I've been reading Matt Stone's free eBook (www.180degreehealth.com) and it was definatley a very eye opening read, and fun too, I should add. Below are some of my responses to what I've learned, put into the context of my own healing journey. Matt Stone writes:
"The ideal end goal for everyone is to be able to eat the greatest variety of foods, properly digest the greatest variety of foods, properly metabolize the greatest variety of foods, and experience great health with the absolute minimum number of dietary restrictions and limitations."
Amen to that!
He also writes:
"We can mimic what healthy people ate all day long, but it’s really the metabolic state that they were in that gave them such phenomenal health. If you don’t get there, you don’t have that health experience."
And that just about sums up my problems. I've been trying to eat like an Eskimo for three years and I'm just not getting to experience health...
One of the new issues that have occurred with my current low carb, anti-candida diet is one that I've not had the courage to discuss here until now because it's been so totally freaking me out. It's my recent tooth decay. Tooth decay is something I had never experienced in my life before, and it was always the one thing I knew I could count on: the strength of my teeth. They are yellow and crooked, but never had a cavity and thus they have always represented the most reliable and strong part of my body.
I am a person who grew up in Sweden, eating all refined foods. Breakfast was white bread with margarine, and some other pasteurized dairy product on the bread, like cheese, or messmor. For drink I'd have low fat milk with sugary chocolate in it. Then lots of pasteurized yoghurt and filmjolk. Dinner was refined school foods and the evening meal consisted of lots and lots of white refined bread, followed by crackers or ice cream by the TV. I developed a severe sugar addiction very early on, and have spent my whole life obsessed with candy, ice cream, cookies, crackers, sugared jam etc. I thought as a child and teenager that I could eat sugar and candy because not only did I not gain any weight, but remained very skinny my whole life (until the low carb diet when I began to gain weight, something I was very proud of and happy about since I always felt that my low body weight was a fundamental sign and cause of my ill health), I also never got any cavities in my teeth, nor did I get diabetes. Those were the things I was told were a problem with candy. Little did I know how many other issues there were....
Then I met my American partner and he told me all about the health issues sugar was responsible for. His dad who's a doctor emailed us lots of information on this topic and I was wide eyed and immediately began trying to cut out all sugar including candy. That's when I realized I was an addict. I tried to cut it ouf for a whole year, totally unsuccessfully. Then I got my pre-diagnosis of endometriosis and I finally had the motivation I needed to quit. I quit cold turkey then and there, and haven't touched candy since then, but there is so much more to sugar than just candy. I also still have an addiction to dark chocolate, 100% raw chocolate is too high in caffeine for me, it also triggers me to want to binge on it, so I need to stay at a safe distance from all chocolate.
Despite my daily struggles with sugar addictions, I've been off of candy and all refined cane sugar for 10 years now. That has not helped my health much though. Probably cause I only cut out sugar, but not fructose. I kept eating lots and lots of fruits for years as a way to cope with the addiction. And I mean, I ate LOTS of fruit. Fruit became my substitute to handle the constant sugar cravings. And fruit juices. I was big into them. Highly concentrated fructose drinks.....Damn, even on Bee's diet I had lemon as an electrolyte drink every day, filled with fructose. What a nightmare. In the last few years I've tried being vegetarian, strict vegan, I've tried the Endometriosis diet, and now last time around it was the low carb diet. I remember reading on forums about how people with Endometriosis felt so much better after cutting out sugar, caffeine or dairy. And for me, I cut it all out, and nothing changed at all. I never felt better.
My health likely didn't improve becuse I found out too late about the dangers of sugar and even later about the dangers of gluten and refined grains. When I finally got the message, I was at a point where my whole organism had already become so overhwelmed I had an auto immune disease like Endometriosis on my hands, closely followed by pretty severe inflammatory bowel disease.
Though I've always been very skinny, I've also always had a bit of a belly pouting out, hid well by my clothes but also something I've never been able to get rid of no matter how many sit-ups I'd do each day.
Also, I've always had super severe hypoglycemia with terrible mood swings. Cutting out refined sugars helped that problem, but getting on the low carb candida diet made me almost insane with low blood sugar mood swings. I can't tell you how many times I'd nearly have a full on nervous breakdown in the kitchen, especially in the mornings before breakfast. Making my meals seemed to be an impossible task that life asked of me. My psychologist even thought it was PTSD, but I'm sure it was the diet. It didn't make sense to me though, and I figured it was part of the detox reactions, but now I realize that my blood sugar levels were actually getting worse, not better. It stabilized after about 2.5 years, but it's still not great, and what 2.5 years it's been...But it seems my body has finally gotten used to the low carb situation.
Despite my terrible sugar-high diet growing up, I can say for sure that I ate a lot of everything. My amounts of mega eating went down in family history on several occasions. Once as a 10 year old I ate 24 meatballs in one sitting. Another time I ate 16 sandwiches. And everyone always kept saying "how can you eat so much and still never gain any weight?". I alwasy thought this was a negative thing, like something was wrong with me, but I realize now that I probably just had high metabolism from eating so much.
