Amanda’s Epic Health Saga

My health took a nosedive when I was about 7 months pregnant in February 2011. Both sides of our family were going through major trauma and I absorbed the stress of those events like a sponge. I then had 22 hours of unmediated induced labor due to dangerously high blood pressure that led to an emergency C-section on April 20, 2011. Our beautiful son, Kyle, arrived healthy, albeit jaundiced, and my body seemingly recovered, and I thought I was ok until August of that year. At that point I was still working full time and never really took a full maternity leave. I loved my job, was successful, and working all. The. Time.

Let’s take it back a few more months before I got pregnant. I was working like a crazy person, doing crossfit 4 times a week at 5:30am, running in the afternoons, drinking copious amounts of coffee to get out of bed and get going in the morning, drinking diet coke to stay awake during the day, drinking wine and margaritas at night to calm down and “deal” with stress, taking multiple rounds of antibiotics to fight a recurring sinus infection, regularly taking 4 ibuprofen at a time to manage chronic pain and intense headaches, and sleeping about 6 hours/night. Basically treating my body like a machine. This was a recipe for disaster.

But wait, there’s more. After my pregnancy I was in a hurry to lose all the weight I gained so I was drinking white protein shakes (aka devoid of all micronutrients, aka – freaking important stuff for your body) 2x/day and maybe a salad for dinner. I never stopped working like a crazy person and had a newborn to care for. My wrist and hands were so inflamed that they clicked when I moved them. I got steroid shots from an orthopedic surgeon and had to wear braces on both of my wrists while caring for and nursing Kyle. It was awesome. The pain in my wrists did not go away with the shots. It got worse, and it moved all over my body: shoulders, knees, back, and hips. At this point I started more heavily seeking alternative health practitioners. I got some help from my massage therapist, craniosacral therapist, and chiropractor and limped along for the rest of 2011 and the first 3 months of 2012. Then the shit really hit the fan when I came down with my first Epstein Barr infection in April 2012. It was serious. It was scary and it got our attention like nothing before. I wasn’t sleeping, I had zero energy, I couldn’t eat anything without getting sick, and I was in pain all the time.

I started seeing an alternative health practitioner in Austin and began considering that my diet and lifestyle were going to kill me if I didn’t make major changes. Despite my efforts with diet changes, supplements, and working less, I just seemed to get worse and worse. In September of 2013 I was able to get in to see a freaking fabulously brilliant doctor in Dallas, for whom I have profound respect. She had me take about a million tests of all types, but once we got the results back from those, were able to more closely put a finger on what was going on with my body. I had heavy metal poisoning, celiac disease, hypothyroidism, fibromyalgia, Epstein Barr, severe gut dysbiosis (my gut bacteria was completely out of whack, which means I couldn’t digest food properly and my immune system was severely compromised), hormonal imbalance (my body wasn’t making much progesterone and my cortisol was flip-flopped which helped explain my insomnia), and pancreatic dysfunction.

Boy, was this a big hole to dig out of. I was intimidated and overwhelmed, but my MD assured me we would tackle this and I would get better. It wasn’t all sunshine and roses from then on. I’ve had some major setbacks, more infections, more problems have arisen as we’ve treated other ones – as it turns out our bodies are super dynamic organisms, not machines. I took (and continue to take) supplements, have tried many different ways of eating, quit my job, started doing yoga religiously, dug deep in to my community and relationships, went to therapy, meditated, prayed, journaled, exercised lightly, started practicing good sleep hygiene, and generally getting my shit together. It takes a really long time to get gut bacteria back as it should be and heal your immune system, stop chronic inflammation, and let your glands recover from years of abuse.

Along with the lifestyle changes, supplements, and continued testing of all sorts, I tried a lot of different eating philosophies. First, I started juicing. After my first 7-day juice cleanse, I felt a significant boost in my energy, sleep, and did not experience much stomach pain. Those results were short lived, but encouraged me to continue down that pathway of eating. So, I juiced a ton and ate raw vegan for 12 months. I continued to trend upward, but not without setbacks. After 12 months I adopted a more varied diet with limited meats, but started eating whole, gluten free grains again and legumes. I felt like a crap sandwich, but continued eating that way because I couldn’t figure out what else to do for myself. During this stage, I realized I’d developed a fructose intolerance from all the juicing and increased sugar intake during my vegan year, but I hadn’t heard of a low FODMAP diet yet, so I just stopped eating all sugar with the exception of berries. This helped somewhat, but my stomach continued to hurt and despite my best food tracking efforts and detective work, I couldn’t figure out why.

In the fall of 2015 I followed a very strict low histamine diet, which again, was helpful in some ways, but not a complete solution. Right after that I cut out all grains and that catapulted me to an even better place – I immediately started sleeping better. Then I started hearing about the low FODMAP diet from my doctor and a friend who had experienced success with it. This is the last diet I wanted to do. It’s a pain, a huge huge pain. Another friend let me borrow a book, The Paleo Approach by Dr. Sarah Ballentyne and that’s when things really got interesting. I devoured this woman’s book and couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard about it sooner. I started following the autoimmune protocol with low FODMAPs in January of this year and had astounding results. I feel like my strict diet sustained me through the stress of selling all our stuff and our house. I started re-incorporating FODMAPs in to my diet in May and so far so good. I still follow the AIP about 95% of the time (only exceptions being the occasional gluten free treat and that’s only been a recent addition). I feel so much better and am sleeping reasonably well. I still have some hormone stuff to sort out – my body still isn’t producing much progesterone and my thyroid is still quite sluggish, but I’m so much better than I was. I was headed down a very dangerous path and am so thankful that we made drastic changes. If I had continued to ignore the warning signs my body was giving, I shudder to imagine what state my body would be in right now.

I love our life and have so much hope for my health and our future. This is not the path I ever dreamed of or planned for my life – it is so, so much better.