addiction, ADHD, Adult, Biggest Looser, blender, blueberry, body, bread, celery, children, chocolate, cleaning, coffee, egg, eggs, family, Family night, happiness, Happy, health, healthy eating., holiday, holidays, homemade, Homemaker, house, house keeping, housework, kid, kids, life, living, living in the moment, motherhood, Parenting, Uncategorized

Week 1 of the Elimination Diet

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OK I have decided to share with you my journey in the search to healing my body. 6 months ago I was really sick. I was in so much all over pain that I needed pain medicine to function for my family. I hated it and tried not to take it because I did not want to turn into a narcotics statistic but then my family suffered. My joints hurt so badly that I was having a hard time getting around. Then my body just started hurting all over. I went to the Dr to have blood work done and everything came back normal. He sent me to a rheumatolorgist and even though I had inflammation he couldn’t place it so he just gave me the umbrella diagnosis of Fibromyalgia and sent me home with a medication that I should just take. I read the side effects and was not OK with it.

I had the Mirena IUD placed 4 months post partum because of abnormal bleeding, which ended up only making the bleeding worse, and the Dr still kept talking me out of having it removed again and my symptoms had been getting worse since then so I decided that I was ready to heal my body. Not cover up symptoms. Clearly my abnormal bleeding was a clue that things were not in balance and I needed to have the Mirena removed to know really what was going on. I scheduled an appointment to have it removed and the PA that was removing it for me tried to talk me out of it again and told me that there was no way that it could be the Mirena that was causing me any of my symptoms. A week later My joint pain was almost gone and I had started running again.

I made an appointment with a holistic Dr to help me get rid of some symptoms I had had for years now which included brain fog, dry brittle nails and hair, dry skin, hard time focusing, sugar and processed food cravings,  poor quality of sleep, seasonal allergies, my cycle was short why my periods where long and heavy and excess weight. This lead to blood tests that tested both my genetics for how I process vitamins, blood count, state of my nutrition and so on. I learned that I have genetics that make it hard for me to process B vitamins and folates so I need to be sure to supplement those and that I was low on CoQ10 and Omega 3s. Just starting to take these suppliments changed so much for me. I was functioning again. I quit hurting. My skin got a little better. But I wanted to tackle the rest of my skin issues, the rest of my brain fog, my short attention span, my sugar cravings that were still going strong and my weight.

I was seen by another holistic Dr and she told me that it was probably my gut that was wreaking havoc on my system. So she prescribed an elimination diet with supplements and antifungals. Warning me that I was likely to feel much worse on the diet before I got better so to wait until after the holidays to do it. She believes I have something called Leaky Gut Syndrome. So pieces of my food are actually penetrating my bowl and leaking into my bloodstream causing inflammation and all my issues. The 4 week plan will hopefully help my gut heal and then I can slowly introduce some of these foods again.

An Elimination diet means that I would not be eating eggs, wheat, corn, Soy, sugar, shellfish, beef, pork, alcohol or coffee (when she said this I told her she went too far LOL). She did hand me a long list of things I could eat. Including rice and oats so that was something.

I decided that Jan 1st was a good a day as any to start and it gave me time to wean myself off of coffee and switch to green tea which I could have. The Dr had sent me a meal plan and a grocery list and like the ADD person that I am I waited until the first day of the diet to fill my prescriptions and go grocery shopping. That trip to the grocery store was a $300 trip. A lot of the items I will be able to use a gain nest week because it is a 4 week plan so this weeks trip will be less expensive. I ended up going to 3 pharmacies to fill my prescriptions because the anti fungal that I needed at those places had simple syrup added to them which I couldn’t have. I’m on day 7 now and still haven’t gotten that yet because of pharmacy transfers and other issues but hopefully Monday will be a better day.

I have cooked sooooo much this week and it was all new to me recipes. Most of them were very good and we had fish 2 times this week which was nice. I haven’t been good enough at cooking fish and that is the reason for my Omega 3 efficiency.

