Start Healing Your Gut
The Gut Healing Journey
“She stood in the storm and when the wind did not blow her away, she adjusted her sails.” – Elizabeth Edwards
Life can be busy and crazy enough without adding any curve balls, right? Yes! You are one hundred percent right! Is that reality? Eh…
Once upon a time…
I was 16 years old sitting in my high school cafeteria eating lunch with my friends. It was a super normal day, nothing out of the ordinary. Until my hand started itching. I looked down to find this dime sized circle of dry skin on the back of my hand. I was very confused when I saw it. It was Spring after all. Cold weather and dry skin were things of the past. Also, I had never had problems with really dry skin. I had always prided myself on making sure I had lotion wherever I went so that my skin could be continuously looking its best. Little did I know that seven years later I’d still be battling that “dry skin” on my hands and that it would turn out to be a much bigger problem than sacrificing some of my vanity.
Before the eczema started, I highly regard how my hands looked. Keeping my nails manicured and my skin hydrated was very important to me. I thought my hands were the perfect combination of smooth and slim and a little edgy with the shape of the bone structure. (Cue the eye roll). At one point, I even considered applying for some hand modeling jobs. (Eye roll #2?). Then the eczema came and shattered my fantasy career of hand modeling. Sometimes I think God was laughing at me from Heaven. It’s just like Him to take something that we have the most vanity about and use that to humble us and show us nothing and no one is perfect with the exception of Himself.
After a couple of years of searching for answers, we came across the term “Autoimmune Disease”. That is when things started to make sense. Since then, I have had blood tests done, went on a gluten free diet then a dairy free diet, tried to lower my intake of processed foods and many more stressful things to heal my eczema all to no avail. The eczema continued to triumph over me. It didn’t take long for it to spread to my other hand which caused both my hands to turn into the flaky, wrinkly and inflamed hands of a ninety year old.
For those of you that have been dealt a bad hand in the health department of life, I feel you. Since there are many different descriptions of “bad health”, let me clarify what we will be discussing today: leaky gut and autoimmune diseases. Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? This is something that can be extremely hard to diagnose yourself with because there aren’t many doctors that have the proper testing (or patience) to figure out what the heck is going on with your body.
Just this last year I have been able to put a name to my specific eczema which is a sister disease to Celiac disease. Dyshidrotic or pompholyx is the scientific term but it is more commonly known as hands and feet eczema. If you are lucky and catch your autoimmune disease early, you might not have as long a road to recovery as I or others do.
First things first! Lets hammer out some basic definitions of leaky gut and autoimmune disease.
Leaky Gut:
When the lining of your stomach or intestinal track become permeable. If it is permeable, then the toxins in your body that are usually dealt with in a healthy way have then leaked into your bloodstream causing various negative reactions in your body.
Autoimmune Disease:
When your immune system is on overdrive and starts mistakenly attacking healthy tissue, aka you. As I understand it (and I have done a large amount of research on this) if you have an autoimmune disease, then you definitely have a leaky gut. So when the toxins get leaked out mistakenly by the damaged wall of your gut, your immune system is deploying white blood cells to attack the ‘foreign object’ but soon finds no foreign object (like a bacteria or virus). The white blood cells still sense that something is wrong. So with nothing to attack, they start attacking your own healthy tissue. In my case, my skin.
This has been a years long battle for me and while healing an autoimmune disease and leaky gut aren’t impossible, it’s still extremely stressful and difficult. Here are some steps to start taking in the direction of healing if you are in the same battle that I am!
Disclaimer: the information that I share with you guys is for educational purposes only and does not substitute professional medical advice. I advise you to consult a medical professional or healthcare provider before implementing these steps I’ve listed out.
How to start your healing journey
Step One
Aquire an extensive food and environmental allergy test. You do not want to be walking blindly (like I did) when you start to eliminate certain foods from your diet. If dairy does not inflame your body, don’t take it out! If you can’t have peanuts but you can have Brazil nuts, you’d want to know that. As far as environmentally, if oak tree pollen inflames you, make sure not to plant any in your yard. If mold is a high inflammatory, you can now put a strong effort into preventing mold in your house. It’s better to know what to stay away from than to cause unnecessary stress and eliminate a lot of things from your life that have no negative affect on your health.
Step Two
Implement step one and start eliminating the large allergens in your life as much as possible. Only focus on the the big ones! If you are like me, then most everything on my food test came back highlighted in red. It was very overwhelming. My advice to you is ignore the small allergies and sensitivities until you feel confident to take on more restrictions.
Step Three
Stay away from inflammatory foods. Don’t worry, I’m not being redundant. Even if you are not allergic to anything in this world, there are some foods that still cause inflammation when eaten. For example: refined carbohydrates, processed meats, nightshades (tomatoes, sweet and chili peppers, potatoes) and trans fat. There are more extensive lists if you need more details. It would be beneficial to add these to your list of “Do Not Eat’.
Step Four
Try to keep mainstream chemicals out of your house. This has been a very important one for me because I am affected either positively or negatively by everything I touch since I have eczema on my hands. If your autoimmune disease hasn’t affected the outside of your body but has affected your body only internally, then I’m not sure if these would help or not. A few of the things I have changed in my household are making my laundry detergent and hand soap, wearing gloves when handling raw meat or washing dishes and making all of my cleaning products instead of buying them. Once I started changing these things, my flare ups would come much less frequently.
I will put links at the end of the post for some of these recipes! It is easy to lose hope of having a body that is healthy if you suffer with any of the things we have spoken about in this post. Please let me be your light at the end of the tunnel! Try to see the positives amongst all the the negatives. If you suffer with autoimmune or leaky gut and you try to heal it, you will be a significantly healthier human being than the next in mind and body. Because instead of going through normal life and being able to indulge in the Westernized diet and wash your clothes with Gain laundry detergent, you have to research and fight for your normalcy. Fighting for something makes you appreciate it more. This is not for the faint hearted. And if you have been dealt this hand, then you, my friend, are brave and strong!