I want to be well!

Here I am as a high school senior. I was young. I was strong. My brain and my body both worked well and I loved to use them. I ran track, acted in plays, sang in choirs and dreamed of a life preforming on the stage. I had limitless energy and a desire to experience life to the fullest. It is hard at times to remember what I once enjoyed and took for granted.

It is my fundamental belief that my body wants to be healthy. I will never be 17 again but that doesn’t mean I can’t improve from here. I believe that everyone has within them the genes necessary to be healthy. That doesn’t mean that it will be easy or that my answer will be your answer. I’m just working my butt off trying to find it for myself and my girls, if you pick up something helpful along the way so much the better.

It is this fundamental belief that leads me to the WAPF way of eating and evaluating food. It also attracts me to the Paleo philosophy. This idea that at some point in our past people were much healthier than we are today, and that we can emulate it, is very attractive and compelling. It helps that I’m not the only person who thinks that is right either. What is hard to say for certain is what it was about those healthier people that made them healthier. Are their parts of their diets that I can leave out or substitute somehow and still be equally healthy? Headlines are full of various bits of advice extracted from the diets of various healthy peoples. I really doubt that reductionist approach to diet is the way to achieve health, but how closely is it necessary to emulate any one group? Was there something about the ancient peoples lifestyle that interacted with their diet to make them healthy? What role does the climate they lived in play in their health? Is there a genetic predisposition to do well eating certain foods or it is flexible depending on what is fresh and locally grown? What about food storage? Is it healthy to eat my own locally grown and frozen strawberries in January or am I setting myself up for problems. What about locally raised grassfed beef that I freeze to eat 6 months later? Is 80% compliance enough? 90%? 99%? Dr Ron Schmid tells stories on his site about people who had been healed by diet only to relapse dramatically from apparently minor infractions in their healing diet. Go here to read more.

These are the questions that torment me at times. Why am I not better? Am I simply in the middle of a process that will take longer to complete or am I stuck and in need of a change of direction? Is this as good as it gets? Am I too screwed up to ever get better? Since my kids were born with Lyme will they ever overcome it or will they always be susceptible to it and pass it along to my grandchildren? Why did I get so much sicker after I stated doing more things right?

I’m on a tangent from GAPS right now learning from Jack Kruse and I’m trying to share what I have learned with you. He may be right or he may be wrong. His knowledge set is very different from most others that I have been learning from so it isn’t hard to reconcile all of the various “truths” that each approach provides. After all this time of trying to heal I am ready to chase some potential dead ends in hopes that one of them will open up to an answer. I find his cold thermogenesis theory to be intriguing and compelling. It seems a bit too good to be true (and then I think of how uncomfortable cold is and I’m not sure “good” is the right word.) I find myself looking into the future and considering cold showers every day to maintain wellness and that sounds lousy and makes me not want to ever try but then I remind myself that I need to focus on today and now. If CT makes me feel better I can decide in the future if it is worth it. I am mourning my hot showers right now a bit and I haven’t even given them up! Talk about putting the cart before the horse! I don’t really care if I am buff and able to run a marathon some day as nice as that may be. I just want to be able to go to the zoo with my family and not need a wheelchair.

I’m going to keep reading all that Jack has written and try to understand it and share nuggets of wisdom with you as I extract them. I hope that some of you will join me in exploring his theories by putting them into practice and that you won’t resent me too much if they aren’t helpful for you. I try to not resent it when things that heal others make me worse. Healing is a journey and for some it is much more straightforward than others. Lets continue traveling together and encourage each other at the difficult spots.