Category: enhancing health

D’oh, it’s dopamine!

lights

We’ve made it through the holidays.

Hurrah!

This post might seem long but it’s kind of all connected.

This post will be looking at how we might think a bit differently about aspects of ourselves by becoming more aware of the role of dopamine. You may have noticed from my somewhat nightmarish vision of christmas decorations and my language that I don’t relish the season we’ve now turned our back on. I’m preferring instead to embrace all that a New Year can bring. I don’t think I’ve ever been considered the life and soul of a party but that’s ok with me.

  • lacking drive?
  • low on motivation?
  • finding it hard to engage and live life fully?

All of the above could describe what I’ve always felt was part of my ‘nature’. Since signing up to 23andme (previous mentions of it here, here and here). I’m beginning to see that the chemistry lab in us all is shaped by our genes and so an impaired neurotransmitter production here and utilisation issue there might explain me sometimes preferring a good book to a good party.

I’m finding out the bits of me that don’t work as well as they could and realising my inner curmudgeon might in part, be thanks to the chemistry lab.

Many of the posts on this site are about investigating how to make life a little better. Sugar’s not come out smelling of roses on these pages. I’ve not been able to find anything good it can bring to the table apart from cake which we all know is really nice (for birthdays and very special occasions).

Having indulged in various sugary confections over the holidays I’m eager to get started on reducing the sugar again and getting back to a simpler way of eating. I talked about noticing the difference here but got a little distracted from my sugar free desires by birthday cake!

I found out something which might stiffen my resolve when it comes to the sweet stuff.

23andme analysis has thrown up some interesting things about dopamine in me. There are ways to protect what we have and get more, naturally. Finding I’m low in/poor at using this stuff through having wonky vitamin Dreceptors could answer an awful lot of questions about my behaviour in years past and the actions of a reformed sugar addict when relapsing with (gluten free) mince pies in recent weeks.

A diet high in sugar can wear out the dopamine receptors which can make what dopamine there is in the system less useful again.

One thing I’ll definitely be continuing with is supplementing with phospholipids over and above the

  • krill oil I take daily. I also started, back at the beginning of December taking two teaspoonfuls every morning of
  • Empirical Labs Phospholipid Complex. I bumped into this site whilst researching the stuff.

Go to about halfway down the NCBI post, The US National Centre for Biotechnology Information (better known as the reliable and often cited PubMed) for studies on depression, improvements in coping with stress as well as repairing brain matter. It really seems to be a wonder substance. It has a consistency a bit like bitumen or treacle (for its stickiness not sweetness). When I first started I thought it could waterproof the hull of any nearby boat. It helps strengthen the edges of all our cells not just those in the brain.

I think I feel… less… wobbly? Like I’m more in charge of keeping my body under control (both mentally and physically). I feel less prone to overbalancing whilst standing completely still. I thought this increased stability may have come from reducing a candida overgrowth since Septembe but the stability’s still there even after struggling to reduce my sugar consumption since a sugary christmas. more to follow on this struggle in another post.

Whatever caused the improvement I’m happy about it and whilst it would be nice to treat my body as an experiment and only change one variable at a time I also don’t want to hang about getting myself well.

After reading the US Pubmed post I’m going to make sure I never run out of this phospholipid complex ever again!

I think it’s fascinating the many and varied roles dopamine plays, including

  • brain function,
  • metabolism,
  • energy production aswell as affecting mood as mentioned at the top of this post.

The role that phospholipids seem to play in our harvesting of dopamine I’ve only just scratched at the surface of. You can perhaps tell I still have a lot more reading to do on the subject but thought I’d share this burst of enthusiasm with you!

There are so many possible suspects involved in us not feeling our best. I’m choosing to see the addressing of potential problems as a challenge to be entered into with curiosity and an open mind.

New Year’s resolutions are for the birds, feeling better is a lifelong undertaking (albeit taking in a few duvet days along the way). Cutting ourselves some slack/being kind to ourselves is just one way to get the best for and from us.

I hope, with a return to low sugar food in my diet and a regular intake of healthy fats I will achieve weight loss , my pre christmas energy levels and will have no need to make this noise.

happy New Year.

 

 

 

 

Self improvement

self improvement

 

There are some things I’ve been doing for a long time

  • gluten and dairy free,
  • sprouting seeds,
  • my own modified version of Pilates
  • occasionally visiting an osteopath and a
  • Feldenkrais practitioner,
  • acupuncturist and
  • craniosacral and shiatsu therapist
  • candida I’ve covered fairly thoroughly but

I need to get more organised in sharing some of these subjects.

look out for posts this year about getting more fresh veg into your diet and dealing with an addiction to sugar. At the moment I’m trying out various ways to get back to my low sugar time last autumn that my love of sweet things all around at christmas hit right out of the park.

