Health, Meal Planning, and Shopping Traps to Avoid

Over on Cage Free Family I have begun a series of posts about food, food costs, and managing increased cost inherent in eating a healing diet.

The series began with my post Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is, where I discuss how meal planning (or a lack there of) can affect not only your budget, but your health and waistline.  I also touch on topics of food additives and Fibromyalgia.

Second in the series is Meal Planning Steps 1 & 2, where I go into detail about the process of meal planning, how to make it easier, and how to make it more effective.

Third in the series is Step 3, Making the List, Where I give a step by step instruction on turning your meal plan into a grocery list.  There is also help with learning more about where you lose money in the grocery store, how to avoid this, substitutions, and escaping the common shopping mistakes.

I do hope you find this helpful, especially as I move into deeper discussion on the connection between health and the food we eat (or don’t eat!).

Each of these posts takes hours to compile, so bear with me as I sort through available resources to choose those that are most relevant and most helpful.

Healing Beef Stock

Broth, made from the bones of animals, has been consumed as a source of nourishment for humankind throughout the ages. It is a traditional remedy across cultures for the sick and weak. A classic folk treatment for colds and flu, it has also been used historically for ailments that affect connective tissues such as the gastrointestinal tract, the joints, the skin, the lungs, the muscles and the blood. Broth has fallen out of favor in most households today, probably due to the increased pace of life that has reduced home cooking in general. Far from being old-fashioned, broth (or stock) continues to be a staple in professional and gourmet cuisine, due to its unsurpassed flavor and body. It serves as the base for many recipes including soup, sauces and gravy. Broth is a valuable food and a valuable medicine, much too valuable to be forgotten or discounted in our modern times with our busy ways and jaded attitudes.  - Allison Siebecker

Throughout my healing journey broth and stock have played starring roles for everything from Fibromyalgia to the most severe stomach flu.  It is humble, unassuming, and so easily dismissed, but it is a true healer.  It took me a while not just to give credit to the benefits of broth, but to implement it as a mainstay in my daily life, but the process has been well worth it.  Not only does it help to heal the body, but it soothes the rough patches of the healing process like die-off, stomach irritation, fatigue and inflammation.  While chicken stock is considered the cream of the stock crop, it is beef stock that we prefer around here because it is easier for us to acquire great bones.  We have made stock from everything from Yak (yes, yak!) to fish and even combined poultry and beef bones.  Each family member has their favorite, but all stock can be wonderfully beautiful in flavor while it does it’s healing work.

From ediblearia.com..

“…if there’s one preparation that separates a great home cook’s from a good home cook’s food, it’s stock.  Stock is the ingredient that most distinguishes restaurant cooking from home cooking.”  -Michael Ruhlman

Here, then, is a proper yet relatively easy way to make a rich, delicious, and (most importantly) healing beef stock at home..

Beef Stock (makes about 1 quart) (informed by recipes by Ruhlman and Darina Allen)

6 cups (more-or-less) cold, filtered water, divided
2 pounds meaty beef bones (shin bones with meat attached are ideal) from a clean, non-industrial source
1/3 pound unpeeled yellow onions, roughly chopped
1/3 pound carrots, roughly chopped
1/3 pound celery, roughly chopped
5 cloves garlic, unpeeled
1 large fresh, ripe tomato, cut into wedges
1 teaspoon whole black peppercorns
2-3 whole cloves
1 bouquet garni of parsley stalks & leaves, fresh bay leaves and fresh thyme

Arrange the beef bones on a roasting pan or in a large cast iron skillet, allowing plenty of space between each (as you can see, I wasn’t able to find any bones with meat attached, so I rummaged around in the freezer and found an old tri-tip to add to the pan).  Place the pan in a 400 degree oven and roast until nicely browned, about 45 minutes.  Take care not to let the bones burn, or the stock will be bitter.

Remove the pan from the oven and scatter the chopped vegetables, garlic and peppercorns over and around the bones.  Return the pan to the oven and roast until the vegetables are browned around the edges, about 20 minutes.

Transfer the roasted bones, vegetables, garlic and peppercorns to a clean stockpot or Dutch oven.

