So much has changed in my life since that post a year ago. I went to see a friend who is a functional medicine doctor. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about functional medicine in general...but I also don't always trust traditional medicine. I feel like there has to be some happy medium. So I decided to make an appointment. I really didn't think there was anything wrong with me...I just knew I didn't feel super great and I wanted to establish some sort of starting point. I starting by having bloodwork done and we went over the results. They showed that something was definitely off kilter...maybe several somethings. The clearest thing was that my iron was way low (ahhh...come to think of it I depend upon a daily nap or two....). I arranged to do another kind of test. A fun one which showed a parasite in my intestine and a bacterial imbalance. The parasite was probably causing me to not absorb several necessary nutrients (iron being one...some others had shown up on the test as well). I was told to go on a rather strict sugar, dairy, gluten, soy -free diet. Which I stuck to off and on as it pleased me for the next several months. And I also took some supplements. A second test revealed that I had righted the bacterial imbalance but had not made much headway on the parasite. And I was still fairly tired all the time. More tired than I thought I should be after taking iron supplements for so long. But we pushed onward.
Although honestly I was terrible with sticking to a diet. Every time we traveled I would go off it. And sometimes when we didn't travel. Finally in December (yes, this is 8 months later) I decided to be strict. I'd had a new test done that tested for food sensitivities. The idea behind that test is that as my body tries to fight the parasite it mistakenly attacks other things (foods) and causes inflammation and malabsorption. By not eating those foods I could help my cause (tiredness should ease up, as well as inflammation should go away). That test showed a sensitivity to wheat (not gluten per-se, but a wheat protein), dairy, and tapioca. Being able to eat soy again actually made life easier. So I worked really hard all through Christmas and New Year's and everything. My trip to Idaho was the hardest of all because I was eating food at other people's kitchens and I realized after I got home that there were lots of slip-ups during those two weeks that I just couldn't control due to lack of knowledge (I have since learned that tapioca is in almost all gluten-free prepared foods so I can't have them).
So I've been pretty good with my new diet. One challenge is that I'm eating less meat so I've gotten very creative. Oats, lentils and mushrooms are my new best friends...and guacamole and I talk on an almost daily basis. I'm hardly starving. In fact, I'd planned to try to lose 5lb this spring but that's proving hard. Mostly because I'm hungry and craving sweets all the time still. That and tired phases make me think the parasite is still alive and well in my intestine. I plan to stick to my diet really well for at least 6 months and evaluate how I feel then. Maybe do a hardcore anti-parasite drug to wipe it out for good.
So that's where it rests right now. I have made drastic changes to how I eat and it hasn't been easy. It's basically taken a year to figure out what I can eat and get used to eating like that. Now to work on portion control and exercise. But the good news... I feel SO much better now than I did last fall. It's like night and day. I feel functional again and that is an amazing feeling.
