Desperate and feeling like I was mentally ill, I clicked a link on a Facebook post that my mom had tagged me in. The link was for a short article about how diet and supplements had transformed this woman's life. I had seen posts like this dozens of times, but I felt in my soul that this one was different. As I mentioned before, reading was very difficult for me at this point in my journey. Brain fog had made basic tasks, like reading, nearly impossible. It took me several days to get through a short little post that was ultimately a sales-pitch for a video series about Hashimoto's and natural healing remedies. I remember wanting to exit the post, but something moved me to sign up for the video series; they were offering it free in the hopes that you'd buy the series to watch it again. The kicker was that the video series had to be watched within a certain time period, if you wanted to watch it for free, which I definitely did. The series was long and there was so much information, but I forced myself to watch it. I even took notes, not very good notes, but notes. At the end of the series I was still skeptical, but I knew that this could be my only hope at regaining my life.
The content of the series proved to be too much information for me, but it did teach me about the Autoimmune Protocol. I also found out that the woman whose life had been transformed with diet and supplements was publishing a book in just a few weeks, which was one of the most exciting things that I had heard in a long time. I spent time googling the Autoimmune Protocol and gathered all of the basic information that I would need to start this diet while I waited for Dr. Izabella Wentz' book to be released. As some of you may already know, I started the Autoimmune Protocol and within two weeks I began blogging about my experience. The girl, whom weeks prior had struggled to read the information was able to blog about it. I remember those early weeks and feeling like I felt much better, but now reflecting back on that period, it was obvious how much better I was feeling just by the fact that I was wanting to blog about it.
The Autoimmune Protocol is a diet for people who suffer from autoimmune disease. It eliminates grains, legumes, dairy, nuts and seeds, nightshades, most oils except for coconut, avocado and olive, eggs, alcohol and sugar. I won't go into all of the details of the diet, because I have done that in previous posts and I want to focus on my results.
In my last post, nine months ago, I mentioned that I was about to go to the doctor for the first time in a over a year and how hopeful I was that this doctor would be the doctor I had always dreamt of finding. Well, he was and is one of the best doctors I have ever seen. He is not a naturopath, but he is a huge supporter of those methods and even has his patients bring in a food diary to discuss which foods could be impacting your health. He recommends supplements and consuming only organic and grass-fed animals. These things are nearly unheard of from a Western doctor; he is extraordinary. On my first visit he ran a bunch of tests and scheduled me for a pap smear and a mammogram, that I was four years overdue for.
The first set of labs came back pretty bad. My inflammation levels were seven times what they should've been. My TSH was still an eight and my liver enzymes were completely off. My vitamin D was severely deficient, which he attributes to GMOs. His reaction was very scary, because he felt that there was something wrong in my body that was triggering this, not just Hashimoto's. He ordered an ultrasound of my thyroid because the nodules on it were palpable. Keep in mind that I had already been following the Autoimmune Protocol for three months at this point. I cannot imagine what my labs would've looked like if I had had them done prior to starting the protocol. Oh, and at that point, three months in, I had lost over fifty pounds. The weight had start falling off of me in the beginning.
I felt pretty good, at that point, but I still had many symptoms. One of the most concerning ones to me was I was losing my hair at such an alarming rate that I had bald patches all over my head. For some reason, losing my hair was terrifying to me. I had been on the liver detox part of the protocol for a couple of weeks. My doctor recommended that I increase all of my B vitamins to at least one thousand percent of the recommended daily dose on the bottle and that I take them individually and not in a complex blend, like had been recommended in the book. He fully supports the Autoimmune Protocol and recommends it to all of his patients. My endocrinologist, however, does not support the Autoimmune Protocol and says there is no science to support it. Which just means that the pharmaceutical companies cannot make money off of it so they do not research it and then the doctors do not know about it; that is the current state of medicine, in general.
For the next few weeks I went to my follow up appointments and started the B vitamins as he recommended and I stressed. I am not going to sugarcoat it, I was convinced that I had breast or thyroid cancer; I did not. I tried not to stress, as suggested by the book, but there was a voice in my head that said things were not great and that I should have taken control of my health years before. My pap came back fine, which I was very happy about, because it had been five years since I had had one of those. My grandmother died of ovarian cancer and I had already had one of my ovaries removed a decade before, so I should never miss an annual checkup. I already knew this, but my anxiety and paranoia had made going to the doctor nearly impossible for me.
