Healing Lyme Disease
It has been quite some time since I’ve posted because I have been on a whirlwind roller coaster ride since having been diagnosed with Lyme Disease. Turns out that Lyme Disease will often mask as fibromayalgia and a host of other symptoms. My health deteriorated to a point where I couldn’t work. My arms were so painful that I couldn’t sleep at night and I had severe muscle spasms during the day that would send me through the roof. The end of the year, 2010 I was diagnosed with Lyme and started alternative treatments. Since that time my husband and I decided to move out of our rental home, put everything into storage and go to Brazil for three months to see John of God, a world renowned healer, and focus on my healing.
Before my diagnosis I moved away from a high raw diet in my many attempts to treat and understand my illness. I went on a high protein diet and now I am getting back to a high raw diet with intermittent fasting and detox. I am realizing that although raw food is excellent when healing just about anything, it often isn’t enough by itself. For Lyme Disease most people still need to be treated through herbs, antibiotics or other healing modalities. I worked with a local chiropractor who developed a technique called “craniobiotic therapy” which completely turned me around in just a couple weeks. However the damage to my body had been incredible as I likely had Lyme for years. So now the real healing is to repair the damage.
Since my treatment my muscle spasms stopped, I’ve been able to sleep much better, the pain intensity diminished probably about eighty percent and I’m recovering range of motion in my arms, which I could barely move prior to treatment. I plan to do a lot more detoxification as well as research on alternative treatments for Lyme so that I can help others know what their options are. Lyme is an epidemic affecting far more people than we realize. The symptoms mask as fibromayalsia, chronic fatigue, parkinsons, MS, ALS, Lupus, and other conditions. So many people out there are sick with Lyme and seeking help but don’t know what they are dealing with. As a result of my journey I feel compelled to help educate others so more people can heal. So this post is only the beginning.
Eating Raw Cheese and Kefir
In the past few months I have completely changed the way that I eat. I have backed off from an all raw vegan based diet and began incorporating lightly cooked veggies, soups, sprouted grains like quinoa, millet and wild rice, and I’ve began making my own raw milk kefir.
Dr. Mercola just interviewed Ori Hofmekler on the powerful benefits of true raw milk whey protein as one of the most superior proteins one can consume, better than eggs, meat or fish.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/10/23/ori-hofmekler-on-whey-protein.aspx
For raw foodists, this probably isn’t a surprise, because raw foodists get their protein from greens, nuts, seeds and superfoods and some raw foodists don’t believe you even need direct protein but rather just the amino acids which you can get from greens.
Unfortunately my health has suffered and going one hundred percent raw for four months didn’t help. I figured if I wasn’t noticing great health benefits after four months I wasn’t getting something my body needed. I know that I wasn’t simply detoxing, as many raw fooders might say. That is a cop out. The more I researched raw foodism the more I realized that an all raw diet really isn’t the ideal diet for a large majority of the population for a number of reasons. In theory it makes sense to eat an all raw diet, but our bodies don’t understand the theory. We have been cooking a portion of our food for a long time and many of us don’t have bodies capable of breaking down the cellulose in our vegetables and there is more.
High sugar consumption is a big part of the average raw food diet. I’m talking fruits, dried fruits, like dates and raisins, agave nectar, raw honey and other sweetners. I found myself eating an awful lot of sugars on the all raw diet. I craved more sugar. I also found I got bored of eating just raw veggie salads and got tired of always dehydrating. I didn’t do well on a lot of nuts, even when soaked. I found myself craving more cooked food and it wasn’t because I was addicted. Most people can clear out their addictions to cooked foods in thirty days. After four months it became clear to me that my body needed something it wasn’t getting. And so I began the research.
Sugar was a big issue. I realized that sugar was probably the reason I wasn’t losing that excess menopausal weight on raw food. Also it was likely feeding the Candida and causing an overly acidic condition in my body. I had been experiencing muscle deterioration in my six years of eating a high raw, mostly vegan diet. I seemed to be having signs of protein deficiency, and yet I was confused because all the raw food experts assured me that protein wasn’t a problem. Perhaps that just wasn’t true.
