This was a hard post to write, after not having written anything here for three months. I told myself a little while back that I wouldn’t turn this blog into a food blog, but the problem is, all I’ve been thinking about for the past 40 days is food, so I haven’t felt inspired to blog. But, I’ve decided it’s time to let you in on what I’ve been up to lately anyway :)
Running, and really all exercise, has taken a definite backseat for me lately. I decided back in October that I wasn’t going to run the local Santa to the Sea Half Marathon that I had tentatively planned. I just wasn’t feeling well enough to run all the training mileage. I’ll talk more on how my thoughts on exercise have changed in my next post. But, today it’s about food, and digestion, which really need to be figured out before exercise is a priority, considering that 80% of our body composition comes from what we eat, and only 20% from how we exercise. So here we go!
Come November 2011, I had been on the full GAPS diet for a full year, and I honestly thought I’d be having less intestinal distress than I was having (lethargy, bloating, etc.). So, I went to a Naturopathic doctor in Santa Barbara, and she did some tests, and voila, I still have strong food sensitivities to egg whites, gluten, casein (a milk protein), and medium sensitivities to many other foods. Mine are not authentic food allergies (IgE response), which can cause anaphylactic reactions for example. That’s good, because it means I can eventually eat the problem foods!
Instead, I have what are called “food sensitivities” (IgG response): my body produces an autoimmune response when proteins that I eat, like gluten and casein, leak through my damaged gut lining into my bloodstream, undigested and therefore toxic to my body. Food sensitivity symptoms vary for everyone, but mine is extreme muscle weakness and lethargy.
Why is this happening? After a year of research and paying attention to my body, I think I’ve figured it out. Let’s work backwards:
1. My gut lining is damaged because of Candida albicans (yeast) overgrowth over the past many years.
a. Candida’s method is to attach itself to the intestinal wall and poke its little yeast tendrils through the lining, creating holes.
b. It is a VERY long and difficult process to detach and get rid of Candida. A person must starve it out by a combination of eating foods that heal and seal the gut lining, like chicken broth and animal fat, and not eating foods that either feed the Candida, like sugar, or further damage the gut lining, like high fiber/carbohydrate grains.
c. With careful implementation of a diet like this—a la the GAPS diet—the Candida dies and releases its bacterial toxins into the bloodstream, which have to be processed by the liver, and then are eventually eliminated. This is called “die-off” and causes a variety of different symptoms in people, like constipation and headaches. (That’s the reason why I’ve been feeling worse before feeling better!)
2. The Candida overgrowth was caused by my over-consumption of: the birth control pill, antibiotics, fiber, and high carbohydrate foods. My under-consumption of enough probiotic (lacto-fermented) food in my diet over the course of my life exacerbated the problem.
Now, if you’re still with me, let’s go back to the beginning of this post. Why wasn’t I feeling better after a year on the GAPS diet? My naturopath’s detection of food sensitivities (because of leaky intestines) was the key. I still hadn’t done enough to eliminate that nasty Candida—it’s still hanging on and causing problems.
Fast forward from November to today—I have moved further in my healing process than I did all last year! Hallelujah!
What did I do? I bit the bullet and went back on the strict GAPS Introduction Diet for a much more extended time than I tried last year. This is a food elimination diet, intended to quickly heal and seal the gut lining, coupled with a protocol for introducing new foods one by one to test for reactions to a possible sensitivity. A life-saver in making the decision to start was Cara’s e-book What Can I Eat Now? 30 Days on the GAPS Introduction Diet from her Health Home and Happiness blog. Thank you, Cara!
There are 6 stages to the intro diet, and I’m only on Stage 2 by now, but for the record, let me just say right now how much I LOVE the GAPS Introduction Protocol. I finally realized that I have to follow it exactly as written by neurologist Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride in her book: Gut and Psychology Syndrome.
The protocol has given me new hope of healing myself! Yay! Because it is so restrictive food wise, I finally know what’s going on, if, beyond the food sensitivities, I’m bloated (too much fiber), have a headache / spacey or “drunk” feeling (too much probiotic good bacteria causing toxic bacteria die-off), or my stomach is heavy (not enough stomach acid for protein digestion, or not enough bile for fat digestion). I would never have been able to figure all that out if I hadn’t gone to Stage 1 and stayed there for the past 40 days!
So, what am I eating? My daily diet has been: boiled vegetables in chicken broth and cooked chicken skin/fat pureed into a soup, with added boiled meat with fat on it, liver, and extra animal fat by the tablespoon(s) melted into the soup. Yes, all that for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. KISS = keep it simple, stupid! :) And, I have to say, my body has been loving all that fat and protein…demanding it at every meal. Every time I introduced a new food beyond this, I would watch for some reaction like those above, and then continue introducing in tiny amounts, or eliminate it for the time being.
