feel 100% confident in doing without supervision. Maybe I am fooling myself and it's actually the medication kicking in fully. But, just maybe, it is just was my diet. 

Gut Healing

I have been doing a lot of reading online lately. To the point at times of making my head want to explode, but it hasn't yet.  Mostly it has been reading about the connections found by homeopaths of Leaky Gut, Gluten Intolerance and Autoimmune disorders. Most importantly Lupus, which is the disorder that I have been dealing with. I had started taking medication for it, but it had a very negative effect on me mentally.  I felt like I had lost my battle to it. That my own physical health was no longer in my control. That is a very hard thing to grasp. It brought around bouts of depression that I drowned out by binge eating things that I had been avoiding for the past few years. This of course made my feel worse, but sated my monster briefly.

Then something happened that changed my perspective and brought about my late night readings online. One of my best friends infant daughter developed severe food allergy eczema brought on by the food my friend was eating while breastfeeding. I have to emphasize on serious huge broken out patches of skin that are weeping blood and puss. So in desperation she went on an extreme elimination diet and as a result her daughters skin improved by 75%. This of course was after her late night reading sessions, finding out the there is such a thing as steroid cream addiction, and that she is also allergic to detergent sulfates. As well as a mass of other things that continue to pop up like some kind of terrible whack a mole game.

Her daughter has an overactive immune system.

This got me thinking about my own body, which then lead me into the realms of Leaky Gut and Autoimmune Disorder definitions and treatments.

The trouble with Lupus is simple. There is no one treatment, the same way there is no one symptom. It is a conglomerate disorder. There are other disorders that mimic Lupus and people are often misdiagnosed with other issues when the issue is Lupus. The whole thing is very very gray. The biggest problem is that this leaves doctors with very little to work with, some limited studies and only one medication that has alleviated the general symptoms.

Then I read this article by FOODMATTERS: Natural Ways to Prevent and Reverse Autoimmune Disorders. .  It brought up some points and things to consider that I never really gave any thought. I have had my vitamin supplements that I've been taking religiously since day one. Apart from my breakdown, I had been sticking to a dairy, citrus, nightshade plant, and sugar free diet. I had never considered that something as simple as not chewing my food into a pulp could of been part of the problem, nor that I could possibly have a gluten intolerance as well (*What Doctor's Don't Tell You).

As a mom, food has become a luxury and the idea of being able to eat anything some days is almost a pipe dream. So the concept of the damage I may of done by forcing my stomach to digest whole chunks of quickly ingested food, actually made me feel horrible. My body is already working double time trying to heal itself and here I am making it work harder.

So, I made the decision to go gluten free, vegetarian and to sit and chew my gosh darn food. This of course being added to what I have been already doing. So I am basically a gluten free vegan for lack of a better term. It sounds horrible I know. But what has helped me is visualizations. I have been picturing my stomach like my friend's daughter's inflamed skin. If I eat something that I'm not supposed to, I picture it wounded, open, bloody and weeping. Like something from the ICU of a hospital. I have to do this, because there is no external cue that what I just ate is bothering me. It's all inside.

So far I am into day 5 and let me tell you. My stomach feels so happy right now. I am much less gassy and bloated than I have been in a long time. If anything I have noticed effects from foods that I have eaten today that I now know I can't eat again or at least for a while. For example, I take a daily health tonic called Fire Cider. I started taking it daily to combat the symptoms from the Raynaud's Syndrome I recently developed. It's got quite a kick to it. Well, today I took it for the first time in a few days and my stomach burned immediately after I took it. Not like heartburn, it was as though I had swallowed a match. It happened again later when I bought something to eat at work. I don't know if it's happened before because I don't know if I was paying close attention to what my gut was telling me before. Or if I even suffered a single phenomenon like that because my entire gut was a war zone. Who notices a single bomb when they are going off all around?

My goal with this is not be on my medication anymore. If it is something that is controllable with drastic diet changes for the rest of my life. I am fine with that. The long term effects of that will not cause cancer nor cause me to go blind, like the side effects of my medication.

I'm a big girl. I can eat my soy and kale.

Updates

So, despite all my hopes my sons bad cavity had to be filled since it had actually become a hole in his tooth. Though, that being said, two of the other "stain" cavities have gone and we have one at a stand still. Same with my daughters cavity. They aren't getting worse, but the stain is still there. I will gladly take that for now.

I am going to try the xylitol in the next batch I make since my children cannot get over the taste of it without some sweetening. I myself love the tooth powder and the "mud" version of it. (It literally looks like you just squeezed mud onto your toothbrush thanks to the bentonite clay). It's very similar to the Earth Paste that is for sale in health stores and on amazon. Only for mine I didn't use the xylitol.  My teeth went through a brief period of being hyper-sensitive to hot/cold and sweet, yet it was over in a few days and hasn't returned. Which is nice because despite having used Sensodyne and other sensitive teeth products I still had bouts of sudden pain.

Moving on, I wish I could say that I had had success going completely no poo. I don't think I ever will be able to since I am an avid runner and am a sweaty matted mess 5 days a week. My children on the other hand have fantastic hair now. I will have to note that the shampoo did ferment really quickly on me thanks to the heat we have been suffering through lately.