Katrina's experience of health restoration from Bowel Disease (Crohn's / Colitis) and from Rheumatoid Arthritis / inflammatory pain condition
At the age of 21 after many years of suffering from Crohn’s disease I began to get pains in some very strange places. It started on the back of my hands, then my toes, and before I knew it, it was everywhere. I was experiencing disabling arthritis which affected my joints, tendons, and muscles, even to the point that sneezing and yawning was very painful. All I could do was sit in a chair and not move. To appear normal to my friends and family I would dose up on painkillers, which allowed me to pretend that I was a somewhat functioning person, however the downside of relying on painkillers was the change of mood and behaviour which disrupted my abilities in making social connections with people.
When I had restored my health and all the pain and deformities had gone, I would tell people about it, and they would say, “But if arthritis is curable why isn’t it on telly?! Why haven’t I heard about it?” I had achieved for myself what other arthritic people were not achieving with the normal processes, I was fit and healthy again by deciding to take my health in my own hands.
I like the commonly quoted 'Einstein’s definition of insanity' which he described as, “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” I could see that over almost a lifetime of illness I had tended towards following the same recommendations over and over again, and expecting that my body would suddenly become healthy. This had not been my experience; the more medical intervention I had received the faster my health deteriorated. I decided that there must be a better way!
My own experience of Einstein’s definition of insanity began when I was two years old. I had a persistent cough for which my GP prescribed antibiotics, non-stop, for two years! They didn’t work because we discovered I had childhood asthma for which antibiotics are not helpful. The GP didn’t have any desire to stop doing the same thing over and over again, while expecting those different results that never came – as I continued to cough and cough. After two years, my mother got frustrated with the GP, when yet another prescription for the same antibiotic was handed to her. Two years is a very long time to be on antibiotics and I remember by the age of four experiencing health symptoms indicating the beginning of something going very wrong. I became very allergic to household dust, to perfumes, to laundry detergents to the point that I couldn’t be taken down the supermarket aisle that displayed the cleaning products. My skin was very reactive to clothing, and I was very 'electrostatic' and uncomfortable in clothing made from synthetic fibres.I remember feeling weary and just a bit out of sorts.
Me aged 3. If you zoom into this picture you might just be able to see the damage to my teeth caused partly by long term use of antibiotics. This was the start of many ongoing problems.
When I was eight going on nine years old I began to weaken further and became very frail. With symptoms of gut pain and diarrhoea, I was examined ruthlessly and carelessly for psychiatric problems because it was believed that I was inventing my symptoms! Children apparently didn’t get these symptoms, it was believed back then in the mid-1980s! I missed a lot of school and the education department sent a psychiatrist to my house to 'investigate' me. I knew what he was trying to get me to do when he said that he wanted me to draw a picture. Kids are smarter than adults think! So, I didn't draw the bloody dagger penetrating my gut! :-) Neither did I inadvertently implicate any family member in some kind of abuse of me! I didn't play their games because I knew that I was very ill; I had been diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease, although this was a borderline diagnosis because the area and type of disease in my gut could denote both ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease. However it was decided that I could only receive one diagnosis and Crohn's Disease was thought to be more accurate. In reality, the body is often not very accurately defined by a diagnosis. As I grew into adulthood I learned for myself that we do not exist as parts of a body that go awry in seclusion of the rest of the body, but we are a whole body that works like an orchestra with a conductor. The harmony is brought together through all of the parts working together, and the resonance becomes profound; just like the body! With any 'disease' the harmony has broken down within the body as a whole. Tinkering around with the parts or sections may not get us very far when it might be the unusual behaviour of the 'conductor'!
What if my gut was behaving as it should under the circumstances, and in all of its sections,
... but the 'conductor' had gone awry?!
This is me in 1986 aged 9, being admitted into hospital. I had been vomiting and going to toilet all day and all night with diarrhoea. I had lost a lot of weight. I was diagnosed with Crohn's Disease but Ulcerative Colitis was also a possibility. We now know the name is less relevant and we call all of these conditions 'Inflammatory Bowel Disease' - same causes, same therapy to restore.