Pour the grease off from the roasting pan and deglaze with 1 cup of the water.  Bring the water to a boil, then use a wood utensil to scrape up the fond (the brown bits) from the bottom of the pan.  Pour the liquid over the bones and vegetables in the stock pot.

Add enough of the remaining water to cover the bones, then add the cloves and bouquet garni.

Bring the pot to a rapid boil, then lower the heat to a bare simmer.  Skim and discard any foam that may be present on the surface.

Partially cover the pot and allow to simmer for 6-8 hours, skimming and adding water as necessary to keep the bone submerged.

Turn off the heat and allow the stock to cool in the pot for 30 minutes.  Strain the stock through a cheesecloth-lined fine mesh strainer to ensure a clear and clean-tasting stock.

Store stock in the refrigerator and use with 3-4 days, or freeze for up to 6 months.

In the Beginning There Was A Little Rebel…

There are times when the memory of the pain, the exhaustion, the all consuming list of symptoms, haunts me.  It starts like a whisper in my ear, and then feels a bit like falling down a long hole.  I don’t really like to remember.  This site is something that I dreamed of making since 2008 when the feeling of being a Rebel first hit.  It’s so much easier to remember only back to that point.  To the point when I knew that I was getting better.  To the point when I knew that I was going to be okay, somehow.

So, there are years, and years, and years of pain and illness memories, that I keep stacked up, tucked away… with a nice heavy cloth to hide them in the corner of my garage.  They feel like people from the past that turn up, uninvited and want to drag you back to a place you don’t want to go.  It’s been a process of uncovering to get back to them.  To remember the fear and the anger, the hopelessness and the powerlessness.  It’s been a process that had to start with establishing a willingness to go back to them.

The memories seem to bubble up at the funniest of times… when I was almost done with a day of heavy digging in rocky, compacted soil.  It was the kind of huge job that I still can’t believe that I can do.  Standing in darkening, newly dug beds, feeling hot despite the cold dusk air, and flinging my sweater over to the nearby patio.  I wiped my forehead and realized that I had done all this.  In one day.  All by myself.  My first thought was, “oh, no. you’re going to regret this tomorrow, and the next day, and the days after that!”  It was a scary feeling full of regret that came just before a flood of memories that left haunting ghosts of pain and fatigue flood my body.  A different reality.  The old reality.  The one where my life consisted of moving from sitting in one place to sitting in another.  Of never doing too much, of never knowing when the pain was going to flare.

But it wasn’t my reality.  In my new reality I get to spend 6 hours digging, weeding, scraping, planting.  In my new reality there is no punishment for such freedoms.  In my new reality I wake up the next morning, roll over to see how high the sun is and think about what I most want to do today.  In my new reality I get to take yoga classes and keep up with the teacher, straining deeper and deeper into poses, holding out and refusing to let my muscles tell me that it’s enough before the teacher does.  In my new reality I get to take friends on a hike up the mountain so that they can see the vast beauty of where I get to live, even when the snow blocks the more reasonable path and our hike qualifies more as rock climbing for an hour.  I like my new reality so much more and would like to leave the old one buried somewhere.  But I also want to unearth it for you.

I want to dust it off, say things like, “Oh, I forgot all about that!” and show you that it’s possible.  That I’m certain that Fibromyalgia isn’t a life sentence.

I want to pull out all the old memories where I’m fumbling forward, blindly, reaching for a health that may never be there for me.  I want to share with you all the moments when I was sure that I was getting worse instead of better, where I wanted to give up, where I just wanted to take a fat pill to make it go away for a little while so that I could think about something other than getting better.  To crack open those days when I crumbled, and cried, cursed and gave up.  I had no road map, no guide, to promise to go on.  Just a gut feeling that I would not give up my life to this thing.  That I would fight for it.  That if necessary I would chase, and rip and pull my life back to me.  It was, ultimately that Rebel spirit that carried me through everything that I would have to do.

I’ve had the great pleasure of talking to some of you over the years.  Sharing phone conversations, fears, miseries.  It makes me immensely happy to know that I am not there anymore, but that I am here for those who need a hand or a shoulder.  It opens up that compression that lived on my chest for most of my life and spills out knowing that I would befriend every one of you, hold your hands, help you to bed, tell you that it’s going to be okay… just keep going.