The next month proved to be even more stressful, as my daughter was hospitalized at the beginning of July. At that point they believed she had Multiple Sclerosis. This hospitalization would become a three month journey. This journey would require two more hospital stays and travelling to specialists in Arizona at the Mayo Clinic, before she was properly diagnosed with Ehler's-Danlos Syndrome, Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia (POTS) and Mast Cell Activation Syndrome. Watching your twenty four year old daughter go from an active young adult to using a walker and having seizures (they turned out to be autonomic seizures), was one of the hardest things that I have experienced to date. The old me would have used this as an excuse to binge eat a case of Reese's and anything else that I could find, but not this time. I had felt what a healthy body could feel like, something that I honestly had not experienced since giving birth to my first son when I was eighteen. I knew that my health could not afford that and that my family needed me to be healthy, now more than ever. She is doing much better and is now learning to navigate a life with chronic pain, but doing it with a smile on her face and more grace than anyone. She is amazing!!
Ironically, it was in Arizona that I realized that I was truly healing. I noticed that I felt amazing. My hair had stopped falling out and was even beginning to grow back. I felt stronger than I ever had. In-between trips to Arizona I would have more labs that revealed what I had already known, that I was healing. My inflammation dropped by eighty percent, to the high end of normal (I will have another test next week to see if it has gone even lower, which I suspect it has.). My thyroid levels showed that my medicine was now too high and it had to be lowered, something that has never happened to me. I know that many people are able to get off thyroid medication altogether, but I don't think I will be one of those people. I would love that, but the last endocrinologist I saw said that my Hashimoto's had nearly destroyed my thyroid. I can handle taking medicine if I need to. My issue with it was always that I didn't feel like the medicine was working, and it obviously was not able to work well enough on its own. I needed the dietary changes, I needed the supplements and I needed to heal my gut. By the way, I have had two tests analyzing my gut's microbiome and it has healed so much. This is an area that I will continue to focus on throughout my health journey.
In December I noticed that I had not lost weight in a few months, while I had not gained any weight, I still wanted to lose more weight. I knew that I needed to add exercise into my healing journey and I felt strong enough to do that. I began working out in January and I am now within twenty five pounds of my goal weight of one hundred and forty five pounds. A weight that I haven't been at in years. I have continued to take most of the supplements, because I honestly don't know if it is just my diet or if it is a combination of the diet and the supplements. I suspect it is a combination of both.
I still follow the Autoimmune Protocol, but I have reintroduced the occasional egg and some nuts. I have experimented with nightshades and I will not make that mistake again; it was brutal. Nightshades were in probably seventy-five percent of my previous diet...no wonder I felt horrible all of the time. I have had gluten a few times and overall it does not bother me, but I will not add it back into my diet on a regular basis as it does contribute to inflammation and I am trying to keep mine as low as possible; however, it was so nice enjoying a piece of cake at my nephew's wedding this past December. I have had a few other treats, but it is different for me now, I no longer have insane cravings that prevent me from having a few bites and moving on. I am comfortable that I could have a few bites of a crepe and not allow it to become a problem. The Autoimmune Protocol healed my emotional eating and my cravings for sugary foods. While that is not why I started following it, it helped me deal with my unhealthy relationship with food. I plan to, in the future, write more about the hold that emotional eating can have on a person.
I have also had cow's milk (I can have ghee because they remove the milk solids ) causes my hands and joints to hurt, so, like gluten, I limit it to very rare occasions. I can have sheep's and goat milk products with no issues. I have not tried white rice, but brown rice also triggers joint pain. I am still reacting to cabbage and green beans, but I have been able to add garlic back into my diet. I have not tried legumes or corn and I do not have plans to at the moment. My focus remains on continuing to heal. So for me, that means eating as clean as possible and focusing on eating a nutrient dense diet.
The Autoimmune Protocol freed me from chronic pain and fatigue. It eliminated my foot pain, which was at times so bad it hurt to stand. It eliminated my chronic back pain and it freed me from chronic joint pain. It took away my brain fog and gave me back the joy of reading and writing. It unshackled me from the constant anxiety that I had been suffering with. It has allowed me to shed over ninety pounds, probably more, but I use the last weight I knew I was as my starting weight. It has allowed me to be tolerant and not as irritable. The Autoimmune Protocol gave me the tools to use food to save my life.
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