In the first two parts I introduced how I got to this point where I am now following yet another food regime.

Most of my adult life I’ve tried out new eating regimes.

I was a vegetarian for about 18 months until I fell pregnant with Laura and thought bacon was more important than lentils.

I’ve done food combining, where you avoid mixing starches and proteins in the same meal. It means all the favourites are out fish and chip, cheese sandwiches, pizza, pasta and cheese, roast beef and Yorkies. You can imagine that didn’t last long. Especially as I spent most of my meal choices eating carbs and wondering why I wasn’t making any progress.

I tried the Blood Group diet by Peter D’Adamo. I have a lot of respect for this and have helped people adopt some of his principles for improved health. Interestingly I am probably about to go full circle with my current plan.

Did vegan for a spell, it really didn’t suit me at all. If you refer back to the blood group diet it’s no surprise. I am blood group O and we suit a Paleo diet better.

Gluten free, clean eating, sugar free, booze free, and heaven forbid coffee free all of these and the above have had some part in my adult life.

The one consistent theme for about 10 years has been a mainly gluten free diet. I’d go months not eating it at all and then choosing to eat pizza or a mince pie or my mum’s shortbreads knowing the consequences.

What are the consequences? Not what you might expect. Yes I get some bloating and rapid weight gain when I eat gluten but I also get outbreaks of a rash called Dermatitis Herpetiformis (DH). I’ve had this since being pregnant with Laura in 1993 and for years no one could tell me what it was. It would come aggressively or not at all. I thought it was a herpes like condition and cut out all foods that aggravate cold sores like nuts and seeds, but still it persisted.

Then in 2012 I read Wheat Belly by William Davis MD and towards the back of the book he talks about

“Dermatitis herpetiformis (DH), described as skin inflammation in the form of herpes, is yet another way that an immune reaction to wheat gluten can show itself outside of the intestinal tract. It is an itchy, herpes-like (meaning similar-looking bumps; it has nothing to do with the herpes virus) rash that persists and can eventually leave discoloured patches and scars. The most commonly affected areas are the elbows, knees, buttocks, scalp, and back, usually involving both sides of the body symmetrically. However, DH can also appear in less common ways, such as sores in the mouth, on the penis or vagina, or odd bruising over the palms. A skin biopsy is often required to identify the characteristic inflammatory response.”

I’ve never been so pleased as I was to read this paragraph! It was exactly as I was experiencing and no one had been able to tell me what it was, I was ecstatic. It made me even more determined to be gluten free.

And it did get better, but there were times when I’d appear to have been glutened and not known why.

When I got my Hashimmoto’s diagnosis with the high antibody readings I was already gluten free. Laura said that her first suggestion would have been to go gluten free, but given that I already was I was reacting to something else in my diet. It was at this point that I decided to find out for sure.

To be sure that you ready to be tested, you need to eat a variety of foods and consume them for 10 days.

So for 10 days in February/March I ate a range of foods that could be checked in one blood test.

I ate bread, cereal, crackers all the stuff I don’t normally eat. And over the course of 10 days I got more and more ill.

• My digestion completely seized up.
• My breathing became very shallow and I couldn’t catch my breath.
• I had the outbreaks on my skin.
• I had an underlying and relentless headache.
• And I was so rigidly stiff that I couldn’t even bend down to put my shoes on. All of me ached. When I went to bed at night I was kept awake by the pain of lying on my own body. It was relentless and horrible and I whilst I enjoyed the foods ( I do love this stuff) I also couldn’t wait to stop eating it and get back to normal.

Then you wait 25 days for your antibodies to develop.

I am hoping to get those results back in the middle of April (2018).

In the meantime I have read and completely enjoyed Why Isn’t My Brain Working? by Dr Datis Kharrazian which has confirmed the gluten association to thyroid malfunction, skin rashes, brain fog and intestinal damage.

His auto-immune protocol is strict but not impossible and I have decided to implement it and started after Easter.

Here’s the list.

