I have been pretty quiet about my current pregnancy to this point,
aside from announcing it the very day that I saw that double pink line
that is. I think after multiple miscarriages there tends to be a fear
of "jinxing it." I had this very irrational idea that if I talked about
my pregnancy before "x" number of weeks I would miscarry. Since joining
a support group for pregnancy after loss I have learned that this
feeling isn't unusual and now that I have reached that magical number,
which for me was 16 weeks pregnant, I feel that I can talk about it.
Actually reaching 16 weeks wasn't the milestone so much as reaching 16
weeks and hearing the heartbeat and having my midwife tell me the baby
is a-okay. So, here is my pregnancy to this point:
I started
my pregnancy with very high health expectations, drinking
herbal pregnancy infusions, walking for exercise, and eating a rather
balanced diet. Well, winter came and with it the morning sickness and I
was lost in the land of Sick, Tired and Cranky. These symptoms were
probably exacerbated by the fact that in my previous pregnancies I could
consume dairy with abandon, which was my morning sickness cure of
choice. With cow dairy a no-go and goat dairy a little too strong for my
sensitive palate, I was left with occasional cravings for fast food, so
long as I ate slowly, and cereal with almond milk. Sometimes I would
find a food that worked for a few days but then I would throw it up and
that made it inedible. It just became a matter of fact that the moment I
walked into the kitchen I would start either dry-heaving or throw up in
the sink. Amazingly in the six weeks that I had morning sickness I only
lost 8 lbs.
Aside from dealing with morning sickness, one
of the things that was very difficult for me was my dear, kind,
well-meaning friends would always ask how I was feeling (every pregnant
woman hears this a lot) and when I would say, quite honestly, "sick,
miserable, etc." they would say "GREAT! That means the baby is going to
stay." Here I would just like to make a public service announcement:
Morning sickness doesn't guarantee that you won't miscarry. I was sick
even with my missed miscarriage where the baby died at 10 weeks. I was
sick even after the baby died and it wasn't until a few days before I
miscarried, somewhere in week 12, that I was feeling better. It is hard
to know what to say to any sick pregnant woman but sometimes "Can I
bring you meal?" is the very best thing and is always music to my ears.
Sadly,
Pinzey and Posie had to go. Their previous owner graciously agreed to
take them back, so while we were out our investment, I could relax in
the knowledge that they were being groomed by someone who had the time,
energy and expertise to do a good job. I felt so bad that I wasn't able
to give those rabbits the grooming time that they needed and really, if
you have angora rabbits, you should be grooming them at least once per week, preferably twice.
Andrew and I have decided to make a pact that we will no longer indulge
each other in micro-homesteading with animals (aside from the worms, of
course) until we have a house with a nice sized back yard and no HOA.
On
New Years Eve, at 13 weeks pregnant, we were able to hear the heartbeat
for the first time and for Andrew, that was the biggest relief in the
world. For me, it just did not feel real no matter how hard I tried,
possibly because the worrisome cramping that I had been having the
entire pregnancy had continued with no sign of stopping. At week 14 I
magically started to feel better. It was like a miracle how much better I
felt, and then the little flutters that I had started feeling in week
12 really started to feel like baby movement. During week 15 I felt the
baby kick my hand from the outside and it was such a surprise and a
delight.
Today my midwife came by for my 4 month
check-up and once again we heard the heart beat. More impressive to me
was that my uterus had grown so much in the three weeks since my midwife
had last visited and the top of my fundus was only two fingers below my
navel. I had thought to have been feeling kicks up that high but
couldn't believe it since my uterus should still be about 4 fingers
below my navel. It was very validating that what I am feeling really is
my baby moving about. Also it means that what I have thought of as my
"pudge" is actually a baby where I just thought I was bloated. Fun
stuff!
There is my pregnancy thus far. I am hoping this
winter hurries up and gets over with so I can get on with my spring
gardening plans: Potatoes! In just a few weeks we will have our anatomy ultrasound and maybe get a peek and our baby's gender. Things to look forward to.
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Introducing...
Our French Angora Rabbits!