Crohn's Disease or Ulcerative Colitis? ... 'bowel disease' is a more accurate term to use because any other name for the condition would make us believe that the causes and the treatments are different depending on the location and type of disease in the gut. I soon realised that my doctors didn't know the cause, and the treatments always targeted the inflammatory symptoms and not their cause! ...
But what about the cause? If you don't know the cause, how can you help me?! I am not helped by knowing the 'name' of my condition when the symptoms associated with that 'name' are not the disease itself! Once I received a name for my disease, I received the wrong treatment focused at the wrong target!
However under the medical system within which I grew through to adulthood, the diagnostic name of my whole body decline focused the treatment on reducing the inflammation in the gut through the use of large doses of prolonged steroid use, and the attempt to use NSAIDs. It was only an 'attempt' to use the NSAIDs because I reacted very badly to them, almost to the point of death; I had become even more poorly with treatment than I had been before diagnosis.
As I got older I began to wonder whether there was a better way rather than just try to reduce inflammation using anti-inflammatories. The steroids had worked well at reducing inflammation - only while I was on them, but then I suffered the side effects of breaking bones, missing out on growth spurts, and suffering from an extremely unpleasant, overwhelming hunger that couldn’t be satisfied, especially for salty foods. The steroids are salt depleting; it would have been helpful to have been advised of that! With that knowledge I could have gone some little way toward helping myself to minimise some of the damage to the salt dependent areas of my body, such as my brain and nervous system ... quite important areas! Also the ‘moon face’ - the plump, rounded face that steroids produce, gave me trouble at school. The doctors did their very best with what they had, or with what they were required to use! Over that time of spending all of my growing and developing years becoming acquainted with the medical system from a patient's point of view, I began to see the vulnerabilities, the flaws and the never-ending promises of new discoveries and cures that beckoned, just around the corner... never to materialise ... like a hopeless dream or fantasy or a never-ending prayer-wheel of hope and dependency on the drug companies to deliver!
Here I am displaying my chubby'moon face' from high dose steroids. The steroids made me very overweight and ravenously hungry! A hunger that could not be satisfied...an awful feeling!
I was attached to this drip that you see bandaged on to my hand, until my veins burned with pain, and then collapsed. Doctors continued to try to needle those veins not believing my pained and tearful protests were genuine, until there was a mass of bruising over my hands! They then believed me! Around this time a tube was inserted into my nose and down into my stomach to feed me a liquid solution with absolutely no food intake allowed....for three months!
Overcoming food addictions began early in life because of this experience of deprivation! Attending school for these three months, and in such a state was a rather harrowing experience! The trauma of medical procedures stayed with me far into adult-life.
With the illness I was very exhausted and uncomfortable in my gut, but I could still make friends and could still find some level of happiness. With the medical treatments I became a psychological disaster with my behaviour at school becoming erratic and unhelpful to me, my peers and my teachers. They didn't know why I was antisocial and it was natural that they would want to separate themselves from me; I didn't know what was happening to me and why I couldn't control myself; why couldn't I make 'contact' with my peers? What was happening to my brain? I could have been helped through this trauma by being educated about the side effects of the drugs that I was taking. Instead of blaming myself and thinking that I was a mess when it came to school work and social interactions, I could have been brought to an understanding that I was being influenced by some chemicals. This is vital for people under medical treatment to know, especially through their critical developmental stages of childhood. Disrupted social interactions early in life can leave an impression of disconnect upon the young adult. This early socialisation can be disrupted and we have to work hard to reconnect with society later in adulthood.
This disconnect is not entirely a curse; it can also be a blessing. The social 'order' of things is not always entirely benign and an early disconnect from social absurdities can be enlightening, and it can lead to freedom from societal restrictions and the attempt to control through conformity.
Speaking of non-conformity!....By my mid-teens I could see what was on offer. I had tried the treatments and I could see my fellow Crohn’s peers not progressing at all and eventually resorting to bowel resections. Growing up under medical care you learn well, that progess is never assured as you watch your fellow diagnosed peers falling under the scalpel when nothing else has worked....only to fall again to further drug treatment regimes when even the scalpel didn't work! I was very interested in keeping my bowel intact so I decided that I had to take my health in my own hands. My last consultant had actually been the most helpful when he shared with me that being careful with my diet was key to my recovery. He didn’t say which diet, what foods, but nevertheless for the first time I was given hope and the responsibility to find out and do something for myself. Here was one of the top consultants in the field who wasn’t keeping me hanging on by assuring me that my only hope lay with the medical drugs and the doctors. He gave me my first tool for recovery, the first to be given to me in all of those 7 years after diagnosis!
