First Day of the detox.

I am still excited about this so it's all good. Except the part about the whole shock to the digestive system due to the copious amounts of real food it is processing. But I feel awesome. My blood sugar hasn't been all over the map today like it has the last few weeks which is glorious. I was beginning to think I was hormonally imbalanced and had even worse hypoglycemic things happening.

Most people think I am crazy for doing this upon hearing about the things I can't eat, and the first question is always "Why would you want to do that?" That's a good question.

When I was younger, like grade school young, I got really really sick. Not with anything specific, just really sickly. Grossly pale and skinny with horrendous dark circles under my eyes. Terribly fatigued and always catching the latest fashion in flu virus. No conventional doctor could really figure out why so they just prescribed antibiotics. Which in turn would give me awful digestive problems and make me more sick. My mom, bless her, took me to an alternative medicine practitioner who decided that through things I was ingesting my body had reached incredibly high levels of toxin concentrations. I was diagnosed with candida (intestinal yeast problems, most likely from the antibiotics), leaky gut syndrome (pretty much what it sounds like, causing my immune system to attack everything consumed as an allergy), and then tested for food allergies. There is nothing more depressing as a 12 year old than sitting at a table with your friends at school while they eat pizza, nachos, sandwiches, cookies and the like, while you eat the same thing for about three years (oats, rice, green vegetables, very little fruit, and beef). I had developed allergies or sensitivities to nearly everything. For three years I had to eat like this in addition to taking an obscene amount of vitamins and supplements, before I could add anything back in. Before cutting everything out I had gotten to the point that things like carrots and bananas would make me break out in hives.

Around the end of middle school, having reached a certain degree of health, I quit caring and started sneaking food I wasn't supposed to have. And everything came back again. I have battled with this on and off since then. For someone who loves food, and loves to bake especially, this is a very difficult struggle. It could be so much worse, I know. But it's still rough. Then, being a single parent added in the problem of never having enough time to cook the way I should and want to be eating which leads to eating a lot of processed foods. Lately, old symptoms have been creeping back in. Itchy throat when I eat things that usually don't bother me, fatigue, digestive issues, and the worst skin problems I have ever had. (Still, could be worse, but hints at something else going on.) The worst though is that my asthma has started to bother me all the time whereas before, it was just around cats and dogs.

So, instead of waiting for this all to lead to a total breakdown in health, or letting this increase my likelihood of developing all the gross diseases that hereditarily stalk my family, I am going to do something about it. Yay me! Let's see how it goes!