Sugar free really was a revelation, I look forward to getting back there again and the improvement in mobility but won’t be beating myself up if the journey meanders here and there rather than its course taking an efficient, direct line!

I’d love to hear what you’ve found has helped you.

Ditching sugar… again, hasn’t been a straightforward A to B challenge especially whilst it gets given the plethora of names to hide its presence in packaged foods. The obvious thing to do would be to never eat packaged foods again but that’s an ideal to aim for not an overnight destination. Sugar acts like any other addictive substance in the brain – we’ll reach for whatever’s necessary to get that hit of dopamine unless we pause here and there to think about what we’re doing.

Foods that turn into glucose very quickly in the body also need thinking about. That baked potato that seemed so virtuous really isn’t unless mixed with a good source of protein and/or fat. Wildly fluctuating blood sugar and insulin levels don’t appear to be good for anyone whether you may be on your type II rollercoaster, waiting in the queue or just wanting to get the best from a poorly functioning body. Exercise and apparently apple cider vinegar can help a body deal with glucose, apparently.

Let’s all flag down the self-improvement boat and do our own research. I think it might present our best chance of feeling empowered about choosing the options we’re given. This power brings a range of immeasurable benefits.

We may not have consciously chosen to be here but we can consciously choose to have an ok time whilst we are here!

 

Seeking Health

PEPPERx3

Everything’s relative nowadays and my idea of health is probably quite different to yours or a kitten’s for that matter.

I’ve been doing family this past weekend so that my husband and I’d be at home to pick up our new kitten from the Blue Cross (a pet rehoming charity in the UK). And then stay at home to keep her (and us) entertained. She’s working a treat so far.

I think I need to get back to short posts. The ability to edit myself and turn one post into two or three had left me while dealing with our dying cat but, as you can see I don’t think I’ll be distracted by old age and possible pain of another being for the moment rather, enthusiastic exuberance and the idiocy of youth!

Bring it on.

The first thing that caught my eye on my return was an article about untested Ebola treatments causing a UK team of medics to walk out of their voluntary positions in Ebola treatment centres in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

The team felt it would be unprofessional giving a treatment originally developed for heart conditions to a group of physically weakened and physiologically complicated sufferers (liver and kidney failure are amongst Ebola patients’ complications). The treatment had limited antiviral properties. The WHO had identified over 50 other treatments that had greater anti-viral strengths. The team were exposing themselves to the patients’ contagious blood all for questionable benefit.

This is another article that’s been brought to my attention. Statins are a drug that have been around for a while and have had some very good PR behind them as you’ll see from the post that explains the difficulties that arise when equating the NNT (Number Needed to Treat in order to see a worthwhile treatment outcome) for preventive medicines where you’re not saving lives rather, preventing deaths.

It’s fascinating stuff and really worth reading if only to get a bit of a handle on how we are so easily persuaded of a thing’s worth by sets of numbers which get mistakenly conflated with other meanings of numbers in other scenarios.

I could list the sorts of pharmaceutical therapies involving supplementation that have received similar treatments but this is a short post as it’s Christmas Day, I’ve just been playing with the kitten at the top of the page and now need to get me some xmas w friends.

Happy Christmas folks.

New Year post will be a rundown of the various strategies we can all do to help us feel at our best.

Happy New Year (depending on the depth of my gluten free mince pie haze) there maybe a post before NYE!

challenge, perhaps?

a challenge to let the right ones in

in this post I’d like to add a supplement that I’d left off my previous two yeast posts. You could argue it was one of the most important additions during an effective dismantling of an overgrowth of candida.

  • Permavite powder; I didn’t use it for the first two months of my candida clearout which I mention here and here while I focused on reducing the invasive parasite which itself, I’ve been told was causing holes in my gut. Intestinal permeability can be caused by many things including a bedded in overgrowth of the yeast candida. When the parasite has been allowed to multiply unchallenged its form changes and it turns into a fungus, creating a thread like structure called hypha which can burrow beyond the gut and set up home all over the body.
  • HCL supplements; as we age we naturally produce less hydrochloric acid in our stomachs. When all is working well this is our first line of defense against bacteria that comes into the digestive tract in and on the food we eat. If we eat a low salt diet this can also impact how much acid we produce as sodium is needed in the creation of this essential acid.

