*** 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. ***
I might make this a post of beautiful photos of Ireland.
My mate Gilly and I chose the very best week of the year, decade, century to visit Ireland! With temperatures beating Portugal and Spain on some days the whole week was beautifully fabulous.
It’s a short post as most of the realisations this week have been on how to manage this Autoimmune Protocol when away from home.
You can’t.
The end.
OK, I’ll give you more detail, but suffice to say this was really quite hard.
Bed and breakfast in the hotel was very limited for someone not eating grains.
I wasn’t about to change that, there are some parts of this plan that I can very easily just stick with. This is one of them.
So I had eggs and bacon each day with a big handful of spinach that I bought with me to the table in the morning. Got some very funny looks from the Americans staying, but let them look on and be envious 🙂
For our lunches we tended to buy provisions from the local supermarket rather than choose a sit down venue. This worked better but still wasn’t perfect. I could buy bags of washed salad leaves (the pre-made salads were all mayonnaise covered or filled with pasta and rice) and cooked protein, but even that was tricky.
I read every label on every packet of pre-cooked deli meat in the supermarket. The only one that was just the cooked item was parma ham. Everything else had something added like rice flour or tapioca or wheat or sugar or milk powder… so frustrating.
I opted for parma ham one day, cooked salmon another day and prawns.
One day I ate a packet of olives and some apples for lunch. This is kind of how it was.
Dinner was a mixed blessing.
There was lots of places to eat in Dingle and all seemed to offer variations of gluten free and dairy free. However there were still components of each meal that weren’t to the auto-immune plan and I had to really have a chat with myself about what was ‘good-enough’.
- I had a roast dinner with no spuds and no gravy one night.
- Hake with salad no chips another (too small, very hungry this day).
- Vegetable soup (made a clanger, this was creamed and so, because I’d not specified I ate it anyway, I wasn’t about to make a fuss). Sea bass with veggie no spuds.
- Rib eye steak with extra large salad. This was my best meal but the onions and mushrooms were cooked in butter and the salad had stuff on it I am supposed to avoid.
I got through a bag of apples through the week and a bag of figs.
I chose to have whiskey and gin tasters at the Distillery tour and a small glass of red wine on three nights with dinner.
It wasn’t terrible, I haven’t keeled over and life goes on. If I had to go away again though I’d be more careful about the dairy. I am still quite new to avoiding that and got caught out several times with butter for frying, milk in soups and dressings and scrambled eggs.
Given that I’ve been told that I need to avoid it because it raises the antibodies I am trying to reduce I need to be stricter here. I can’t measure my progress if I don’t cut it out.
On the Monday evening after arriving I had an email from Janie, the lady who did my blood analysis and put me on the bowel cleanse last week. She had mentioned when I was with her about a food list for blood group specific foods for people with Hashimoto’s.
I was very interested in this, I mentioned in an earlier post that my very first interest in health and food came from reading ‘Live Right For Your Type’ by Peter D’Adamo some 20 odd years ago and that despite playing around with it a bit during that time I felt I was full circle with my current plan.
Janie had a revised list and sent it to me.
I was really keen to look at it thinking that it would be very similar to what I am doing now.
It is mainly like my current plan, but some of my key basics that I use a lot are now on the avoid list.
At first I was deflated.
I wanted to know what the list was but wasn’t ready for the changes I was about to see.
No more olives, blueberries, figs, strawberries, raisins, mushrooms, grapes, vinegars.
Much reduced cabbage, broccoli, cabbage, courgettes, chicken, salmon, prawns, squash.
Still avoid (as per current list but secretly hoped would be in) nuts, seeds, chocolate, red wine, peppers.
I sat with it for a day or so and then emailed her and asked whether this was a lifelong approach or temporary. I needed to know how to prepare for it. I thought I was done with food lists and changes, but it would appear not.
She replied that a 3 month approach after doing the preparatory work she’d given me may be all it takes. So that’s what I’ll do.
I’ve got a liver cleanse to do when I get back this will take 14 days.
I’ve then got to rid myself of the parasites that will take 2 months and in that time I’ll also start this new 12 week regime for blood group O, Hashimoto peeps. I can do that. It takes me to September and then I’ll get a new antibody test done and see what improvements have been made. Which will be about a year since my first one, so a good enough time frame to have some kind of measure of progress.
I was quite surprised by my reaction to all of this. Maybe it’s because I was away and struggling to keep on plan and not be a pain with my travel buddy by being fussy. Maybe it was because I want to see some changes, I want to know that it’s working. And maybe it was because I was tired … sleep was very lacking on Monday and Tuesday night so my head was not working clearly.
We came home on Friday leaving for the airport after lunch.
I slept terribly on Thursday, too much worrying about something I had to get done on Friday morning, I’ve seen this as a pattern now. And so I was already tired. It was a hot day and we had lunch pretty early. I had a bag of salad leaves and some prawns and shared some raspberries (there’s a reason for this story!).
Our flight was about 16.00 and there was nothing at Kerry airport to eat, it’s a teeny-tiny place, and so by time we got back to Stansted having battled with people en-masse for a few hours, feeling run down from tiredness, hungry from not really enough food all day and feeling very over-peopled I found myself with a bar of chocolate in my grubby hand! It was an 85% one, some marketing BS about gluten free, vegan etc and I fell for it hook line and sinker!
I didn’t eat it though. I put it in my bag. Considering it emergency rations should I need them.
I got home about 20.30 and went straight out to Sainsbury so I could buy some dinner, breakfast and my provisions for my liver cleanse that I was starting the next day.
By the time I got to eat that night I was past caring quite how religious I was to the plan.
- I had a small bag of dried blueberries whilst putting stuff away.
- An avocado whilst making dinner.
- Steak and salad.
- My chocolate bar
- Two Graze snack boxes that had been delivered whilst I was away.
I made myself stop then. I probably would have continued.
Three triggers that set me off…
- Tiredness
- Way too long between meals of not enough substance
- Too much people-ing.
Noted and logged.
The liver cleanse starts tomorrow. Then I will be back on it as quick as a gluten attack.