There had been clues that diet was a key component of recovery; I had had nil by mouth for three months at a time, while being fed with liquid nutrients through a tube that went up my nose and into my stomach. That went down very well for my already disrupted social interactions at school! But never-the-less when there was no food going down into my gut, my symptoms went away and I had normal bowel motions. The aim was to slowly introduce foods one by one, week by week to see which foods I had a reaction toward. And...the symptoms came thundering back! What my doctors and dietitians hadn't realised is that introducing carbohydrate-rich and fibre-rich rice into the diet as the first foods after a 3 month fast, is a disastrous thing to do. Carbohydrates and fibres require complex breaking down and a good range of gut flora, both capabilities that I was missing from my diseased gut. And...it doesn't take one week to react to a food, - it can take three weeks!!! So, I went through all o f that tube feeding and nil-by-mouth suffering through melted-cheese-craving-starvation, with no enlightenment at the end for all my hardship and deprivations. But ... the clue was there, food was a big part of the problem!
With my new found sense of responsibility I knew that my health was down to me and I worked out some of the foods to which I was reacting, or so I thought at the time! ... and I avoided them. I knew nothing then about how to improve health, my health research journey was only just beginning! I improved my bowel function enormously in as much as I didn’t get diarrhoea anymore, never mind that I could go for a week without going to the loo! I thought that not going at all must be a good thing given my whole childhood experience of diarrhoea 10 times a day. So, I thought I had dealt with the whole issue until...the joint pain began about 3 years later.
I went for the diagnosis, I had the X-rays, I was offered chemotherapy! I decided that I wasn’t going to repeat that journey all over again! I remember thinking, are they still doing these horrible suppressant meds?! Didn't they move on? I've moved on, now that I'm 19 years old! - (I thought that I was very old!) I decided to use painkillers to keep myself out of the horrendous pain that I was experiencing. My earlier experience with Crohn’s enabled me to walk away from the offers of medical help without the fear experienced by many sufferers with health problems, and their families, when they think that walking away removes all hope of recovery. I knew that there really was nothing that medicine could do apart from provide management of symptoms, but I didn’t want to go through any more problems with medications.
Me looking ghostly and thin at 19 / 20 yrs old. Painful, painful hands! No position was comfortable! My feet felt like I was walking on marbles, with pain in every toe joint. My knees swelled, hips and spine were painful with movement. Exhausting! But...those painful hands today are very, very strong as they massage very tight muscles! What a miracle the body is, to recover like that!
With my very strong painkillers to keep me almost sane through the pain, although very dopey and dreamy from the opiate reaction, I went off to research my own recovery strategy. I was older, and better read about healthy living so I had some basic understanding to work with, although I wasn’t immune to the misguided health fads. The internet had been introduced to my life and this became an amazing tool for my research. It revealed to me that there was so much more to learn about the body, its food needs, and nutrients - their form and quality, and their absence from fruit and vegetables. Then the most significant coincidence happened that would help to lead to my health turnaround. Chris Puckey was doing a talk about nutrition and health and the avoidance of toxins, and I slipped into the room for the last 30 mins after my choir practice. As he talked about ‘my’ subject I knew that he knew his stuff! He hadn’t just gone and done a cheap correspondence course in nutrition, he had extensively researched this area, to achieve his own health restoration from osteoporosis and liver tumours, and he knew all that I had found out about and much, much more!
I discovered that our food isn’t as nutritious as it used to be so just eating yourself well wasn’t going to be totally successful all on its own. The quality of the soil, whether the food was harvested before it was ‘ripe’, how long it was stored and travelled before it arrived on the plate, even hybridisation, were all important factors that caused depletion of nutrients in our food. Chris was able to share with me how he overcame this problem with our food by locating some powerful nutritional formulas that he had used for his own health restoration, and I learned that not all nutritional formulas are powerful enough when you are looking to achieve a body overhaul.