There’s a whole other post on the finer details of our salt consumption (table salt=bad, rock or sea salt=good) but here is someone else’s version for the moment. Processed (ie table salt) versions of sodium have been stripped don’t hold the minerals that our bodies were developed to ingest at the same time as the electrolyte sodium.

If you’re getting heartburn or recurrent UTIs consider looking into the benefits of taking an HCL supplement with every meal. It may be responsible for reducing tiredness/fatigue after eating. This tiredness could also be down to eating foods your system has an intolerance to or a disordered bloodsugar response which I talk about briefly here.

A number of naturopathic approaches say these holes, which are sometimes referred to as Leaky Gut Syndrome can lead to undigested food particles entering the bloodstream. When this happens the immune system sees stuff that is not ‘self’ and mounts an immune response.

‘Leaky gut’s’ very existence is hotly debated in certain circles but some of the people questioning the theory’s existence (in my experience) talk of mysterious triggering of auto-immune conditions but so far have offered no better alternative.

  • Gluten
  • Legumes
  • Nightshade family of vegetables
  • Long term use of antibiotics, ibuprofen and any number of other medications.

Having the troops on high alert, facing a challenge with every forkful and behaving in a twitchy, trigger happy manner, attacking anything that looks a little bit different to self (a little like some members of the US police force) is not a long term strategy for any body.

As I started to see signs the overgrowth was lessening including waking with a clearer head, not feeling so… puffy and swollen and the size of my potbelly reducing aswell as losing 7 pounds and counting (whilst not even trying to) I started to use Permavite with each meal to build up my gut lining.

Slippery Elm, Aloe Vera and Marshmallow root supplements, okra green foodstuff and chia and flaxseed all have mucilaginous properties (they go gooey with water) and soothe the GI tract by creating another barrier to protect the gut lining from bacteria in the belly.

 

I listened to a presentation by Suzy Cohen the author of Drug Muggers, a pharmacist and functional medicine practitioner in the US, recently. In the book she talks about the various interactions prescription drugs can have with each other and the food we eat (fruit juice and cholesterol lowering drugs don’t mix, apparently) and the side effects they can have on our bodies.

Ability to edit myself has slipped (you may have noticed) while dealing with a dying cat at home.

She’s no longer in pain so I’m hoping to get back to doing the things I do every day to feel a little bit better.

LOTS of advice givers!

 

advice aplenty

As patients of incurable conditions nowadays we’re surrounded by advice from mostly well meaning folk. Today’s post will look at a handful of these suggestions. Some of them I first heard in relation to lesseniing MS’s effect on the body but which now have a wider audience.

 

I asked my neurologist, about 15 years ago about what different sorts of foods should or shouldn’t I be eating?

It won’t really make any difference, came his reply, as long as you eat a sensible low fat diet; the same thing as everyone is encouraged to do. I can refer you to our hospital’s dietitian if it’ll make you feel any happier?

His utter lack of interest in the fuel we provide ourselves with I felt was shortsighted at the very least. I’ve never put diesel in my petrol car because I’ve heard the car wouldn’t run so well if I were to do so. I went to the appointment and was told the only evidence she could find after searching the available data was a diet high in polyunsaturated fatty acid was mentioned in a couple of studies as showing potential worth in following.

 

Things have moved a little in the intervening years – well, there’s more information to be aware of and a greater need to pick a path through the avalanche of data.

15 years later and one of those suggested approaches to eating is widely recognised as Paleo. The Western world and our cousin seem to be on some form of it. You could argue the rest of the world are still on it (assuming they’re not yet under the shadow of the golden arches).

This shifting and creeping nature of food advice I feel highlights the similarities between various chronic diagnoses and people in general. We’re all trying to slow the aging process or, at least  ensure our time on earth is as comfortable and productive as it can be. Chronic disease is just some of our bodies choosing to age differently.

As scare stories about our food sources and methods of commercial production are revealed even some perfectly working bodies are wishing to keep those bodies from unnecessarily deteriorating by jumping on the bandwagon of… essentially… not eating stuff from packets.

 

Saturated fat is no longer the devil in disguise but it is considered so to some MS diets (see further down for a link to the Swank diet).

So, it would seem not just the oil but the heating of the oil is relevant.

  • This is one that I found recently. I was under the impression that canola oil as a foodstuff was questionable? For a start, there’s no such thing as a canola plant that might produce canola seed (Canola is in fact, according to wikipedia, a creation of the main suppliers of rapeseed oil from Canada).

I include links from a variety of sources to highlight the need to keep our wits about us!