I have dreams that Fibromyalgia is a blip on the map of our past.  That we learn not just how to heal from it, but how to prevent it for our children and theirs.  I dream that this swell of diagnosis is near the breaking point and that I will not be a rare case for long.

I’m trying to start a rebellion.  wink wink nudge nudge

To our health!

 

GAPS For Beginners Series

While searching for something I came across this blog that contains a nice GAPS for beginners series.  I thought I’d pass it along.

It’s not the first thing listed when you go to the link, but scroll down a little and there are links to the whole series.

http://wholenaturallife.com/gaps/

Inflammation, Leaky Gut Syndrome, and the Food We Eat

The Toxic Truth About the Gluten Free Diet http://scdlifestyle.com/2012/04/the-toxic-truth-about-gluten-free-food-and-celiac-disease/#more-3490

I’ve just come across this and thought I’d better share.  The fact is that it has been more than 4 years since I read Gut & Psychology Syndrome which helped me to understand why I was sick.  It has been more than four years of forgetting, and I have never since felt as completely healthy and strong since.  I have been wondering why, when I no longer have most of the FMS symptoms I still get occassional feelings of flare ups, and just a general feeling of fragility despite my lack of symptoms.

I’ll admit, I eat a lot of brown rice.  Most of it is sprouted to eliminate the problems that this article talks about, but some of it (that contained in the brown rice crackers and the brown rice pasta) is not sprouted.

Alas, I think it is time for me to read the GAPS book again so that my choices can be made from an informed place again.  For those who have not yet looked into the GAPS program, I highly recommend it.  It was utterly integral to my healing process.  For those who have, but are overwhelmed try reading a bit about the SCD (Specific Carbohydrate Diet).  There is a lot more information and support for this one, but they are essentially the same, with only a few minor differences.

I picked up the GAPS Guide companion book a few years ago, and would like to recommend that one too.  It goes a long way in the hand-holding department.  For those utterly new to healthy eating, you might also like the Internal Bliss Cookbook.   I got mine here:  http://www.shop.gapsdiet.com/category.sc;jsessionid=9C6FB7D261DFF619D218B7A5483565ED.qscstrfrnt06?categoryId=7

I don’t get any kickbacks or anything like that.  It’s just where I picked up my copies.

That being said, my real introduction to healing diets was from the Nourishing Traditions Cookbook and the Wild Fermentation book.  Nourishing Traditions will teach you how to eat some of these dangerous foods in a way that renders them not just safe, but nutritious as well.

Healing Is Possible

Learning to breathe through the pain, to meet it at face value and let the fear of it slip away… to find it’s limits and discover that I was still here when it passed was my biggest lesson.  It was the life vest that kept me safe as I ventured through the unknown, uncharted, lonely path that led to health.

Management of Pain While Healing

Manage. This is what I did for myself in the beginning. I managed.  Once I realized that this is what I was doing, a whole world of options opened up to me.  As I researched managing pain I found a wealth of information from hospice workers.  The most helpful came from reading Buddhist Teacher, Zen Priest, Medical Anthropologist, and Author Joan Halifax.  At first reading about pain was scary, but quickly it was quieting. Comforting.  I started learning about meditative management of pain.  No, it wasn’t easy.  Often I didn’t get it.  I didn’t understand words, ideas, faiths.  I didn’t want to sit, I couldn’t focus, I had no patience, and was easily bored, but I did it.  My life became about this.  I eliminated all  non essential things in my life that interfered with this new focus.  Yes, this included unsupportive family and friends.  This was a matter of life and death.  Death being the life swallowing symptoms I was working against.

I knew nothing of Buddhism.  I knew little about what meditation really was.  I just moved forward.  I focused.  I bought a Buddhist magazine called Shambhala Sun, I read, and read, and read.  As I did this I started to learn that I could quiet my body’s reaction to pain, to stress, to fear and especially to outside factors like loud children, traffic noise, phone calls.  I started to become aware of myself and my body in a way that had seemed dangerous all of those years before.  I had spent half a life time learning to ignore what I was feeling so that I could survive.  Now I was focusing on it.  Everything started to slow down. Slooooow down.  Feelings and pain and stress and fear stopped flying at me and floated around instead.  I started feeling separate of these things.  A big shift from feeling like I was made of them.

