eat your vegetables

by Jackie Patti

A few years back, I saw Dr. Wahls' Tedx talk, "Minding Your Mitochondria".

Dr. Wahls had multiple sclerosis and became disabled to the degree that she was confined to a zero-gravity wheelchair when the tilt-recline became insufficient.

She did a bunch of research about what was necessary to fuel the mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cells. First, she went paleo, but that wasn't sufficient. Next, she added a whole bunch of various vegetables to her diet and she got well. Her Tedx talk ends with her on a bicycle!

If you haven't seen it, the YouTube shows below; I highly recommend you take a few minutes to see it if you haven't.

how to accomplish things when you're tired and in pain

by Jackie Patti

Ironically, I started writing this post before my two trips to Texas, 2 weeks in March and 4 weeks in April, that have left me very fatigued again through May, and thus quite late with this post!

There's 3 important reasons for me to continue to do as much as I can in spite of my disability:

• the feeling of accomplishment
• to retain and regain abilities
• to avoid boredom

One of the big tricks of being able to do things while disabled has been to break tasks down into the smallest steps. This is why I can grow a garden of tomatoes, make sauce and can it, but risotto is hard for me. Risotto has a half hour where I have to stand and stir constantly, I can't break that down any further. But almost everything else, I can break down into small 5-10 minute steps.

I am going to illustrate what I mean with the simple task of doing the dishes:

how Jackie got her groove back

Things have been very up-and-down this past year with my fatigue.

In spring, I was doing great! I was gardening up a storm, plus doing yard work, 4-5 hours a day. I even mowed about a quarter acre one day with a push mower. I started job hunting, thinking I could handle something at least part-time. Meanwhile, I cooked up a storm and got over 100 home-cooked meals in the freezer.

I was doing better than I had since the heart attack. I was so excited as I could barely even consider myself disabled anymore.

And then... it stopped. The fatigue came back.

I'm moving...

I will no longer be posting at GAPS for T2 but instead at Deductive Seasoning, a blog about cooking, diabetes, disability, fatigue, homesteading, nutrition, science and anything else that strikes me as interesting to write about.

I have always enjoyed BBSs, Usenet, IRC, web discussion forums and lately Facebook, because I like the give-and-take in chatting with other folks.

However, sometimes it gets a bit tiresome to explain the same thing in one conversation after another and I always thought it'd be handy to have a blog to post so I could write something once, and then provide a link whenever the topic came up again.

And also to save my wisdom for all posterity. ;)

Though I liked the idea of a blog, for years, I never got around to starting one. Every topic I was interested in discussing was blogged about elsewhere. I commented on those blogs and joined the conversation, but never started my own because someone else was already blogging my interests.

my adrenal history

Vertical section of kidney,
from Grey's Anatomy,
on Wikimedia

This is an image from Grey's Anatomy showing a sliced kidney; the adrenal glands sit on top of each kidney. So if you've ever had a kidney infection, that spot in your mid-lower back where you felt pain is pretty close to where your adrenals are located.

When I had adrenal issues, I drove the moderators of the Adrenals Yahoo! group half nuts with my demands for explanations for every recommendation they made. Val was pretty patient about providing me references when she had time, but one thing it never occurred to me to ask was why she said people should not try to do any sort of detox while healing their adrenals; she just said detox was hard on adrenals. Since I had absolutely no plans to do any detoxing at that time, I never asked, and don't have references. I will likely look them up at some later time, but for the purpose of this post, I am just accepting this as a very true statement.

This will be a very long post as I need to cover my previous health history, which is a bit of a long story.

But before I begin with that, I need to point out that I am not a doctor of any sort. The labcoat on my avatar is because I used to be a biochemist. Furthermore, you ought not take avatars seriously anyways, even if I add a stethoscope! ;)

the ThreeLac experiment

 

 

WARNING: This post may be TMI for some. Sorry, but there's just no way to discuss GI issues without... well, discussing GI issues!

 

I started ThreeLac in January of 2012.