Anyways, I always was very happy that I'd never had a single cavity in my life (apart from one I got as a child in a milk tooth that I dropped later). This was the case my whole life until I got on Bee's low carb candida diet. Within a year I could see several black and grey spots in my teeth. Bee just said it was part of the detox process but I always doubted that. I thought perhaps it's the lemon causing this, so I quit lemon, then I thought perhaps it's the sauerkrat, so I quit that. The dark spots just continued to grow in size and number. By the end of the 3 year program I could no longer count the black spots they were so many (over 30 in the teeth I could see, I was never able to look at the upper teeth, just the lower row). I was so sad and concerned about this, and desperate as I knew this was the opposite of signs of my health returning. Especially since I'd seen no other health improvements either. Then my psychologist suggested I might be low in calcium and that might be causing my horrible edema. (I hadn't told her either about my tooth decay either). So, I began eating egg shells. I know it's an extreme but it was all I could think of that wouldn't feed the candida, and that was thus Bee approved. Within a few days I was stunned to see many of my dark black and grey spots in my teeth disappear or become less prominent. Within two weeks my teeth looked mostly white again. The I had a digestive disaster associated with eating the egg shells (much like eating glass, if you don't chew long enough it will have serious consequences...). Remember I've got inflammatory bowel disease. Even though I don't yet know how to go about fixing my issues, I think I solved this one mystery. I was low in calcium and that was what was causing my tooth decay. Mind you, I had not one fruit during these last 3 years....No sugar of course. Super strict candida diet. This proves to me beyond all doubt that it's not the fructose causing tooth decay, but it's just as Weston A Price says, that it's a lack of essential nutrients, minerals and vitamins. Clearly a low carb diet is not sufficient to provide enough of this important mineral, at least not if you can't eat dairy products, or egg shells like me.
Now the question remains, how do I get enough calcium without consuming any dairy or grains? I'd been taking calcium supplements this whole time, so that proves to me how useless supplements can be.
Now, reading Matt Stone's eBook, I was intrigued not only by the evidence that perhaps low carb is not the answer after all, but to an interesting passage on infections. He has observed in literature that problematic nutrition can lead to insulin and leptin resistance, this can lead to low body heat, and that in turn can lead to infections. The infections can lead directly to disease or indirectly. I thought this was just too much of a coincidence with the Buteyko breathing work I'm doing.
My Buteyko teachers Ryan Bowie and Christopher Drake has seen people in the cities have much worse clearing reactions when trying to reduce their hyperventilation syndromes. People in the country side, they say, suffer less and see their CPs rise faster. Buteyko also was very aware that CP cannot improve when there is a serious infection active in the body. If our refined diets cause a lot of infections, then this might be why my CP is not improving despite my best efforts and despite my initial success in upping my CP fo 10 to 20 seconds. We generally eat more refined foods in the cities and especially in the US. So, if people living in the countryside have better metabolism overall thanks to having more of a whole foods diet, then they won't have as much infection in the body, causing severe clearing reactions and preventing CP from going up. Candida is really nothing but an infection, a yeast infection. Perhaps that's why I can't improve, because I have too much active infection in my body due to my low metabolism and low basal body temperature. It might also be due to the many cavities still active...cavities are also infections.
My diet is no longer a refined one, and is even low in fructose now. However my diet is too low in crucial minerals like phosphorous and calcium, as evidenced by my recent tooth decay, and my body temperature is so low I can't fight off candida infections or other infections very well.
Perhaps if I add back more whole grains and raw milk, this will solve my mineral deficiency, and if I manage to eat enough and rest enough perhaps my body temperature can go up, and thus my infections that prevent my CP from improving can be conquered.
What a mess I am.....but it's a plan for sure.
I'm so glad that Matt Stone has the health, mental clarity and stamina to read through all these books for people like me. I'm stuck with ill health, concentration problems, brain fog, memory issues, and that on top of my life long dyslexia...for me reading just one or two of those thick books on nutrition takes many months....I'm chance-less if I'm supposed to figure this all out on my own. So, I feel lucky, very lucky to have run into Matt Stone's webpages, so filled with information but in reasonably short format.
Apparently when metabolism is lower than optimal, the body temperature sinks. I know from trying to monitor my cycle as a way to understand my fertility and use it as a contraceptive (I recently learned it's actually more effective in preventing pregnancies than the contraceptive pill. It also gives knowledge about ones body and the opportunity to try to conceive if one would like to. I've never taken the contraceptive pill due to my weak health, so this was a huge piece of information for me. In school they told us that this method was as good as useless.) In the process I discovered to my surprise that my basal body temperature is impossibly low. My charts never reach a normal temperature shown in the examples. I've always had cold feet and hands too.
I definitely feel like a FOOL for falling for the low carb, anti candida dietary ideas, but I try to remind myself to be a little compassionate with myself. My intentions were always coming from a good place, a place for healing, for finding a way out of disease in a natural holistic way and to then, after I'd succeeded, be able to help others who suffer like me. I have so far failed miserably, but my heart and intention is still in a place that is fundamentally good, even though it seems to have led me to torture and abuse myself quite a bit. But now I'm starting over, again, and I honestly can't wait. I am filled with optimism and new information, and so long as there is life, there is hope.
I don't quite know where my optimism and hope comes from, but I know I'm one of the most stubborn people I've ever run into, and that is something that has come to benefit me these last years. My rigidity is both working for and against me though, since I can stay on a diet that isn't working for 3 years fully strict. I can only do my best though, and I am and I have been.
It's a journey for sure....
Matt explains that the basal body temperature is low because
"...your body is running low on something, adrenal hormones or vitamins and minerals."
My basal body temp was well below 97.8 F for all but 11 days in January 2010. This means I'm lacking in something, ie I suffer from hypothyroidism. Today my temperature was 97.2.
