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Apparently I either have the attention span of a gnat, or maybe its just that I have been enjoying the amazing changes that have come with this new lifestyle? Either way once again it has nearly been a year since my last post! Since I left off updating my progress at day 19 I will catch you up on what the last 300+ days have been like. So many positive changes have become the pillars of each and every day that I hardly even think of them as changes any more, they are just part of how I choose to live.
Yoga is still an every morning staple as is my big mug of hot water. This for me is a wining combination, the ritual calms me, gets me centered, warms up my muscles and makes me feel ready to face the day no matter what life and MS throw my way. In the old days I could roll out of bed and be meeting a client in 20 minutes, the new me takes nearly 2 hours to get out the door but I have adjusted to this change. Not going to lie it took a while but now I really appreciate how far self care goes toward improving my quality of life.
I am really glad that I went through the elimination diet and all of the rigorous food testing with the support of the incredibly knowledgeable and caring ND's at Waters Edge Natural Medicine rather than on my own with a book as is the popular thing to do. For me it would be really tough to stick to a plan based merely on what I thought I was feeling, having all of the tests to back up what I felt was really helpful and it has made it a lot easier for me to make the necessary long term changes, plus it saved me from the hassle of even needing to test a couple of foods (dairy and wheat) that came out as problematic during lab testing. I was certainly not accustomed to taking vitamins on a regular basis other than my rx vitamin D, but the supplementation that the ND's tailored to my specific needs helped me feel so much healthier and more vibrant that I quickly saw that this was going to be the new routine for me forever not just temporarily through the dietary changes. The foods that proved to be problematic for me are dairy (including sheep and goat) wheat, soy, peanuts, and corn is borderline so it is consumed sporadicly and sparingly. I am also continuing to leave out sugar and alcohol as both are incredibly inflammatory and my MS really doesn't need to be poked, it is plenty rude enough without me adding to its furor!! I have been able to add some decaf coffee to my life but my rule is that I can only have it after my first 16oz mug of hot water has been consumed.
I really started these changes at the perfect time of year, fresh fruit made ditching sugar far easier than it would have been if I had started this in the winter! Not to say that every day was easy but the peaches last summer were fantastic and they were very much appreciated! I know I ate more fruit than peaches but they are what I remember the most vividly, perhaps this is because they were the most delicious peaches I have ever encountered!
It turns out that I am quite good at finding or making up tasty things to eat, check out my instagram sometimes I remember to post the pictures! Having already been in the habit of keeping processed foods to a minimum and loving to cook good fresh whole food has proven to be helpful beyond words. This is not to say that there hasn't been some seriously frustrating moments. The substitutions that I am sometimes making have such different moisture content and textures that I do have some fails and in the kitchen. This is something that I am really not used to have happening to me and at first I took it personally but I have learned to cut myself some slack, this is new territory and I am having fun.
My quality of life is drastically different! We have focused on getting my hormones on track, fixing my thyroid, getting me sleep without pharmaceuticals, calming down the Epstein Barr Virus (which I didn't even know that I had...and it was of course running wild) and cutting out as much dietary inflammation as possible...so how couldn't my life be drastically different? I am lucky to have a much fuller life, before I started this process my life was work, and bed. I literally got almost no sleep even though I was laying there literally unable to move feeling like a block of cement! I still have what I call "cement" days, but not as often unless I over-do it or get stressed out. I feel so much more productive, its amazing to think of where I was just one year ago.
By the end of the summer I was feeling so much more alive and confident and I was using my cane less so I decided to try to stand on a paddle board as sort of a reward for all of my hard work. At first I was really self conscious because my "bad leg" had quite the neuromuscular response and shook noticeably when I stood on it. (awesome physical therapy work) I was freaked about what people on the shore might be thinking. I could only stand for little bits before it felt like that leg was going to give out and I had to kneel but I am stubborn and I kept getting back up, one rental time led to another and another and then I decided to buy boards instead of wasting my money renting. I am really excited for spring to actually happen in Seattle so that I can get out there on what will be the most beautiful board on the lake!
When I was first diagnosed with MS and read all of the crazy things that people with MS try to do to feel better I was appalled. The money that people spent on treatments that hadn't been proven to help and were not covered by insurance seemed crazy to me and I was determined not to be one of those crazy people but at a certain point you have to ask yourself exactly what is being able to live your life not just be alive worth to you. I do not believe that I will ever go off of my MS medication but the more other medications that I tried the more I realized that I didn't want to be sitting around at 70 with a liver that was shot because I hadn't at least tried to add natural medicine into my repertoire and I wanted to see if this group of ND's could help me and if so how much of a difference could they make? So here I sit, nearly a year into this science experiment of mine feeling grateful to have taken the opportunity to see if this path could add to the quality of my life.
