Hey y’all! The day after Christmas. My prayer is that you had a wonderful Christmas with family and that you also remembered the reason for the season, Jesus. The greatest gift ever.
I am sure that you all had massive quantities of amazing food, from traditional family dishes to the new stuff somebody fixed for everyone to try. Plates heaped with food. A taste of everything that always turns into a mountain of food on your plate. Everyone’s favorite saying, “my eyes were bigger than my stomach.” To-go boxes filled with the stuff you liked best. The joy of the merriment on your mind and the misery of the stuffed stomach in your body, on the trip home, or to bed if you hosted. Good stuff!
I had a different Christmas dinner this year with the family. My plate did not look like everybody else’s plate. It was smaller than the others. Not the plate. It had less options piled high. I did have some of my bother-in-laws amazing prime rib…and a baked sweet potato. That’s it. Meat and potato. You see I am following a food protocol from my nutritional therapist. Actually, she is a Functional Nutrition Therapy Practitioner (F.N.T.P.). I want to share the part of my journey to health that has to do with the gut. The eating side of health. I already knew that my normal, basic diet was junk. I had been trying to eliminate as much processed food as possible. I read ingredients on everything. I looked at carbs, knowing carbs turn to sugar and that was an issue for me. I’m getting ahead of myself.
At the beginning of this year, 2022, I decided I wanted to feel good, better, actually well. I wanted my body to feel something other than run down, out of sorts, and basically crappy all the time. I have shared before that I am a research nut. I love to research stuff. For many years I have been listening to and reading blogs that dealt with food and health. So, in January, I decided to do a sugar detox. I was convinced that this was the main area my health issues were coming from. My A1-C had been high for several years. The experts said cut out sugar. I did. I was convinced that doing this would cure many, if not all of my mysterious ailments. I had been working with my doctor to try and get some diagnosis for what I was battling. Chronic fatigue and generally feeling lousy. My research seemed to show that sugar was a primary culprit for the symptoms I had. Sugar detox. I got started.
They forgot to put in their information the jolt, the confusion, the absolute rebellion of the body when you remove sugar. I have since learned that suddenly removing something from your diet, like sugar, can and will send the body into conniptions. It really is similar to those who decide to get sober when they have drunk alcohol for a long time. The body has become used to it and has oriented itself to function with it being present on a consistent basis.
The trauma of cutting sugar out of my diet, when it had been such a mainstay, is not explainable. Stuff went nuts. I felt worse than I did before I started the detox. And my goal was to feel better. I know why people have a hard time quitting stuff. The quitting seems to be, at least this time, worse than the problems I had before I quit.
All my life I have “pushed through.” It’s what you did. You did not allow weakness. Much abuse comes when people think you are weak. Well, I had decided to listen to my body when I started the detox. I was not going to push through. I was not going to act like everything was okay when it wasn’t. Pushing through does not allow the body to heal the way it needs too. Really, I couldn’t have pushed through if I had to. The physical effects were so bad, that I actually had to choose not to go on a trip to Florida with Carr to see the grand kids. I love my grand kids. Big time! I love my daughter and her husband too, but grand kids are the best!!! There was not enough energy or life in me to make the trip. Oh, and it was for the grand kids birthdays that we were going. I wanted to push through. I wanted to believe the lie that I could push through and make it. Not so.
I wanted to be well. I wanted to feel good. It had been so long since I had felt well or good, I was not sure I would know when I reached that goal. I do know that the beginning of the journey was NOT what I expected. I had a picture in my head that this would take a couple of weeks and I’d feel the way I wanted too. Nope. Didn’t happen. Things were better, but not better enough. There were still issues that were not going away with deleting sugar from my diet. I was exhausted and frustrated. I wanted to feel better dammit!
More research. Sort of. Carr had me sit down and share all the research data I could remember. I follow many bloggers and Facebook pages that deal with the nutritional health world. Holistic people are my primary. These are the folks that do not use medicine but diet to help with health issues. I had thought about it for many years but had never said anything to Carr; I wanted a nutritional therapist. A person trained in the nutritional science of how food affects the body to work with me on my issues. To my surprise and joy, Carr started to look for nutrition therapists for me. Sheez. Who knew? This started in late February.
Sometime in late April, I finally found one. I had made a trip to Florida by myself to see the grand kids in early April. It was good, but my body was still not feeling well but good enough to make the trip. I begin to look very seriously for a nutritionist when I got home. I found several. One stuck out from the rest. I had been asking God to lead me to the correct nutritionist and He did. We had a phone consultation. She was the one. She went over the process, how she used supplements, and the duration of the process. Then she shared the cost. Holy …. You can put whatever word suits you in there. It was not a number I was prepared for. It was large. On top of her fee was the cost of the supplements. These are not supplements you can go get at the health food store. They actually have to be prescribed to you by the nutritionist. They have to be prescribed and sent into the company for you to order just like a doctor does for regular prescriptions. I was overwhelmed.
Fire up the trauma responses. My mind went crazy. The cost was too much. We couldn’t afford it. Carr wouldn’t want to pay it. I am causing so much trouble. I am not worth that much. I need to just push through. I hope this gives you a little picture of the battle that raged in my head.
I will continue this story tomorrow. Sharing to this point has worn me out.
Okay, bye for now.
Delisa (with Carr)