We Love Paleo

**

I had chronic brain fog.

I never felt rested when I woke up.

I got migraines all the time.

I was hungry all the time,

and people feared for their lives

when they were around me when I got hungry,

because I crashed and turned into a crazy person.

And just felt generally cranky and...

bad, basically.

The outlook on life prior to being diagnosed

and figuring out what was going on was pretty bleak.

I had chronic fatigue syndrome,

fibromyalgia.

Chronic migraines, that was a huge one.

I had chronic gastrointestinal issues.

And I saw gastroenterologists for several years,

and no one ever told me it could be related to food.

I thought that I had

early-onset rheumatoid arthritis.

I had chronic adult acne.

I had numbness in my feet and in my limbs.

I was always cold.

Everything and anything I took really didn't provide me any relief whatsoever.

How I would I have been? 35, or 34, or something.

You're probably not supposed to feel that crappy at that age, right?

That's not old.

But I felt old.

I had come to just really live with it.

It became part of my life.

I remember feeling strange,

feeling weird from very early on, you know.

Not feeling healthy.

Not feeling like I lived to full capacity.

Even as a child.

And that's weird.

I mean, the thing is everyone is so sick in this country.

Our food system is so broken.

The solution given to me by my GP was,

"Don't worry. If you take these meds now,

"you'll be able to keep these... you know, suppress these issues that you're facing,

and you should be able to live longer."

It's amazing...

You know, it's like the human body just gets comfy with stuff

or accepting of conditions and just kind of like...

It's like, "Oh, this is gonna hurt."

Or, "I have a bum knee," or I have a whatever.

"We'll just kind of deal with it. We'll compensate. We'll be fine."

And so, you get used to those things.

And so, the same thing happened with me.

I just felt horrible,

but did it for so long

that I forgot how bad I actually felt

and how it felt to feel good.

I was never extremely sick, but I was never well either.

I was vegetarian for about six years.

I ate fish sometimes, but was mostly vegetarian,

and also mostly dairy-free,

because the person I was with at the time had a dairy allergy.

So in addition to being vegetarian,

I was also eating way more soy than anyone should ever consume over their lifetime.

Because we had all the dairy substitutes,

like the fake butter, and the soy milk, and the...

I don't even remember what else,

but it was all pretty horrible.

And I also worked in vegetarian restaurants at the time.

That was my life, basically,

and was eating seitan, which is wheat gluten, sandwiches

on rye bread.

So, I was just eating a straight-up gluten sandwich.

So gluten and soy were, like, my main staples in my diet,

and I was completely the angry chef that threw pans.

I was... psychotic

and not a happy person.

And of course, there were other factors.

It wasn't 100% diet,

but that played a huge role.

I was definitely the sickest I've ever been

and the unhappiest I've ever been.

My husband was Paleo for almost a year.

And through that year,

every time I ate, I had just horrid pain, stomach pain,

and he would say, "I really think that you have Coeliac,

and I think you need to get it checked out."

And if you have it, if you take about a pinch of saffron, you'll want to...

My specialty as a chef was Italian.

After about a year, we were having a celebration.

It was one of the kids' birthdays.

And I was making, of course, all of that,

and there he was, making his own dinner.

And I looked at him, and I said,

"You're, like, really never gonna have my pizza and pasta again, are you?"

And he goes, "No."

And he said, "I really think that you have Coeliac,

and you really need to go get it checked out."

They checked for the wrong antibodies. I checked out negative.

The doctor that was sitting there talking to me said,

"You're negative, but you know what we're gonna do?"

He said, "I really think... From what you're telling me,

"I really think you might have Coeliac,

and so, we're gonna do a biopsy of your colon."

He starts telling me how he's going to cut into my colon,

and as he's telling me, he's... nodding off, falling asleep.

And I'm just like, "Hmm. That doesn't sound like a good option to me."

And I thought, "Why is the next step so invasive?

"Why isn't it just cut these foods from you diet?

Why not start there?"

I got diagnosed with Coeliac Disease about four years ago

and was lucky enough where I had typical GI issues

and very physical manifestations of that.

So, if I ate gluten, I knew that I ate it and felt horrible.

So, went gluten-free,

and that did not fix things.

We've tried gluten-free. We've tried gluten-free vegan.

We tried all of those different variations of it.

I ended up with no energy

and... puffy.

Is the only way I can kind of describe that.

It's like my body fat percentage

took a nosedive in the wrong direction.

And I was lethargic, and I just didn't feel good that way.

So we did that for maybe six months or so

and then said that's enough of that...

and went back.

I grew up in Olympia, Washington.

I grew up in a totally normal family,

your standard, American family,

and grew up eating cereal, and bagels, and Subway sandwiches.

And there was no food in the food that I was eating.

There was no pasture-roaming animals.

There was no grass-fed meat.

There were no seasonal, local vegetables.

It was like whatever we could pick up

and throw in a plastic bag at the grocery store,

and, like, whatever is on sale.

A general health consciousness was very strongly present in my life

because my parents ran a pharmacy.

My father was a pharmacist,

which means that we ate healthy

according to conventional wisdom on what is a healthy diet.

So I ate very little meat.

No fat at all. That was forbidden.

We had the fat substitutes, of course, every day on the table.

Margarine instead of butter,

the heart-healthy alternative.

None of us in the family was healthy.

My father suffered psoriasis heavily.

My mother had severe asthma.

My sister, which I discovered now,

clearly had a histamine problem.

I had a number of health issues.

You know, I had this asthma as well, skin problems.

Major energy dips throughout the day as being a child.

Now, I realize what was the reason for that.

I was never able to wake up in the morning.

It was hell to drag my body to school

and to pay attention in school.

I couldn't... It was impossible.

I would fall asleep in the first hours of class.

Nobody could tell me why that was,

and nobody questioned it even.

So from this background...

You know, it would have been different

if we had grown up in a family eating junk food all the time.

We did not.

So we were obviously doing everything correct

according to conventional standards.

I had several inflammations going on in my body.

I had aching joints all the time.

I was lethargic, tired all day long.

It doesn't even matter if I had slept six hours, or 12, or 14 hours,

I was just tired the entire day.

My life before going Paleo was pretty much that of a fitness nut.

Like, just doing silly workouts at a commercial gym.

I think people are really tired of the conventional stuff they've been told for years,

so they, eventually, are really ready for a change.

I went to my doctor in my early 30s.

And my doctor said to me, "Based on your blood work,

"and based on the results that we've got back,

you have an increased risk of X, Y, and Z in terms of lifestyle diseases."

My blood sugar was very high.

My cholesterol levels were high.

My blood pressure was very high.

When I asked him for lifestyle alternatives,

he said, "Well, you're eating a low-fat diet,

"and you're currently going to the gym,

"so there's nothing else you can do.

"You're kind of doing the right things.

"You're not a drinker. You don't smoke. Everything is fine.

"It's just about your genetic heritage

and the fact you're getting a little bit older."

I didn't accept that,

really because I was scared of taking those medications, especially in the long term.

I've been practicing as a doctor for about 25 years.

Most of my patients come with what we would call chronic

or sort of long-standing health issues.

Some of the problems might be things like irritable bowel syndrome,

diabetes, headaches, migraine, general fatigue.

Usually, the individual has either not had a good experience

with conventional medicine or conventional approaches,