You are what you put into yourself

So many unpublished posts on the topic of diet and how it effects everything.

Notepad next to me has scribbled:  "pepsin/marshmallow root (for small intestine)"

15 conversations with 15 different people (at least) over the holidays about what it all means, these sensitivities leading to mood alterations because of poor nutrition quality...

But since I've been on this diet for over a month, I can't seem to sit and offer any advice to anyone else on the brink of making their own decisions.  This is something you have to do for yourself.  The research, the commitment, the sacrifices.  I won't even bother mentioning how much weight I lost.  That's totally not what this is about. 

This is something I've known needed to be done for a long time and have subconsciously been gravitating towards for years...

When so much information flooded me at once, pointing to the probability that Jack's got a malabsorption issue with his digestion, that was it. 

No more artificial food additives, preservatives, added junk to make foods more addictive, processed, refined, added sugars, no "fortified" foods (which have to be fortified because the processing of them made them nutrition less).  So no more fast food, no more easy to pop in the oven frozen food, no pizzas piping hot at the door a half hour after calling, no more turning up the nose at the produce aisle because it all goes bad before the more enticing longer shelf life stuff runs out...

That's where we started. 
That was a good place to start.  Made what came next a lot easier to handle.

Jack's tests revealed high IgG antibodies for predominantly dairy foods, but also wheat.  Gluten was not as great a number, but several foods were on the second tier alongside gluten.  Also, seven of his neurotransmitters were elevated.  Two of them extremely so.
IgG doesn't mean he's allergic so much as his body developed antibodies to proteins slipping through his mucousal lining not fully or properly digested.  Why would they not be properly digested?  How could they get through his digestive cell walls?  What does it matter anyway?  Apparently, and this is all news to me, if you have these peptides in your system, they build up and create problems in the brain that cause every behavioral issue we've been suffering as a species over the course of humanity ...it's just that there's a much higher amount of behavioral suffering going on now because of a collision of modern medicine with our shitcrap food (+ pollution).  We need our food as a society to last a long time on the shelf  because nobody cooks home cooked meals.  We need it boiled down and refined and over processed so a lot of it can get made, get packaged, get shipped over the country, get eaten six months to a year later. 
It's fantastic we're not starving to death, except we sorta are.
People crave and eat more because they get so little nutrition from food.
I know this from juicing.  One glass of veggies and I'm full.  A super-sized cheeseburger meal and I'd still be digging to the bottom of the kids' bags to finish off their spilled over French fries.

It's unfortunate we're not intelligent enough to make the best foods for us just as convenient and affordable to purchase...
Or AREN't we?
After a week or so of freaking out a bit in the health food stores, waiting in line behind label readers (I need to start taking reading glasses to the store), turns out it's not so hard eating right. 
Plus I just went hard core and bought bulk online, so it's not as expensive, either.
We now have the benefits of a food co/op at the push of a button.
When I consider how much less we spend eating out, I'm guessing the numbers even out.
And even if they don't mouthful to mouthful, we don't need to eat as much (meat, for example), because we get more nutrition per bite.
AND, when we're older, our health bills are going to be so much less than average.
Hell, if I can get away with achieving old age without needing any medication, I'll keep drinking spinach daily from now 'til my 100th birthday.

I'm lucky, though.  I have my garden.  I have new incentive to bother canning, freezing, drying, even.  This will also equalize the food bill, not to mention add even more reassurance as to the healthy contents of the foods we eat.

This will put people off who smell lots of extra work (or don't have the time).

But I have a dramatic sense of personal fulfillment again.

Control.

Could be because I'm eating an impeccable diet.

The last ten years I couldn't help but notice how modern medicine has been pushing drugs.  You're depressed, anxious, can't get on top of life, can't make two and two come out four and the vicious cycle repeats itself, so someone decided to start messing around with the neurotransmitters and skipped all those steps that should have been taken in between, such as encouraging--insisting upon!--a healthy HEALTHY diet.  Mostly clean and organic raw vegetables (the really healthy ones, I mean).  Meats without antibiotics or hormones...and not a lot of them, mind you.  A couple servings a week, no bigger than 6 oz cuts.  They should have started with the basics and worked out to drugs, but until someone believable finally insists it's the food making us sick, that's what doctors are going to do...prescribe medication.  Because they know diet and exercise goes over like liver and onions.

Casein & gluten (dairy and grain proteins) are the most difficult to digest.  Undigested proteins start to clog stuff up and cause problems, the same as (I'm assuming) cholesterol and plaque buildup in the arteries.  Dairy/casein and gluten IS IN EVERYTHING processed.  This is why I imagine these two proteins have become a big issue.  We eat far too much of them.

And we don't eat beneficial bacteria in our over processed diets any more, which means all of us are at risk for digestive problems. 

People with digestive systems that function properly could still have non-behavioral obvious digestive issues that they don't know about such as long term cloggage...gas, poop problems nobody ever talks about... but what I've been submersed in these last few months is the likelihood that more and more people I know have "leaky gut".

If undigested proteins are leaking out into the bloodstream from the intestines, you get a chain reaction of biological events that cause all sorts of psychological-seeming issues.  You get neurotransmitters out-of-whack, for instance.  Mildly you get foggy brain.  Severe, you get diagnosed with dementia, Alzheimer's, depression, etc.

Or so the research is suggesting these days.

All I know is that while educating myself on all of this, I've come to realize I knew nothing about my body before, and totally ignored the effects of food.  I took my health for granted far too long.  I ate things I always ate and shrugged and imagined what's bad goes out the other end...

