If it's not clear from the name of our site, I'm disabled. In dealing with my health crap, I've been bounced around from specialist to specialist, clinic to clinic for years. Honestly, it's all been a lot to manage, but worse, I've been hearing the same answers from medical provider after provider: therapy, physical therapy, mindfulness, and oh well, there's nothing more we can do for you. I've been in therapy for many years, starting before the worst of these symptoms started, so while it's a great help and still needed, that's obviously not the answer. Physical therapy almost always puts me in a flare and increases my pain levels long after they finally admit that it's not working. Mindfulness is something I've practiced for years and continue to work on, but again, if it were the answer, I wouldn't have all the health stuff going on that I do. As for not being able to do anything more for me, it's a frustrating answer I've heard so very many times over the years that it's not even a surprise anymore.
Until this January when I saw Dr. Umeda at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Integrative Medicine. He was the first doctor in forever who actually had read my chart before I walked in, and he had a theory I'd asked others about only to be dismissed: leaky gut. It's his theory that, while the leaky gut is not the cause of all my health problems, it's a confounding factor. Many of my conditions seem to be very sensitive to inflammation levels, which have been increasing over time according to my blood work. If treating the leaky gut lowers my overall inflammation levels, then it would, by extension, help my other conditions as well. It wouldn't stop me from being disabled, but hopefully, it would help me get back to where I was a few years ago in terms of overall pain levels and energy. So, I decided to try his treatment plan, and for the first time in years, I've had a little bit of improvement. One of the supplements he told me to try, rhodiola root powder, has turned down my daily headache so much that I can basically ignore it. It's frankly amazing. Nothing had worked on that headache, other than more Pepsi than was healthy for me and even then, it didn't work as well as this has. It's even increased my daily energy level a bit, and with a farmstead to keep going and a teen at home to help raise, I need all the energy I can get. For the leaky gut, Dr. Umeda told me to do the following:
I've added in collagen powder in my daily oatmeal breakfast (something I'd started before seeing Dr. Umeda) and up to a half a cup of a live cultured food (my homemade sauerkraut, yogurt, goats milk kefir, etc.). I added those in after seeing them recommended in so many books and websites, and they really do seem to help some. We are also using more traditional fats (rendered pork fat, avocado oil, coconut oil, olive oil, butter, duck fat), and I think that's helping, too. The big thing is to avoid processed food and the standard American diet, and when we do, when we make our own, my husband and I both feel better. One of the books that has been helping me on this new journey is the Nourishing Traditions cookbook. Now, I'm no fan of everything she has written, but Sally Fallon was on to something back in 1999. The way she describes a traditional diet in many different cultural groups, using the research by Weston Price from the early 1900s, just sounds like a farmstead diet to me and a whole lot like the diets that are recommended for leaky gut, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), and dysbiosis. The more I read and think through the recommendations in that book, the more I realize this is where Robert and I have been headed for years. More vegetables and fruits, better proteins, less dairy and sugar, more cultured foods. We grow, raise, and make a lot of that food, and if just eating more off our farmstead will make us healthier, then that's all for the good. This year, our goal is to raise many more meat ducks than we have before, mostly in response to really high meat prices. That said, it's a really healthy meat, as is the fat, and I need the bone broth to drink daily. Those ducks forage our property (that's all organic) and eat out of our organic garden. That makes for healthier eggs and fat, too. We've been expanding the garden little by little every year, and we need to eat more vegetables daily, especially fermented ones. The goal this year is to eat more fresh foods out of the garden first while in season, then preserve. When I started down this serious farmstead path, I got it in my head that I am growing all this food to preserve, but this year, I want to make sure we eat more of the vegetables and fruits in season first, then preserve and ferment after that. I think we can definitely do that. One of the dietary rules I have read somewhere while trying to learn all I can about leaky gut was to have half the plate vegetables, one quarter starch, and one quarter protein. We have been moving towards that more and more every year, and we have some plans to make this even more accessible now that spring is around the corner, which means more work taking more out of us by the time dinner comes around. It will be much easier once the garden is producing, but we still have some frozen and canned vegetables from last year to get us by. Another dietary rule I often see mentioned is to eat the rainbow: try to have as many different colors on your plate as possible. This is easier with salads, casseroles, and soups, to be honest, but it is a rule I try to take into account when making dinner. So, our farmstead diet that we will be following this year consists of these basic rules:
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CarinaI'm a 40s something disabled mom living the life on our small urban farm. Archives
April 2022
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