Oh hi y’all.
I forget that some of you are still interested in how my health’s been doing since I’ve rid my body of parasites (dun dun dun… I know). Just as a recap, I’ll tell you that I really wanted a solution for the dysmenorrhea I’ve been experiencing since high school. I get pretty brutal and painful IBS during my periods. I had sought the help of a couple of general practitioners, allergists and even spiritual woo woo stuff. Years of tweaking this and that helped temporarily but nothing stuck. I was determined that a solution out there existed.
Delicious Indian thali platter. Trying to heal my gut enough so that I can get this back into my diet without looking and feeling super bloated.
Reasons for continuing to find a solution for my dysmenorrhea included not really being comfortable making plans with anyone, work or otherwise, around the time I would expect my period to come. I would never even know what foods would help or hinder. Some times I would eat a paleo diet and be fine, sometimes I would eat a giant plate of nachos and be fine. Actually, it would be rare that I would feel fine after eating nachos. It was frustrating because I had a feeling dietary changes would help, I just didn’t know which ones. I had found that dietary changes had lowered the frequency and severity of panic attacks and a lot of mental problems like hallucinating and intense brain fog. Maybe dietary changes could help with my period too?
After listening to a million Joe Rogan podcasts with nutritionists and then finding their podcasts, I decided to seek out someone who was into the Functional Medicine scene. I had to apply to be a patient with a particular doctor I found because she she wanted to know if she could help the symptoms I wanted help for. I got in pretty quickly and she decided to test for yeast overgrowth and parasites in my gut based on my complaints. Low and behold she found two parasites and an overgrowth of bad yeast. She couldn’t say where the parasites were from.. could be from travel and eating street food, could just be from cross contamination. She then put me on a cleanse. If you want to know how that went, check out my Health Journey blog series.
Where am I at now? My husband has noted that even though I still have one pretty bad day, I’m much much better. I can generally still leave the house (yay!) even if I need to really be careful that there’s a bathroom near by (tmi? Whatever, if it is, you’re on the wrong blog haha). This is certainly better than the three bad days I would have plus the days I would need to recover leading up to and after my period. It would be like that week and a half of each 28 day cycle was a write off. I didn’t want to be in what people call the prime of my life and have it dictated by this.
After doing a few herbal and one intensive prescription parasite interventions, my Funcitonal Medicine doctor has prescribed me a daily probiotic (that I ordered online because it has the most probiotics you can get in a dose) that I take with a prebiotic recipe she gave me (apple sauce mixed with flax seeds, psyllium husks and hemp seeds. Read more about why pre and probiotics work in conjunction in my blog post here). She said that this would help the lingering IBS that I was experiencing. I’m only half way through the repopulation of my gut biome but I still have some trouble.
While I was doing my parasite cleanse, my doctor also suggested I eat a ketogenic diet. This was for other complaints I sought remedy for including a desire to even out my energy levels. I wanted to continue to work hard on my cooking / tv career and wanted to feel more energetic in the morning. I was strict on the diet (or lifestyle as a lot of keto evangelists like to call it) for 6 months as I really wanted to find a solution for both my energy and my period pains.
Adding acting into the mix
Since the parasites have been gone, I’ve been experimenting with eating grains again and I can say for certainty that I notice my body and face are puffier and my brain foggier after eating a lot of them. I just love popcorn! But the real problem has been that I literally do not digest ANYTHING during the first 3 days of my period including the prebiotics I was eating. So, some people say that for IBS you need to eat cooked vegetables that were blended. I tried some cycles with basically eating baby food style soups with the most epic nutritious slow simmered bone broth. Unfortunately that didn’t work. I do not digest anything with even a hint of fiber. Even whole supplements pass through. I’ve been starting to consider it possible that a women’s diet should / could cycle as her hormones do?
I recently started considering what it would be like to eat a carnivore diet around this time of the month. If you haven’t heard of the diet, it’s extremely controversial because it’s completely devoid of vegetables, fruit, seeds, oils (other than olive) etc. Some people go as extreme as only eating red meat, salt and drinking water. Some, who can tolerate it, include raw milk and dairy products and a plethora of nose-to-tail eating like liver pates, eggs, headcheese, you name it! Foods we should be including in our diet anyway because they’re such nutritional powerhouses. I should say that this is easier done if you have the skills to prepare organ meats and have access to pasture raised foods.
Back to me though because the topic of nutrition in food available in our current distribution system is for another post. So, my intestines essentially shut down during a certain time of my cycle (thanks body). I’m pretty worried because it’s easy to say that I barely uptake any nutrients during the first few days of my period if I can see that I’m not digesting any vegetables. No wonder it would take me so long to recover from my period.
I started to consider eating the really densely nutritious, fiber free, bone broth, raw milk cheese and red meat diet during those days my gut isn’t feeling like working. So, I tried it!
How did it go and what the hell did I eat? Find out next week!
