the gut story – part two

I’m back with Part Two. If you missed Part One, you can get caught up here.

And for the results…

The food testing showed that I have sensitivities to corn, rye, salmon, tea, and chick peas. These seemed totally random to me like they could have just been drawn out of a hat.

The environmental testing showed that I was highly sensitive to dust and dust mites, down feathers, and just about all molds.

The other tests showed that I had an overgrowth of candida in my gut. Candida is a yeast that naturally exists in your digestive tract but under certain circumstances can grow out of control. The symptoms range from chronic fatigue to fungal skin infections to craving sugar and alcohol to anxiety and mood swings to digestive issues to insomnia to itchy skin to food sensitivities – yep, I had them all.

The candida overgrowth in my gut was the result of a suppressed immune system and chronic inflammation. I was under an incredible amount of work related stress. I wasn’t handling that stress well, and I was turning to alcohol more often than I would like to admit. A common mantra for me was, I survived another day, I deserve a glass of wine or two or three. And this was every day.

On top of that, I was exposed to extreme amounts of dust and mold in my workplace. Every night I slept on a down feather pillow. My raw food diet had me eating a lot of fruit which flooded my bloodstream with sugar which yeast loves. I basically created the perfect environment for a yeast breeding ground.

You should know that candida overgrowth is not readily acknowledged in mainstream medicine and is somewhat controversial. It has been called a “fake illness” by medical professionals that don’t believe it is a real diagnosis. 

This is what the Mayo Clinic has to say on the subject, “Unfortunately, there isn’t much evidence to support the diagnosis of yeast syndrome. Consequently many conventional practitioners doubt its validity. And there are no clinical trials that document the efficacy of a candida cleanse diet for treating any recognized medical condition.”

That’s all well and good but after four years with no solution, I decided to gamble on a fake diagnosis. It couldn’t make things any worse. My holistic doctor referred me to a dietician specializing in elimination diets. To get rid of the yeast I would have to starve them out. I might also be intolerant of other foods like gluten and dairy that don’t always show up in traditional testing. I didn’t have Celiac and I wasn’t allergic to gluten, but I might have developed an intolerance for it.

I was put on a three month elimination diet as well as probiotics, glutamine and a prescription strength anti-fungal that I took in powder form ( I couldn’t take anything as a pill because often pills are processed with corn – who knew?). The first step was to cut out the foods that I had shown a sensitivity to in the testing. No corn, rye, salmon, tea, and chick peas.

I quickly realized that corn is in everything. Because that includes corn syrup and corn starch and corn oil and maldextrin. I didn’t eat much processed food to begin with, but when I started to read labels carefully I noticed that corn and its by products exist in just about all of our packaged food. I had to stop chewing gum. Did you know corn is in gum?

The good news – cutting out corn did relieve my symptoms significantly. From there I cut out all gluten and all dairy. And anything fermented – all alcohol and anything with vinegar which is most condiments and dressings. No refined sugar including honey and maple syrup. No potatoes – white or sweet. No beans. No chocolate or pistachios because both are rather moldy. No leftovers – mold starts to grow within hours. Even in the fridge. Sorry. It’s true.

Coffee is moldy, but I could have one cup a day. I could have 1/2 cup of fruit a day, a whole cup if it was berries because they are lower in sugar. And I could have a cup of whole grains (brown rice, quinoa, farrow) a day. As much vegetables and protein including eggs as I wanted. And nuts and seeds were okay too. And it should pretty much all be organic.

The point was to kill off the yeast, but to also relieve my system of the inflammation that had taken over my gut. I left my job which tapered off the stress and took me out of the dusty and moldy environment. I got a new pillow.

It was summer so it was hard, but it wasn’t horrible. I had a smoothie for breakfast, protein and rice for lunch and protein and salad for dinner.  Because I was at home and not working, it made managing food easier. The hardest part was eating away from home. I became a hermit that summer. It became very difficult to socialize when you couldn’t enjoy a beer or easily share a meal.