With my much depleted digestive abilities, I was still struggling with multiple symptoms of nutritional deficiencies. I was getting terrible urinary tract infections which caused profuse bleeding. My hair was falling out and thinning. I had bald patches which looked a bit like an ancient, archeological landscape of circular patches. My energy and stamina was non-existent - like a very old lady at 20 years of age! My skin was dry and itchy, my eye sight continued to deteriorate so that I had to have very strong prescription lenses. My brain was foggy and I was looking out on to the world through what felt to be like a thick, soupy brain! My blood sugar was all over the place. I couldn't feel satisfied with meals, I needed to eat more and more, and then felt terrible from overeating. My blood pressure was low and I would get into a spin from getting up from a chair. I had dust, pollen and animal allergies which prevented me from being much good with housework, although with every movement of my limbs causing agony, I quickly gave up on the religion of hoovering. I was living in such a mess, and I had so many symptoms! I feel as though I have been through my old age and retirement already!
I took Chris' guidance and began to notice improvements in my general well being after about six weeks of using some special nutrients. Later I introduced some other very potent nutritional formulas that gave me the ability to do more, think more, and take some authority and action in my life. As I got a little stronger with an increase in energy, I was able to research more about food and nutrition, and I made improvements to my diet that helped with some aspects of my health regain.
It took about 3 years to achieve a total absence of joint pain, which only returned to a much, much lesser degree of severity when I was under stress or my diet was neglected. However I was left with a lingering, intense fatigue because I still hadn’t dealt with the main issue which in my case was bowel immunity. I read a book by gastroenterologist and neurologist Dr Natasha Campbell McBride MD, MMedSci(neurology), MMedSci(nutrition), (author of ‘Gut and Psychology Syndrome’), and I attended one of her talks. I got to grips with her great information about how the digestive system works, what harms it, what heals it, and how to heal the mind (gut brain mind!) all at the same time, and I set to work with my new knowledge of diet and nutrition based on Natasha’s work and experience
I fully adopted Natasha's GAPs diet, and it truly was the beginning of the best diet that I had ever tried! I was no longer afraid of saturated fats and salt. I had come to understand that the foods that my body had desperately needed had been vociferously avoided. For 5 years I had been a vegetarian; I mean, that's what anyone worth their salt in all things 'natural' medicine were going on about all the time! The messages all said to me, "You can't be healthy and eat meat!" and, "Vegetables are your medicine!" and, "Vegetables are alkalising!" and, "Meat is not spiritually evolved!" Well ... I WANTED to be SPIRITUALLY EVOLVED! I thought I had quite a good handle on what that meant and I thought if it was something to be had, I wanted it!
Me on the GAPs diet, doing very well indeed! Beginning to make plans for the recovery of my physical strength and endurance so that I could come off benefits and start work.
But ... if I was becoming spiritually evolved, it wasn't very obvious to anybody as I went about with my surly mood swings, my depression and the suddenly encroaching joint pain rampaging through my body destroying any remaining abilities to think spiritually, moment by moment. This was no good! I was vegetarian, doing everything that 'they' had said, sprouting my lentils, soaking my brazil nuts, eating nut roast ... and here I was balding, exhausted, moody, no friends, something wasn't right! Natasha's GAPs diet was the beginning of my dietary rehabilitation. In desperation I abandoned the meat-less, hair-less, friend-less way of life, and embraced meat broth. I found that I was like a person coming through starvation and I would drink and drink the oiliest, saltiest broth I could make. I didn't know I needed or wanted it until I started to drink it and I felt a deep warmth enter my body. My mental health improved enough for me to progress to the next stage of my health journey ... and there was a lot of work to do.
I kept my new dietary habits a secret from the vegetarian community all around me! I knew that they would consider me a 'heretic', but my body was speaking, and it was demanding meat, and broth, and liver, and all things animal. Just on animal foods I was beginning to experience life in a way that hadn't ever been part of my experience not even as a small child. Some of the people that I knew as vegetarians said that they had 'spirit guides' who were Indian Chiefs. But many of the Indian Tribes were almost solely meat-eaters ... so how did they get to be so 'spiritual' and wise while on venison, elk, bison, moose, to become 'guides' to humanity?! It can't be all that bad for my 'spiritual vibrations' then! And my 'spiritual vibrations' were doing so wel!, that is until .... I listened to more health messages and I rushed into introducing the 'alkalising foods' called 'vegetables and fruit'. With the meat-based diet as foundational support for my vegetables I was still extraordinarily better than ever before, but the introduction of fruit and vegetables, and often only vegetables put a dent in my well-being. But, I reasoned, these foods that seem to be making me less healthy, are 'medicinal'!!!! I neglected to listen to what my body thought about it!
