Nine days ago, I embarked on a 28 Day Clean Eating Challenge. The first four days were more than rocky to say the least. My body was detoxing and I felt miserable. I had a migraine for four straight days and could barely muster the energy to get out of bed. And then, suddenly, out of the blue, I felt a sudden shift in my health. I woke up feeling good. I mean, really, really good. And I had energy. And I felt motivated. And I could function without having to lay down and take breaks in between tasks. And I didn't have any headaches, or sugar cravings, or the desire to sleep for days.
Truth is, I felt better than I had in years. In total, I had four straight days of almost feeling like my old self. And I began to believe I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. That was until I woke up today. It wasn't a horrible headache, but it was there all the same. It was joined by the evil twins -- sluggishness and fatigue. And so I was reminded that I'm still not off this twisted path of Lyme.
I wish getting better was just a matter of eating clean, but I'm afraid things are more complicated than that. I've been sick for a long time, and it's going to take a considerable amount of time and concentrated effort to put me back together again. Eating clean is definitely part of the equation, though, and probably one of the best things I can do to heal my body. After all, food is medicine. But it's not going to happen overnight. There are no magic pills here.
What I have learned on this journey is that "modern medicine" won't help someone like me. Because most doctors aren't interested in getting to the root of what ails my body. They merely treat each symptom as it arises without connecting these symptoms or recognizing that what we have here is a body that isn't functioning as it should.
My body is very sick. In many ways it has become sicker over the years from getting the "wrong" treatments from my doctors. You could even go so far to say I've been "mistreated." Not out of malice, of course, but merely because doctoring and healing have become co-opted by the pharmaceutical industry. Our doctors are taught to look at symptoms, make a quick diagnosis, and give us a pill. And so, I've been given anti-inflammatories, antidepressants, antibiotics, and epidurals. And all of these acted as as temporary aids, mere band-aids, that ultimately only masked my symptoms. But worse, I believe these medications merely made things worse. To my system, these things are just more toxins that it can't filter. And they don't get to the crux of my issue.
I've only started learning about my body, and how it works or rather how it should work, when I started seeing a functional doctor to treat my Lyme. I've recently learned that I possess a genetic mutation which means I have a methylation deficiency. Without going into a lot of detail this means my body has a problem creating methyl folate which is necessary for healing, creating dopamine, clearing chemicals and toxins from the body, supporting T-cells, and human growth hormones.
I was born with this defect, and thus have had it my entire life. This is why I've always struggled to feel better after extreme stress or trauma. I have always felt like I was functioning at only 65% of my capacity even when I was supposedly 'well.' My body had been fighting various infections for years, which led to chronic inflammation, which has damaged my immune system and made me extremely sensitive to and and all toxins entering my system. This is why I can't shake Epstein Barr, or Lyme, or the other parasites that have invaded my body. This is why I have mold illness and can't handle gluten or sugar or dairy.
Good news is I'm not at the end of my road yet. And I have many new paths open to me. I just can't follow the traditional path and make my symptoms disappear. In fact, my symptoms are clues that I should have been following all along. When you treat the body as a whole, rather than as a bunch of parts, you start to see that you can't heal your gut or heal your headaches or heal your depression or heal your heartburn, until you understand how your own body is functioning. We don't all respond quickly to pills, because we're not all hardwired the same.
And so I continue down a rocky path, moving towards answers and solutions that aim to heal my whole body, and not just address the symptoms.
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