Day one I felt good and was doing fine. My older kids were still at their grandparents so I was still getting to sleep in with the 1 year old. Day 2 wasn’t that bad either, the kids came home that day and I went for a run that night. Day 3 I hurt all over and the brain fog hit me to the max. I was always full because the meal plan leaves no availability to go hungry but I was dragging. Day 4 I was dragging even more. Day 5 I was still in a funk but still sticking to it but missing coffee and Day 6 was hard. It was Family night which means pizza and a movie on the couch with the kids. Husband, being the good husband he is, brought home the pizza and handed it to me while he changed out of his work clothes so that I could pass the pizza out to the troops. That was the first time I really wanted to break the diet. Handling and smelling the pepperoni pizza. I didn’t want to cook so I ate leftover beans and rice and made my self a bad smoothie. Day 7 and I am a little bit peppier. Good husband let me sleep in since I was up and down all night with the one year old and have been all week getting around 4 hours of sleep on average a night. This does not help me heal but it is the way things are at the moment.

I’ve been doing my research and apparently the trifecta of getting rid of sugar, gluten and dairy + antifungals (the one I have) and probiotics is causing a storm in my gut flora and the nutrients I am getting from my food.  So my Dr was spot on about things feeling much worse before they get better. I’m just hoping that by the middle of next week I will start to get the ability to think back. I seriously could just stare at a wall and I wouldn’t get bored because I just can’t think at the moment. Writing this post was hard. But I know I am doing this for a reason and hope that since the antifungals have done their job and I no longer crave sweets all the time that I will be able to keep it up after I quit this diet. I will be incorporating some of these meals into our normal meal plan because the fish we had was really good and so was some of the chicken. The smoothies have not been good at all.

I am also happy to announce that 12 lbs have been shed since we purchased this house. 2 during this week. If I lose 2 lbs a week for the next 3 weeks I will be very happy and this will have been worth it. I’m more than tired of my gut and my double chin. If I could just stop being so tired all the time that would help too.

If you read this all the way through then thank you for reading. Have you done the whole 30 or an elimination diet? Is it something that you need to do but have been putting off? Tell me about how it went. Did you have withdraws? Anybody have any recipes they want to share with me?

ADHD, Adult, housework, mom, stay at home mom

Adult ADHD is what I Have

OK so those of you that have followed for a while have heard me talk about my adult ADHD. I used medicine for a while during the last few months of my Master’s degree and it was wonderful but once I found out that I was pregnant I quit taking it.

ADHD as a stay at home mother can be problematic. See, like a child with ADHD I get easily overwhelmed with my tasks if they aren’t exactly they way they should be. So, on Saturday I had everything picked up and clean. By Monday morning the whole house looked like a bomb had gone off in it. What happened? What caused this horrific line of events? My dishwasher didn’t dry the dishes so Sunday morning my whole routine was thrown off. Sound dramatic? It is. It’s down right embarrassing that something that small could throw off my whole day. Why, do you ask, it this so problematic? Because if I can’t unload the dishwasher as soon as I get up then things can’t be put directly into it again and I made waffles for breakfast, noodles for lunch, cake for snack and spaghetti and meatballs for lunch. Non of this got put in the dishwasher. My kitchen looked like a war zone and a mess is overwhelming to me. Hubby was also cleaning out the basement yesterday and found a blanket his mother made and wanted it washed and for me to get the smell out of it. I put it in the wash and it still smelled, I washed it again with vinegar and it still smelled, I washed it again with dish washing detergent but it still smelled so it was in the wash all day and nothing else got washed. So all the diapers were dirty and all the laundry from the weekend.

On a normal day I start by breastfeeding the baby, unloading the dishwasher, loading anything that didn’t make in it the day before or over night, make coffee, make breakfast, put the diapers in the dryer, put a load of laundry in the wash, go in the bathroom and wipe off everything, sit down and check my email, facebook, and ravelry and write a blog post, hang out with the kids, make lunch, stuff diapers and put laundry in dryer and then in the evening I make dinner, load dishwasher, put diapers in the wash, watch a show, knit, go to bed with baby, read while I nurse him to sleep and then pass out. As long as there is no issue with any of that then my house is cleanish and I’m happy but if there is a disruption it is hard for me to get back in the groove til that disruption is taken care of.

