My life in Acronymlandia to now

My life until now! (LOL)

(This is a long one - my health journey is more complicated than I realized!)



Even though I've been doing GAPS for almost a week, I was inspired by Starlene Stewart of GAPS Diet Journey to start my own diary of my visit to GAPS town, both so I can see my progress (fingers crossed!) and for others who are starting or are thinking of starting their own attempt. It's not easy, and it's been enormously helpful, inspiring even, to read about other people's experiences. I hope this blog can do the same for someone else.

I found myself in Acronymlandia - living with PCOS, GERD, and SIBO - decades ago, even though I didn't realize it until fairly recently. In my early 20's I started having issues with gas (mostly burping but often out the other end as well). In my late 20's I started developing seborrheic dermatitis, a lovely skin condition where you have giant monster sized flakes of dandruff. Super attractive and not embarrassing at all! By my late 30's I also had gross, scaly (seriously scaly, like the Creature from the Black Lagoon scaly) eczema on the front of my ankles; and keratosis pilaris (tiny hard little nubs keratin, i.e. fingernail, growing in your pores) along with a rashy redness on my upper arms. For most of this time I also had hidradenitis suppurativa, another skin condition, this one looks like the absolute worst and most disgusting case of giant acne pimples on the inside of my thighs.

Holy moly, looking back on it I really was a mess! I do remember feeling depressed and pretty much resigned to never having an intimate relationship because who in their right mind would want to date a scaly, rashy, bumpy, acne-y mess. All this changed when I found the Paleo diet. Almost immediately all of my skin conditions started getting better. I was on a kick! I lost a ton of weight, almost without trying, by sticking with low-ish carb Paleo. This lasted for about half a year; I was feeling great! I had started training at a great Crossfit box in Brooklyn. I was doing WODS! I was lifting crazy heavy weights! I felt AWESOME!!

It all came crashing down when, after a workout, I started feeling pain in my right shoulder. I motored through it, because that's what you do! I didn't let it stop me! At work, I kept lifting heavy things above my head! I kept working out! I kept doing bench presses! The bench presses which had irritated my rotator cuff tendon because I had bone spurs that I had no idea I even had until I started exercising. I blindly kept this up until I tore my left rotator cuff tendon, too. This time I did not try to be a hero. I pampered my left shoulder. I did nothing until the soreness disappeared. And I went to an orthopedic doctor, who told me that I had torn both tendons and would need surgery. SUPER DUPER AWESOME!

I tried to keep up with Paleo but I started backsliding, and then backsliding a little more. I'd do strict month-long resets then tell myself I would eat 80/20 Paleo (80% Paleo/20% Standard American Diet, or SAD). It would not go the way I planned. The holidays would come and I'd tell myself that I would let myself eat whatever then be strict again, and I would manage to stick with it when I had to do it 100% but I could never keep it up. I tried different month-long rounds of Diane Sanfilippo's 21 Day Sugar Detox, and John Kiefer's Carb Nite. All of these short term solutions were beneficial, but they never lasted. During this time I had started living with my boyfriend (did I mention him? I got a boyfriend! After years and years and years of nothing! OMG!) Awesome as he was, he found himself constitutionally incapable of resisting the lure of crappy SAD foods.

Then, last year I tried a month of cyclic low carb and... Nothing. I lost nothing, not one pound! It didn't work!! It was then that I realized that I had PCOS, a hormonal imbalance in women that, among other symptoms, makes it really, really, REALLY hard to lose weight. With this realization I basically gave up, and decided to just try eat well and exercise; to be healthy regardless of my size.

But a storm was brewing on the horizon; the GERD that I'd been struggling with for years - the excessive gas after meals had progressed to having to suffer the torture of food getting stuck halfway down your esophagus - got even worse. It was bad enough to have food get stuck in your esophagus. It's one of the most painful things I've ever felt, like trying to birth through your chest! It didn't happen very often, maybe once every couple of months, but when it did it was AWEFUL! But then, even though I couldn't imagine it getting any worse, it got worse: it wouldn't go down. The first time this happened I was in the bathroom at work, terrified that I was going to have to go to the ER to have this food removed, but then my body went into action and I vomited it up into the toilet (to my great relief.)

Since that incident it's happened several more times, even though I tried to chew and chew my food until it was mush; I would forget and get a little careless, and then it would get stuck again. Most of the time it would go down, as it had before, but a couple of times I had to upchuck what was stuck, including at my cousin's beautiful wedding (joy!!).

Around this time I started developing new symptoms whenever I would go off Paleo; swelling and severe pain and inflammation in my ankles! On my last vacation my good friend (F) came over and painted my apartment for me. As a "thank you" I paid for all his food. Since I was busy too (Boyfriend an I would do all the cleaning and prepping of the area, including moving furniture from one part of my small studio apartment to the other - it was like a giant, exhausting Rubik's cube). My pain was so bad I could barely stand, and had to take frequent breaks. I showed F my ankles and he was horrified - it didn't even look like I had ankles! I immediately went off gluten and that helped enormously. I still ate tons of rice, potatoes, and SUGAR though.

This was in October, the beginning of bad food season, and I wasn't going to make myself trigger disordered thinking around food. I've struggled with this since as a result of  dieting from my teens to my late 20's, when I decided that loving myself and being kind to myself was more important than what people thought about me. I have a much better relationship with food and with my body now, but I still will have a reactive urge to binge if I restrict my diet too much, or even if  I'm around people who are judgmental about food and eating.

It was around this time that I realized that I probably had PCOS. I have all the symptoms: obesity, exhaustion, unwanted hair on unwanted parts of my body (like my chin), hair loss where I actually wanted it (like my head), sleep problems (sleep apnea, for which I've used a CPAP machine for years). It all fell into place. I started trying to work on this issue, too. But the GERD was always there in the back of my mind. I knew I had to do something about it. I had known what the solution was for a few years but I had avoided doing it because it's so hard, and takes so long. I had to go on a GAPS/SCD style diet, and I had to stick with it far longer than the month or few months that I normally would do.

I need to do this. I'm 47 years old. I've had a good 25 years of health issues that need to be cleared up (longer if you look at how I went from a skinny, healthy kid to an overweight, hungry all the time teen - I'm sure my gut issues really started around puberty if not a little earlier). I don't want to be stuck in a wheelchair when I'm 60. I want to live a full life, and life requires a healthy body.


(To be continued! Because this got waaaaaaay too long for one post!!)