The image is a field of oilseed rape in high summer near my home  – when becoming rapeseed oil it can be extracted mechanically involving solvents and heat; Canola (amongst others) or it can be cold pressed like the best virgin olive oils and this process is likely to cost more.

Canola provides omega VI essential fatty acid (which sounds like it should be a good thing, right?) but if we eat a typical Western diet/SAD (standard american diet) we’re most likely brimful of VI but deficient in omega III.

In a perfect world/caveman times/paleolithic era before farming when we lived in small communities and hunted and gathered for each other (pretty far from where we in the Western world are now) we’d eat a roughly one:one balance of the two fats but we eat biscuits and other tasty and addictive stuff from packets.

  • This is another oil story  (olives this time) but it has good news!
  • We’ll save saturated coconut fat for another post (one of the paleo folk’s essentials).

Stuff from packets is made to make profit (nothing wrong with that) but using the cheapest possible ingredients often means using these cheap seed and vegetable oils that are extracted in ways that involve substances I wouldn’t want to eat before it even gets to our plate, mouth (or oven for that matter).

Omega VI tend to be pro-inflammatory which, if you have a long term health challenge I believe your symptoms could be exacerbated by inflammation brought on by consuming way more VI than III?  This is what the ‘avalanche’ link at the top of the page says, anyway. Even if you don’t have a chronic condition a body will be happier and function better with less omega VI.

Check with your care giver or do a search on google but inflammation appears to lie at the heart of many intractable conditions for which there has been no cure found, as yet.

  • Omega III is anti-inflammatory and found in raw nuts and oily fish. Inflammation, as I discuss in an earlier post happens in our body and it’s a smart method to get the organism to sit still and allow healing to happen rather than cause further damage (a vast simplification but you get the gist).
  • Here is another page detailing the issues we have with inflammation in the body.
  • Here is another ms specific diet from a doctor with MS.
  • We haven’t even got onto the SWANK or the
  • Best Bet Diet (which is a modified Paleo approach and reduces the amount of foodstuffs the body might potentially react unfavourably to.
  • There are now so many nutrition based approaches for dealing with a long term condition we have a flood of information and websites and folk offering advice.
  • Which I appreciate is what I’m doing but at least I have no bias; I’m throwing bits of all that I’m aware of at you!

I’ve been listening to a talk from Sarah Ballantyne (author of the Paleo Approach, auto-immune diet book) and she explained some of the reasons for avoiding legumes (beans, chickpeas, peanuts, peas) and nightshade family (potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants/aubergines, peppers).

Saponins somehow came into her explanation. They can contribute to making holes in your gut which allows food particles to enter the bloodstream and create things for your immune system to throw a hissy fit at. Fatigue can be one of the side effects. I’m putting together an article on the subject of a leaky gut at the moment.

Getting a bit of the ‘why’  has helped me knock legumes off my daily diet something I’d struggled with in the past (legumes and nightshades were verboten on the Best Bet Diet also).

I’m choosing to follow an adapted paleo diet (sweet potato in place of white potatoes but I don’t go quite as crazy for bacon as they seem to. It was a bit of a bind to avoid eating legumes after stopping gluten a lot but not all of the MS (and lifestyle paleo) diets agree that our bodies weren’t built to tolerate a grain which has only really been around in an evolutionarily noticeable quantity for not more than 10,000 years.

Farming and a steady food supply has brought huge progress to society if you are one of the consumers. If you have been one of the producers of grain, you have been tied to the soil and made a slave to this phenomenally successful organism.

I’d love to hear from you to find out what foods you’ve found worth avoiding or ones you really can’t imagine ever avoiding!

We’re all basically the same but slightly different beings.

Find your own path, I’d love to hear it.

I still don’t think I’ve settled on mine although this article (from a mainstream news source) is a help!

Any port in a storm?

water water everywhere

I chose this image of mine to illustrate the need of any port in a storm but it’s a disordered environment, really. The glowering images of a storm on a Norwegian sea I’d thought of to illustrate this post are on a packed away external drive at the moment. I feel now, this image works better – something’s wrong with what would normally be a charming image of rural countryside.

There might be any number of contributing factors that bring a hint of the nautical to what should be a bucolic agrarian scene.

Brain you tube: The body will keep circulation for as long as possible to basic stuff like breathing. The newer stuff – thinking, writing poems, doing a One Direction dance are not worth saving at all costs by the brain. They’re less important because they aren’t essential for our survival. I think it’s good to get an image of how things are supposed to be.

