I’ve been sharing my health story from the last four years in the Something Was Wrong and Taking Responsibility For My Health blog posts. Here is how I started healing myself.
From my research on the Internet, my symptoms pointed to inflammation, autoimmune disease, and leaky gut so I started to heal myself with food and lifestyle changes. I started with the 21 Day Sugar Detox to remove gluten, dairy, most all fruits, and many other foods that trigger inflammation, and start resetting my body. This detox cleared up the eczema on my stomach and hands. I read The Paleo Cure and did the 30-Day Reset. I started to reintroduce foods slowly back into my diet and carefully watched how my body reacted. I found out dairy triggered my eczema, and gluten, tomatoes, and white beans upset my stomach. I knew to stay away from these foods.
I found a doctor on the Institute of Functional Medicine that was in line with my approach to recovery. I wanted someone to find the problem, not manage my symptoms. He used blood tests to find answers. I had a thyroid autoimmune disease, also known as hypothyroidism, also known as Hashimoto’s. Gluten intolerance triggered this and caused the inflammation in my skin (eczema) and brain (uncontrolled twitch).
Conventional medicine would treat the thyroid autoimmune disease symptoms with antibiotics. Because the antibiotics won’t solve the problem, there would be more antibiotics and higher dosages to treat the symptoms.
I chose to reduce, manage, and hopefully eliminate the inflammation. I changed my diet and stopped eating gluten, dairy, and the other food triggers. The other changes I needed to make were lifestyle changes. I’ve always had stressful jobs and not enough sleep. This had to stop. The food changes were the easier part. Managing stress and sleeping more then 7 hours were much harder.
It’s been 3 years since I started this journey of getting well. My B12 number is healthy, thyroid antibodies is going down, no uncontrolled twitch, and eczema is almost cleared up. It’s a journey that I’m still on and I know as long as I’m feeling well and my test results are heading in the right direction, I’m on the right path.
Cheers to Feeling Healthy,
Chrissy xo