The pain still rose up, but it wasn’t having the same effect on me.  It wasn’t so sharp, so unbearable.  I started to understand this ‘Brain-fog’ thing because I could see it more clearly.  I wasn’t fogged.  I wasn’t confused.  I didn’t have memory troubles.  I was tired.  My brain was tired.  Sometimes more than others.  From this tired brain place it was easy to go on auto pilot and react to the world as it happened to me.  As I slowed down and became more aware of all that was happening in my body I was able to slow down the world around me too.  When previously I could not find time for sleep, or accomplish it, I was now able to open up space for this in my life.  Even when I meant bringing the kids into the bedroom with me, setting the up with something and napping between them.  Bit by bit the life inside our home changed to accomodate what I needed.  I did not make a list and demand that it adopted by my family so that they could tell me why this could not happen.  I moved life myself.  I changed and it affected change.

Remaining calm and peaceful became a high priority.  When my family realized how much more functional and healthy I could be in a calm environment they started to prioritize this too.  It wasn’t over night.  We didn’t know what was happening as it was happening.  It just shifted, imperceptibly, as I shifted.  As we realized that I was getting better, even in the presence of devestating regressions, it became easier to allow me the things that I needed to get better.  When we began to believe (together) that I would get well, it became simple to make sure that we were protecting that progress by letting other priorities go for a while.  Life shifted.  It became about healing.  Living was put aside.  Chores, expectations, commitments, these things were placed below all things that led to healing.

It was like starting to finally see a hint of that light that was supposed to be at the end of the lightless tunnel I had started traveling.  It was the breath of life, the ray of sun, that was rewarded after all the promiseless trials.  And there were many, many promiseless trials.  There were more coming too.  It didn’t really matter though.  This healing thing had taken a life of it’s own and I was being carried through it, pushed through it, pulled through it and sometimes crawling through it of sheer will.

I had no idea how long this tunnel was.  I had no idea how far I may or may not have come.  There came a point when it didn’t matter anymore.  I wasn’t focused on the light at the end.  I was learning to focus on the best here and now that could be achieved.  I was learning to experience each moment in the best way possible, pain or no, fatigue or no, strain or percieved failure or not.  Each thing was going to be experienced in the best way that it could be.

It was an astounding lack of judgment.  It took me a while to realize that shift, but when I did it opened up yet another stash of tools for the process.

I read more.  I perused the book ads and reviews in Shamala sun and found two books that would become very important to me.  Two books that would act like security blankets and start to carry me back into every day life.  They were The Four Agreements and The Power of Now.  If someone had told me that these two books would have anything to do with healing I would never have picked them up.  I wouldn’t have believed such a thing and thus would have chosen to not waste my time.  But no one told me that and they intrigued me, so I was able to pick them both up and simply read.

I read them ever, ever so slowly.  Trying to understand every single sentence.  To follow every single paradigm shift, and to take a break when I couldn’t follow anymore.

I was truly astounded to discover that these two books helped me manage the pain.  It went against everything I had ever been taught, told or previously believed, but it was very real.

I was getting better and it was time to refine my practice… discover what was truly working and give it more.  Learn more.  Heal more.

Accupuncture, Herbs, and Kooks

When I first began I knew nothing about so called “natural health”.  I ate a mostly organic diet, I believed, but this is as far as my understanding went.  Many years earlier, with the use of a book called Reversing Fibromyalgia, I had my only experience with ‘natural health’ and it included hundreds of dollars of vitamin and mineral supplements with unpronounceable names and throat gagging pills, powders and tablets.  I failed.  Even in Dallas 1999 did not provide a useable selection of organic foods and food allergy substitutes. The idea of going down this road again, even with access to many huge, well supplied Organic Natural Food stores like Whole Foods, was unpleasant.  But down it I went, taking my family with me.  Though my father, who lived with us at the time, did not choose to join us and continued to stock the house with his usual foods, the kids and husband were along for the ride.

