This has been my diet for the last month and a half:
Lettuce
Cilantro
Beef
Chicken
Collard greens
Apple cider vinegar
Coconut oil
Olive oil
A ton of salt.
REALLY boring. But everything else (so it seemed) was giving me arthritis, skin issues, itchy skin, and depression. As you know, I cut out fish in April… and before that I cut out turmeric. I cut out everything I could think of that might be giving me issues. And I got better. Then I came up with this Candida theory and so I’m thinking it’s sugar that was causing these problems. Well, I successfully reintroduced fish (salmon and tuna) 2 weeks ago, turmeric a week and a half ago andddd OLIVES YESTERDAY. I was wrong to cut out fish and turmeric thank god. It’s hard when it feels like everything you eat is making you ill though.
Olives are pretty much my favourite food (except soy but that’s never happening again). They don’t have any sugar in them! AND SUCCESS, no arthritis, no skin issues, no mood issues!! So it looks like this no sugar thing is an actual step in the right direction. (I’m going to try avocado’s next – they have 0.7g of sugar per 100g so that’s pretty much what lettuce has). And that would be amazing as well. But I was pretty happy yesterday. I’m still pretty happy. I haven’t had olives in almost 2 years and these were goooood. I made sure they were organic and preservative free to avoid an IgG reaction. They weren’t hard to find at Whole Foods and some natural food stores.
That also means that (potentially) most spices are back in and some other things.
I started taking a low dose probiotic, literally for babies. 5 billion CFU and a couple of strange things happened. It made my stomach a bit gurgly, and then a day or 2 days later it hit my mood, but not like and IgG reaction. I couldn’t handle any stress. Things that I wouldn’t normally care about freaked me out, but if I was in a place with zero stress, I was fine. (With IgG reactions, there is no place you can be where you don’t feel awful until it’s over – so this was way easier to deal with). So my stress tolerance dropped to zero, and my digestion improved overnight, then it started to get to my skin and I woke up with a coated tongue.
Dad, who has been extremely skeptical of the diet for the last while actually sat down to talk to me about it – he’s also eating as limited as me and he’s feeling better. He thinks this Candida theory might be plausible. Anyways, he suggested activated charcoal. I hadn’t thought of this before, but I thought the probiotic reaction was a Herxheimer reaction (die off from the Candida). That would also explain why my skin started reacting and my tongue got coated. So I started a regiment where I take my probiotics right before bed (on a full stomach), then I wake up at 7am and chug some water and charcoal and go back to sleep, then I eat around 10am. You can’t eat that soon after activated charcoal.
The reason I’m taking the probiotics at night is I find they cause a dip in my mood within about 40 minutes of taking them. So theoretically, I take probiotics and go to sleep, they push out some Candida while I’m sleeping and in the morning I chug some charcoal which helps wash the Candida + toxins out.
I feel way better. And my skin started getting better right away. So I upped my probiotics dose (to 10 billion CFU – still the children’s kind). Two days later I had an emotional freak out again, and then the next day I felt better (again). My digestion also improved again.
Very odd. I’m feeling good again so I’m going to up the dose to 15 billion CFU tonight. I’ll let everyone know how it goes.
UPDATE: it didn’t go well – be wary of taking probiotics if you have a severely leaky gut without addressing the leak. Sometimes they help address it, sometimes they leak into your blood from your gut and make you feel awful.
This is a ketogenic type diet. So supplement with potassium and possibly magnesium. Hope you can eat avocados cuz they got a lot of these two minerals. Also replace normal salt with pink salt since they have potassium and magnesium, and drink a lot of bone broth soup. There are specialists (doctors of functional medicine) such as Chris Kresser in the US that treat candida. I suggest you def look into his research and practice in treating Candida. I came to know him from the Joe Rogan podcast! Also try Sauerkraut( fermentation lowers the amount of carbs), and fermented garlic. I heard good things about probiotic called vsl #3 which is not necessarily introducing many bacteria from different families, but many from one family especially lactobacillus
Hey, so I’m doing a bunch of this! I always eat pink salt, and I drink bone broth soup almost every day. I can’t eat white cabbage and the amount of probiotics in sauerkraut is actually too hard on me.. so I’ll do that when I can handle more. I can’t wait though, love sauerkraut. I’m going to make my own with red cabbage. I’ve heard really good things about vsl #3 too… I’ll try that when I can handle a higher amount of probiotics. I’m a bit worried about garlic because I seem have a sulfite reaction.. so we’ll see about that. Otherwise I’ve started some antifungals. You can’t do much when you’re pregnant though. Berberine, oregano oil, a bunch of antifungal herbs aren’t okay. So I have to wait :/ so far just probiotics and vitamins too. I’ll write about the supplements I’m taking Sunday probably!
