Giving Up Grains Saved My Life

It’s nearing the end of 2010 and I am a long-time vegetarian. Most of my meals consist of fruit, veggies, beans, and a large serving of grains. I just discovered I have lactose intolerance and probably gluten intolerance too, but I have no idea yet that I also have autoimmune disease(s) that are contributing to and exacerbated by these (and other) food sensitivities. I am always bloated, gassy, and have a constant dull ache in my head. I’m depressed, tired, and I have no appetite or sex drive. Every couple of days, I get abdominal pain so bad it brings me to my knees. It feels like killer diarrhea, but nothing of the sort ever happens: Just the pain. I’ll curl up in a ball on the nearest surface for a few hours while I wait for it to pass. On top of the crippling abdominal pain, I also get migraines about once a week that bring nausea and vertigo along with them. Most of the time, I can still function–not well, but function–when these migraines strike. It’s my last semester of college and I’m taking a lot of seminars, just hoping to get my participation credit before the nausea overwhelms me and everyone notices how rotten I feel. I miss all of the classes I can afford to, and I’m in a panic about what I’m going to do once I graduate if these migraines don’t go away. Some days, they’re so bad that I can’t sit up without my head lurching and ripping a startled shriek of pain right out of me. The kind of pain I never thought I’d feel, except maybe in childbirth. The kind of pain that made me look back fondly on my third tattoo, the one that covered the scar tissue of the two previous ones and had me convinced I was going to pass out in a cold sweat. I’ve been on almost every drug in the book, seen more than 18 specialists, and no one has any answers or relief. Half of the doctors I’ve seen think I’m making it all up to score some Vicodin, but I don’t take the painkillers they do give me. They only make me feel worse; in fact, Maxalt left me with neuropathy in my face for six months after I took it. I’ve already lost my part-time retail job for calling in sick too much and I can’t possibly hold down a full-time career. What on earth am I going to do once I get my degree?

You can imagine what my symptoms do for my social life, too: I don’t have one. I am too afraid to go out and embarrass myself by suddenly feeling like hell. My friends have no idea how sick I am. I on the other hand am starting to get a pretty good idea. Not in the sense that I have the least clue what is actually wrong with me, but in the sense that I know it’s serious and I know it isn’t going away. I know I’ve been getting worse over the past few years and it’s clear to me that if I don’t do something soon, I’m not going to make it much longer. Every time a migraine strikes or I’m on the floor fighting that abdominal pain, I wonder “Is this the day I give up?” The longer the pain drags on, the more I think that there’s only one way to make it stop. I don’t begin to plan my own demise, because I can too easily imagine the devastating effects that would have on my poor family. But I do secretly hope for some terrible accident. Every time I go down the stairs, my brain plays through a mental slideshow of a tragic slip. Every time someone cuts me off at an intersection, I imagine that I didn’t slam on the brakes in time. Driving at night or during storms becomes a circus of morbid thoughts. I don’t want those thoughts, I don’t consciously think them, they’re just there… hovering. They’re knee-jerk reactions to totally mundane situations. They feel inevitable. It feels like death is stalking me and I catch glimpses of it even in the middle of happy thoughts. It has occurred to me that I might actually be dying, and I just wish it wasn’t so long and drawn out. I wish I knew why.

The months drag on into 2011. I graduate; I pull out of the job interviews I’d scheduled; I focus full-time on “just feeling better”, whatever that means. I go vegan, take up yoga, join a running group, and start researching my symptoms. I force myself to socialize a little more, even if it’s only with one person and all we do is watch movies. It takes six months for me to stumble into a diagnosis of Hashimoto’s disease in the summer of 2011, but it will be a long time before I realize what that diagnosis means for my diet, lifestyle, and long-term outlook. In 2011, I’m still vegan, still having abdominal pain, and still getting daily headaches. My new neurologist concludes the likely culprit for my migraines is gluten, and that it may be causing irreparable neurological damage. The evidence is a recent MRI of my brain showing white matter lesions that look like Multiple Sclerosis, but may actually be caused by the immune response my body has launched against all the grains I’ve been eating, as evidenced by a blood test. So, I eliminate gluten. I still get a migraine every now and then, but not nearly as often or as severe as before. I have a long way to go, but now that I have some answers, I have a mission. I’ll do everything I can to fight this thing. And if I run out of options and still feel like hell… well, I’ll do whatever needs done to end the pain. Even after my diagnosis, I still had moments in which I wasn’t sure those drastic measures were off the table. But being able to go days, weeks, and even a few months without a single morbid thought was a vast improvement.