Posie, a five month-old chocolate tort doe
Pinzey, a four month-old black doe
After having lived with us for six weeks Posie is settling in to life as part of our family pretty well and is curious and friendly; Pinzey still thinks that I want to eat her. I am looking forward to harvesting Posie's fur in December and learning to spin it into deliciously soft yarn!
No, the rabbits do not live in my kitchen.
No, the rabbits do not live in my kitchen.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Finished Objects: Summer
As usual, this past summer I had lofty goals for completing projects that have been sitting around in my to-do basket for quite a while. Unfortunately a trip to Germany and a lingering illness souvenir kept me mostly out of the creative loop until the end of July. What took me the most amount of time was this sampler which I started in June 2011 intended as a Christmas gift for Ravenna (oppps!).
I worked on it a bit while in Germany and finally finished and framed it as fast as I could. I did not frame it correctly. There is a whole process for framing embroidery that includes stretching and mounting boards and pins so that it doesn't look rumpled. Maybe I will get to that one day but for now, I am just happy it is done, wrinkles and all.
*****
*****
*****
Sunday, July 22, 2012
When Your Immune System Attacks Your Fetus
With my most recent miscarriage at the end of May I decided to get blood tests to see if there was something going on causing the miscarriage. I was certain it was my thyroid causing the miscarriage(s) but my doctor did a number of tests just to be sure, including an Anti-nuclear Antibody (ANA) test to see if my immune system was producing antibodies against itself causing an auto-immune disease that wasn't allowing my body to carry a fetus. Surprisingly, all my blood tests came up fine, including my thyroid, except the ANA. Not only did I test positive for the antibodies but I also had a high titer of 1:640 (a titer of 1:40 is considered normal) so my doctor decided to send me to a Rheumetologist, a doctor who specializes in autoimmune disorders, for further testing. Since I was leaving for Germany I could not meet with a specialist until 5 weeks after the initial blood test and nearly 6 weeks after the miscarriage.
My visit to the Rheumetologist was disappointing as he wouldn't test me for the tests that I had asked him to test me for but he did do the routine tests given after a positive ANA for specific rheumatic auto-immune disorders, like Lupus, as well as another ANA. Just as I had predicted, I do not have Lupus (or syphilis for that matter) but once again I tested positive for ANA. Unlike the first test, this test I had a much lower titer of 1:80, which is considered a very low positive reading. This got me thinking, and Googling, to see if there could be a connection between positive ANA tests and miscarriage. Amazingly, all over the Internet I found infertility/miscarriage forums where women with repeated miscarriages were talking about their positive ANA tests taken directly after their miscarriages with no diagnosis of autoimmune disease. For the majority of these women their titers were only high directly after their miscarriage.
This was all very fascinating to me but it seemed that many doctors did not believe that there was a connection and that the positive ANA could mean that the body was attacking the fetus specifically, not just the body. Some doctors treated the condition successfully with daily doses of baby aspirin. Others added in supplemental progesterone and in some cases, twice daily injections of heparin, an anti-coagulant, during pregnancy the use of which is rather questionable. BUT these actions, in many cases resulted in full-term pregnancies in women who have had many repeated miscarriages.
So, where does this leave me? It leaves me in a quandary because it doesn't explain why the immune system is attacking the fetus and I want to know what is causing this and all my other symptoms of poor health. I could try taking baby aspirin and see what happens but I really don't want to take the chance of another miscarriage because I don't really understand what is going on. One thing I am willing to try is herbal cures. This website recommends specific herbs to help with immunological miscarriages such as Dong Quai and Maca. Other herbs, such as Vitex and Evening Primrose Oil have been shown to help with aiding in the production of progesterone, which is often lacking in women with repeated miscarriage.
Susun Weed, herbalist and author of The Wise Woman Herbal for the Childbearing Year, has recipes for preventing a threatened miscarriage with a number of herbal tinctures. Susun also recommends daily infusions of stinging nettle and red raspberry leaf for every woman, pregnant or not. Here is info that I liked on a natural fertility diet, though I am not a believer in excessive raw foods, protein powders or green smoothies (seriously, no people throughout time have EVER eaten pureed raw greens! EVER!). So there it is...food for thought. I am still left feeling like I have no idea what to do either way.