A total health regain isn’t only measured by the reduction of pain in arthritic conditions. Reduction of pain is significant especially to the sufferer, but real health regain is achieved when the joints, tendons and cartilage begin to repair, any bowel involvement is addressed, the organs of the body are returned to good health, and when the immunity especially the immunity from the bowel is nourished and restored to proper function. While this is being achieved the person can go through more pain at times, as the toxins are released into the blood stream and cleared out (this is our present understanding, and is known as the Herxeimer Reaction). The person may not feel a sense of well-being for many months but over time they begin to feel the effects of all those months of repair and regeneration.
During my process of healing myself I was becoming stronger, less tired, and more able to continue to research for longer periods of time. Thanks to some enormously helpful web sites such as www.mercola.com, I developed a much greater understanding of food energetics and how different types of food produce different effects. The most significant area of research that brought the most benefit to me and subsequently, to my clients today, was in the study of the traditional diets of the long lived and robust, indigenous tribes of the world. These peoples were studied extensively and their foods and food preparation techniques were recorded by Dr. Weston A Price. Their food was nutrient dense and they did the opposite to our ‘healthy’ food practices. They prepared their bodies with nourishing foods before conception to ensure that their children would develop well, they didn’t have words in their language for cancer, arthritis, osteoporosis or any of our degenerative diseases because these illness were unknown. They lived long lives and usually died of old age or in accidents - no health and safety - climbing mountains well into old age. These peoples are still in existence. Simply by following their example and by developing a knowledge of the food practises of other cultures, tremendous health results can be achieved, and for some people the use of nourishing food and better food preparation is the only change they need to make. For others we need to do a lot more but the good, supportive food must be present to achieve the best results.
Stronger hands now, no pain, building my stress as I built my experience in Tuina.
As I began to grow older, I became less aged! I remained at 90% wellness and compared with the rest of my life experienced so far; this was magnificent! I remembered back with great fondness to my time on an all-meat diet when I had felt at my very best and very well-nourished for the first time, and I would think, "Ah well, it's for the best that I eat vegetables!" What was I thinking?! We began working with other people, helping them with their health restoration and we began to notice that the Government push to get everyone eating multiple portions of fruit and veg each day, was causing our clients to not cope well and their health was showing signs of deterioration. We were witnessing that people were actually struggling to digest fruit and vegetables, nuts and beans, in their pursuit of doing what was best! We began to find that when people stopped eating fruit and vegetables, their symptoms would calm down and they would find that their moods were better. A number of our clients came with extremely serious illnesses where all options had been exhausted by the medical profession, except repeating the same round of treatments all over again ... for the 7th time ... with the hope of a different outcome! We could see that our clients' digestive capabilities had been assaulted first by illness and then by medical treatments. They were trying to eat their anti-cancer vegetables and they were suffering the consequences - forget flatulent cows! It's the flatulent, vegetable-eating humans that may be the problem ... if there is a problem at all ... don't get me started!!! ...
Here I am having regained much of my strength and endurance, doing Tuina massage therapy on a strong and hefty builder - no problem!
By this time there were other people on the internet telling their stories of bipolar and manic depression being resolved by going meat-only, and arthritis and lyme disease, and all sorts of people with all sorts of problems being helped. This gave some of our clients the confidence to try eliminating the plant foods. It worked! Their health grew stronger, their symptoms disappeared as the body self-corrected and returned to harmony and resonance. At the same time, Chris and I joined in with them because we could sense the fear in people when we suggested that they try a plant free, but allmeat, fish and sometimes egg and unpasteurised cheese based diet. If we could do this diet and still maintain our very physically demanding jobs, then they would realise that it would be OK for them to do. Early 2017 Chris and I began the all-meat diet, and for Chris he included unpasteurised cheddar cheeses, eggs, and butter, and for me it was just beef, lamb and some fish. Chris finally lost all of the weight that he had accumulated over the years of struggling around on walking sticks and not having his normal vigour ... and from the past consumption of health-destroying, multiple packets of chocolate digestive biscuits per week! ... which had ensconced themselves on his belly for eternity ... or so those biscuits thought! At first Chris looked like a deflated balloon - he said! Being female I was more fortunate because women have a layer of fat under their skin that keeps them looking firm and 'inflated'! ... unless they are on low-fat diets ... in which case - everything deflates! We remained on a handful of supplements that are particularly important for our climate and our lifestyles.
