"In order to write about life, first you must live it." ~ Ernest Hemingway

Category: dairy-free (Page 3 of 3)

Nutritional Healing

“Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” ~ Michael Pollan
 

As I have been blogging about recently, the whole Sjogren’s Syndrome/health situation has pretty much been on a steady decline for me lately. Along with many other avenues of trying to improve my situation, I am amping up my efforts at figuring out an appropriate and healing way for me to eat. I won’t call it a diet and if I use the word “diet” anywhere by mistake, please call me on it!

Right after Christmas last month, I had decided to resume my green smoothie plan (I will probably blog about this in the future), get back on track with eliminating soda and fast food, and attempt to eliminate as much processed foods and refined sugar as possible. That in itself was enough of a challenge because up until 2011 my eating habits were horrible for most of my life. At one point I was one hundred pounds overweight. And as I spend more and more time reading about nutrition, I cannot help but wonder how much of my destructive eating habits have contributed to either the onset or severity of my autoimmune illness. Not that I am looking for a self induced guilt trip, but I don’t think that I can honestly sit here and say there can be no possible way for it to be related. Maybe yes, maybe no. But I have to find out if I can now make it better. As I have continued to research information and read patient stories from my bed and couch, it has became clear to me that I really need to make this nutrition plan dairy free and gluten free as well.

Yikes.

I did not come to this decision easily. Especially because there is SO MUCH conflicting information out in the nutrition and health world about what is the best way to eat in order to maximize your wellness. Some information says go strictly vegetarian, some says eat Paleo like our ancestors did (which includes grains and meat), no this, no that. It is also challenging because even if a nutrition plan has certain restrictions such as being gluten free, it does not necessarily mean that is healthy. There are a wider choice of gluten free processed products on those supermarket shelves right now. You can make a snack of gluten free tortilla chips and top it with dairy free cheese and dip it in dairy free sour cream but I am guessing that that is not the type of food that will help fuel my body in a healthy manner on a regular basis.

It is all quite complex and enough to make you want to scream! However for my particular situation of trying to manage a chronic autoimmune illness, I feel that I have educated myself enough about which plan of eating will be the best choice for me.

Problem is though, I wasn’t sure how to define my new eating habits. This wasn’t important to me because I needed a name to it but rather because I thought it would help me define what the heck I was doing. Having a name would help me locate recipes and cookbooks that would better steer me in the right direction. I am knowledgeable enough to know that you can take a recipe and modify it into a certain formula that meets your dietary restrictions but honestly, I need it simpler than that right now. Between my physical challenges, doctor appointments, and managing my day to day existence, I have my hands full. I am willing to put the effort into figuring out what foods are appropriate in the supermarket and into cooking at home, but I need clearer guidelines as to how to proceed.

So I developed my own eating plan and that is the following: Gluten/dairy free; semi vegetarian; whole foods with minimal amounts of processed foods and refined sugars; no soda or fast food at all.

So what do you think? I know it seems quite ambitious but desperate times call for desperate measures. I cannot expect to make any type of life changing, possibly harmful, decisions about putting new toxic medications into my body without putting forth a 100% effort on my own behalf. I think there is a place for both and they are not mutually exclusive of each other.

And on that note, it is time to hit the kitchen….

Photos: Courtesy of Google Images

Patient, Heal Thyself

“It is during those quiet hours of desperation that truth and enlightenment are revealed to us.” ~ Me

The past five days or so have been some of the longest I have physically struggled through in quite a while. You know that saying “It can’t get worse?” Well, it can get worse so you may want to think twice before uttering that well-meaning phrase. When I thought that the Sjogren’s joint pain I experienced back in 2008, before I was treated with any type of medication, was as bad as it could get, I didn’t realize that it could be outdone by the stabbing, burning, and agonizing feeling of nerve pain. Well at least that is what it seems to be according to my primary care’s physician assistant. I’ll get back to you all on that when I can finally get in to see my rheumatologist this week.

So the hours of the holiday weekend ticked on. I tried not to panic when I struggled with my coordination and balance as I tried to get some errands done with Chuck. I prayed for relief and did everything within my resources to deal with it. My mental arsenal was (is) low because the medical plan has been to treat this issue at home over the weekend, until I can see my rheumatologist, with a high dose of steroids; a dose that I have only taken once or twice without being hospitalized. To be honest, I prefer to be at home, despite my anxiety over my stumbling into a wall here and there. The problem though is that as I have previously blogged about, the steroids wreak havoc on me. Especially when first starting the drug and especially at larger doses, unprovoked crying jags are frequent, I start to feel a little out of control, and sleep is nothing but a distant memory.

As I wrote about in my previous blog entry Giving Up and Finding Peace, recent health events have found me on a path of wanting to give up fighting and struggling with Sjogren’s all the time so that instead I can work towards accepting where I am in my journey with this illness and become more effective in my coping and my ability to live a more peaceful existence.

While I was trying to cope hour after hour over the past few days, I used a variety of things to distract myself from focusing on the pain and side effects of the prednisone. One of those distracting techniques was spending time surfing the net, especially when television was lousy at three am. I did a lot of surfing about diet and nutrition these past few days.

Even before these past few difficult days, I have been spending time talking to other Sjogren’s patients and doing research about the role of nutrition and diet in autoimmune disorders. As many of my readers know, I started making more of a conscious effort last spring to eat healthier and exercise when I was able to. It was about getting healthier and I thought that losing weight would accomplish that. I did lose some more weight in addition to what I had lost over the past two years but then as I got a little lazy and took more steroids, I gained a little back. What was important though was that I learned a lot about nutrition along the way and improved my cholesterol scores dramatically.

So during those wee hours of the morning, while surfing the internet and reading articles and patient stories, I had my moment of truth.

I was enlightened.

I realized that I have truly never accepted the notion of treating my illness with nutrition.

Why?

Because I didn’t think that I could do it and I didn’t want to let go of the multiple dependencies I think I probably have on certain types of foods like sugar, additives, dairy, and processed foods. I wasn’t fully taking responsibility for my health. I was complaining on a regular basis about the failure of the medical system; a system that was not helping me get better. But yet, what about my responsibility as the caretaker of my body?

After all the reading I have done over the past week, it is absolutely ridiculous of me to not pursue drastically changing my diet in an attempt to improve my health. Yes, there are not tons and tons of factual scientific studies saying that eating a more plant based diet and eliminating gluten, dairy, additives, and processed foods will cure your autoimmune disorder, but the stories are there. People like me who feel better, have fewer flare-ups, and more energy eating in a more healthful way.

After all the new and recurrent Sjogren’s health issues I have dealt with over the past six months, how can I NOT give this kind of eating a real chance? The challenge of eliminating gluten and most processed foods in addition to the dairy, soda, and high sugar foods I have already eliminated overwhelms me. I mean really, what is there left to eat? Ahh, veggies…and fruits…nuts and beans…gluten-free grains. The good stuff so they say. I don’t expect it to be a miracle cure. But I do expect to gain something from putting some faith in myself and in what kinds of things I put into my body. And who knows, maybe the process will also help me attain a little peace along my journey….

Photos: Courtesy of Chuck Myers and Google Images

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