And there we are. All up to date and waiting for blood test results and signs of improvement from my dietary changes. After a period of clean eating on this regime there’s a process of reintroduction to see how certain foods react with me, so this isn’t life long. However I can’t see a time when I eat gluten grains again, my long term health is too important to me to risk it for a piece of granary toast and marmalade or a slice of cake.

*** This blog is not to be prescriptive nor give you advice, merely to show you my way of navigating true health in a jungle of advice and pharmaceutical pressure. Please do your own research, ask your own specialists or contact those I have used if you wish to find out more about your personal condition and symptoms. To your very best health. ***

Part two, part one here.

Since being diagnosed with Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis and reading up about the disease and the ongoing health concerns of untreated auto immunity (AI) I realised that despite my protestations that I’d been fine before, I was recognising several symptoms that I’d never considered were linked or even a ‘thing’.

1. Constipation. Despite my diet, my digestive system has been struggling since I was a child. It goes from absolutely awful (7 days at a time) to perfectly normal 1-2 a day.
2. Cold hands and feet. I work outside a lot, I get cold a lot, but my hands and feet are generally always cold. I am sitting writing this with socks and slippers on and my feet are freezing.
3. Reynauds Syndome. This is known as white-finger too. It’s a circulatory condition that I get when cold and especially when I’ve not eaten or a while.
4. Enlarged tongue. For as long as I can remember the edges of my tongue are scalloped. I don’t know why I didn’t think this was a thing, but I didn’t This is when the tongue gets too large for the mouth and pushes against the teeth creating the scalloped look.
5. Losing hair. I have a lot of hair, so this one took some time to be noticed. But I started to see lots of hair on the floor where I dry my hair each day, more than before.
6. Insidious weight gain. I don’t weigh myself, it’s a rule of mine for a happy life but I had noticed that I seemed a bit more fleshy around the middle, trousers were a touch tighter and I put it down to being less active. I had infact gained about 1.5 stone despite my good diet.
7. Tired. Now I put this down to working for myself and being responsible for keeping the business going. I do work long hours and I do work long weeks, so it seemed natural to think that was the reason. But fighting the urge for a nap in the day started to become more frequent.
8. Thinning eyebrows. It’s a thing. If the outside edges if your eyebrows are finer than the rest, chances are you may have a compromised thyroid,
9. Lack of libido.
10. Trouble swallowing at times or chocking on my own saliva (so classy!)
11. Lack of oomph.

Since then I’ve learned about these other fascinating symptoms…

1. Previously good handwriting gone to the wall (mine has)
2. Brain fog
3. Dry skin
4. Compromised gut health

And then I learned about the other side effects of untreated AI conditions.

1. If you have one auto immune condition, chances are you’ll have another.
2. Chances of being a coeliac are increased.
3. AI can’t be ‘made better’, but you can take it into remission.
4. The chances of brain health issues like Alzheimer’s, dementia and Parkinson’s are increased.
5. Cardiovascular conditions.

It was around this time that I read an old blog post I’d written some years before that made me realise I had to get over my phobia of taking the medicine, and remember that it didn’t have to be forever despite what my GP said. Here’s what I wrote on my Friday with Heidi blog that day.

I was in the system.

Since then I have been through the following tests to see what to work on first to get my health to an acceptable place.

1. Stool test. That’s all you need to know. 🙂
2. Thyroflex test from Dr T who invented and designed it. My thyroid by now was causing my metabolism to run at about 450 calories a day slower than it should for my height and weight. No wonder weight gain was easy.
3. Antibodies blood test to see which foods are causing my body to build antibodies.
4. Learned about Dr Datis Kharrazian and his AIP
5. Started his AIP which I am recording as a weekly food diary here

So there you have it.

A summary of how I got here.

This blog will record my research, findings and how I react to them as I work to lower that antibody reading to something nearer 0. I have no idea how long this will take. But I am giving myself a year to see what impact I can make in 12 months.

Find out what the AIP is all about here.

Week One Reflection