Hi Mikhaila,
What do you eat for breakfast based on the foods you’re limited to eating?
I’ve given up on typical breakfast foods a long time ago. Fortunately I never really liked breakfast foods. I just eat lunch and dinner foods for breakfast!
Have you checked out the work of Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride?
(A medical doctor with two postgraduate degrees: Master of Medical Sciences in Neurology and Master of Medical Sciences in Human Nutrition.) She practiced in Russia for five years as a Neurologist and three years as a Neurosurgeon. She moved to the UK, where she got her second postgraduate degree in Human Nutrition. She developed the concept of GAPS (Gut And Psychology Syndrome) and the GAPS diet – I believe she treated her own autistic son with the diet -Natural Treatment for Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, Depression and Schizophrenia, autoimmune disease, digestive disorders – Her theory is that disease begins in the gut; poor gut flora leads to poor health – The GAPS Diet focuses on removing foods that are difficult to digest and damaging to gut flora and replacing them with nutrient-dense foods to give the intestinal lining a chance to heal and seal. Treatment includes fermented foods, removing foods that are difficult to digest and adding supplements to complement the diet including probiotics, digestive enzymes, vitamins and minerals. When I was younger, I suffered with severe allergies and I’m sure it was related to poor gut flora and also terrible affects of allergy shots I got when I was young. I’m convinced the serums I was given were toxic and did more damage than anything. With regards to vitamin supplements, I’ve found Platinum brand very helpful and Ultimate Flora or Natren probiotics are very good. Check the links: http://www.gapsdiet.com and http://www.gaps.me/new-baby.php. All good things to you Mikhaila in your last seven weeks and this exciting time in your life! Blessings to you and baby!
Regarding research into this I’ve personally gone down a similar path you are right now years ago. The next thing you’ll run into, if you have not already, is heavy metal poisoning. Mainly mercury and lead. Some say candida contributes to this and your damaged gut lining is not keeping these toxins out. If you have had lots of bone issues in the past, I’d imagine your teeth would also have suffered. Do you have any amalgam dental fillings. Also called silver fillings. They are 50% mercury and 20% silver. The claim is that the mercury is inert when hardened, but there is a tremendous amount recent info that claims otherwise. Old houses used to also have lead piping solder in plumbing until it was banned in 1986.
I find this whole area of naturopathic medicine is so much full of BS, that it’s difficult to know what is just “old wife’s tales” and what is actual science. It’s a slippery slope which can eventually turn you into a paranoid hypochondriac.
Also, regarding food sensitivity: http://www.cleanandleanrevolution.com/why-i-dont-recommend-food-sensitivity-intolerance-testing-to-my-patients/
I’ve run into heavy metal poisoning already, I’m not that concerned because I don’t have any metals that would cause problems in my body. I’m also taking a number of things that coincidentally (supposedly) cleanse heavy metals as they can (supposedly) accumulate anyways – like you said, with old piping for instance. It is a slippery slope though! As for that article, I’ve read it before and disagree with it. I also don’t believe the author has an understanding of basic immunology (at least in regards to antibodies) at all. It was articles like that that stopped me from looking into IgG intolerance testing for years. You can read my post on IgG antibodies, but there’s solid evidence that people who produce these antibodies to certain things (dairy mainly) have joint problems directly due to those antibodies. That’s solid already. There are also a plethora of health problems caused by IgG build up in tissues. Also evidence for that. This information is available in second year immunology textbooks and I don’t believe the author of that article is aware of this. She does agree that a 10 food panel (at the end of the article) is more accurate, but if a 10 food panel is accurate, then testing for all foods isn’t gong to be less accurate (unless the company is flawed). The company I tested with seems to be right on point. This kind of article prolonged my recovery because I’m such a skeptic, and it made sense on the surface more than pro food panel testing articles. But I completely disagree.
The test I’ve had must have been trash then, because it said I was extremely sensitive to absolutely everything except fish. I love fish and all, but I decided I can’t just live on that at the cost of salmon. Plus now they say almost all fish are contaminated with mercury. What are you taking to clean heavy metals? Only thing I’ve run into is seaweed (chlorella).
Chlorella is what I’m using. Send me an email, and let me know what test you took if you’d like
Thank you Mikhaila for clarifying that. You certainly know your stuff. I am so grateful that there is someone like you who is educated on all the food sensitivities and knows the real truth about it and is willing to share it with the world!
Leave a comment