October 23, 2016
Ever since I can remember I had this weird nauseated feeling in the pit of my stomach. The feeling felt normal to me, but I always knew something was wrong. To be perfectly honest, I just figured that was how people were supposed to feel after they ate a meal.
When I was about 14 or 15 years old, I started to get awful body rashes. Not just bumps but an entire swollen area, the size of a dollar bill, that would be so itchy I would scratch so hard while I was sleeping that my sheets would be blood stained. I will never forget the area right below my belly button that almost looked like second degree burns. This is when I started to visit the doctor to try and find out what was wrong with me. He started to prescribe me steroid cream of course. It calmed the itching down but never really cured anything. I still had my rashes.
A few years went by after visiting with my doctor every few months, I wouldn’t be surprised if I tried about a dozen different kinds of creams. Nothing worked! When I was 19, I was finally diagnosed with neurodermatitis. My doctor said I was allergic to stress. He said when I face a stressful situation the hormone that is released from stress my body goes into an allergic reaction mode. So… You guessed it! Another prescription. Anavar. I started on the new prescription, and to be honest, within a few weeks my rash was gone. But when my body came to get used to taking Anavar the rashes started to come back. Solution? Yep, a higher dose.
A few years later I had moved out of my parent’s house and found myself living in Niagara Falls. This is the time when I really started to get sick. If you can believe it was possible to get anymore sick then I already was. Anavar stopped working. Rashes came and gone, and then out of nowhere I started to gain weight. I went from about 125lbs to almost a whopping 180lbs. My muscles hurt, my joints hurt, my bones hurt, my skin hurt. Worst part about it, that awful stomach feeling I always had; it actually turned into something that made me not want to travel more than a couple of minutes from a washroom. I lived three and a half hours from my family, so travelling to see them was quite tough. When I did visit my family I would make sure I drove in the middle of the night just in case I had an episode where I wasn’t able to make it to a toilet. This is when my doctor started referring me to specialists.
When I was 25, I applied for a job in Toronto. Interview went great, and I passed all the required testing for the position. I started this job in January 2010. Part of my position required me to stay places without washroom access for hours at a time. Believe me, I had a few close calls! Part way through the year I started to get even more symptoms. Yes, more! Red itchy watery eyes, and lets just add a plugged nose to the situation. The only way to survive from day to day was eating Reactine like candy, and I would drink a bottle of Immodium every 5 to 7 days. Sometimes that wasn’t enough. I called in sick 7 times that year. Even with the doctor’s notes, I still almost lost my job.
I was lost. I didn’t know what to do. How could I keep going? I was hurting physically, mentally, emotionally. I was completely exhausted. November 2010 is when I met up with an old friend from college. We were talking about my situation, and she asked me, “Have you ever tried an elimination diet?” What? What in the world is an elimination diet? She explained to me that what I was going through sounded like I had a food allergy and I should eliminate gluten from my diet for about 4 to 5 weeks and see how I feel.
I took her advice, the first few weeks were hard. I couldn’t just stop on my walk home from work to grab a slice of pizza, or subway. To be honest, there were a more than a few times where I wanted to cry because I couldn’t cave into my cravings.
Four weeks had past. I felt AMAZING! My energy had returned, I had dropped about 10lbs, rashes were almost gone, the pain throughout my body was almost gone. You know the best part? I had a doctors appointment! While I was sitting with my doctor, he had asked me how I was feeling. I told him that everything I was feeling had been subsiding and I was feeling so much better, and also about how I had removed gluten from my diet. His response still baffles me today. He said to me, “I figured that you had an allergy to gluten, but I didn’t want to suggest the diet until we had made sure it was nothing else because the diet is so expensive.” I had been sick a better part of my life and went misdiagnosed for almost half of my life, and to say the least, I was not impressed with the response I had received. Needless to say I moved on, never scheduled anymore appointments, and started to research the powers of food.
Eliminating gluten from my diet was just the starting point into learning the importance of good wholesome, organic, non-gmo food and the effects it has on the body.
I sit here today, at the age of 32, being the healthiest I have ever been. To be honest, I don’t even recall feeling this good as a child. I have healed myself naturally. I have healed myself with food.