I started by calling around town (Austin, TX) to find an acupuncture clinic that I could afford since my insurance did not cover such things.  It was days of tears and defeat as I called office after office to find that treatements averaged $75 per visit, and that they weren’t as likely to help unless I went at least every week, if not twice every week.  It was again a friend who told me about ‘group acupuncture’.  In a seedy part of town I found a low cost clinic that provided acupuncture to multiple patients during the same appointment.  We each arrived 15 minutes apart and were placed in cushy recliners behind japanese style screens in a large, perfectly tempered, zen inspired room.  Spa like music played quietly, everyone whispered, and the earthy smell of herbs floated around the darkened space.  There was nothing familiar about this experience.  I was afraid of the needles, afraid of the herbs, afraid of having a flare up during treatments, afraid that I would suffer for the rest of my life.  It took everything I had to go into this new world, but very quickly it became my world… my new comfort.  I was not alone anymore.  I could now give all of my fears to a person who did not share them, and believed, fully, in my ability to be free of this disease, even when I could not.

The treatments were working, but the improvements were short lived.  Sometimes hours, sometimes days, but they worked none the less.  Very quickly my acupuncturist discovered that I did much better with a very simple ‘opening’ treatment.  Complicated, symptom specific treatments were too much for me.  They overwhelmed me with sensations, energy, and sometimes flare ups, so we backed off of that and stuck with what worked.  I even began learning to meditate with the use of a favored guided meditation by Jan Bennett Collier.

With a taste of what could be possible and a growing belief that I may actually find a life of complete health I started moving forward with great intention.  I began trying every single thing that was suggested to me.  Faith healing? Sure!  Body Talk?  Why not! Chinese medicine?  Okay!  And why the hell not?  I no longer cared how kooky it seemed.  In fact I couldn’t care less whether or not I could believe in it.  I did it all anyway.  I did it all with complete commitment. The things that seemed to work got more of my time/money/effort, those that didn’t moved to the back burner and fit in where they could.

I started learning about sleep, the process, the theories, even the new agey stuff.  I started trying to pinpoint the place where sleep was going wrong for me.  I was consumed with discovering the answer to the deeper question… the question beyond the label of Fibromyalgia… What is wrong with me?  Then the real question, How do I fix what is wrong with me?

All the while I had to continue to tackle the now lessened, but still present, symptoms.  I started researching western herbalists and what herbs I could take to help me with the still flaring symptoms.  Susun Weed’s philosophy spoke to me, and I picked three herbs (in tincture form) that seemed right in doses that she recommended: Skullcap 3-6 drops, St. John’s Wort 25 drops, and California Poppy 15-25 drops.  I learned things about these plants, what they did, how they worked, what elements of them were being used to create bastardized and adulterated forms in prescriptions.  St. John’s Wort turned out to be much more that a mood lifter.  It was a powerful anti-inflammatory and treated nerve pain.  The Skullcap, also a nervine, eased the fear and stress present in every day life as well as in living with this disease, but it also treated nerve pain!  California Poppy?  Powerful, good stuff.  The more I took them the more I could start to see how they effected me, when my body needed them, and how I could use them best.  There was no road map, but in taking responsibility for my body, owning my own self, I started to trust, bit by bit.  Gradually I realized that my body was communicating with me in more subtle tones than just pain and tired.  There were are myriad of smaller, more specific symptoms that had blended into a huge noise that I called Pain and Fatigue.  Smaller, more specific symptoms that I could manage.

 

The Role of Sleep and the Successful (Banned) Prescription

Hi Everyone,

I always mean to write more, but as the years go on I wind up writing less and less.  I have a bit of a pile-up of emails and commented questions, so I want to try to answer some of those questions.  WhileI can’t tell you what to do, and ust tell you to always check with a trusted health care provide, I can tell you what I do, have done, experienced, and have learned.

I get a lot of questions about the prescription that is on a split ban in the US, so lets start there, because it is my sincere hope that you may be able to learn something helpful from my struggle.  The drug is called Xyrem as a prescription.  It is a chemical drug called GHB (Gamma Hydroxybuteric Acid/Sodium Oxybate) and is both a Schedule I and Schedule III drug here in the US, so it must be prescribed by a doctor who is certified to prescribe it (a process they must go through) and will arrive via Next Day FedEx directly to the patient’s door from the one central pharmacy with the license to make it.  Currently it’s only on-label use is “excessive daytime sleepiness” as experienced by people with Narcolepsy.  There was a trial (I believe by Orphan Medical) to make Fibromyalgia an on-label use, but as far as I know this bid was denied by the FDA.