Has this path of natural medicine and food as medicine cured anything? No, of course not, there is no cure for MS. It has however, allowed me to have a decidedly better quality of life, and that in my opinion is pretty much everything.
Yoga is still an every morning staple as is my big mug of hot water. This for me is a wining combination, the ritual calms me, gets me centered, warms up my muscles and makes me feel ready to face the day no matter what life and MS throw my way. In the old days I could roll out of bed and be meeting a client in 20 minutes, the new me takes nearly 2 hours to get out the door but I have adjusted to this change. Not going to lie it took a while but now I really appreciate how far self care goes toward improving my quality of life.
I am really glad that I went through the elimination diet and all of the rigorous food testing with the support of the incredibly knowledgeable and caring ND's at Waters Edge Natural Medicine rather than on my own with a book as is the popular thing to do. For me it would be really tough to stick to a plan based merely on what I thought I was feeling, having all of the tests to back up what I felt was really helpful and it has made it a lot easier for me to make the necessary long term changes, plus it saved me from the hassle of even needing to test a couple of foods (dairy and wheat) that came out as problematic during lab testing. I was certainly not accustomed to taking vitamins on a regular basis other than my rx vitamin D, but the supplementation that the ND's tailored to my specific needs helped me feel so much healthier and more vibrant that I quickly saw that this was going to be the new routine for me forever not just temporarily through the dietary changes. The foods that proved to be problematic for me are dairy (including sheep and goat) wheat, soy, peanuts, and corn is borderline so it is consumed sporadicly and sparingly. I am also continuing to leave out sugar and alcohol as both are incredibly inflammatory and my MS really doesn't need to be poked, it is plenty rude enough without me adding to its furor!! I have been able to add some decaf coffee to my life but my rule is that I can only have it after my first 16oz mug of hot water has been consumed.
I really started these changes at the perfect time of year, fresh fruit made ditching sugar far easier than it would have been if I had started this in the winter! Not to say that every day was easy but the peaches last summer were fantastic and they were very much appreciated! I know I ate more fruit than peaches but they are what I remember the most vividly, perhaps this is because they were the most delicious peaches I have ever encountered!
It turns out that I am quite good at finding or making up tasty things to eat, check out my instagram sometimes I remember to post the pictures! Having already been in the habit of keeping processed foods to a minimum and loving to cook good fresh whole food has proven to be helpful beyond words. This is not to say that there hasn't been some seriously frustrating moments. The substitutions that I am sometimes making have such different moisture content and textures that I do have some fails and in the kitchen. This is something that I am really not used to have happening to me and at first I took it personally but I have learned to cut myself some slack, this is new territory and I am having fun.
My quality of life is drastically different! We have focused on getting my hormones on track, fixing my thyroid, getting me sleep without pharmaceuticals, calming down the Epstein Barr Virus (which I didn't even know that I had...and it was of course running wild) and cutting out as much dietary inflammation as possible...so how couldn't my life be drastically different? I am lucky to have a much fuller life, before I started this process my life was work, and bed. I literally got almost no sleep even though I was laying there literally unable to move feeling like a block of cement! I still have what I call "cement" days, but not as often unless I over-do it or get stressed out. I feel so much more productive, its amazing to think of where I was just one year ago.
By the end of the summer I was feeling so much more alive and confident and I was using my cane less so I decided to try to stand on a paddle board as sort of a reward for all of my hard work. At first I was really self conscious because my "bad leg" had quite the neuromuscular response and shook noticeably when I stood on it. (awesome physical therapy work) I was freaked about what people on the shore might be thinking. I could only stand for little bits before it felt like that leg was going to give out and I had to kneel but I am stubborn and I kept getting back up, one rental time led to another and another and then I decided to buy boards instead of wasting my money renting. I am really excited for spring to actually happen in Seattle so that I can get out there on what will be the most beautiful board on the lake!
When I was first diagnosed with MS and read all of the crazy things that people with MS try to do to feel better I was appalled. The money that people spent on treatments that hadn't been proven to help and were not covered by insurance seemed crazy to me and I was determined not to be one of those crazy people but at a certain point you have to ask yourself exactly what is being able to live your life not just be alive worth to you. I do not believe that I will ever go off of my MS medication but the more other medications that I tried the more I realized that I didn't want to be sitting around at 70 with a liver that was shot because I hadn't at least tried to add natural medicine into my repertoire and I wanted to see if this group of ND's could help me and if so how much of a difference could they make? So here I sit, nearly a year into this science experiment of mine feeling grateful to have taken the opportunity to see if this path could add to the quality of my life.
Has this path of natural medicine and food as medicine cured anything? No, of course not, there is no cure for MS. It has however, allowed me to have a decidedly better quality of life, and that in my opinion is pretty much everything.
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