My visit to the Rheumetologist was disappointing as he wouldn't test me for the tests that I had asked him to test me for but he did do the routine tests given after a positive ANA for specific rheumatic auto-immune disorders, like Lupus, as well as another ANA. Just as I had predicted, I do not have Lupus (or syphilis for that matter) but once again I tested positive for ANA. Unlike the first test, this test I had a much lower titer of 1:80, which is considered a very low positive reading. This got me thinking, and Googling, to see if there could be a connection between positive ANA tests and miscarriage. Amazingly, all over the Internet I found infertility/miscarriage forums where women with repeated miscarriages were talking about their positive ANA tests taken directly after their miscarriages with no diagnosis of autoimmune disease. For the majority of these women their titers were only high directly after their miscarriage.
This was all very fascinating to me but it seemed that many doctors did not believe that there was a connection and that the positive ANA could mean that the body was attacking the fetus specifically, not just the body. Some doctors treated the condition successfully with daily doses of baby aspirin. Others added in supplemental progesterone and in some cases, twice daily injections of heparin, an anti-coagulant, during pregnancy the use of which is rather questionable. BUT these actions, in many cases resulted in full-term pregnancies in women who have had many repeated miscarriages.
So, where does this leave me? It leaves me in a quandary because it doesn't explain why the immune system is attacking the fetus and I want to know what is causing this and all my other symptoms of poor health. I could try taking baby aspirin and see what happens but I really don't want to take the chance of another miscarriage because I don't really understand what is going on. One thing I am willing to try is herbal cures. This website recommends specific herbs to help with immunological miscarriages such as Dong Quai and Maca. Other herbs, such as Vitex and Evening Primrose Oil have been shown to help with aiding in the production of progesterone, which is often lacking in women with repeated miscarriage.
Susun Weed, herbalist and author of The Wise Woman Herbal for the Childbearing Year, has recipes for preventing a threatened miscarriage with a number of herbal tinctures. Susun also recommends daily infusions of stinging nettle and red raspberry leaf for every woman, pregnant or not. Here is info that I liked on a natural fertility diet, though I am not a believer in excessive raw foods, protein powders or green smoothies (seriously, no people throughout time have EVER eaten pureed raw greens! EVER!). So there it is...food for thought. I am still left feeling like I have no idea what to do either way.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Busy...
I am sorry that I haven't posted in a long time. This is mainly an apology to the many Lisa's that read this blog. I do appreciate their comments. After writing the last blog post my grandmother passed away prompting a flurry of activity. Ravenna and I flew to California for two weeks to be there for her funeral and our foster-baby stayed with another foster family.
During that trip a number of things occurred that pushed our family to decide that we could no longer work as foster parents within a system that cared so little about the health and safety of both our family and the foster child in our home. Needless to say, it was very difficult to say goodbye to the little one. On the last day of March I passed the baby who we had raised since birth and had been with us for 10 months to his new foster family. I hope they are stronger than we were. With that parting I think I lost a part of my heart.
April was spent in recovery and preparation. The first three weeks of the month I was in shock and I can't recall doing a whole lot (plus I had totally changed my diet so I was in a daze trying to figure out how to eat FOOD again)*. So much of our time had been spent with dealing with foster care drama and suddenly I had only one child and, amazingly, TIME. I got back on the German learning wagon (slowly), worked in our gardens to get them ready and planted, and was inundated with landscape approval requests for the committee I am on in our HOA (Home Owners Association). Andrew was deeply immersed in a translation project for a German textbook company so he was basically absent from the time we returned from California until he finished the project on April 20th.
Ravenna turned four and then May came: the strawberries appeared in an early abundance and the garden harvest started in earnest with lettuce, radishes, chard, green onions, bok choi and the lovely strawberries. One day early in the month I opened the freezer and realized that I had a whole lot of meat to eat before our 1/4 beef arrived in July. Therefore we began to invite people to eat with us in earnest, sometime having three couples per week. We have become fairly adventurous eaters, even making Pennsylvania Scrapple to use up the odd pork bits we had lying about. We have also eaten beef heart, tongue and ox-tail in the last few months. Hurray for offal!
