Today is super busy, so I must type fast. It's my Grandpa's 95th birthday and we need to leave by 11:00 this morning for his birthday party. Immediately after we have to run home and change, and head back out for Mass. So I spent yesterday afternoon baking multiple batches of cookies for it, and I didn't have a crumb! Woohoo! I usually can't make it through the first batch hot out of the oven without taste testing a couple. It did help that it was an Ember day (day of fasting and partial abstinence in the Catholic Church).
My Grandpa and Grandma Langreck with their brood, plus first grandchild (Grandpa is holding him). My Mom is the pretty young lady with the glasses to the left of my Grandma.
I pushed myself harder this week. This is when the real frustration kicks in: when I push, and fight, and tell myself no repeatedly, and run daily, and I don't drop a pound. It's also when I learn the most about myself, and all the illusions fall away. I saw clearly why I'm doing all this, and I realized in a way I've been expecting instant gratification. I understand there are good things happening to my body as I discipline it. But I can't see them. I tell myself it's for my health, to feel better, to be able to do all that I need to do as mama, teacher, nurse. And it is--but mostly for the way it makes me feel. I want to feel comfortable in my own skin. To not feel embarrassed by the way I look when I run into someone I know in the store. While I know most people probably feel that way just a little, I can't help feeling like it's vanity. So I go back to work on the mental aspect of this change, throwing out thoughts of what society sees and thinks, and work on loving the body God gave me, and being thankful for all that. After all, this body is a vehicle to get through this life and nothing here will stay the same.
There is something I stumbled across that I started researching this past week. It's something I feel will make a world of difference, and I want to share with you all.
I mentioned at the beginning of this leg of my journey that I had experienced a lot of gut issues, and some people had suggested I may have a leaky gut. The Gaps diet was also suggested as a way to heal my gut. That thought has been in the back of my mind this whole time, but when you research the Gaps diet, it's pretty rigorous. I'm not sure how sustainable that would be for me at this time in my life. In most diets one thing usually rises to the top as "the bad guy", such as carbs, or calories, or fat--despite most of us knowing it's a combination of things. Last week an ad popped up on my Instagram feed with a video of a doctor talking about his research into the correlation between health issues, weight-loss, and your diet. A lot of it clicked for me. I'll try to summarize what I got out of all this in the short time I've had to look into it.
The doctor is Steven Gundry, formerly a top cardiothoracic surgeon in the Unites States. Once 70 pounds overweight despite being on a vegan diet and working out regularly, he set out to find out why what should have been working wasn't. Dr. Gundry does some major name dropping in his pitch, including the singer, Usher, and life coach Tony Robbins--which automatically made me skeptical. I'm not the type of person who buys beef from the trunk of a travelling salesman just because he has a list of all our neighbors who have. As I listened to him go on detailing his research, I started to do some of my own: fact checking, reviews, testimonials, and actual medical studies. It appeared his theories on diet carried some weight. I was still skeptical, thinking that he would eventually ask me to buy his "life changing book" or "join my diet club today for the low price of $____" just to learn what the simple thing is that he found he needed to eliminate from his diet. I was wrong again! He explained his findings in this video. Of course, he also markets his own supplements and books...it would probably be even fishier if he wasn't making money off of this somehow.
Basically, certain foods we eat contain little proteins called lectins. Studies have linked lectins to inflammation which causes heart disease, cancer, depression, and autoimmune diseases such as celiac disease (which my Grandpa Mahoney had), diabetes, and rheumatoid arthritis. They have been found to cause red blood cells to clump together, and are considered antinutrients because they can block your body's absorption of other nutrients. As with most things in this world, lectins are also beneficial in certain ways. But it's how we use these things that determines good or bad results.
Dr. Gundry explains that lectins have the ability to destroy the lining of your GI tract, creating tiny holes that allow endotoxins, or bacteria (waste) to leak out (leaky gut). This bacteria is then free to spread through your body. If it enters your joints you get joint pain and inflammation. If it enters your upper GI tract it causes heart burn and indigestion. If it enters your blood stream you get sepsis. This bacteria is fought by your body in the same way that viruses are, which leaves your brain on "threat level red" the whole time. Your body can fight bacteria successfully for a while, but eventually it wears out. You are left with headaches, brain fog, fatigue, and illness. Most medications simply mask symptoms without ever healing the problem. Changing your diet can heal a leaky gut and reverse many health issues.
If you're like me, you've wondered why are so many people getting sick from gluten? Is it a scam? A health fad? I never thought it was a fad, but maybe some people were getting paranoid for no reason? Are we just learning it's bad and causing these health issues, or is there something different in the kind of food we're eating now? Why is there so much conflicting news about what we should and shouldn't eat? Dr. Gundry does a little explaining about the history of food. How tomatoes and eggplants weren't part of human diets until Columbus brought them back from the New World. How brown bread and whole wheat foods gained popularity in the 1950's, while until then the brown husks had been removed before using, and how gluten-related illnesses increased from there. So what ingestibles contain lectins? He mentioned a few:
- Gluten (obviously)
- tomatoes (*gasp*)
- beans
- whole grain wheat
- eggplants
- antacids
- OTC pain killers
This is currently the stage I'm at with all this. Looking at the recipes will shed a lot of light on how sustainable and affordable all this will be. But, for someone who has a lot of autoimmune and other health issues (like my husband, who I hope to drag on board with some of this) I can't imagine it could be worse than the pharmacopoeia of drugs it takes to keep on kicking every day.
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