Others have seen that we have not paled and frailed on the absence of plants. I still demonstrate the proper preparation and use of vegetables in our Food School workshops, because when prepared properly they can be medicinal. But medicine shouldn't necessarily be consumed regularly to work as medicine, and plant foods are not the nourishing foods that they may once have been. Hybridisation of vegetables, fruit and grains has led to too much sweetness, less bitterness, and less need for cooking; transport across the world has led to longer storage and less freshness, and less ripening, and more raticides to keep the rats off while in store which means that they are very, very different from those foods once consumed generations before.
When working with clients today, not everyone needs to go plant free, but we have found that many do benefit. It is the only diet that I have found works to completely cure the cravings. On any other diet I craved and binged. On this meat-only diet (mostly red meat) I am so completely nourished there is nothing that the body needs. What a relief! I was the biggest of all junk food addicts! The absence of sugar in all of its forms over all these years has made a profound difference to my mental and physical health. We can take people as far as they want to go on this particular dietary journey. I have tried most diets, including the mucousless diet, vegetarianism, GAPs, anti-candida, paleo diet, ketogenic, plant-based, all raw ... I've done it all! Diet should not be a religion. Some people swear by their all-plant diets, and if they have a robust microbiome (gut flora) and magnificent digestive capabilities, and strong stomach acid, and they are not thriving only because they have removed the poisonous sugar from their diets - then fantastic for them! But they can never be an example to people like me who were not blessed to have such capabilities.
My 90% wellness and strength now soars through the roof and beyond to, dare I say it, 100%! I am completely well and restored, with no arthritic pain anywhere, all the deformities in my fingers and hands have gone, and my muscles are strong and healthy. I am healthier and more resilient than I can ever remember. A cold virus to me is a rise of temperature with a slight weariness in the evening which is completely gone by the next morning, or at other times the immune system becomes active and phlegm is produced in the respiratory system, but with no body and brain fatigue, no need for bed rest, and energy levels remain high why the immune system is fighting the virus. I thank my body that for the first time in years it is working well and is now allowing me to live simple, but wonderful and busy days.
This is me in the summer of 2019 age nearly 42. I made it! There were many times over my life so far when I thought that I wouldn't pull through. My body is now as it ought to have been at around 20 years old! But...no regrets, I've come a long way and my body has taught me so many things. I am very grateful and I don't take my body for granted.
Am I less spiritually evolved for eating meat and animal foods?!
Well, I am kinder, and easier to be with, I am calmer and better able to cope with the struggles and chaos that life brings, as it always does. I now have no concern about how 'spiritually evolved' I am! Who really knows how 'spiritual' actually feels. I now think that this is just unnecessary baggage and labeling that I carried around with me.
So, yes, thankfully, I think I would say that all of that means that
I am LESS spiritually evolved!!! :-)
Diet Update from July 2020:
It started as all-meat but is now better described as a carnivore diet because after the first year Chris introduced unpasteurised cheeses (Lincolnshire Poacher is his all time favourite!). We both now eat eggs, Chris eats sheeps’ milk yoghurt and sometimes raw (unpasteurised or soured) cream. Often they will both have onions too especially when K has fermented them. Onions are very powerful medicinally and not having the irritating, inflammatory cellulose fibers of other vegetables, encouraged us to ‘let them in’! Plus they are not a root vegetable, which is also good. Chris has homemade sauerkraut daily, in condiment size amounts. Katrina has sauerkraut occasionally. Sometimes Chris will have berries from the garden, native apple varieties when in season, and butternut squash grown in our garden.
As experienced carnivores we would like to say a word about the environmental impact of our choices because some people might be concerned that we are being careless.
We use far less toilet roll!!...
