Maybe you’ve seen these acronyms before. Or maybe like me, they have become a familiar part of your life. But what do they all have in common? How are these related? Here’s everything you wanted to know (or didn’t) about gut acronyms. Let’s start at the beginning…
Health
Here you will find all my posts related to health, disease, and eating well!
When Healthy Food is Your Enemy
I’ll admit it. As soon as I get in sight of the bakery section in the grocery store my heart skips a beat. I might drool a little. Donuts make me want to leap for joy. Why are those darn things so cheap and enticing? Don’t they know I’m trying to be gluten-free? Yet they taunt me from behind the glass all innocent looking with their golden, freshly frosted outside and creamy delightful inside. My arch enemy and guilty pleasure all rolled into one.
But the “eat whatever I want” era came to a screeching halt when I was diagnosed as autoimmune. “Natural” and “healthy” was now the new, or not so new, trend. My body no longer functioned properly and healthy food held the promise of possible recovery. 70-90% of the immune system is located in the gut. Fix the gut and you can fix your immune system. That’s what the research said. The argument that food and nutrition could be a better and safer form of treatment for healing chronic disease was all too convincing.
So I got to work. Out with the processed, packaged, and modified foods. Hello antibiotic-free, grass-fed, organic, clean and friendly foods. Donuts took a back seat to their nutritious counterparts (although I have still been known to sneak one on occasion). My disease changed my outlook on food as I began to slowly replace our “American” diet with foods that were hormone-free, organic, grass-fed, local, and non-GMO. Superfoods like kale, quinoa, avocados, kiefer, and nuts littered my diet. I went vegan. I tried vegetarian. I became Paleo. I experimented with exclusion diets and avoided 25 food sensitivities all at once for a month. I went dairy-free, gluten-free, corn-free, and egg-free…all at the same time, for a long time. I took a regimen of supplements so intense that I had 20 dixie cups all marked by time, an alarm set for each one. I saw a naturopath and drank dirt, or what I affectionately called, “bunny farm” (some of you know what I’m talking about). I made high fiber smoothies that made me gag but I plugged my nose and chugged it down anyway. There were moments I thought I would go crazy. But I was desperate. I did it out of necessity. I wanted my health back.
But after two years of eating better, taking supplements, and making meals from scratch, I was still suffering. My digestive and gastrointestinal system were still dysfunctional and my pain was at an all time high. I felt discouraged and was getting depressed. It didn’t make sense. I was eating “healthy”. I tried all the tricks in the book. I was following all the suggested tips for optimal nutrition but I wasn’t improving…in fact, I was just getting worse. What if I was broken beyond repair? I felt frustrated and confused.
Can healthy and nutritious foods actually do more harm than good?
How to pick perfect produce
Many find choosing produce to be a tricky endeavor. Just last week I was shopping for groceries and overheard a girl remark, “That is such a great deal on pineapple! I would buy one but I just don’t know how to pick it out!”
Say it ain’t so. I refuse to imagine a world where crisper drawers are left empty and sad.
Produce can be your friend. The day I learned how to pick out produce is still forever etched in my memory. I was standing in the produce aisle, bored out of my mind. Mom had decided Continue reading
3 Tips for the Sneezing Season
Spring is finally here, bringing with it flowers, green grass, sunshine…and hay fever.
Allergies have been a familiar friend foe of mine since birth. My childhood was littered with countless respiratory infections and antibiotics. The repeated offender? I had both severe indoor and outdoor allergies. I mean, just my dust allergy alone tested at a whopping 9,000%. For real. It’s a thing.
Darn you, allergies.
After battling colds all winter long, the last thing you want is more sniffles and runny noses. Continue reading
Have Your Chips and Eat Them Too
You can be healthy and eat chips too. Yes. You read that right.
I’ve been on a number of exclusion diets and at one point was avoiding 25+ foods including the big dogs themselves: gluten, corn, eggs, and dairy. Lunch time would come around and I would sadly look at my plate and feel like something was missing. It just wasn’t the same. A girl’s gotta have her chips.
And so began my hunt for ones that would make the cut. My criteria? They had to fit within my diet restrictions and they had to taste good. After all, who wants to eat chips that taste like cardboard or styrofoam? I mean, I’m willing to compromise my taste buds when necessary but I gotta draw the line somewhere.
I can happily report Continue reading
The Broken Road: my journey with disease
It started out as a normal summer day and we couldn’t have been more thrilled. Hubs and I had just purchased our very first home. And it was yellow. I had prayed for yellow. Moving day was set, our boxes packed. We were moving right along with our list of goals: New house, check. Jobs, check. Furniture, check. Search for a dog, check. Our future was looking bright.
And then it happened. Something didn’t feel quite right. My energy started to fail and I found myself getting easily fatigued. Over the next few weeks my knees began to swell until they became the size of cantaloupes. As the swelling increased, the pain grew. It hurt to walk, it hurt to stand, it hurt to move.
I spent my 30th birthday and a good part of that year battling a crippling disease. Instead of gracefully waltzing into a new decade, I hobbled my way through. Within two weeks of our move I became confined to our couch, utterly fatigued without even enough energy to make myself a sandwich. Even hobbling across the floor to the bathroom became a tremendous feat. My body was rapidly breaking down before my very eyes and there was nothing I could do about it. Continue reading