A few mug shots ago, I posted about how this can never be coffee and I missed the coffee culture and how my food allergies have taken over my life. Well, my friends, a lot has changed since then.
It has been 16 weeks since I found out I was allergic to:
Eggs
Egg whites
Almonds
Hazelnuts
Whey
Beans
Coffee
Black tea
And in those 16 weeks I have had a fundamental shift in my health and I want to tell you all about it because unknowingly I was poisoning myself for the last 16 years with things I “knew” were good for me.
Nearly every morning I would have a whey protein smoothie with almond milk and yogurt or eggs from our pampered backyard hens with bread (sometimes homemade). Sounds like a really sound diet, right? Turns out the only one of those things that doesn’t send my histamine count into a tailspin is the yogurt!
To tell you what has changed requires me to say what my symptoms were, so here it goes.
I was always chemically very weird. I couldn’t have normal things, like a glass of wine, or a cup of coffee because I would break out in hives or get a headache very quickly and spend the rest of my day feeling sick.
I never sweated. I know! Might be a blessing for some but for me, I work out hard and enjoy being warm. But if I were to over heat at all, I’d end up with a roaring headache. Pushing through for CrossFit only worked if I had a set routine like drinking 2 quarts of water (equal to everyone else’s daily allowance) and taking a warm shower as soon as I was done… and even then it was a crapshoot between if I’d feel like garbage for the rest of the day or not. I was told that it was a transition but it lasted a year and eventually I gave up CrossFit.
I would get these huge red blotches out of no where. They would just show up. My face would feel like it was on fire and my chest, arms, and neck would turn blotchy and bright red. Randomly.
I had ocular hallucinations, which is a type of migraine headache, about twice a month. My body would just stop one of my eyes from working for a few hours. It would look as though I was looking through a pool of water with a light on the other side of it. These would last until I fell asleep. Didn’t matter what time of day they happened and I definitely couldn’t drive while they were going on so sometimes I would get stuck at a job, or a homeschool club, and have to find a dark space and try to shut my eyes for as long as possible. If I couldn’t find that space, I’d end up with a migraine so awful that it occasionally made me vomit from the pain.
My stomach hurt whenever I ate. I just got used to it. Food never really felt good to eat. Ever.
My cycles were hell. Not in the crappy, painful way… but in the “sneeze and half my uterus comes out for nearly a week” type way (sorry, guys).
I started losing hair. Every time I would have stress in my life, my hair would fall out. This was actually the last straw for me that sent me to the doctor asking for these tests. My hair was thinning, and it just wasn’t ok with me.
Now I wonder how I lived that way for so damn long, seriously.
And I am sure you are, too.
My restrictions were already many. My stomach doesn’t handle any fruit, most cucurbits (cucumbers to melons), or several other things.
But it wasn’t until I got a blood and urine and body composition test that it finally started clicking….
It took 10 weeks to really feel the progress. And for about 6-8 of those, things got worse. Not ☝️ those things. Everything ☝️ there got better immediately upon eliminating all of those things completely from my diet, but other things got worse.
I called it “weird bad” because it wasn’t my normal bad but it wasn’t fun.
However, I trusted what the tests were saying and I kept going.
Now?
Now I sweat.
For the first time in literally my adult life. Not a ton, because I don’t think my body’s a super sweater, but I sweat. On my stomach and my back. It is absolutely strange to me as I don’t EVER remember doing it before, but i don’t get a headache when I work out. I can physically handle heat. That part’s been wild. (My armpits smell different when I sweat, too! This one is the most wild and the most unexpected for me. I didn’t even know toxins could stop you from sweating!?)
I can drink alcohol. I have never been a heavy drinker and I doubt I’ll start now, but if I want to have a margarita with my SIL over tacos, I can. And I can just, magically, go on with my day.
My cycles have calmed down to what others have said is more normal. I am hoping this trend continues.
I haven’t had an ocular migraine in 16 weeks. Last one was in March, right before I stopped eating all my trigger foods.
The only time I got the huge blotchy patches was when I tried to eat eggs. My body had a HARD pass on that protein. It just said no. It took two days to recover from a 2 egg omelette.
Hurting and bloating and pain is no longer normal for me. It happens. I think it happens to us all, but it’s not anything like what I have experienced previously.
My hair has completely stopped falling out. I no longer roll down my car window to throw out the clump of hair because I decided to take my ponytail down. It’s one or two hairs at most. And this one has stayed consistent for 2 months now.
My skin looks consistently brighter. This one could just be summer, or it could be this chemical change in my system. I’ll be able to tell you that by November. 😉
Last of all, and least important in my mind, but I have lost 7lbs. All that inflammation I was carrying around is consistently gone. My body is starting to regulate differently. Even my PMS is completely different.
Why do I tell you this?
Because I thought I knew my body.
I spent the last 5 years playing whack-a-mole with what I could and couldn’t put into my body so it wouldn’t hate me. I have actually eliminated all of the trigger foods at one time or another…. But never all of them at once.
I felt like I had tried everything. And it did take me a while to figure out what I could eat and an even longer while to figure out how to get more protein in my meat-light diet without eggs, almonds, soy, beans/rice, or whey protein.
I felt like I was failing at the whole food change thing too….
Until I realized my back was sweaty one day during a hard yoga class. And then I realized I still felt energized when I got home and didn’t get a headache. And then I hadn’t had a migraine in 8 weeks, then 10, and now 16 weeks migraine free….
Small changes made a huge difference. And I feel like I have gotten a whole new lease on life. Some of it is wild. I actually need to change after I workout hard. That was never an issue for me before. But other parts are just filled with sweet relief for what I have spent my life trying to figure out.
That. And a whole lot of hope.