There is also an upside to my ADHD. I hyperfocus really well. If I get an idea in my head I have to follow through with it and I can do nothing but that for a long time. If I need to know about some sort of gardening then I have to sit down and read everything I can find on the subject. I hyperfocus a lot on my knitting. When I was on medication for my ADHD then I couldn’t knit because I didn’t hyperfocus any longer. But on the medication stuff like a wet dishwasher would never have thrown me off of my groove.

Do you have ADHD? How does it effect you?

If you have a friend that is ADHD or a child and they are having a hard time and everything is a mess ask them where they are stuck and help them work through the stuck part. The rest should flow.

finals, holidays, housework, life, Parenting, pregnancy, toddler

End of Semester Mess.

So it’s the end of the semester and finals are quickly approaching. I have 5 reaction papers due tomorrow and I am having a hard time starting anything. Because of my anxiety of having so much to do I even have a hard time keeping up with housework. It is normal at this house for the house to go to pot when finals or final projects are almost due. It’s like the project is so great that I have to do for school that I can’t even think about unloading or loading the dishwasher but it’s not like I’m doing homework in stead. I’m probably just sitting on the couch with my laptop in hand doing what I am doing right now or stuck on Facebook dreading the fact that I have to do all of this work that I am honestly too tired to do after not getting a full nights sleep in years.
All I need to do is get started and chip at these 5 reaction papers one at a time but all I see is 5 reaction papers that are all due tomorrow and I haven’t started. It becomes so grand that my brain goes on overload and crashes and turns me into this zombie that just sits on the couch and does nothing even though there are plenty of things to do. Am I alone in this process of waiting till the last min to get everything done and then when it comes down to it it’s finished and then I can get back to my life? My home literally goes from being a pigsty to being nice in about a week after finals.
I know I am doing way too many things at once most of the time and I guess that is why I get so overwhelmed. I’m knitting X-mas presents, keeping a home, taking care of my toddler, I threw a dinner party on Sunday, getting ready for the holidays, studying for finals,32 weeks pregnant, running my own business, getting ready to go back to Iceland to have this baby and doing 11 hours in grad school. I just don’t know where to stop if I want to get to where I want to be. Is it greedy of me to want to finish grad school now so that I can enjoy my children better later with a better income?

Anyway, Peace out I need ot start my 1 of 5 papers for Dr. Coopers

housework, motherhood, pregnancy, Rumba

About to plant my fall garden.

So my summer garden got left out in the heat of the summer and morning sickness and tiredness of being pregnant. Now I´m in the second trimester and felling so much better. We found out that I am pregnant with a boy. Yay! Two boys close in age. Fun times.
Anyway, this weekend will be spent cleaning up the summer garden and planting my fall garden so that we can have fresh salads, potatoes, peas and in the spring some leek, onion, and garlic.
I have a few projects on the knitting needles as well. 2 are gifts so I will not be showing them here till I´m done. I´m also working on a shrug for me. The only thing I can make for myself right now that I can use while pregnant and when I´m not. We will see how it goes. Now that I know that I am having a boy I want to knit lots of little boy clothes that I didn´t get to making for my older son.
Fall classes have started and this semester I´m taking assessment, Family Therapy, and Group Therapy. Then this January when this baby is do I will start my year leave from grad school. I´m going to enjoy being with my children and doing the best that I can for them and my husband.

On another note, I got my birthday present from dear husband early this year and it was a rumba vacuum. It is the best gift he could have given me. My floors are so clean now of cat hair and dust and cheerios. You know the normal things that end up on the floor when you have a 17 month old. But who would have thought that you can have a robot clean your floors for you. Just turn it on and do something else . Or do nothing. It´s like having someone come in and clean for you.
I also started using the pledge multi surface and I clean so much faster. All I need to clean is my roomba and the pledge multi surface and I have the room clean in no time.

Oh, one more thing that I am taking on since I will not be in school this up coming year is me and a friend are starting a podcast. It will cover the normal day to day life of a modern eco-conscious mom and things that are going on in the world. It will mostly be me and a mom hanging out, her drinking wine and talking and me not drinking wine but probably indulging on some really good tea or a new gourmet chocolate.