Fecal transplants seem to be something that’s been helping conditions obviously affecting the gut – Clostridium Difficile for example. Now it’s also being suggested for neurological disorders such as MS, Parkinsons and Autism.

This post will be full of things that have caught my eye recently. Here’s one to throw into the mix: alkalize for health. We all know that veg especially greens are good for us (read previous post here where I speak about folate) but also making our body less acid has untold benefits for a body that’s become used to one too many cakes or steaks (both food items I heartily approve of but probably not that extra helping?) Trying to increase the number and variety of veg in the diet I see as the take home message of the page.

Get to know your body whether it’s behaving well or not. I had my genome sequenced. I mention my experience of the process in previous posts here and here. It’s pointed out that my supplementing with

  • vitamin B12 will be better being done with hydroxy rather than methyl B12.
  • My vitamin D receptors aren’t working properly which could explain my especially bad SAD in December/January.
  • certain glutathione processing SNiPs were completely missing so it seems it would be a good thing to supplement with glutathione (I’m using a cream applied under the ribs (over the liver) that will be absorbed transdermally and will hopefully give my liver a bit of a leg up and help it rid the body of general day to day toxins. I hope this might result eventually in a bit more energy. I probably have a lot more reading to do!

Here is another page that highlights why we want to get all the vitamin D we can. The methylation cycle is fiendishly tricky to understand (well, it is for me anyway).You may have noticed from the flavour of the posts on here so far that I’ll point you toward things that aren’t necessarily cures – the approach, protocol or exercise regime won’t make you all better by tomorrow but I’ll suggest things that might make life a little better whether you may be someone with a condition, care for someone with a condition or, you’re entirely well and somehow ended up on this site.

How does this help?

It might not help anyone else but I take some comfort knowing there may have been an underlying reason I didn’t fully engage in life at school and could never have been considered life and soul of the party! Half the population are thought to have impaired SNiPs. The information I’ve found out about me makes me wonder about the worth of double blind placebo controlled trials for complex conditions and also all the people who grew up being told they were slow, stupid or lazy.

All these lines of investigation and exploration might help an individual a little bit. I believe any port in a storm will do for me. Having a chronic, neurological disorder I believe can sometimes be likened to being lost at sea. You can’t rely on a stable base or solid ground or anything!

Dr Amy Yasko, a molecular biologist with an interest in healing her child’s autism has written about the process she has taken to getting a disordered brain back to some kind of normal.

I consider myself to be at the beginning of this process.

  • I took a food intolerance test over 10 years ago so know what foods my insides prefer not to deal with (dairy and gliadin, gluten essentially).
  • I got 23andme’d this summer and have found out I need to reshape a malfunctioning (from birth) methylation cycle and
  • I’ve been on a candida clearout for the past few months (please read 2 earlier posts on the subject here and here).

I wonder whether a body not working optimally from before birth also contributed to some of the vascular issues whose existence is being debated in cases of MS. I went to get CCSVI’d by Dr Sclafani in Brooklyn two years ago and have mentioned it here)The hypothesis that Dr Paulo Zamboni first put forward in 2009 but was initially investigated by Dr Franz Schelling (which i talk about here) is called ccsvi.


As we know, MS (and life) is multifactorial.

Candida Overgrowth Part 2 and/or SIBO?

two cups of hot drink on desk

This is the second part of my candida cleanse collection of posts.

What can we do after finding our spit sinks first thing in the morning? (please see the previous post for details on sinking spit here).

I’ve entered into this protocol with a bit more vigour than in the past and am now into my 3rd month of a daily diet of pretty much no sugar, booze, yeast and/or vinegar but lots of fresh veg (mostly greens less starch) and no sweet fruit (green apples and blueberries are ok in moderation). Recently I have reintroduced fermented vegetables (I describe the making of them here).

I checked my spit this morning as I’ve been feeling slowly, slightly a little better in a number of areas.

  • My limbs feel more… reliable,
  • my balance seems more centred (I don’t feel like I might overbalance and fall over as much and
  • my head feels clearer. I appreciate none of those statements sound like gamechanging successes but
  • I no longer crave sugar! That I consider to be a resounding success.
  • I treated myself with a square of 85% dark chocolate and there’s still a quarter of the square left this morning!

I’m still not great at carrying two cups of hot liquid in both hands at once (a few drops spilt but neither cup tipped) these are all tiny signs (to me at least) that things are changing. Grated ginger in one and loose leaf green tea in a yellow submarine in the other are both I believe, polyphenol rich and therefore, desirable?

