nutrition

What is a new food or product you found at the store that you would like to share?

Comment below to tell us about it 👇🏾

#Diabetes #DiabetesType1 #DiabetesType2 #Diabetestype3 #lada #mody #prediabetes #GestationalDiabetes #JuvenileDiabetesType1 #ChronicIllness #AutoimmuneDisease #Lifestyle #nutrition #EatingHealthy #Food #SupportGroups #Support #MightyTogether

I was diagnosed with end stage liver failure in February, unfortunately I have only gotten the bare minimum in regards to my future health plan, how to set up appointments with the specialists I need, prevent the disease from progressing in addition to my heart failure, supportive help/groups, and overall health/recovery/care. #LiverDisease #liver
#selfcare #wellness #Transplant #hepatologist #MedicalBills #MedicalProfessionals #MedicalResearch #nutrition #bilirubin #LiverFailure

This month’s food resource find comes from The Hangry Woman!

The Hangry Woman is created by my fellow diabuddy, Mila Clarke. Originally diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, then correctly diagnosed with LADA (Type 1.5), she originally started The Hangry Woman because she was in need for community. She encourages others to live a happy, healthy, and joyful life with diabetes despite shame, stigmas and misconceptions.

Her blog contains tons of delicious recipes for keto, low carb, gluten free and diabetes-friendly, along with other useful resources for calculating your A1C, a food journal and information for the newly diagnosed.

Check out her blog and her recipes:
hangrywoman.com

❓ What stands features out to you?
❓Which recipes are you willing to try?

#Diabetes #DiabetesType1 #DiabetesType2 #lada #mody #prediabetes #GestationalDiabetes #JuvenileDiabetesType1 #ChronicIllness #AutoimmuneDisease #Lifestyle #EatingHealthy #Food #nutrition #Support #SupportGroups #MightyTogether

(continue from part 2)

It felt such a long way. I had traveled through the ME tunnel and I had come out on the other side. After luckily treating IBS and giving up Western medications I was semi functional and could have a semi life.

After switching to macrobiotics diet I was even closer to an actual normal health. That normal health (or a close approximation) came to be only after a bioresonance therapist informed me about mercury poisoning and amalgams. I had my 6 (7? I forgot) amalgams safely removed, and after some months I felt NORMAL, for the first time in 7 years.

I was still happily on a macrobiotic diet, with some adjustment to accommodate my constant meat cravings (macrobiotic diet is mostly vegan, but it does include some meat, even if it's on the Super Extra Yang side of the spectrum).

My strength was more or less as I remembered it before getting ill (I was never very strong because of all the tranquillisers), the bouts of weakness that were still occasionally returning after my miraculous although partial improvement in 2009 had all but disappeared, Fibro pain was back briefly only after a lot of exercise, once every couple of months. I could do almost every activity I wanted. I felt healed.

In hindsight that was quite an achievement - only in 2015 I discovered a paper from 2005 that a doctor had misrepresented, demonstrating clearly that I had reactivated Epstein Barr all along. And some months before the onset of what had been diagnosed as ME, I had an insect bite (tick?) showing the fateful bullseye rash, which at the time for lack of better judgement I ignored. All this I learned only many years later.

So I had managed to send reactivated Epstein Barr and lyme into remission with just diet.

And juicing. And $80 per week of acupuncture and bio resonance and chiropractor. And 2 years of Chinese herbs. And frigging meditation, 30 to 60 minutes per day. And yoga, And running. And healing all my relationships/ dumping all bad relationships. And changing my sleep patterns. And oil pulling and skin brushing. And 1 month of physio rehab in spa waters every year. OK, maybe it wasn't JUST the diet. Still, as I didn't even know what the real problem was, it was still pretty impressive.

What I didn't know was that destiny had more s*, pardon me, challenges in store for me. In the form of some delicious sushi. That must had been off and gave me a really bad food poisoning. I didn't think much of that, but after some months the most terrible depression started. I had various reasons to be depressed, my life wasn't going at all i as I wanted it to be, in spite of those two years of good health, but still, I had gone through so many challenges in my life and NEVER felt such bottomless despair.

