My World Turned Upside Down and So Thankful!

The past four months have been chocked full of unexpected lessons that have taken our whole family on a journey toward healthiness that we never anticipated.  It all started at a seminar I attended in March that touched on the topic of gut health, a topic I knew nothing about.  Not wanting to appear rude since I was on the front row, I stayed the duration of the seminar.  Boy, am I glad I did!  The speaker was an alternative doctor who taught about the importance of our "inside tract" and touched on many of the side effects i.e. illnesses that may occur when our guts become unhealthy.  Intrigued by his talk, I decided to approach the doctor afterward and ask him a question regarding one of my children.  I told him that one of my children had suffered from loose stools since weaning.  I honestly thought nothing of these bowel patterns because there were no other symptoms and his bowel movements were like clockwork, one in the morning and one in the afternoon and occasionally one at night.  It did not seem to bother him at all, so it did not bother me.   However, the alternative doctor made it quite clear in our brief talk that chronic loose stools were not at all normal and termed my child's condition "leaky gut syndrome." He urged me to get to the bottom of the loose stools so my child's gut could heal and that complications would not arise in the future due to an unhealthy gut.  This conversation started me on a journey that I anticipate has really only just begun.   That same month I talked to the alternative doctor at the conference, I got on amazon.com and spent a week researching books on this very topic (digestion, gut health, reading food labels, healing foods, etc.)  before ordering the following books:   The Pantry Principle: How to Read the Label and Understand What's Really in Your Food, Digestive Wellness for Children: How to Strengthen the Immune System and Prevent Disease Through Healthy Digestion, An A-Z Guide to Healing Foods- A Shopper's Reference, Digestive Wellness: Strengthen the Immune System and Prevent Disease Through Healthy Digestion, The Inside Tract: Your Good Gut Guide to Great Digestive Health.  The more I read, the more I realized this was a whole new world that I knew nothing about.  I could not put these books down.  As I read, I began to look at history and other cultures and realized that the West is dealing with diseases that other countries have never seen or have seen very little of, with our problems apparently related to our diet and how far removed it is from the natural ingredients of the natural world.  I had never thought of food as medicine and medicine as food.  For example, there are so many foods that I had deemed 'healthy,' that were not 'healthy' at all:  Foods that experts actually label as 'not food at all,' because of all the fillers, chemicals, and amount of processing that has taken place to create it.  As I researched and read, I began to hear testimony after testimony of people who were cured of chronic illnesses that conventional medicine could not heal.  The diseases ranged from digestive illnesses such as IBS to things as serious as cancer.  According to The Inside Tract: Your Good Gut Guide to Great Digestive Health, written by Gerard E. Mullin, MD the director of GI Nutrition Services at Johns Hopkins, the United States ranks last in longevity among developed countries and was the leader in avoidable deaths in a study of 19 countries. 

After much reading, I decided to take my family on the journey of an elimination diet starting June 1 to try to see if a food allergy was the cause of my child’s loose stools.  If one person had to do this diet, we all would.  Let's just say looking back a month ago, I had no idea what we were in store for.  As for the elimination diet, we basically took out all possible allergens, or at least what we thought are allergens, and ate a very basic whole foods diet, nothing processed, all fresh, etc.  We also juiced a lot.  I spent the first week highly frustrated and shed quite a few tears.  I had no idea what an adjustment this new eating plan would be for me and how many times I would visit the store.  In the beginning, I think I frequented Whole Foods and Earth Fare daily because I could not get organized.   I am naturally a planner, so this was quite humbling to say the least, and exhausting.   I planned on this experiment lasting ten short days and then returning to normal, so I kept telling myself it is only for a short time.  What caused me the most stress was the fact that I was faced with a huge dilemma - I had no idea how to feed my family yummy meals on this elimination diet and had no idea how to do this on a budget.  In fact, many of the things we could eat, I had never heard of before.  For one, we were so conditioned to the traditional American diet, so eating less sugar and dairy was our hardest adjustment.   Prior to this change, I had gotten in such a rhythm of feeding my family, and for the most part everyone was happy with the meals I prepared.  I was able to feed my family on twenty dollars a person per week through utilizing coupons at Bi-Lo and Publix coupled with shopping the buy-one-get-one sales, buying in bulk, buying chicken through Zaycon, shopping at Aldi, and other deal places.   Now, I had to read food labels and eat whole foods or unprocessed foods that for the most part did not have coupons and were not buy-one-get-one.   A lot of the seasoning I had used in the past, I just had to put away.  My family was gracious for the most part as I tried out new recipes and slowly learned to make food taste good.  I still have so much to learn!!!  The kids were pretty resilient, which to be quite honest completely surprised me.  Ten days came and went and nothing changed so we kept going with the elimination diet.  By day eighteen, to say I was frustrated is an understatement.  I sought out a homeopathic practitioner in the state.  She encouraged us to continue on the whole foods diet, avoiding processed foods as well as gluten, dairy, and sugar and to only allow our child who was dealing with loose stools to eat blueberries for fruit.  After seeing her, he took colloidal silver for 3 short days.  His daily regimen since seeing her has been a probiotic, a homeopathic remedy, sole, diatomaceous earth, aloe vera juice, and a fiber supplement.  One week exactly after seeing her, his stools changed to NORMAL for the most part- with two exceptions thus far.   This would have been twenty five days from when the whole journey began.  We are very hopeful and thankful that we have seen normal stools and will continue this on this journey.   We plan to begin introducing possible allergy triggers slowly to see exactly what the culprits are soon and praying we can figure this out.  This certainly is a journey toward health, not a fast track to health as I had hoped, and one that I have to chronicle so I can learn what foods offend his system.  This journey takes discipline and endurance for sure, but ultimately it has launched me on a journey toward dependence on God as I cannot rely on my knowledge or my expertise nor do I posses the skills or wisdom to even know fully what I am dealing with.  The books are endless.  I need His wisdom and His guidance.  I so easily get in a tizzy or become intense when worrying over an issue regarding my children.  The older I get the more I realize how complex life truly is and that I need a God who is so much bigger than me and whatever issue is on the table.  I don't have time to fixate on an issue even if I want to or attempt to figure it out on my strength.  For one, I can't.  Second, with little children, I don't have time to try.  My husband asked me to read A Praying Life by Paul Miller with him and this has proven so timely.  The book has challenged me to spend more time praying for my children than researching.  Do I follow through yet?  No, but I need to and I want to.  Yesterday, chapter seven in A Praying Life convicted me of how quickly I want to take credit for things going well and how I so easily become full of pride.  How quick my heart wants to say, “Lord, now that things seem to be moving in a positive direction, I can take over”… when in reality apart from Him I truly can do nothing.  We have asked the Lord to bless the work of our hands since this journey began and we pray that He will continue to bless us and ultimately heal our child's gut. 

So we continue on....