More good news (olives!! and probiotics and activated charcoal)
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.