July that year was a wonderful summer, and I started crying then, all day, and never stopped. I knew better than running to some psychiatrist to get poisonous medication that would have defeated all my detoxification efforts, also because an impressive number of accidents piled up in the span of few months - a scooter accident that gave me two herniated disks, my career being basically destroyed by some nasty coworkers for no reason, pneumonia, two most important relationships disappearing, I mean, I had good reasons to cry.

But still, it felt odd, nothing like my usual self. In the same period I developed some intense allergies that I never had before in my life. Allergy to dust. To grass. To some foods.

Destiny kept turning its wheel, and I moved to another country, in a house with a very weird smell. I had immediate violent reactions, which I thought were due to dust. I cleaned and cleaned, but the reactions got worse. For some strange reason taking a shower was excruciating, the exploding pain in arms and legs would require hours of rest in bed to recede. I tried my usual remedies, juicing, superfoods, strict rice diet, nothing, it only got worse and worse.

After 6 months I was diagnosed with a shiny new condition, Peripheral Neuropathy, of idiopathic nature ("idiopathic" apparently means : appearing for no reason, in my book it means "diagnosed by an idiot"). Between the pain and the respiratory allergies and the brain fog and the depression that hasn't improved in all that, I was beyond miserable. After a while I changed home again, and I had some respite.

Finally I had gotten a diagnosis of Lyme and reactivated Epstein Barr and a couple of other beasties to substitute the useless diagnosis of ME and fibromyalgia (I mean, what use is a diagnosis if the only thing they can do for you is tell you to suck it up?!) and finally I had something to work on.

I started a protocol for Lyme, and in the new city where I had moved I discovered a lovely shop selling fermented food. I never had kombucha before. Or fermented vegetables. Or water kefir. It was a fascinating universe, full of mystery and possibilities. Live bacteria everywhere. Good bacteria winning over the bad bacteria. There was justice in nature. I was excited.

(trigger warning - we are now at the disgusting part of the story)

On day 3 of eating fermented food and drinking kombucha, I passed a spoonful of small worms just like my cat used to have (pinworms. they are called). I blinked like 15 times before my brain accepted the reality of what lied at the bottom of the toilet.

On day 6, I felt something weird, and looked back in the toilet : a 25 cm (almost 10 inches) long string of something that definitely looked like a worm was staring at me (ok it had no eyes so it couldn't stare, but you catch my drift). I could swear I lost consciousness for some seconds. Upon further examination, it was easy to recognise it as a tapeworm (the typical segments and appearance).

Food had done it again: it made all these parasites come out of hiding. I kept going with food. According to some sources, papaya seeds are given to children in some African countries to get rid of parasites. I took them. I doubled down on the fermented stuff. But then the parasite gave such huge jumps that I realised the problem was much bigger (or actually,

longer) than I expected.

There was no specialist to help me. Two gastroenterologists I visited vehemently refused to look a the specimen that i had preserved in a ziplock bag. The holistic doctor I was seeing literally close his eyes and kept them closed until I put away the photos. At the ER a terrified young doctor agreed that it definitely looked like a tapeworm, and, looking very shaken, after a short google search prescribed me one dose of a medicine that was usually prescribed for 7-14 days. Not enough. Stool tests came back negative, but I tended to believe my eyes, and the ziplock bag, more than tests.

Once again, I had to make do without medical care.

The Great Parasite War needs its own post, but to cut it short, after various (also pharmaceutical) antiparasitic medications and remedies, I kept the beasts in check thanks to a combination of fermented garlic, pumpkin seeds to paralyse them and Diatomaceous Earth to kill them.

(One small note; after I passed the whole beast, more than 6 feet without counting the first bit, and I was finally free, the bump I had at the level of my duodenum disappeared, my gallbladder issues disappeared, and the depression vanished overnight. My mental health was back to its original state (which doesn't say much, ok) but I didn't feel that despair anymore. I wish more people knew how parasites can affect a lot of functions in the body. End of note)

Again I was eating to get healthy. At some point while living in the smelly house, I developed an intolerance to my beloved brown rice. Or all rice. Little did I know that it wasn't much the rice, but the mycotoxins often found in the rice. Or miso. I was so sad to react to miso. I didn't know that Miso is made with one sub-species of Aspergillus. And that a far cousin of his was actually living in my bowels.

(continue....)