So long as I exercised, I could eat whatever and be healthy.

Maybe that's true for now, but I don't want to be 60 and aching in all my joints, struggling with eyesight, memory, impulse control, lack of energy or enthusiasm, lack of self esteem, feeling thirty years older than I really am, essentially.  I've opted through all of this to begin a life of prevention and maintenance for the long haul.

And so, after a month...I can't physically bring myself to drink a soda.  Especially diet sodas.  It tastes like chemicals.  I can't do it.

I drive by fast food and shake my head in anger.
I get food cravings for random strange foods like Doritos or cheesy burritos or Raviolios and I realize that my mind obsesses about it because the manufacturers of those foods made them addictive.  Not because I lack self control...I do not lack self control... but because my chemistry was tricked into needing it.

Try fixing your gut.  It is the healthiest thing you'll ever do for yourself.  In our case, we can't eat casein and gluten until we're sure the leak is fixed, so we have to substitute all the foods we used to eat containing those two proteins with ...turns out... all the healthy foods we forgot existed.

We can't put cheese or butter on our vegetables any more, so we eat them without and after a week, the notion of cheese or butter on any vegetable began to turn my stomach.  (Like maple syrup on spaghetti.)

Christmas dinner was a horror fest.  Not my mom's.  My mom made a beautiful roast with oven roasted veggies in a veggie broth with gluten free bread from the breadmaker and a big bowl of steamed broccoli (no butter).  My children ate every morsel.  No one left the table unsatisfied.  That's something I've noticed...when I'm hungry, I'm hungry--you have to eat BEFORE you sense your sugar dropping or making that meal for yourself is gonna be tough, but after I eat (and half the old portion size does the trick) I am no longer craving anything.  I'm up for doing an activity.  I'm done thinking about my stupid food.  I'm not tired...I'm all, 'Let's go!!  Let's do stuff!'

We got a juicer when I started suspecting Jack has digestive malabsorption issues, and we've used that contraption more times than all the other counter top appliances combined, though the rice cooker's getting quite a workout.  I now know that if I juice spinach, carrot, and apple into 8 oz. and drink it before starting dinner, I'll get enough of an energy boost to keep working for at least two hours.  No sugar crash.
What I used to do was eat cheese.
Now I drink vegetables.

But the biggest thing that's made a difference, the most dramatic reaction to any of this, was the cut back on sugar.

I decided to do this going along with the notion that the gut has an overgrowth of bad bacteria that feeds on all the sugars and carbs that are so prevalent in our current American diet.  I figured there was no hope fixing the leak if the body was fighting against the invasive bacteria, and since I can't help shaking that a long stretch of antibiotics is what caused all this imbalance in the first place, sought out other means to killing bacteria in the gut. 

So.
No sugar.  Starve them out. 
Day one of doing this, everyone lost their shit (behaviorally).
Sugar is in way too many foods that we'd been eating.
Including ketchup.
It was like every single bacteria in my son's gut united and screamed, "GIVE US THE SUGAR NOW!!!"
It was awful.
I cried a couple of times.
We were all in terrible moods for three days.

And then Jack was sleeping all through the night.  The OCD like tics were fading. 
I'd also started him on a probiotic, and the combination of the two really seemed to make a big difference.

But the holidays hit us and the holidays are pure sugar wrapped in frosting with more sugar on top.
And people kept giving me looks like I was a crazy lunatic bitch for telling him to put down cupcakes.  And he's a great kid, so I caved a couple of times and tried to reassure him it didn't bother me (otherwise, he had no intention of eating it).

For the most part, he's been fantastic about all of this.  He didn't care about the cookies, pies, chocolate covered chocolates, etc., but he did miss his beloved ketchup. 
We caved and went back to organic cane sugar ketchup.
Not a big deal, people say, but until I get my PhD in bacterial annihilation, I remain unreassured by the gentle 'You're doing more than most as it is,' advice.

He has since been put on digestive enzymes, omegas, specific digestives for gluten/dairy, and I rotate vitamins from D to C and a multi-vitamin.
Plus, and I can't stress this enough, the probiotics.

Honestly, he was pretty amazing the day after he drank a kombucha (which has naturally created enzymes, probiotics and antioxidants), but I'm not a health care professional and Jack's not a big fan of kombucha.

He craved fast food cheeseburgers and fries the first two weeks of all this.  "When are we going to McDonald's again?  Are we EVER going back?  Am I NEVER getting another cheeseburger?"
After awhile, I kept hearing, 'Where's my heroin?' screaming from his gut.
Now he doesn't say it as much.  In fact, he self regulates more maturely than any other adult I've ever known to do something like this. 

And Pickles is no longer weepy at night before falling asleep.  She's the opposite.  She's happy!  She's giggling before she conks out.  It's really REALLY fascinating.

I'm withholding other observations of how Jack's doing with all this for now.  There have been some cool changes.   But these things take time.  It can take more than four weeks to get the casein protein flushed out of the body.  I'm just getting started with figuring out where enzymes are produced in the body and pondering whether or not the pancreas is the source of the imbalance or something else blocked the enzymes from getting to the intestines...if the bacteria was the first problem or a breach in the mucousal lining... How much of genetics we talking about here?  Etc.  I see changes in him, but I see changes in ALL of us.  So I'm giving it more time before getting excited.

In the meantime, I can feel good that he's eating the way humans should be eating.

Which reminds me, I have to go start dinner.

Happy New Year, everybody!!



© Copyright 2012 Angeline Larimer