Is it all about the food??

As many of you know, Christian, Courtney, and I have been on strict diets for awhile. Courtney's and Christian's started in May and mine started a couple of months ago.

These diets have included no dairy, no eggs, no peanuts, no gluten, no yeast, no soy, and no citrus for the kids. I am off everything else except the citrus, but add black pepper and garlic.

Why have we done this?  For our health. But trust me, it hasn't been easy.

Last May, I decided that we should try to eat "healthier." I decided to start buying only 100% juice and switch out bread to "whole grain" breads without any high fructose corn syrup. I also wanted to not eat so much boxed food and try to eat the fruits and veggies more.

In a way, my plan backfired.  We were eating whole grain bread, but soon Courtney started to not feel well.  By the end of the week, she was sick as a dog!  I skipped my pediatrician (I will not get into that now!) and went to a new doctor that I had been seeing, she is a chiropractic physician and she seemed to be helping me with my issues, so I took Courtney in to see her.  She thought she had a food intolerance, which I would've never guessed, so we did an allergy test and all these things came up! I could hardly believe it!  Christian was also having some bowel trouble, so we put him on the same diet.

So began my life of not eating anything I used to eat and figuring out how to feed my children a whole new diet!

But I will say, it has helped tremendously!!  Courtney eats so much better now and she is not as picky. She does not curl up in a ball on the recliner after every meal. We always used to laugh at her too, whenever she would jump up and down, you could hear everything in her stomach jiggling. It would do this night and day. Guess what? It doesn't jiggle anymore! I asked the doctor yesterday what that was all about and she said that the jiggling was the inflammation in her stomach and now that it's not inflamed, it doesn't jiggle anymore!
Really, was she that affected by what she ate?? We are starting to get her back on foods now, but it is just amazing.

Why did I go on the diet? Many of you know that I have been dealing with anxiety for the last couple of years.  It was getting worse (along with a bunch of other symptoms) and I was going from doctor to doctor trying to get answers.  All they ever wanted me to do was go on anti-depressants.  None of them ever wanted to get to the source of my problem.

Then I found this chiropractic physician last March.  I called her up as a sort of "Let's see what she has to say."  I needed a different perspective and I really wanted to figure out what was going on.

The first thing she did was did an adrenal test and we found out that I had stage 3 adrenal fatigue. This means that my adrenal gland was burned out.  I was under so much stress that my adrenal gland gave up making cortisol.  This explained many of my symptoms!  So now what? We tried treating my adrenals, but as I was taking the supplements, I was getting worse!

I called the doctor back up and she looked over my test results again.  She determined that something inside my body was causing my adrenals stress.  She suggested to take a food allergy test.  This is about July or August now.  Her theory was that if I was eating something that my body didn't like, it was going to fight it.  This would therefore cause stress on my body and cause all my symptoms. I went ahead and did the test and  many things came up for me just like Courtney!

I have been off all this food for two months and it is like night and day difference to how I feel! I went back and saw my doctor yesterday and told her that I sleep so much better at night, my blood sugar is more stable and I am not taking naps in the afternoon anymore, plus I have more energy and my moods seem to be more stable.  I was amazed that I have improved so much in such a short amount of time!

I still deal with anxiety, but I know how to deal with it.  I also noticed that if I eat something I am not supposed to (like yesterday I had French Dressing which contains garlic), it will cause all my symptoms to come back again.  If I eat exactly what I should be and not drift away from the diet, I feel great!

So in the end, food can be our enemy or our friend. In my family, changing our diets has made a huge improvement.  Now that I have more energy, I am finding new meals to make and cooking is fun again.  We eat lots of fruits and vegetables and very little processed food. We can only eat out at buffet with a salad bar or we need to know exactly what is in our food. We ate at Qdoba the other day and I had some symptoms afterwards, maybe I should've asked for an ingredient list. :)

Anyway, life is good again. My adrenals are returning, anxiety is going down, I have well children, and it all boils down to what we are feeding our bodies.  Amazing!