…and that’s really all we need to say about our impact on the environment! J
But, we will continue further …
OK, so the toilet roll thing really matters because … I mean, whose idea was it to put all our dirty paper in our water supply – I mean gross!!! What stupidity! But anyway that’s the system we’ve mostly all got. When we were eating lots of vegetable matter, grain fiber, fruit and nuts, we produced the level of waste that everybody else is producing. But now we have seen the contrast!!! No vegetable, grain or fruit fiber in our diets makes for … shall we say … a very clean output! But NOT constipated; constipation with meat eating turned out to be a myth. The output just reduces!
We would ask, is anyone putting this into the equations for environmental impact of ‘the human’ the ‘output - increase or decrease depending on the amount of fiber, and the subsequent amount of toilet roll needed to be processed out of our drinking water supply’?
Setting aside the toilet roll impact … There’s the water flushing impact – less waste, less flushing!
Just saying!
The output is daily, if you don’t mind me mentioning, but it is minimal!
Ok let’s now talk about flatulence … Chris is now looking very concerned at K … no, we need to address these things! …
We are practically non-flatulent and as for the cows that WE eat, they are less flatulent because they are carefully grass-fed or silage fed. If they were grain fed then they would be very flatulent because a cow’s diet is not supposed to be grain based. And neither is ours supposed to be grain based.
But you could say that forests are flatulent too!!! Now Chris is looking very concerned!!! No, but hold on … because it was discovered that the methane output from forests was very high. This wasn’t known before because they weren’t measuring for it, because well, why would they do that! But then they did measure it, and so now they might as well say that forests contribute to global warming – let’s ban forests!
K is now also insisting on wearing leather clothing or animal skins because if she is eating the animal, she says she needs to wear the rest of it, otherwise that is immoral in its wastefulness!
The impact on the environment of K wearing leather or skins is minimal because synthetic leathers are made from petroleum products and go through intense chemical processing which is very damaging to the environment. Polyester fibers from other clothing fabric have been found filling up the bellies of fish. K will not wear polyester which is why at times she is not the most fashionable or glamorous, unlike other, polyestered women in town!
But even setting all of that aside – our meat supply is from down the road and doesn’t need refridgerated containers on an OIL barge to transport it to us from far distant lands, or a fuel hungry aeroplane to fly it over. And the animals are on land that can neither be farmed for crops nor developed for housing.
But like those people that report health turnarounds from bipolar, cancer, arthritis etc by eating carnivore diets, the environmental impact of those people being as sick as they were, peeing their meds down the loo into our drinking water, having to live in overheated houses because they were so ill … and that’s another thing …
K and C both take cold, freezing cold, showers now … and the heating in our house has had to be turned down because we are so warm … and K goes about sleeveless throughout the winter like a native tribal person – but not quite naked!
Re the supplement requirements of K;
Maybe K has some genetic polymorphism from her very sick ancestors, or maybe it was the irreparable destruction of her gut right at the point in the gut where fat-soluble nutrients need to absorbed, or maybe it was the gut flora decimation?!!! Some or all of which has made her very dependent for now, on megadosing of some vitamins like vitamin D3. For other clients that we have worked with there have been a likely genetic anomaly that meant that they were dependent on taking supplements like niacin for their mental health stability. We each have particular needs depending on these anomalies, often ancestral issues. Where one person can survive without a supplement and get enough of the nutrient from their food, another will need megadoses from a supplement. That’s just the way it is. Sometimes diet doesn’t do EVERYTHING but it forms a fantastic foundation to find out what else is needed that diet can’t provide for that person.
In terms of the carnivore diet we are 100% carnivore! … OK, Chris we need to come clean … with the 0.5 % part of the diet that is non-carnivore!
Chris’ fruit scone / keto pancake indulgence:
Well, about once or twice a week Chris will now indulge in a keto pancake with cream and keto raspberry sauce from our local 'Petite Pancakes' cafe. He used to loooove fruit scones - conventional - with sugar inside, but he has found that these keto pancakes so cleverly put together are his new favourite thing. They are made with almond flour instead of wheat flour. A further Jana treat (Jana is the Estonian owner of 'Petite Pancakes' in our local town of Stowmarket) is a buckwheat pancake with some scrambled egg and smoked salmon with a few veg toppings. K usually sticks to a warmed and toasty goats' cheese round. As you can see, K and C certainly still know how to have fun!!!