Let’s touch on why I wanted to take this drug first.  In my years of research I found some mentions of a failure to achieve the deep restorative sleep, previously called Delta Wave or Stage IV Sleep, by Fibromyalgia sufferers.  In tests research subjects who’s delta waves were repeatedly disrupted developed widespread pain and fatigue.  One study suggested that the FMS pressure points became activated as well.  Essentially, delta wave disruption seemed to be causing FMS in previously healthy patients, but when the subjects were no longer interupted by teh researchers they returned to normal sleep patterns and the symptoms disappeared.  This was a big flag to me as a person with lifelong sleep disruption and insomnia.  I had been through may years of sleep inducing and assisting prescriptions as well.  As I began researching this idea further…  how to achieve this elusive stage IV sleep… I came across a number of works that suggested that nearly all, if not all, sleep related drugs were disruptive to the sleep patterns, blocking or interrupting the all important delta waves.  This spoke worlds of truth to my tired body that had been so long drugged with sleep assisting pills and was yet, thoroughly exhausted, never refreshed.   It was my father that called me one day to tell me that he had heard a short story on PBS radio about a drug that was being tested to treat delta wave disruption and included a quick note about Fibromyalgia.  It was years later that I finally found the right string of words in my Google searches that gave me Xyrem.

Once I knew the name I was able to take it to my doctor and begin the pleading process.  He did a bit of looking and returned to me with the news that it was roughly $500 per month and that even if he did write it on-label there was a good chance that my insurance company would not pay for it, but after a long discussion we went for it anyway.  A couple of weeks later I finally had the prescription in my hands, but alas, there were no instructions for use.  No dosing information.  Nothing.  It was going to be a stabbing in the dark process with a drug that I had been repeatedly warned could easily kill me.  Fun times, y’all.

It was brutal to put it shortly.  It was months before I found a dose that did not make me vomit, wet the bed, or live in a constant state of nausea and dizziness.  The headaches were long lasting as well.  It was frightening and miserable, but it did eventually work.  The pain slipped away under my distraction with the extreme exhaustion and ever present symptoms.  I lost 60 pounds during the first 3 months, dropping to 105 pounds, and living in a blur of sleep and half sleep.  Ultimately it was a friend of a friend of a friend, who had experience with recreational use of GHB, that suggested that Cannabis/Marijuana might aleviate the dizziness, nausea, and food aversion, enhance the sleep time, and be a safer drug combination than another prescription.  I had talked with my doctor already about an additional prescription, but with so little known in the medical community about GHB, no one wanted to combine anything with it.  I had to turn to the recreational users who had a wealth of information on dosing and combining.

To say that I was terrified would be an epic understatement, but I had a gut feeling and I followed it to success.  My doctor could not comment on what I was doing, and only reminded me that he had nothing to go on that could allow him to advise for or against my choices.  He simply asked me how I was feeling.  Very well.  Like a real person, I told him.  And I did.  Once I found the right combination, a much lower dose of GHB and a much higher dose of Medical grade Marijuana, I had a life.  I was skeletal, no muscle and no fat left, but I had a place to start and learned to jog and start to build strength.  I lived in this way for 11 months until I became pregnant with my second child.  Then the gig was up.  I couldn’t take it while pregnant or nursing, so I was quite suddenly facing years without access to what had finally allowed me to escape this miserable disease.

The video, Healing Fibromyalgia, was filmed just before and after my daughter’s first birthday, when the drug was still unavailable to me, but I could not take the return of the pain or other symptoms.  They were worse than ever before.  This is where the alternative healing treatments entered my life.  Unwilling to wean my daughter to take drugs again my doctor suggested that it was in my best interest to walk away from Western Medical and try something else.  He suggested Acupuncture.  After a few days of crying about the utter unfairness of it all, this is where I began.

Is There A Perfect Human Diet?

 

I’ve written a bit about health over on Cage Free Family today and thought that I ought to post it up here.

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