I cut out all the sugars and stuck to stevia and xylitol, both non-glycemic sweetners, using them mostly for sweetening my tea and kefir drink in the morning. Like I said I did add raw milk to my diet in the form of kefir and I brought the raw cheese back in. So I was still choosing raw food products but not vegan. I also was adding some eggs, cooked. I will probably add raw eggs in my morning drink as well.
I downloaded “The Diet of the Masters” and learned not only about the power of Kefir but also about sprouting your grains and beans and the benefit of cooking some of these foods. So I started doing that. I find myself much more energetically stable and enjoying having more variety back in my life. I have been enjoying wok’d veggies with sprouted quinoa, sprouted bean soup, baked potato and veggies, egg and veggies, and a little bit of my raw chocolate treats for special occasions. I am doing very little fruit. I had one pear a day when our pears were ripe right off our tree. And a friend brought over some freshly picked organic grapes that were divine. So I am not being so strick on myself that I can’t enjoy life but I am being very careful about the sugars.
One thing I noticed after letting go of the sugars is that excess weight dropped right off within two weeks. Mind you I wasn’t really overweight so this won’t happen so immediately with everyone. I might have packed on an extra eight pounds or so since menopause and had trouble getting it off and keeping it off. Eliminating the sugar did the trick. Perhaps eating a more balanced diet helped as well. I wasn’t eating breads. I wasn’t eating a lot of carbs. Mostly vegetables and proteins both raw and cooked.
I am still in the process of experimenting but really feeling good about the kefir. I am making a new batch every day so that I always have a large dose of kefir for my morning smoothie. I add the whole days batch of kefir to the blender with a teaspoon of maca powder, a tea spoon of acai berry powder (both raw products) and a little xylitol sweetner. Sometimes I’ll add a half cup of frozen blueberries which aren’t very sweet. No more bananas for now. As I write this I’ve only been making the kefir for about a month. So far so good.
I’ve also found Donna Gates “Body Ecology” which I’m really excited about. I haven’t read the book yet but have read an awful lot of her work on the Internet and listened to several audio and video’s. Donna is a great example for health and youth. She is sixty three years old and looks better than a lot of die hard raw foodists that are the same age. Donna really talks a lot about using fermented foods like cultured vegetables and kefir. She is about assisting our body in digestion and assimilation of the nutrients as well as curing conditions like Candida. Donna also says that we need to be careful about judging others based on their choices to eat meat or dairy, for being raw or vegan. We all have different needs and it is important to honor those needs in ourselves and in others.
For myself I am still finding my way in a confusing world of food, youth, health and nutrition. My current health goal is to find out how to heal my fibromayalgia symptoms which are likely caused by adrenal fatigue due to having Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in the past. I realize as great as food can be to help us heal it is only one part of the puzzle. We have to consider our life style, our ability to meditate and quiet our mind, our levels of activity throughout the day, working with the stressors in our life, eliminating many of the stressors, and truly finding balance. That is the path I am on. Finding the balance!
Here is to you finding the balance in your life.
Blessings!
Kaleah
Food…The Real Gold
As I was working in our Garden yesterday, a beautiful August day, I looked at our struggling strawberry patch and how it looked like we might actually get it to produce after all. I reflected upon how excited John and I get over one sweet juicy strawberry that has been produced from our own hands in our own Garden. I also reflected on the abundance of our harvest as we gathered onions, tomatoes, two varieties of peppers, a zucchini (first one of the year) and broccoli to create our Sunday brunch with. As I looked at the basket containing our home grown vegetables I felt a sense of pride and accomplishment. It was our first year organic gardening and we were pleased. But there was more than personal pride going on here. As I listened to the voice within I could hear something very profound. “Food, it’s the real gold!”
We have become so disconnected to our food source and yet it is what truly keeps us alive. We need three things to survive in this world…good food, clean air and clean water. We can do without just about every other thing, except perhaps the roof over our heads and a way to stay warm and dry.
In watching the evolution of our species, from a very distant perspective of course, I could see man going from being hunters and gatherers to being stationary farmers to being consumers of material goods manufactured by large corporate entities. Each time we progress, or rather digress, we become more and more disconnected from the earth and more dependent upon others for the basic needs of our survival. The thing that really bothers me about this is that we are so hypnotized and conditioned to live this consumer lifestyle that most people never really stop to question how dangerous it is to put our survival in the hands of Corporate America.