Oh, and there is the occasional, once every 6 months fish and chips meal for Chris, but only when they are cooked in beef dripping – no cooked vegetable oils for us not even when we are indulging, THAT would be a toxicity sin too far! … and K might once a year, eat 4 … no, 6! ... of Chris’ beef-dripping chips!
Because you see, our diet isn’t an ideology. We are non-conformist at almost everything else, and for us, diet is no different. There is no belief system or activism when it comes to personal choices like diet. Freedom of what comes out of your mouth is as important as freedom of what goes into it! – is what K says! And unless we are very ill and need to be careful, which is how Katrina began her carnivore dietary journey in her past, we are careful not to be dogmatic when our strong bodies can handle a little toxic indulgence from time to time. But for K, it is never sugar in any of its forms. She is free of the sugar-monster! He is forever looming, so she can't be complacent by eating anything sweet, because the addiction would be there once again.
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Moving forward with a new
and healthy attitude
The lesson that this life experience taught me was to question everything – always! When someone tells me I can’t do something – is that true? If someone tells me that my illness is incurable – is it true? When the health media tell me that this food is bad and this food is good – is it true? When someone tells me that I can only get better with their help – this can’t be true!
This new way of questioning the world extends to all areas of life; the government tells us that we are healthier and living longer – is that true? With cancer affecting 1 in 2.5 people today compared with 1 in 200 in 1908 (two separate studies by two doctors in London and Yorkshire created data for their practices from 1908), and heart disease is now the biggest killer, not to mention all the suffering that degenerative illnesses cause, the governments’ idea of ‘healthier lives’ is rather unusual! Any story can be told with statistics – when more babies survive and grow into adulthood than in previous centuries it puts the average age of death very much higher, making it look as though we are all living longer. Actually we are only living months longer than we did 20 years ago (comparing life expectancy of a 25 year old male 20 years ago compared to today) – the average age of male death is 73.2 and for women it’s 79.4 (www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/death1203.pdf) with many years of ill health before death. We are neither healthier nor very much more long-lived than before! Knowing this encourages us to take action rather than believing that we’ve had a good innings when we reach 70, or that our aches and pains are only to be expected now that we are so healthy and aged!
When I naively told some doctors about my restored health the more scientific response was, “Hmmm... I’ll have a look at some research on those nutrients”, and the unscientific response was, “you must be in remission, anything else? Goodbye!” So, before I became too downhearted with the responses of doctors and other sufferers to my wonderful news, I became much more careful about which roof tops I shouted from!
What is my response when people say:
“But if arthritis was curable why hasn’t my doctor told me?”
“If there was something I could do about it my doctor would have said!’?
There is no answer I can give that doesn’t sound cynical and people are suspicious of hints of conspiracy or cynicism. They are absolutely right to be suspicious too; we often need to be careful that the conspiracy theory isn’t itself, the conspiracy! However, if you don’t mind me sounding cynical for just a minute, I would suggest that drug companies are not charities – they need to make a profit, and good profits they make too! I would suggest that through their medical training, doctors become experienced at the promotion and use of their drugs, and that however well-meaning that person with the big heart was when they entered medicine, they may end up being a drug promoter for drug companies who send in the advertising reps to promote new drugs to the doctor. I met such doctors from the age of 9. They worked hard, very hard. Some of them even cared about their patients…some really didn’t! They gave me drugs, drugs and more drugs! Now I understand why they didn’t tell me about the diet that had been found to be an effective treatment for digestive disorders of all kinds. They didn’t know!!! If they did know, they weren’t allowed to share with people like me, that diet and nutrition IS the 'cure'!
Today we would suggest, don’t ask your doctor for a diet cure! This is not how they are trained, and this is not something they are allowed to share with you at any great level, even if they had some personal ideas about it. Ask them to patch you up and provide pain relief and intensive care when you are in danger. Other than that, we must take ourselves in hand and look after our own health, - we are the one that feeds us, sleeps us, and exercises us.
You can Regain control of your life and Turnaround your prospects from symptom control and symptom management, to renewing vigour and strength.
You CAN do it, you can find a better way.
Doget in touch if you find that you need support.
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