For those of you worrying about my fat or animal product intake, I give you permission to worry no more, and here’s why:
1. All that fat is actually good for me because it is sealing my intestinal lining.
2. I make a huge effort to only buy organic and/or local meat, organs, and fat from pastured animals. No factory farmed food for me.
3. In terms of numbers, I have been eating a diet of at least 50% fat (mostly saturated from animals**), and up to 50 grams animal protein at every meal. If you’re worried about me getting a heart attack, read The Primal Blueprint: 21 Day Total Body Transformation by Mark Sisson, pages 67-74, or his more scientific explanation here. He uses scientific evidence to debunk all the “Conventional Wisdom” about saturated fat and cholesterol leading to heart disease.
4. I lost 12 pounds in 30 days, and the cellulite I had on my legs and thighs has noticeably reduced from all the gelatin/collagen in the chicken broth. The weight loss was obviously not the goal in this enterprise, but it was awesome to stop feeling bloated and fit into my old pants once again. Over the past year, I had gained those 12 extra pounds from eating carbohydrates that I wasn’t digesting properly!
5. My irritable moods have improved dramatically. Thank you, Julia Ross, author of The Mood Cure.
**Side note for me to rant just a little: If you’re a vegan or vegetarian and all this talk about animal eating grosses you out or bothers you in any way, we need to have a talk :) For reasons I won’t fully go into here, a vegetarian lifestyle is not the solution for a healthy body or environment. Yes, the amazingly effective Gerson Therapy cancer treatment program is vegan, but it is a misunderstanding to think it prevents cancer. All vegan diets at first do make people feel amazing as toxins leave their bodies, but eventually (up to 20 years for some people) veganism and even vegetarianism leads to mass nutrient deficiencies, body degeneration, and chemical imbalances in the brain that cause a person’s thinking to become very rigid and black-and white; s/he becomes unable to make the neurotransmitters that support healthy moods and as a result feels persecuted and angry all the time. If robust health is your goal, go out and eat a grass-fed, local beef hamburger wrapped in lettuce, with buttered veggies on the side. You know, deep down, that you want to. Listen to your body—it is brilliant and will smile. I would also recommend reading The Vegetarian Myth, written by a recovering vegan named Lierre Keith. Please comment below and we’ll start a healthy dialogue!
CASSEROLE RECIPE
Last weekend, on Day 42 of the GAPS Introduction Protocol, I ate something other than boiled meat and vegetables in a soup! I made this healing casserole:
Here is Cara’s recipe on p. 25 of her e-book, with some modifications of my own:
2 pounds hamburger (I used ground pork)
1 large butternut squash
1/2 tsp sea salt
fresh thyme and sage
2 cups chicken broth
Butter or animal fat (I used duck fat—yum!—found at this awesome meat market in Ventura).
Preheat oven to 360. Mix ground meat with sea salt, 1tbsp fat, and 1tsp each thyme and sage. Set aside. Peel and remove pulp from butternut squash and chop into bite-sized pieces. Grease a 9x13” pan with fat. Place squash in the pan and pour broth over the squash. Place pieces of the raw hamburger mixture over the top of the squash, covering evenly. Bake, covered with aluminum foil, for 45 min, then remove foil and bake an additional 30 min or until squash is soft and meat is cooked.
The sweetness of the butternut squash mingles with the saltiness of the meat and it really was tasty. That said, it could have been great just because it wasn’t soup! Enjoy :)
This morning I woke up and my body felt a little weird. I was slightly shaky, and feeling “underpowered”. But, I planned on going for a run today, so I ate a pre-run snack of homemade yogurt cream, chia seeds, 1/2 banana, raw honey, and raw cacao bits. I headed down to the Ventura boardwalk, where I like to run on the weekends. When I started running, my rational brain assured me I’d just run until I was too tired to keep my form in check and then walk the rest, but my competitive brain (what, I can’t have two brains?) told me that I should try to increase my mileage today and run up and over the bridge that I stopped at last week. Although now I’m quite exhausted, I’m proud to report that on the run I was able to both increase my distance to about 6 miles, yet not have to stop and walk, with the help of the ChiRunning Fatigue Fixers.
Today, at about mile 4.5, I thought I was ready to stop and walk, as my quad and calf muscles were getting fatigued. Having spent 2 years now working on my ChiRunning form, I can tell when my muscles get tired and cause my form to break down, because I get mild pains in certain joints and tendons. If I can rally the strength to bring the form back in check, the pains disappear. On page 254-255 of the ChiRunning book, Danny Dreyer lists some great tips for reducing fatigue on a run. I had read these a long time ago, but this morning I found myself cycling through the ones I remembered to keep me going. Happily, they worked! I’ve ordered them below—1 being the most helpful for me, 2 the next most helpful, and so on:
Tips for Reducing Fatigue
Hope this helps you run further, pain-free and without injury!
