Could there be some actual healing going on here? Auto-Immune Paleo
It's day 8 of our auto-immune diet and I'm coming out of a day or two of feeling extremely crabby about it. Around day 3, Aidan's skin got so much worse than it had been in quite a long time and I was feeling nervous, (but also curious) because there's something called a healing crises that can occur when your body begins to have what's called a die-off effect (called Herxheimer)...this can have a wide range of symptoms that can manifest in the body from brain fog to skin conditions from the toxins released by an overgrowth of bacteria or yeast. I had to succumb to using steroids on his skin because he was beginning to bleed in many places, which you really don't want as open wounds can lead to infections, and and he was pretty miserable with all the scratching. We used steroids twice in one day and then once more in a few spots the next morning and sent him off to my mom's for two nights (with lots of instructions, chix soup, Paleo jerky, and recipes) to help support her cooking for him too! Flash forward to today: I am knocking on wood as I type, but...his skin is SO MUCH BETTER!!! Yes, it IS possible that it's still the steroids working, but it's been a few days and normally we would start seeing the eczema working it's way back in, but it is only looking more and more clear and he says he hasn't felt at all itchy in a couple of days.
So, why was I so crabby, you ask? Aside from the massive eczema outbreak around day 3, I was also feeling overwhelmed by the task at hang. All the planning, the shopping, the chopping, and quite frankly, eating ALL. THAT. MEAT! I have never been a big meat eater and was a vegetarian for 15 yrs, so while I believe that meat can be a very important part of a person's diet (as long as it's been fed what it was put on Earth to eat and that there's no hormones in it), I am a big proponent of eating beans and other protein rich foods to round it all out. But not now. Now I'm all veggies, grassfed meats, fruits (but not too much), and healthy fats.
So here's what I'm doing to make this journey easier on myself:
1. creating a dinner plan I will rotate every single week: I'm not going to go exploring all kinds of new recipes this first month. I'm going to find the ones that are fast, easy and that my family likes, and have them over and over and over again. :)
2. using my Plan to Eat app, so I can put all my recipes into it and get a shopping list that I can pull up on my phone at the grocery store. I absolutely LOVE this app. They give a free 30 day trial--if you wanna try it click here! I can tell you, it's the best food planning decision I've made in a long time (the coolest part is that if you find a recipe on any website out there, you just click on the Recipe on your toolbar that you've very easily installed, and it puts it into the app for you--so easy. AND, you can see all your friends recipes to share!)
3. let go of it being 'hard'. I meditated on this one last week. A lot. I realized that my saying out loud that it's going to be hard, that it's challenging, that it sucks, just wasn't working for me. I had turned it around. All the way around. Because the truth is that if I follow #1 and #2 above, it really isn't all that hard. And I'm already not missing the treats I used to love. And...BONUS, I'm losing a bit of the extra weight I put on this summer. My mantra: I got this. This isn't suffering. It's exploration, healing, and light. And it won't last forever!!
And to cap off this post, I thought I'd share with you our favorite new recipe from last week that even my pickiest eater loved. This is a very easy recipe and one I plan to have every week--great for fall, too!