Then I got the genealogy and feverishly started seeking out my ancestors and filling in my family tree. Yesterday I had a birthday and now we are readying ourselves for our BIG trip. And that has been our life for the past few months.
*I quit the GAPS diet on March 12th and I will get to that in a future post.
 |
| Ravenna at "The Old Spaghetti Factory" in California |
During that trip a number of things occurred that pushed our family to decide that we could no longer work as foster parents within a system that cared so little about the health and safety of both our family and the foster child in our home. Needless to say, it was very difficult to say goodbye to the little one. On the last day of March I passed the baby who we had raised since birth and had been with us for 10 months to his new foster family. I hope they are stronger than we were. With that parting I think I lost a part of my heart.
 |
| This is the only photo I can post since it doesn't show his face. |
Ravenna turned four and then May came: the strawberries appeared in an early abundance and the garden harvest started in earnest with lettuce, radishes, chard, green onions, bok choi and the lovely strawberries. One day early in the month I opened the freezer and realized that I had a whole lot of meat to eat before our 1/4 beef arrived in July. Therefore we began to invite people to eat with us in earnest, sometime having three couples per week. We have become fairly adventurous eaters, even making Pennsylvania Scrapple to use up the odd pork bits we had lying about. We have also eaten beef heart, tongue and ox-tail in the last few months. Hurray for offal!
Then I got the genealogy and feverishly started seeking out my ancestors and filling in my family tree. Yesterday I had a birthday and now we are readying ourselves for our BIG trip. And that has been our life for the past few months.
*I quit the GAPS diet on March 12th and I will get to that in a future post.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Helpful Real Food Cooking Tips
In the past few months I have been reading more and more cookbooks
and books about food in general. Some of these books have been duds (The Taste Thesaurus?
Blah) but others have been gems. You might be wondering if I have
become obsessed with food and you might be onto something. I do like
food, A LOT, but cooking? Not so much. Being on the GAPS diet, also
known as the "no processed anything diet" requires me to spend a lot of
time cooking. You might think that having been on this diet for 16 months!
now I would have acquired a love of cooking given the many hours each
day I spend in the kitchen but you would be sadly wrong. If nothing else
I probably dislike it more. In my quest to make cooking less painful I
have stumbled upon a few very fabulous tips that help me spend less time
in the kitchen and help me save money to boot.
The first tip comes from a cookbook that I haven't even read yet and probably won't unless the price goes down:
The author of Well Fed offers a thirty-page teaser preview on her website which was so awesome that I was almost willing to pay $30 for the cookbook; almost. What is magical about this cookbook besides its delicious recipes which include, amongst others, chocolate chili? Melissa Joulwan comes from a family of restauranteurs which means she knows how to cook food FAST. Once a week Joulwan does the majority of her food prep for the week, usually within a day of her shopping trip. In two hours she browns ground beef, cooks chicken breasts and sausages, roasts sweet potatoes and spaghetti squash, steams broccoli and cabbage, chops up raw veggies for snacks, boils a dozen eggs and much more.
As I read this idea it astounded me. In years past I had subscribed to a menu mailer that advocated such weekly prep as this but it didn't really work for me because I didn't like all the recipes included in each weeks mailers. Joulwan, however, doesn't worry about such things as "recipes". She only makes 2-3 real recipes every week. The rest of the time she makes what she calls "hot plates." Basically, she takes what prepared items she has an assembles them into a meal. She decides what flavor she wants (Mexican, Indian, Asian etc.) and then what protein and throws it all together into a skillet and voila! Dinner. The example she gave for a Mexican dinner was to throw together in a skillet a pound of the precooked ground beef, steamed chopped peppers and cabbage and while that was warming up make some "South Western Cumin Lime Dressing" and she had dinner ready in less than ten minutes. This way you get lots of variety and you aren't stuck with the Chicken curry you had planned to make when what you really crave is Mexican.
I have done this a few times and it has worked famously. I wish I was better at doing it but as with every new skill learned, it takes time to change habits and fit something new into the routine. The chopping and steaming vegetables has been genius. I wash and cut up lettuce as soon as I get it so that I can make an easy salad, grate and steam cauliflower rice, and slice a head of cabbage for "noodles." It is so easy just to steam the already wet from washing sliced vegetables until just soft and put in a container in the fridge until I need it. I also like to make up the week's salad dressing so I have no excuse not to eat my greens.
