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.

Cold

The recent  changes in my Lupus symptoms, I have to say are downright irritating and annoying. 

This past summer I was able to shed quite a bit of weight to help with caring for myself.  Under my Dr. supervision, I started running and even got myself up to the distance of 10miles. Then winter hit and I found myself unable to cope with the dip in temperatures.  Anyone who knows me knows that I have never been a fan of socks and slippers, but now I cannot do without both. My feet turn white and purplish if I do not have on either two pairs of socks with slippers over top. I have invested in wool and fleece socks for the first time in the history of my life. It's not only my feet that are affected, my hands go numb easily and also turn white. I also am now the owner of fleece pj's and go to bed wearing socks with them. 

My toes in particular have been affected for the worse. If I do not wear my millions of layers, I noticed that I started to get purple dots on them. They also are MUCH more sensitive than they used to be. Stubbing a toe  isn't pleasant in the first place but I was usually over it in about a minute. Now, it's as though my toe has broken. I spend the good part of five minutes rubbing and soothing my throbbing digit. It's not pleasant. At my most recent visit to my Dr, I pointed out my mysterious dots. He sighed and stated that this is a common symptom with Lupus and Reyes syndromes. It has an old name "Chillbains" or "Chilblains".  But it is basically cold blisters that form on the feet due to poor circulation. There isn't a treatment just for it, other than keeping your toes warm.  It can lead to nerve damage and eventually amputation if not taken care of properly. Hooray. I was prescribed a high blood pressure medication to help open my blood vessels up to help with the poor circulation. I also inquired if there was a vitamin I could take to help with it that I could try first. Since I have always had low blood pressure, the idea of taking high blood pressure medicine makes me nervous.  I have added L-Carnitine to my vitamin regimen and am waiting patiently to see if it is going to help. I have also been drinking Licorice Root Tea and Burdock Root Tea in the hopes of something working. 

Heavy medications make me nervous for all sorts of reasons and they are all listed in the Side-effects.  Most of the ones prescribed for Lupus patients have "may be linked to some forms of cancer" and "stroke or heart attack" in the listing. No thanks, don't feel like dancing with death today, not while I have small children anyway. 

Then there is my "mask".  I'm not sure if it is linked to my new circulation issues or to my being in the sun a lot over the summer, but I now have a very very apparent Lupus mask that butterflies on my face. It is my diet indicator now. If I have dairy or sugar it puffs out, little tiny pimples appear and it itches like mad. I basically want to rip my own face off. This has made it very hard to wear makeup (not that I was big on it anyway) to hide it a little, even the most natural and sensitive skin brands still cause inflammation and burning.  I have to hunt and bounce between sensitive skin lotions. And I now only use glycerin soap to wash my face with. Anything else dries it out or irritates it making it worse. So, even though I was never much of one for makeup and dressing up, the option is completely gone. I guess that's alright, that takes time and patience that I never really had when I was doing it. There is nothing that I can take that will treat this. Staying out of direct sunlight and wearing sunblock are all the treatments listed. The trouble is, I like to be outside when it's nice and (like with the makeups and skin creams) there isn't a sunblock I have found yet that my face can handle. Since I don't want to be a hermit and live in a dark cave, I will keep hunting and carry on. 

A change in Diet

When you say the word diet, a lot of people think of it as in 'dieting'. I've had to correct this with some people. That your diet, is what you eat regularly.  I'm also going to say here, that I am not a doctor, I am just sharing this because it has been working for me.

When I was pregnant with my son, I had a strange swelling occur in my left hand. It lasted a week and was almost unbearable. A month or so later, it happened in my left shoulder, then my left hip and so on. I had gone to see a doctor, but they didn't see a reason for it to be happening. So I just added it to my list of things that my body does that makes no sense to me or anyone else. After I had it, I had it happen in my right knee and elbow to the point that I was terrified I was going to drop him just trying to carry him to change his diaper. It ended with me calling my husband to come home before I did drop him.

Skip forward a year. My son is now 18 months old. I was in for a regular physical and remembered to mention these weird physical occurrences that come and go. My doctor sent me for some blood work and there it was. A tiny little blip, as they call it, a trace. Lupus. I had no idea what Lupus was. None. I was referred to a Rheumatologist and we sat and talked. I found out that all the things I had piled into that list of "Weird things my body does that makes no sense" was all caused by this tiny little blip. Thinning hair, sensitive skin, redness on the face, easy weight gain, swelling joints, and trouble with certain foods. They were all symptoms. Armed with this new information, I went out and did some research of my own and discovered more. Not so much about the disease, but how to treat it. Some of the options that my doctor had suggested, included me going on medication that I would have to get off of if I were to want to become pregnant. I had to be off of it for 6 months previous to me getting pregnant.

I didn't like that, not at all. I barely liked the medication I was given when the swelling happened. It caused a strange sensation. The swelling disappeared, yes, but it was like I could feel the damage happening in my joints when I moved them. I preferred to deal with the pain and swelling.

Then one day I was at a health food store and there was this HUGE book sitting open. I flipped through it and decided to buy a copy.  The Prescription for Nutritional Healing turned out to be my new best friend.  It went into detail about things my doctor didn't really mention about Lupus. Then it lists vitamins, herbs, foods, behaviors, etc that I should include or exclude from my daily diet. The idea that I could control this with my diet was exciting. No meds? No side effects? No having to wait 6 months before trying to get pregnant? I'm IN!

The one thing I was prepared for was the amount of will power it was going to take. I have already tried sticking to it once before and it all went downhill after I had my daughter. Now I am determined to stick to it and make it habit, so that any future pregnancies won't sway me into damaging eating.

The first thing I did was buy the vitamins that were listed as "Essential". They alone made a huge difference. The swelling and pain disappeared within a few months. Moving along to the food part, this is where the will power comes in. I cannot eat any dairy, refined sugars, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, red meats, white potatoes, citrus fruits, paprika, caffeine, and alfalfa sprouts.

You are probably wondering what the heck I'm eating. The dairy wasn't too hard to give up. I've been suffering my whole life from what I thought was lactose intolerance, so that I'm used to giving up for dairy free alternatives. The hardest one the first week was sugar. Oh man, was I a major b***h that week. Headaches, nausea, exhaustion, you name it I had it. My body was SCREAMING for sugar in any form. I am able to have honey, agave, and Stevie. But those were not quenching my fire burning for sugar.  The second week, after the headaches were gone, it became the rest of the foods. If I'm making pasta, I have to say no to the red sauce and say hello to pesto. I also learned that not all pesto's are made alike. Some are evil and have cheese in them or sugars. Made that mistake the second week.

Now for the trade off. Since I've been following this diet, I've not only lost weight, I feel fantastic. I don't wake up in the morning groggy and stumbling. I am able to just wake up and be awake within a short period of time. My joints feel better and my mind feels clearer, I'm able to think better. Not as forgetful or stumbling. Granted this whole change has made eating out tricky. Almost everything out there is coated in butter. Literally. We went out for seafood and I was almost sick by the time we got home from what my dish had been soaking in. I also experience food lethargy, really for the first time. Food Coma, where you just want to go to sleep and you can't think straight.
I would never of believed this and haven't from what I've read or heard others say. Now I do.