I have a question mark as there are so many things I don’t myself have proof of and have to take it on trust that various people on the internet aren’t lying to me and as far as I know, I’m not lying here either but like I mention in various other posts, your best bet is to do lots of reading from lots of different places and become your own research and/or researcher.

Anyway, let’s get on to how these happy changes may have come about.

In the previous post I spoke of hugely reducing my sugar intake, stopping booze, vinegar and generally what could be considered as excess starch consumption. It’s not like I was a booze hound or I ate all the cakes every day but even a tiny amount was giving fuel to the yeasts that I felt had grown out of control in me resulting in recurrent UTIs, fatigue and fierce sugar cravings.

Along with those dietary changes I followed the regimen of antifungals as suggested by Christa Orecchio when talking to Sean Croxton (both of whom I believe I mentioned in the previous post. So, I’m hoping to try and get rid of

  • recurring yeast infections
  • remorseless fatigue
  • bloating and gas
  • poor memory
  • brain fog.

At every meal, I have been starving the yeast of its favorite food (by not eating those foods) aswell as, in 4 day rotations, taking two at a time of:

  • pau d’arco
  • olive leaf extract
  • oil of oregano (this one is cruel as the smell reminds me of Italian food!)
  • grapfruit seed extract
  • uva ursi

As well as my

  • Betaine HCL supplements with every meal (the dosing of this supplement deserves its own post – watch this space).

This supplement enhances the amount of stomach acid to help digest a meal. When things are ticking along nicely Hydrochloric acid should be your first line of defense in killing pathogenic bacteria from food but age, a history of disordered eating, antibiotic use, stress and low salt diets can all interfere with our body’s natural ability to produce it. Every morning, before food I take a spoonful of

  • Diatomaceous Earth and
  • Bentonite Clay mixed with water.

The clay has a positive charge which can be lessened when it comes into contact with metal. Luckily the company I bought it from supplied a wooden spoon. The DE (food grade) has really sharp edges that scour out your gut and the clay clings to particles. Essentially the two products together behave like Harvey Keitel in any number of his roles as a ‘cleaner’ in films. Combined they remove the evidence of the bacteria’s presence in your body.

I think this subject could be spread into a third post but for the moment I’m stopping here. My spit was floating and I thought it might be safe to have a glass of wine, it wasn’t. So, I’m back to ensuring my spit doesn’t drown! I’ll keep you informed of changes.

I mention SIBO in the title and honestly have little idea of the difference in action of an opportunistc yeast and a Small Intestine Bacterial Overgrowth as I haven’t gone as far as sending my stool off to be analysed. I’ll see what I can do on my own for the moment as I understand there is some overlap between having an overgrowth of one organism when compared to another.

Candida Schmandida?

There’s regularly much mention in complementary/well being/alternative circles about troubles with candida albicans, its overgrowth and the many and varied symptoms it can create in humans. This post will be looking at just one strand of how to get a body working better by introducing how to see if it’s a problem for you.

My next post will go into greater detail about how to reduce it’s presence in the body. Have a look online there are many people who suspect it could be an issue for a great many people – not just those with MS or other auto-immune conditions.

  • Have you had what feels like fatigue out of all proportion to any exertion on your part?
  • Do you get aching joints not explained away by your activities?

These are just a couple of the symptoms attached to the actions of this opportunistic organism in your system. Fatigue and aching joints could be down to many other things so read on to find out how to rule this culprit out.

other beings

When I first started my ‘journey’ towards enhancing my wellbeing (soon after diagnosis) I spent the afternoon in a bookshop choosing which book to buy to tell me something about the condition, Multiple Sclerosis, a self help guide seemed to be the most positive in outlook and full of what appeared useful stuff.

This all happened in the days before I was introduced to the internet but it’s still a great book and the guidelines hold their own against many websites and blogs nowadays. I’m eternally grateful to the author Judy Graham for introducing me to an alternative way of looking at my condition before the tsunami of auto-immune journeys flooded the wellness side of the web.

I’ve hesitated to use the word empowering in previous posts but I think it’s an apt description of the book I read and how I felt after reading it.

Since then all the Ws have arrived and google helped the web become a place to go and find stuff out, whilst not even having to put your shoes on to leave the house… what progress!

Various candida cleanses are available so I thought I’d join in! Seems to me the best place to start is finding out if it might be an issue for you and could be contributing to existing symptoms you may have.

My thanks to Christa Orecchio for some of the detail collected from a talk given to Sean Croxton (I mention his JERFing mantra elsewhere on here). Just eat real food (his mantra) I mention in an earlier post and backed up by Dr Josh Axe and any number of naturopathic practitioners:

  • first off is candida albicans rampaging in your body?