As for working on those flavor combinations to mix together those hot plates? The Flavor Bible is essential! I cannot say enough about how great this book is. The way it is organized is so perfectly aligned with how my brains works. The only thing that I didn't like about this book is its omission of Sherry for cooking.
An Everlasting Meal: Cooking With Economy and Grace had such a lovely little gem of a not-quite-cookbook title that I bought it, not even waiting for it to come to the library. I don't exactly regret my purchase but I since I am not eating grains currently, her grain heavy and Italian influenced cooking tips really did not quite hit home with me. She also has a mysterious "thing" with beets which I cannot comprehend. It wasn't that this was a useless books, on the contrary, her tips for stretching your culinary budget are sound and tasty, but Adler definitely needed to endear herself to me with her unflinching praise of fat to keep me reading until the end. The most useful tip that I found in her book was to use EVERY part of the vegetable. The core and leaves of that head of cauliflower? Edible. Yup. Not every part of plant is edible (carrot tops?) but when you are paying for those throwaway bits it is nice to be able to put them to use. I now use the extra leaves and cores of cabbage and cauliflower to make blended French-style potage soups.
Another trick that Adler taught is to use the cooking liquid from cooking vegetables as a base for soups. Yes! Duh, I don't know why it took me this long to figure that one out. For a while now I have always saved the drippings from roasts to use for soups and they really amp up the flavor; using the veggie "drippings" is much same.
My favorite kitchen tip I have actually been doing for years: boil the bones but what I didn't know is that you can boil the snot, erm nutrients, right out of them for a week before throwing them out. Perpetual Broth has become my new best friend and the very best way to stretch that expensive pastured chicken carcass. It is so nice in the winter to be able to have broth for soup available for meals throughout the week and even with a 1/4 tsp. sea salt, a cup of broth is both nourishing, soothing and delicious after a long day. I very highly recommend doing this.
Those are my tips for now. Any that you are willing to share with me?
The first tip comes from a cookbook that I haven't even read yet and probably won't unless the price goes down:
The author of Well Fed offers a thirty-page teaser preview on her website which was so awesome that I was almost willing to pay $30 for the cookbook; almost. What is magical about this cookbook besides its delicious recipes which include, amongst others, chocolate chili? Melissa Joulwan comes from a family of restauranteurs which means she knows how to cook food FAST. Once a week Joulwan does the majority of her food prep for the week, usually within a day of her shopping trip. In two hours she browns ground beef, cooks chicken breasts and sausages, roasts sweet potatoes and spaghetti squash, steams broccoli and cabbage, chops up raw veggies for snacks, boils a dozen eggs and much more.
As I read this idea it astounded me. In years past I had subscribed to a menu mailer that advocated such weekly prep as this but it didn't really work for me because I didn't like all the recipes included in each weeks mailers. Joulwan, however, doesn't worry about such things as "recipes". She only makes 2-3 real recipes every week. The rest of the time she makes what she calls "hot plates." Basically, she takes what prepared items she has an assembles them into a meal. She decides what flavor she wants (Mexican, Indian, Asian etc.) and then what protein and throws it all together into a skillet and voila! Dinner. The example she gave for a Mexican dinner was to throw together in a skillet a pound of the precooked ground beef, steamed chopped peppers and cabbage and while that was warming up make some "South Western Cumin Lime Dressing" and she had dinner ready in less than ten minutes. This way you get lots of variety and you aren't stuck with the Chicken curry you had planned to make when what you really crave is Mexican.
I have done this a few times and it has worked famously. I wish I was better at doing it but as with every new skill learned, it takes time to change habits and fit something new into the routine. The chopping and steaming vegetables has been genius. I wash and cut up lettuce as soon as I get it so that I can make an easy salad, grate and steam cauliflower rice, and slice a head of cabbage for "noodles." It is so easy just to steam the already wet from washing sliced vegetables until just soft and put in a container in the fridge until I need it. I also like to make up the week's salad dressing so I have no excuse not to eat my greens.
