Remarkable website.....and story-telling....

It seems I get the most responses from health related posts. :) This is fascinating to me. Thanks to all who sent messages via FB over the weekend. I am striking cords and rekindling friendships with so many, purely on the basis that we all have secret symptoms or concerns that we're not talking about in public. Or maybe you're not willing to bridge the gap between a minor inconvenience and a truly painful disease because you know all too well that your mainstream practitioner will prescribe yet another pill. :) For whatever reason, thanks for opening up and sharing! I will continue to do the same.
I found a remarkable website this weekend. READ THIS, please. And if you're a Hulu fan, take a look at this video. God has designed our bodies to heal themselves. Plain and simple. But there's no way our bodies can heal if we're bombarding them with toxins, lack of sleep, and a suppressed immune system. My Candida has nothing to do with my "southern hemisphere". :) Sorry for the confusion. I should have explained more but I whole-heartedly believed no one would be able to relate anyway, so why share more information? Wrong! Turns out SO MANY of you are dealing with the same things. So, welcome, new Candida friends! :) I have had health problems since the day my daughter was born. She will turn 2 in December. She was my third c-section, and I lost an insane amount of blood during recovery in the hospital. Thankfully they were able to pump me full of enough meds to make the blood transfusion unnecessary. I need to be really careful about how much personal information I share because I really have no idea who's reading this. If I knew you were all girls, I'd spill my guts. But because there is no way of knowing for sure, I would rather ere on the side of "private/conservative" than ere on the side of "your hubby doesn't need to be knowing this about me". Understood? K. :) Again, if you have more questions, please just FB me! I am an open book. Just not one I want every other man reading. :) So here's my story:
I was losing the aforementioned "insane amount of blood" during recovery, but sadly it didn't end there. After months of this new "normal", I had a myriad of blood tests, exams, and ultrasounds to check for anything serious. My OB said it was the result of having 3 c-sections in only 2 1/2 years. So what? We love having babies. Sue me. :P My blood tests were showing a significant amount of vitamin deficiencies. For some reason, I wasn't absorbing the nutrients I was eating. That was IF I was eating any nutrients at all. After baby #3 came along, I just felt like I didn't have time to care anymore. Just last week I had a bag of swedish fish and 5 pieces of pepperoni for lunch. No lie. Tack onto that the marathon of "taxing mommy body syndrone". I don't expect you to know what that is. I just made it up. :) It's my definition of being pregnant and/or nursing every. stinkin'. day. of my life. for ALMOST 4 straight years. No breaks. Not even a single day where I wasn't doing one or the other. Talk about a burnt out body. But I don't even want to hear your comments about that one. I loved every minute, and miss it terribly. :) ANYWAY, I decided to go gluten free because I have such a high family history of celiacs, and I already knew through blood results that I carried the gene. Going gluten free changed my life. I have never had more energy. Seriously. I remember being 12 years old on any given holiday and the females in my family would go hit the sale racks after our large family dinners. I have very vivid memories of being so completely wiped out that I would have rather chosen to sit on the couch next to my daddy and fall asleep to the football game. That's not normal! Unless you had a dad like mine who would slid hand-written notes under your door in the morning that said how much he loved you. Then maybe that would be normal. :) I digress... Now let's get to the present day at hand. My mom heard of a study that showed that a lot of people who are deficient in magnesium can go back to eating gluten IF they bring their magnesium levels up. Hm. Sounded like a winning plan to me, so off I tread to my holistic doctor to explain my recent findings. She agreed that it could definitely help, but after listening to my crazy symptoms she knew right away what my problem was. Candida. She said going gluten free was a fantastic first step, but now I need to take the next one. She'd like me to have a special 184-panel blood test done to check for other food sensitivities, but insurance doesn't cover that so it will need to wait a little while longer. Thankfully no meds are needed to treat my case of Candida, just a lot of will power. No flour, no sugar, no yeast, no vinegar, no fruit, no juice, no soda, no ice cold Java Chip after a mid-morning run to Target. :( Sniff sniff. This is like torture for me! I R.E.L.Y. on sugar. And GF snacks. And ice cream. And mountain dew. And starbucks. It's what I look forward to. It's my "reward" for finishing the laundry, or homeschooling, or sorting through bins of clothes, or getting out of bed. :) I said "Oh no! Does this mean I can't have Mountain Dew in the middle of the day for my daily dose of caffeine to get me through the evening!?!?!" Her response: "Yeah, you can no longer have soda, but (insert positive, excited voice here) you CAN have a cup of green tea!!" Oh jeez. Thanks a bunch. My doctor (who is a holistic practitioner) had a baby a couple months ago and put herself on the Mucho Insano diet. I decided to take a good, hard look at my doctor. Beautiful, healthy, long hair. Perfect skin. All of 95 pounds. Hm. Remind me to NEVER schedule Seth an appointment to see her.... She said she thought her "baby belly" would be there to stay after she had child #2, but it completely left after 3 months on the diet. Another plus: everything you're allowed to eat with this plan is everything that fights cancer. It completely eliminates cancer's reason to live: yeast, flour, sugar. SO....I've spent the weekend researching what to eat, what not to eat, and how to survive the withdrawl period. Not fun. I'm almost to the point of wrapping my mind around it enough to start. Almost. :)

Keeping you posted,
Me