So, last week I posted about how Walking Is Underrated. It’s been another week of walking and strengthening exercises in the mornings since then, and while I was running this morning, I noticed some interesting things about my abilities:
1. Racewalking helps me practice rotating my pelvis. I’ve been working on my ChiRunning form for the past two years, and only now do I feel like I’m getting the Pelvic Rotation form focus figured out. If you have the ChiRunning book, it’s described on pages 99-101. Doing all that walking and really swinging my hips as I do it makes my body used to that kind of motion, so it’s easier to implement in a run. Also, it strengthens my abdomen so I can keep my pelvis leveled for longer periods of time. When I do focus on rotating my pelvis in this way while running, I start to feel my legs relaxing and the rest of my form solidifies.
2. Proper ChiRunning form requires upper body strength. My arms are getting stronger with the push-ups, triceps dips, shoulder presses, etc. that I’m doing in the mornings. But, because I do them every weekday, by Saturday my arms are a little tired. On the run this morning, my arm swing was great and I felt a powerful momentum and balancing effect from it, but I think my arms pooped out before my legs did! I’ve realized that the ChiRunning arm swing technique is something that I have to make an effort to do, to pull my elbows backwards as I move forward. To me it feels more like an arm “pump” than a “swing”, because the idea of swinging my arms makes me think they’ll just do it on their own, which they don’t. That’s why it takes some extra muscle and control to make the technique work well for me.
3. Racewalking strengthens my calves, but not my quads. Usually, when I’m out for a long run, I know it’s time to stop when either I’m too tired to keep my form solid which leads to my tendons/joints hurting, or my calves start tightening up. Walking in my FiveFingers makes it easy to remember to peel my foot off the ground, heel to toe, and that is a great calf workout. Today I ran about 5.5 miles, and surprisingly, I felt my quad muscles aching. I say surprisingly because I’ve never really felt my quads on a run unless I’m doing sprints or something. This tells me that training for long weekend runs by running on the weekdays builds up my quads, but training for long runs by racewalking builds up my core and calf muscles.
Obviously, a combination of both walking and running for training is in order if I’m going to have a successful half marathon in December. I think I’ll eventually add in one weekday run after school, maybe a sprint workout, and see how that feels. What do you think?
I am getting a sneaking suspicion that my speed walking for 30 min. every weekday morning keeps up my endurance as much as running 2 times on weekdays used to. A fitness goal I’m about 60% committed to right now is to run a local half marathon at the beginning of December. For the other halfs I trained for, I used the ChiRunning Pain Free Half Marathon Training Program and it was great. But, I had to run a lot after work, and I was always so unmotivated and tired or hungry or whatever when I started running that day that it was difficult. (Over the course of the run I usually would feel better and then be glad I did commit to it.)
I started the school year a month ago intending to train again, but to do my runs before school because I don’t teach first period this semester. With my husband’s encouragement to not jump into a drastic schedule change too quickly, I started speed walking with him in the mornings instead of running right away. And now I like the walking routine so much I don’t want to run instead! Here’s what my morning currently consists of:
We get up at 6:00, are out the door by 6:10. Walk around the neighborhood till 6:40, then I do my 10 min. morning workout that I talked about in my last post. Meanwhile, husband is juicing veggies so when I’m done with the workout I can gulp down a GAPSdiet smoothie of carrot juice, a raw egg (pastured), and homemade sour cream (you’ve gotta try it to believe it, but YUM). Then I shower and and am out the door again by 7:10 and off to school. This routine does take advance planning the night before to have my lunch packed and school clothes ready to jump into after the shower, but after 3 weeks of doing it, I’m finding it energizing and worth the thinking ahead!
The wake-up call about walking being underrated came this past Sunday when I went for a run and I was able to run a full mile and a half further than the last run I did two weeks ago. I felt strong in my muscles, lungs, and heart and was really surprised. I went into the run feeling like “Oh, I’ve been bad not running during the weeks, but I’ll just go as far as I can”. I guess I needn’t have worried. That experience psyched me up big time because the speed walking is already built into my get-ready-for-school routine, so I know I won’t slack off or forget to do it. I’m curious to see if I can keep increasing mileage every weekend while only walking during the week.
Maybe I should buy the ChiWalking book. Maybe it will be my new thing…anyone else try it?
I originally posted this workout a year ago, and since have upped some of the reps and added some new exercises. My arms are getting strong! Especially with all the bone broth, butter, and lentils that I’m eating :)