As for working on those flavor combinations to mix together those hot plates? The Flavor Bible is essential! I cannot say enough about how great this book is. The way it is organized is so perfectly aligned with how my brains works. The only thing that I didn't like about this book is its omission of Sherry for cooking.
An Everlasting Meal: Cooking With Economy and Grace had such a lovely little gem of a not-quite-cookbook title that I bought it, not even waiting for it to come to the library. I don't exactly regret my purchase but I since I am not eating grains currently, her grain heavy and Italian influenced cooking tips really did not quite hit home with me. She also has a mysterious "thing" with beets which I cannot comprehend. It wasn't that this was a useless books, on the contrary, her tips for stretching your culinary budget are sound and tasty, but Adler definitely needed to endear herself to me with her unflinching praise of fat to keep me reading until the end. The most useful tip that I found in her book was to use EVERY part of the vegetable. The core and leaves of that head of cauliflower? Edible. Yup. Not every part of plant is edible (carrot tops?) but when you are paying for those throwaway bits it is nice to be able to put them to use. I now use the extra leaves and cores of cabbage and cauliflower to make blended French-style potage soups.
Another trick that Adler taught is to use the cooking liquid from cooking vegetables as a base for soups. Yes! Duh, I don't know why it took me this long to figure that one out. For a while now I have always saved the drippings from roasts to use for soups and they really amp up the flavor; using the veggie "drippings" is much same.
My favorite kitchen tip I have actually been doing for years: boil the bones but what I didn't know is that you can boil the snot, erm nutrients, right out of them for a week before throwing them out. Perpetual Broth has become my new best friend and the very best way to stretch that expensive pastured chicken carcass. It is so nice in the winter to be able to have broth for soup available for meals throughout the week and even with a 1/4 tsp. sea salt, a cup of broth is both nourishing, soothing and delicious after a long day. I very highly recommend doing this.
Those are my tips for now. Any that you are willing to share with me?
Sunday, February 12, 2012
When It's Time to Change...
Have you ever read something on the internet and thought "Wow. It would have been really nice to have known that a year ago?" Well the last few weeks have been that, over and over again for me. I am still on the GAPS diet, plugging away but I have been making some BIG changes. After 12 months on the GAPS diet I figured that I would be feeling pretty great and that I would be well on my way to recovery. The problem was, however, that I felt terrible. I felt worse. How was this even possible with all the work that I had been doing. So I kept plugging along at it, never understanding why my symptoms never got better and others appeared in their place.
The candida infection never left. It would get worse and then get better but it never totally went away, no matter how low carb I went. I felt tired all the time; depression would creep in at every little disturbance especially foster parenting stress would put me into a tailspin; my appetite disappeared both for food and sex; I got terrible PMS symptoms of incredibly tender breasts, acne and spotting a week before my period; my cycles were irregular; and I started to put on a lot of weight even though I wasn't eating any more calories. What was going on?
I have been following the Cheeseslave blog for a few years and while I don't always agree with her, I think that I was absolutely meant to read the posts she has been writing recently about what being low carb did to her and it was like reading my own story. I had NO idea that being low carb for too long could be dangerous. Everything I had read, like on Mark's Daily Apple, said that if you stayed between 100-150 carb grams per day, you were golden for life! I was afraid of adding too many carbs for fear of my candida beast and the possible effect on my insulin resistance. It was just easier to restrict my carbs since I had been doing it for so long so I usually stayed somewhere between 50-100 net carbs a day.
Now it is like EVERYBODY, even Paleo/Primal bloggers are coming out with these studies about how being low carb for too long with stress your adrenals. Matt Stone was writing about this long ago but his style can be so abrasive that I generally ignored him. Now, however, I am paying more attention and what he has been saying has been backed up so many times that I think I can say that he knows what he is talking about.