(continue from Part 1)

In 2004 I was literally struck down by what I read is the classic onset of ME, a weird violent flu (which was in fact Epstein Barr reactivating, but I didn't know for years), which left a lingering state of unthinkable weakness and exhaustion, that got only worse with the passing months.

After a year I was mostly bedbound and barely able to care for myself. Common sense told me that eating ready-made trash was not going to help my situation, so I made an effort to eat properly, but it was a struggle as most days I was barely able to stand.

My meals were very simple, vegetables often boiled whole because I didn't have the strength to cut them in pieces (at some point I got a steamer so at least they were a bit tastier), wholewheat pasta with tomatoes and basil and olives, yogurt, nut bars, all from the organic store, pretty healthy by conventional standards but I was still eating gluten and dairy and a pretty consistent amount of sugar.

What had been diagnosed as ME and later as fibromyalgia continued to wreck havoc my body, so I developed IBS with a couple of scary bleeding episodes.

That still didn't affect much my eating habits, as I was doing literally the best I knew, but at some point a spell of terrifying bowel immobility that lasted 9 interminable months made it clear that I needed to learn more.

(A Note: you will ask: why didn't you follow the doctor's advice? The first specialist's advice was: eat only pasta and no vegetables, and only one beer per day (! I didn't even drink). The second specialist's advice was to take some medicine that listed "death" as a side effect, and zero mention of diet. At that point, it was clear that I was on my own).

As I was miserably dragging myself from one hydrocolon therapy to the next (the only way my bowel would empty), it made sense to try and ingest as many nutrients as I could in liquid form. For that reason I looked into juicing. I found on youtube a film by some Joe Cross called "Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead", where he recounted his story of salvation through juice fasts, and how he traveled across America to spread the Gospel. That was a helluva convincing movie, and I was sold.

At the time I hadn't understood the importance of having a good juicer, so juicing was cumbersome and messy, the results everything but tasty, but I did it, for 3 weeks. After that, when it was time to start eating solid food again, I was ready, armed with another kind of precious knowledge.

In the library I had found a book about Macrobiotics, which not only appealed to me because it was based on eating seasonally and the principles of Yin and Yang (Chinese medicine and acupuncture had been key in helping me out of the worst agonic ME years), but also it was based on simple natural foods and easy to prepare, albeit quite bland.

After the fast I started with the recommended brown-rice only diet for 2-3 weeks, with the only extra taste from umeboshi plum and miso (and a bit of olive oil and soy sauce if I got too desperate). In hindsight, it was possibly the prebiotics in the juice, the much needed probiotics in the miso and the antiparassitary and detoxifying effects of the umeboshi plum that performed the miracle, but from that moment on, taking a LOT of care, my bowels started working again more or less normally.

Because I am not very smart, after a couple months I went back to eating sweet stuff (although rigorously organic), but my healing was at a turning point after stopping tranquillisers and all Western medication, and I had started walking again, I like to think possibly helped by all the fasting and cleaning I had done.

As I was trying to catch up with my life after recovering a bit of my health, my energy was still not au pair with the tasks required by my new job (I had a job! that was unthinkable before) and I was suffering quite a bit from the neurological fallout of having quit benzodiazepines, which translated into horrible anxiety and nerve twitching, on top of all my usual lovely ME neurological symptoms, still present at some level.

I came across a book called Sugar Blues, which I found terribly written but the main concept was very convincing: sugar was considered a potent stimulant in Ancient Greece and was to be taken in tiny amounts, and in today's amounts it was creating all kinds of neurological damage. Thanks to my classical studies in high school, I knew where to look for that bit of Ancient Greek medical wisdom, and I found that the quote was correct. At that point I was ready to believe the whole book, so I made a solemn wow to give up sugar.

But that was not enough. Another source I had come across was called the Whole 30, that maintained that some foods had inflammatory properties, and eliminated not only sugar but also gluten, dairy and any kind of processed food.

So in I think August 2011 I eliminated all that and started eating, as I myself admitted, "like a hamster", vegetables and rice and seeds, and cooking everything from scratch was driving me crazy.

By end of September 2011 I noticed something very weird: the nerve twitching and jumpiness and constant tense feeling from the benzodiazepines was gone.But there was more.

The anxiety I felt for immeasurable time, more years than I could remember, actually if I think about it, the anxiety that got worse AFTER I started taking benzodiazepines, was gone.

