October update

Hi Everyone! Still doing well. I'm teaching pilates, taking care of my family with good food and spending time with them, and in general, doing great!

 I have found that one drop of iodine is plenty. I muscle test every day for my Armour Thyroid and need a half one day, a whole the next. So I'm alternating between a half and whole grain. Maybe my thyroid will eventually heal completely.

 I still take iron and my gyno thinks I'll have to until menopause. I've been taking it since puberty. I added blackstrap molasses because it's a natural source of iron and other minerals. I prefer to go with food sources when I can, but I still take one Blood Builder per day most days.

 I still take 5HTP for sleep.

 I juice off and on. Recently, I have been juicing. I eat healthy with no grains. I do pilates three days per week and one day do sprints on the Spinning bike for 20 min. and a shorter pilates session of 25 min. 

So, I'm healthy and busy and live day to day without even thinking of Lyme Disease. I tell people "I used to have Lyme." It's not like remission where you have to do something to stay there, I'm just healthy. And I do things to stay healthy ... but in a normal, I'm almost 50 way. I hope all of you are doing well and getting better every day!

March update - allergy testing

Sorry I haven't written .... well not really ... I haven't written because I'm just feeling good and there's nothing to add.

Oh, I got allergy testing done. Remember how I ate at Bonefish Grill and had a crusted trout, so thought that since it was Bang Bang shrimp night that I got sick from shrimp contamination? Uh, surprise surprise. It wasn't the shrimp ...... it was the pecan crust on the trout! I'm allergic to pecans, peanuts (I knew), and sunflower seeds, but not shellfish.

I got a blood test done to confirm and don't have those results yet.

Still taking:

1 drop Lugol's iodine
Blood Builder, 1 tablet
magnesium
5HTP at bedtime
Armour Thyroid
Vitamin D3

Sometimes take:

Vitamin C
other antioxidants (resveratrol, or something else)

Update: My blood test came back as mildly allergic to clams, oysters, squid, and scallops.

Raw Food: Ignored advice to go slow!!!

Prior to becoming ill, I ate a TON of raw food! I tried to shoot for 50% or more. I juiced often. Then, when I got sick, I couldn't digest raw food at all. :( I could only eat vegetables if they were overcooked, so soups became a favorite because who likes overcooked side dishes?

Recently, I FINALLY can eat as much raw food as I want, so as I usually do, I went overboard. I read Norman Walker's book on Weight Control .... I didn't buy it, it came with my Norwalk Juicer .... but it has good information in it about eating raw. He warns, GO SLOW, don't change over all at once. Did I listen? Of course not!!! I'm too healthy for it to have been more than a little issue!

WRONG!!!

A day in, as usual, I had a little headache. Nothing big. Hardly noticeable. Three days in, my hips started hurting so badly that the pain woke me up in the middle of the night. The pain in the morning was severe. I did okay, but not great that day. That night, the pain reminded me of when I broke my leg!! OUCH! Two and a half hours after I went to bed and couldn't sleep because I was crying over the pain, I finally got up and ate an Udi's gluten-free bagel with butter and raw almond butter on it. I took a Vicodin, and went back to bed. I played on my iPhone until the Vicodin kicked in then went to sleep.

The next morning, they hurt again, but not so bad. After my evening juice, YOWEE!!! I wasn't messing around with it a second night, so took two Advil and a Norco. I ate some organic blue corn chips and had some wild rice with my dinner salad.

Today I got up and ate my new normal raw breakfast (a glass of fresh apple juice and a couple celery stalks with raw almond butter). I had leftover salad with wild rice for lunch. Multiple raw snacks. I feel much better today, no pain.

I was worried about not having enough food, not about an intense healing reaction. I've been eating raw seed bars, raw soaked almonds, avocados, and nut butters to be sure I'm getting enough fat and calories with all the pilates I've been doing. But I hadn't taken into account that going to fast might cause a healing reaction. Wow. I learned my lesson.

Here's a good site that talks about going raw and what can happen if you go too fast -link

I don't plan on eating all raw all the time, but I am happy to get back to eating a significant amount of raw fruits and veggies full of enzymes. Interestingly, last time I started juicing, a friend who only sees me once a week was so surprised how much younger I looked after only a week of it that she went out and bought a juicer that day. This time, hubby was out of town for four days, and when he got home he said the same thing. Why do I ever stop juicing?!?! LOL

"You're eating a raw food dinner? You better not, it will make you feel like $#!T!!! Yup, my body is weird. There is really no way to know why the detox reaction is in the hips. It started soon after starting raw food, and ended soon after adding cooked back in, so it was clearly related.

Being able to eat this way again tells me that I'm significantly healed. I've been finished with treatment of infection for a couple years now, but as you know I've been working on total healing since then. I want to change my body so that it's not the same as the body that got so gravely ill. I think I'm close to the last layer .... though you never know how many there are .... but this step is significant.

My plans are to eat raw all the way until dinner .... except for today, of course.