After getting up in the morning, before you brush your teeth or have a cup of tea/coffee/hot water and lemon juice (helps alkalize your system, I’ll write about this in another post) pour a glass of water and work up some spit in your mouth then spit into the glass and leave it til after you’ve had some breakfast (not somewhere where someone might accidentally drink it!)

  • After half an hour or so has your spit stayed floating on the surface of the water or has it ‘grown legs’ and some or all of it has sunk to the bottom of the glass?

When everything’s in order and we haven’t been taking another curse* (sic) of antibiotics or been dealing with a range of different stressors on the body (including physiological stress from food intolerances as well as  emotional and/or mental stress) we manage to co-exist with an array of symbiotic hitchikers in our systems. These guys live in our gut and help to digest our food when all’s going well and communicate with other parts of us like our brains and fat storing departments.

*Don’t get me wrong, antibiotics have their place but it seems we, as a society have come to rely on them too much which has brought its own well reported troubles.

You may have noticed, as members of the western ‘developed’ world, most of us are pretty good at not allowing our bodies to reach calm. Buddhists consider our constantly gabbling brain to be a ‘monkey mind‘. this incessant internal noise can contribute to a poorly performing immune system which, in turn can pave the way for an opportunist bacteria to make a break for the big time in your belly.

Anway, I should stop showing you evidence of my monkey mind and get back to the detail of this particular candida cleanse.

  • Did your spit sink?

If it did that’s a sign there are too many things living in your digestive tract (the tube between mouth and anus). In earlier posts I’ve mentioned Hippocrates and him believing that all disease starts in the gut. Most, if not all functional doctors agree.

One of the first things to do is remove from your diet stuff that these rowdy inhabitants of our gut like to eat. Unfortunately it’s the same kind of thing we can be partial to, too:

  • sugar
  • vinegar
  • yeast
  • alcohol

Incidentally, this is how sugar effects our brain without any need for ‘outside’ help. Sugar it seems doesn’t do us or critters living in us much good.

There’s more to follow but try doing less of these things to start with and see if your body behaves a little better without their influence.

My next post will go into more about the symptoms and the 2+ month protocol involved in slowly removing this energy robber from your system.

I mention Judy Graham as she talked about candida and I read about it some 15 years ago and things might have progressed differently if I’d tackled this situation then.

I appreciate if, if, if don’t amount to a hill o’ beans suffice to say I’m two months in to the no booze or sugar protocol and I think it’s doing me some good but perhaps too early to tell?

 

 

Improving Prognosis?

The image of ivy is from my back garden and illustrates one of the few things that truly thrive there.

NIHCE have issued guidelines to address which treatments might be worth the NHS providing for MS patients. Aside from the disease activity going on in our brains we have similar symptoms to many other chronic conditions. Some of those symptoms are brought on by our bodies becoming increasingly inactive due to deterioration in our brains. It’s even been cheerily suggested by a London research establishment MS could be rebranded as a form of dementia. With this in mind I thought I’d share a link I was sent that was made with seniors in mind but could be useful for anyone that doesn’t move as much as they used to.

  • NIHCE have suggested no longer financing injections of B12 to try and reduce fatigue (unfortunately, I’ve never been able to get hold of any through any number of GPs) but perhaps with more people asking for some basic maintenance strategies from their GP things might change?
  • Vitamin D supplementation is involved in many processes carried out in the body every day and helps regulate the body’s own immune activity. it might be wise to address both of these deficiencies in the general public aswell. A GP can carry out this test.
  • On the pharmaceutical side NIHCE would also prefer not to pay for Fampridine and Sativex. There wasn’t enough evidence to show statistically significant efficacy for all four supplementation approaches.

ivy up close

News of the Commonweath Fund’s conclusions about the brilliance of the NHS in a global league table of developed nation’s healthcare systems (as long as you don’t have a long term condition) I’ve mentioned in another post. The NIHCE use all sorts of equations and algorithms including weighing up loss of tax earnings for the country if these citizens can no longer earn and contribute. Perhaps  the measure for the wellbeing of patients with long term health conditions needs to be adjusted?

I’m conflicted about withdrawing a therapy that has worth for some people but then I remember that the NHS doesn’t have bottomless pockets and whilst some people are missing out on marginally increased walking speeds, baby units and end of life care could perhaps benefit from the spare cash? I’ll still be buying my own supplements even if it doesn’t clearly contribute to improving prognosis  on the NIHCE scale of improvement as I’m choosing to believe when their effects are all added up, these therapies are worth applying to help keep my body working as best it can. I think this outlook involving positive thinking may bring its own benefits.