This year, most of the way through 2012, I’ve learned a hell of a lot and gotten so much better than I ever imagined I would. I did hold down a full-time job. A manual labor job, no less. I learned more about what was wrong with me and what I could do to prevent further decline. I gave up tomatoes when I noticed they were making me bloat and I gave up yoga when it seemed to be exacerbating my poor circulation and neuropathy. All of those things supposedly being healthy, it didn’t come as too much of a surprise to learn that supposedly-healthy whole grains might be a problem, too. And, as a vegan, I had been eating a lot of them.

I’ve had neuropathy for years. It comes and goes, and usually gets worse when I do something obviously bad like binge on sugar or sit with my legs crossed for hours on end. But it started to get more frequent after I gave up added sugars and started exercising more. I’d wake up every morning with an obnoxious tingling in my hands and feet. I worried I had developed diabetes or that my demyelination had finally struck. I thought, “how many more diagnoses can I take?” I thought, “I am doing everything I know how to do–avoiding gluten and dairy, going for walks, taking supplements, meditating–so what more is there?” I thought that I had all the bases covered. I never imagined that veganism wasn’t the healthiest diet on the planet, and shrugged off the few mentions I heard of the Paleo autoimmune protocol… until the food diary I kept revealed that I actually was feeling bad when I ate nuts, seeds, beans, and non-gluten grains. I was cross-reacting, which meant that my body was confusing things like rice, quinoa, and oats with gluten. Giving up gluten had helped a little, but I was still having neurological problems because as far as my body could tell, I was still eating it! As a vegan, the only food group left on my plate was “non-nightshade veggies”. Well, that couldn’t be healthy.

This, I thought, was the end of the line. I can either keep feeling crappy, or I can add the one food back into my diet that I know hasn’t been causing any problems for me the past ten years: Meat. Everything I’d already learned on my own matched up with what the autoimmune protocol–the diet I’d been hearing about and ignoring for months–recommended. Well, I had sworn that I would do whatever it took to get better. It was either worth a try, or my veganism was worth dying for. I took up the AIP. I eliminated all those problem foods and added in fish and lean meats. Sticking with it is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but my headaches have completely vanished for the first time in four years. Even if they come back, just having a lull is a huge blessing. My neuropathy is getting better. I have an appetite again. In 2006, I dropped from a healthy 114 pounds to a skeletal 102. In the past two months, I’ve finally been able to climb back up to 108. I wake up refreshed, not exhausted. And for the first time in ages, I am actually starting to have some hope for the future. The health problems that have been piling up my whole adult life have started to fade away, one by one. I’ve made some great memories in the past year and I am so grateful that I was actually around to do so. For a long time, I doubted I’d live to see my 24th birthday… but I made it. It’s today. And simply not wanting to be dead feels like an incredible accomplishment.

Giving up grains saved my life, and I consider it a miracle that I even discovered this “heart-healthy food” was causing such serious problems for me. I mean, really: Who would have thought? Not to mention the uncomfortable things legumes, nightshades, nuts, seeds, eggs, and dairy had done to me, too. How many more people have had their lives and livelihood ruined because of the things they were eating, even supposedly healthy things? I know I am extremely fortunate that, after ten years, one of my 18 specialists was finally able to help me figure it out by putting Celiac disease on my radar. And while I hope no one else ever has to go through any of that, I know a lot of people have had it much worse.

Here’s to the future. Hopefully, a better one.

Keep Your Health on Track

Whether you’re starting the autoimmune protocol, a new medication, an exercise routine or trying to get to the bottom of your headaches or indigestion, cataloging your activities and symptoms is a great way to gauge your progress. The Ultimate Health Journal can help you stay on track with diet, fitness, and other lifestyle changes you have begun or been prescribed, notice patterns in your health and lifestyle so you can enact positive changes, and provide a valuable tool for you, your family, and your healthcare team. I would never have noticed that cinnamon makes me sneeze or dairy gives me hiccups without keeping a written record during my elimination diet, which helped me see the patterns that solved my problems! The ebook is available as a digital download with printable template for $9.99.