I always thought of myself as a very jumpy, nervous, hypersensitive individual (I am undoubtedly HPS, but that s another story), as I mentioned in Part 1 of this story. Well, it turned out that a good part of it was just sensitivity to sugar.

So giving up sugar as a teenager would have saved me 17 years of tranquillisers and 7 years of therapy. (Ok, I did need a couple of years of therapy, but I swear all the other years were overkill). And the reputation as the town's troubled teen, which never stopped following me, really. And countless lost chances, both work and relationship-wise. Seriously, wtf. Sugar. The mind boggles. It's easy to see things clearly with the knowledge of 20 years later.

But that is still not the end of this story, bear with me.

(continue )

This topic should probably need several posts, or maybe a whole book :) but I will try to condense everything in one story.

I always had a pretty bad relationship with food. My mother raised me to see food (candy, really) as the only source of happiness. I got treats for doing things right (more or less like a dog :D). Couple that with really disturbing events in my late childhood, and by age 12 I had a full blown eating disorder.

At some point I started buying food for myself, as the food quality at home degenerated at the same speed as our family life, and as a sad 12 years old I only bought chocolate and pastries, and lived almost exclusively on that for a good 6+ months.

After that, my appendix got inflamed and it had to be removed. Also, I felt nauseous most of the time. I had learned my first lesson about comfort food: you can only take so much of it.

Fast forward a few years: in high school I hated being chubby and I got started on crash diets, sustained by a ridiculous number of cigarettes. Because I have a scientific mindset, I looked for books about nutrition.

I read Atkins and various fad diets from America, and I tried to imagine what my grandma (the source of my common sense) would think of them.

My young cousin with MS was doing well with the Kousmine diet, it seemed like a miracle, but I didn't care for it.

At the time I had no particular health complaints, except for constant anxiety and insomnia, and after all everyone thought I was a very messed up teenager because of my family history, -- remember this part, more on that later - so anxiety and insomnia were just to be expected. Or so everyone thought including me.

After I managed to kick off smoking (age 18) my crash diets became somewhat more healthy, basically steak and fish and vegetables and fruit, sadly in those days no one knew about the Paleo diet. My dieting was still frown upon by my relatives, for whom it was a crime to live without pasta.

I moved to a different country at 19, then another one, and especially with the stress of the big city and trying to have a normal life while dealing with terrible insomnia, I went into a full binge eating disorder circle, overeating for days, usually pastries and cakes and pizza and whatnot, only to later on survive on salad (never vomit, thank god).

One day, during a particularly stressful period, I regained conscience (because overeating was truly like a trance) after a binge and around me I saw a good SIX feet of carpet covered by the remains of food, all sort of food, sweet, salty, a lot of it the fat free kind so I could eat more of it. It was a shocking sight. I looked at the floor and I felt I had finally reached rock bottom.

I went to my first dietician, and his crash diets were far worse than mine - he repeatedly let me understand that I was very fat (I wasn't, maybe 8 pounds above my perfect weight, which for him was 20 pounds less) and made me spend a fortune in shakes and food substitutes.

Thankfully in the same period I came across an amazing book, by a Jean Philippe Zermati called Losing Weight Without Diets or something like that (it was in French, I was living in Paris at the time), which core concept was that the human body was built to eat only what it needs and nothing more, and people overate for all kinds of emotional reasons and gained weight only because they stopped noticing this inner urge to stop eating once they had enough.

That was the year 2000, and the beginning of my recovery with regards to overeating. But as I read somewhere in 12 steps books, with alcoholism you put the tiger in a cage, but with overeating you have to take the tiger out for a walk three times a day (sorry I can't remember the quote).

Anyway from that moment on I was pretty happy with my eating, binges were mostly gone, I was eating proper food most of the time, that is, until illness struck, in the form of ME and fibromyalgia, and my relationship with food had to change once again.

Eating healthy is so incredibly important, whether we’re struggling with massively stressful circumstances or not. Today’s creation is BOCA veggie burger crumbles stir fried with diced pineapple and mango, some craisins and a tangy peanut butter sauce, over a lush bed of spinach leaves. Quick, easy and healthy on a hot day! 😋🥵🌞

#Healthy #yum #Food #diet #Cooking #Lifestyle #nutrition #feelgood