So now what is my game plan 15 months into the GAPS diet and feeling no better than when I started? Well, number one, I started eating more carbohydrates and more often. To repair adrenals it is best to eat 3 meals and 3 snacks a day, but it is really hard for me to do that on GAPS without spending my life in the kitchen. To boost my carbohydrate intake, in the last two weeks I have added some GAPS legal legumes (split peas and lentils) and I have also been eating more fruit and honey. While the extra carbs do aggravate the candida, it wasn't going away anyway and it doesn't seem to be getting worse so I will press on. I am supplementing with Adrenal Stress End which is a blend of adrenal cortex and some herbs that was recommended by another GAPS blogger in a similar situation. I do not like that it containes Betaine however since it gives me heartburn. I am also supplementing with Magnesium oil, Magnesium Citrate, B-Complex, Vitamin C and Zinc Piccolinate, all of which are supposed to support the adrenals. In addition I started to brew my own Rooibos Kombucha which helps with detoxification and should help with the candida.
Matt Stone recommends overfeeding and a lot of R&R to repair stressed adrenals, but unfortunately for me as a mom and especially as a foster parent I just don't have that luxury. I have been going to bed earlier; a bedtime between 9-10 pm is recommended as well as naps throughout the day (again, that really wouldn't work for me). Stress reduction is a HUGE but the only way I would see that happening is if our foster baby went home, which would make me sad.
So that is what I am doing and where I am at. So far I am feeling better and I am no longer constipated which is what always happens whenever I get stressed. I have been waking up less groggy and without arthritic-like pain in my joints. Those are good signs so far and I am hoping for even greater improvements in the next few weeks.
The candida infection never left. It would get worse and then get better but it never totally went away, no matter how low carb I went. I felt tired all the time; depression would creep in at every little disturbance especially foster parenting stress would put me into a tailspin; my appetite disappeared both for food and sex; I got terrible PMS symptoms of incredibly tender breasts, acne and spotting a week before my period; my cycles were irregular; and I started to put on a lot of weight even though I wasn't eating any more calories. What was going on?
I have been following the Cheeseslave blog for a few years and while I don't always agree with her, I think that I was absolutely meant to read the posts she has been writing recently about what being low carb did to her and it was like reading my own story. I had NO idea that being low carb for too long could be dangerous. Everything I had read, like on Mark's Daily Apple, said that if you stayed between 100-150 carb grams per day, you were golden for life! I was afraid of adding too many carbs for fear of my candida beast and the possible effect on my insulin resistance. It was just easier to restrict my carbs since I had been doing it for so long so I usually stayed somewhere between 50-100 net carbs a day.
Now it is like EVERYBODY, even Paleo/Primal bloggers are coming out with these studies about how being low carb for too long with stress your adrenals. Matt Stone was writing about this long ago but his style can be so abrasive that I generally ignored him. Now, however, I am paying more attention and what he has been saying has been backed up so many times that I think I can say that he knows what he is talking about.
So now what is my game plan 15 months into the GAPS diet and feeling no better than when I started? Well, number one, I started eating more carbohydrates and more often. To repair adrenals it is best to eat 3 meals and 3 snacks a day, but it is really hard for me to do that on GAPS without spending my life in the kitchen. To boost my carbohydrate intake, in the last two weeks I have added some GAPS legal legumes (split peas and lentils) and I have also been eating more fruit and honey. While the extra carbs do aggravate the candida, it wasn't going away anyway and it doesn't seem to be getting worse so I will press on. I am supplementing with Adrenal Stress End which is a blend of adrenal cortex and some herbs that was recommended by another GAPS blogger in a similar situation. I do not like that it containes Betaine however since it gives me heartburn. I am also supplementing with Magnesium oil, Magnesium Citrate, B-Complex, Vitamin C and Zinc Piccolinate, all of which are supposed to support the adrenals. In addition I started to brew my own Rooibos Kombucha which helps with detoxification and should help with the candida.
Matt Stone recommends overfeeding and a lot of R&R to repair stressed adrenals, but unfortunately for me as a mom and especially as a foster parent I just don't have that luxury. I have been going to bed earlier; a bedtime between 9-10 pm is recommended as well as naps throughout the day (again, that really wouldn't work for me). Stress reduction is a HUGE but the only way I would see that happening is if our foster baby went home, which would make me sad.
So that is what I am doing and where I am at. So far I am feeling better and I am no longer constipated which is what always happens whenever I get stressed. I have been waking up less groggy and without arthritic-like pain in my joints. Those are good signs so far and I am hoping for even greater improvements in the next few weeks.
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