I'm three days into this new journey and it is both overwhelming and exciting. I stopped 7 different medications three days ago and still have one more to go before I am medicine free for the first time in many years. There was a time were I was medicine free and wouldn't even take ibuprofen; that time feels like eons ago. My body has been absolutely destroyed in so many ways over the past decade by poor decisions made hastily by medical practitioners and it terrifies me to think about the lasting effects and possible permanent damage that it all may have done to my body. I am 32, the same age my mom was when she passed from her own medical issues. If anyone would have asked me 15 years ago if I thought I was going to make it to this point my honest answer would have been no but now having actually made it I have a determination to fight to fix these horrible things happening with in my body. Will I make it to 50? I dont know, I hope so. Truly. This chronic pain and the constant in and outs of the hospital have made me question it all in the past. It has been such a hard journey to this point. So many days where I have laid broken and defeated on my bathroom floor crippled in pain. I desperately want to move past it all. This new journey is perhaps my second chance at living a better more pain free life. Doctors and pills didn't work, if anything they made it all worse. This is what I have to do to be better and I am ready. 

Three days ago when I cut the medicines out I knew a couple of them had rebounding effects and withdraw effects. I was ready for it. Part of my AIP means no OTC pain medicine or anti-inflammatory medicine to help cope with any pain. So far the biggest rebound I have had has been with my hormone therapy. For the past 2 years my whole system has been stopped, so basically like menopause, even my hormone levels in my blood panels showed menopause levels. Well stopping the medicine meant all the hormones are now flushing back into my body like a freight train at full speed. I am afraid that my cysts will come back but confident that the doctors at the natural center that I am at are doing everything to help get my system running like a "normal persons" system, something that my system has not done EVER. The hopes is a normal period that lasts 4-7 days vs 6 months and isn't ridiculously heavy as mine have been my whole life. We will see as time goes how that works out, I am hopeful... This morning I felt it coming on and I know the first one after 2 years of a stopped system is going to SUCK. Time will tell.

I wanted to talk a little bit about the diet I am doing. I touched on it in my videos but I wanted to share more on it. Basically AIP is an Autoimmune Paleo diet. You use the Autoimmune Protocol which is a series of steps for eliminating and then reintroducing foods back into your diet. Now because I am doing the gut restore program which is a 3 month program my nutritionist has me doing a modified AIP diet. I am 100% cutting out red meat, dairy, and gluten. I am doing AIP but rather then cutting all of the foods on the inflammatory list out I am cycling the foods every 4 days. I put in and then remove a new food from the list every 4 days and I never repeat a meal or a food. This makes doing meal prep and left overs practically impossible but it is thankfully only for 3 months while I finish the gut restore program and we fix the inflammation in my gut. I am waiting on the results from my 240 food panel as well as the results from my gut test. I am very excited to see what the results from those two tests say. I plan on doing the 240 food test again in 6 months after my body has healed to see how I am reacting with a better functioning system. I of course will share the test results once I get them. 

I purchased a couple books before starting AIP that I researched and felt would really help me on my journey. The simple Autoimmune Protocol handbook which goes into detail about how you can use food and herbs to heal leaky gut and essentially reverse autoimmune conditions. It is a fascinating read and I highly recommend it for anyone entering into a journey themselves with their health. The other book that I bought was The Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook. This cookbook is phenomenal. It has a 4 week meal plan using the recipes in the book and even has a shopping list for each week! The other thing I love aside from that and all the various recipes included is the detailed lists included of foods to eat and foods to avoid. Those lists really help me when making my own lists. Overall the cookbook is just really well done and I think my favorite for what it is. 

Another part of my journey is keeping a log of my food sensitivities and my overall health during the 3 months. I purchased this amazing log on amazon. It has a 90 day log as well as a graph that you can fill out and see how your pain levels or even anxiety go up or down based on certain days of the month. I know they make phone apps for this but I am a pen and paper gal. My carpel tunnel holds me back from really journaling but this journal is just enough to make it so I can do it each day before the wrist pain kicks in. 

The really cool thing about this journal aside from the graph is how detailed it is for each day. I can go back and see when I ate a certain food and figure out time of ingestion and how long it took to trigger me. I can also document things like migraines or neck pain and keep that in the graph. This journal is amazing. I plan on doing this journal for two cycles of 3 months at least and comparing. 

Six months from now I am hoping to be in a much better place health wise. If I want to make it to 50 this now is what needs to happen. I can not go another day in a healthcare system that cares more about padding the pockets of pharmaceutical companies then helping to cure or better the lives of their patients. I won't do it anymore. I have to do better. We have to do better. 

Today is the day I make HUGE changes to better my health. Both medicines and foods were removed but I am ready to take on the new challenge. Watch below for the full update. 

As spring gardening adventures continue I brace myself for new adventures in the medical world. Watch below as I breakdown just a fraction of what has been going on with my health journey as of late. It is a long video update  but it's filled with  just about everything thats been going on. ​