Sure I cheated here and there – especially at the beach. The beach was impossible. But overall I stuck the plan and after about six weeks I tried to reintroduce both gluten and then dairy without much success. My system wasn’t able to handle them. They came back out of my diet indefinitely.

At the end of three months, I felt significantly better. The symptoms that had plagued me for the last four years had pretty much disappeared. And when I got into a food that didn’t agree with me, my body let me know right away. I became much more in tune with what I put into my body and the physical reactions that foods triggered.

Although, I had re-calibrated my gut back to normal, I continued to maintain a version of this diet. No corn, gluten, dairy, limited sugar. I was able to have a glass of wine or cocktail when I wanted. And I learned to treat myself to things I love (like cheese and chocolate) by being more cautious in other areas. It became a very big balancing act.

So that’s where I was, plugging along and understanding that this was my new reality. I learned how to adapt my family’s eating so that I wasn’t making myself a separate dinner every night. I learned to like rice pasta.  I became an expert at eating on the go and ordering in restaurants. I accepted that this was what I needed to do to stay healthy.

Until this past November.

I decided on Thanksgiving Day that I was done. I wanted to eat what I wanted to eat. So I spent Thanksgiving eating stuffing, pie and mashed potatoes and December eating cookies, bread, crackers, cheese. I was off the wagon. And I didn’t feel that bad on a daily basis. Maybe this wasn’t a lifetime sentence. Maybe I could go back to a  pre-candida life.

And then on December 26th, I ate a whole formal tea service – mini sandwiches, scones, petite fours. Didn’t even bat an eye. Down the ol’ hatch.

Later that day when I started showing signs of a yeast infection, I knew the party was over. But I didn’t back off. I barreled straight through to New Year’s Eve. By January 2nd, I was barely able to function. I crawled into bed and didn’t emerge for five days. It was bad. I felt exactly like I did in those early days before I figured out what was wrong with me.

I lay in bed thinking stupid, stupid, stupid. I never want to feel this way again like you do when you have a particularly bad hangover and swear off alcohol forever. I knew what I had to do so I went into complete detox. I spent all of January back on the elimination diet trying to starve out the yeast that had once again taken over my gut.

It had been two and half years since I had started this whole ordeal. And I was back to where I started.

With this recent relapse, I’ve tried to become more accepting that this is a long term thing. Some part of me had to test the waters one more time, and it will probably happen again But for now I’m back to being much more disciplined about the food I use to fuel my body. And again, my symptoms have vanished.

Do I think candida is a real thing? I don’t know, and I’m not sure that for me it really matters.

Here is what I know and what I want you to know:

Taking the time to find a doctor that will listen to you is not something you should brush off. I can’t say this enough. Do the research. Have the interviews. Be your own advocate. And if your doctor doesn’t relate to you, keep trying until you find one that does.

Gut health is a major component to overall health. There are new studies coming out that link the gut to the brain that are fascinating and this book is very helpful if you think your gut is not functioning as it should be.

Chronic inflammation is really, really bad for your long term health. Think cancer and Alzheimer’s. (Google it). 

Long term health is more important than cheese. I’m still coming to terms with that.

I don’t know if any of this could have been avoided – if I hadn’t tried the raw food diet or hit the vino so hard or let my job take over my life or worked in a moldy building, maybe I could eat like a regular person. And that’s the hardest thing to come to terms with. Food is and was important to me. It is a part of celebrations and traditions and connecting to other people.

Saying, I don’t eat that or always having to ask about ingredients feels stifling and limiting to this girl who used to dive into chicken feet in Chinatown. Can you imagine me trying to ask if they were fried in corn oil?  And as anyone who lives with a food allergy knows, it is just plain exhausting.

If you have any questions or want to know more specifics about how I was suffering because you want to compare notes or think your gut might be off, please feel free to email me directly. Again, I’m not an expert or a doctor but this was my experience and I hope that by sharing it with you, there is continued awareness about gut health and why it matters.

Have a very real weekend.