A UK MS researcher agreed that good things appear to happen during O2 therapy after being asked for his opinion on a study on this website where Israeli long term stroke patients found new brain cell growth/synaptogenesis after receiving intensive O2 therapy in a decompression chamber. There are things we can do for ourselves that might help a little. I appreciate this isn’t a very rock and roll closing statement but it seems we, as owners of chronic conditions are in charge of improving our prognosis.

Simple strategies for living well

Take a piece of string, measure your height with it and fold it in half, does it fit around your waist?

Waist to height measurement is a pretty good indicator of whether you really need that extra helping of… cake/pie/favourite foodstuff!

A balanced diet is made up (thanks to Paul Chek for this simplification) of food with eyes (protein and fats) and food with no eyes (carbohydrates). Avocados and nuts are exceptions to that rule but generally vegetables growing above ground like leafy greens will be less starchy than vegetables grown below ground: potatoes, sweet potato, beetroot, parsnips and carrots to name a few.

Why does all this matter?

There are a growing number of people that believe the gut is at the heart of most disease. Hippocrates got there first over two thousand years ago but a growing number of people alive today are also questioning the quality of the food we eat nowadays and are looking for simpler/less procesed foods to eat. Stuff that our bodies have evolved to digest over multiple dozens of millennia.

There are many different versions of the ‘Just Eat Real Food‘ sentiment. Eat food, not too much and mostly plants is the simple guideline given by journalist Michael Pollan in his book In Defence of Foods.

Food = Epigenetic information. Which is a new way to think of our morning break fast.

Every piece of food we eat ‘talks to’ the cells in our body. These conversations can shape how our bodies continue to exist in their environment. I think but am not fully read up on the research yet, that what we eat over time can impact how our bodies respond to everything around us. And our decendants!

Epigenetics is a fascinating area of research: A 2nd WW dutch famine had repercussions for the grandchildren of those who lived through it. Our DNA forms the building blocks of who we are but those building blocks can be shaped by the world around us, too.

This nutrition lark seems to be far from straightforward!

I attended an online summit called the Evolution of Medicine at the end of September 2014. In it a number of functional medicine experts and enlightened ‘regular’ doctors were interviewed and issues were identified that needed to and were beginning to change in mainstream medicine.

We have a slew of chronic disease – much of it could be considered to be mediated by the way we live. Type II diabetes is better dealt with by addressing what you eat and how you move now rather than waiting for a profoundly reduced insulin response to turn into heart disease, stroke, nerve damage, wonky eyes (my wording)… the list goes on.

We eat a diet so far removed from what our bodies have been designed to cope with, no wonder they’re ‘slipping up’ and creating disease in us. It’s not just GM foods that could be storing up trouble for us and our children. Food is just one aspect of how we can make our lives a little better.

Small changes to how and how much we move can have surprisingly satisfying results. Getting outside and going for a walk every day is good for the soul as well as our heart and lungs. I’ve been performing my own version of HIIT (high intensity interval training) on my exercise bike. I can’t walk very far and have a wheelchair for events that call for more walking than say, getting round a supermarket with a trolley to hold onto so it’s not often that I can achieve a change in my heart rate.

There are a wide variety of websites I visit and gather what I hope is useful information to me and I assume others including a number of strands of research from around the world. Change in my body (including not getting out of breath so quickly) seems to be happening… slowly but I think getting the heart rate up must get more blood pumping round the body and that includes the brain so, a handful of 30 second bursts on the static bike every other day with the resistance turned up is giving my brain a treat. It also has a happy side effect of warming perpetually cold hands and feet!

To a continually pumping heart the brain is just another extremity (like hands and feet) that the pressure and circulation doesn’t always reach. Gravity works against the brain here, unfortunately.

Always low blood pressure can be as problematic as high BP resulting in fatigue perhaps partly because the brain isn’t getting enough glucose or oxygen to function optimally.

I read this in a fascinating book Why Isn’t My Brain Working by Datis Kharrazian. He has used a similar functional approach to identify strategies to improve an underperforming thyroid.

It’s always a good idea to get an MOT from your gp to check that your body can cope with the changes you’d be asking of it with a new exercise regime. I never used to be much of an exercise person but I was also a smoker as a youngster so i wasn’t really caring what my body may have been trying to tell me!

Small things can make a difference and some simple strategies have got to be worth a go, no?