Are you tired, bloated and don’t feel like yourself? Have you tried everything to lose weight and it doesn’t seem to work? I want to tell you how I reversed my cervical dysplasia, said good-bye to my severe anxiety and finally started to lose weight after “trying everything” in less than 6 months without heading to the gym!
First, I am not a doctor, nor am I anywhere near qualified to make any type of recommendations. Everything in this story is how it applied to me, and hopefully, it can help you.
My Journey
In order for you to understand the journey, I need to take you back to the Spring of 2015. I was working out, but couldn’t lose weight. Like always. I was stuck. I felt terrible. I knew I had to do something, but I had no idea what would actually work because I had done it all. Eat fewer calories, tried it. Go to the fat doctor and take a prescription … done it. HCG and 500 calories a day .. yep, did that, too. Nothing made a difference for more than a short time and it always seemed to lead back to overweight and miserable.
After a lot of research, I decided to do a round of the Whole30 to get myself off sugar. The 30 days were hard, sure, but they went great and I was ready to move forward with a new plan. I lost about 10lbs and had cut out dairy, sugar, and grains. But The Boyfriend had always said, “Low sodium, low carb, low sugar … low flavor” and he refused to eat better. Then came the moment in June when he needed bigger pants and he freaked. He wasn’t his high school and college size of 34″ or even the 35″ he had started in the past year or so … no, he needed to migrate to a 36″.
We decided to meet with a local friend and learn about the Keto lifestyle. It sounded like something we could all do — eggs (yes!), dairy and cheese (absolutely!), bacon (…really?!), so we started immediately. The Boyfriend started to drop weight. Fast actually. He lost 35lbs in the course of about 6 months and kept it off.
This was a family vacation in December 2016. We had been doing Keto for 1.5 years. No sugar. Low carbs. No grains. But I kept gaining weight. I now weighed my heaviest I ever had {and that’s including when I was pregnant!}.
My anxiety was terrible. I had an emotional breakdown of sorts on Easter weekend of 2017. I was hateful. I was exhausted. I just couldn’t be me. I was over it. I had no idea what to do in order to fix it, but Jason’s words were, “Something is wrong. I don’t know what we need to do, but we need to make some changes and try some things.”. I ended up in the emergency room for the first time in my life. I had terrible kidney pains {a tiny kidney stone was developing} and my fever started {more about the fever as we go}. They said, “Nothing is wrong with you. Your blood work came back perfect. You are boring.”. But clearly, I was miserable.
Since we had been on our Keto journey for a while, we listened to a ton of podcasts on the topic. So many of them talked about visiting a functional medicine doctor and/or a naturopathic doctor to do food sensitivities testing and about healing your leaky gut issues. Jason kept pushing for us to take this next step. It was a logical thing for us to do to continue moving forward. But where to start? Those things are “city” things … not something we have access to locally, right?
May 2017, the day after Mother’s Day. The ER visit kicked me into gear. I decided that I was going back off dairy products. This was hard, as I had jumped on the “cream and butter in your coffee” wagon of the Keto lifestyle and loved it! But, I just kept thinking that maybe my body wasn’t doing well with it. And boy, was I right. Within days I had started to let loose of the water weight and bloat I kept holding onto, but little did I know then that this decision would start me on my path to how I feel today.
About a week later we had our first meeting with our naturopathic doctor. The first shock was that we sat in her office for an hour-long consultation, each. Like … with her at a desk and us in chairs, answering questions about how we felt, how our bodies worked, and all of those questions on the intro form. This was a totally new type of “doctor visit”. But, I loved it. The things she talked about really seemed to make sense.
I won’t spend time telling you how Jason’s visit went. He did discover many things he is sensitive to and that has made a huge difference in his daily life.
As we went down the info sheet that I had filled out before our visit, she said, “I see here you have had abnormal pap smears?” … my reply was that yes, they often come back abnormal, but usually, they find nothing. Then, the previous October, I had to do a biopsy, which came back as Stage 1 Cervical Dysplasia {pre-cervical cancer}. At this news she was frustrated and immediately jumped on her personal soapbox of “these things can be fixed so easily, why don’t more doctors know this”. She asked when my next appointment was {the coming October}, and as she counted the months in between, she finally said, “Ok, five months. Great, we will get it fixed before that!”. She sounded so confident like it was a done deal.
We went on to cover my severe anxiety issues, depression, current fever I had had for the past week and my lack of weight loss and the frustration that went with it. Her reply to all of this was, “Leaky Gut”. {If you have no idea what this is — I love the way Dr. Josh Axe tells about it on his website, check it out!}. She proceeded to tell me that no matter how much I tried to lose weight, that my body was currently at war. My body thought I was starving it, and there was no amount of low-calorie, pills or other fixes that would help. Anxiety issues, depression, mood swings … Leaky Gut. Heal your gut, get on the road to fixing your health.
Now that we knew what we were up against, we could make a plan. Food sensitivities testing was first on the list. I was instructed to take a high dose of Vitamin A & folic acid to fix the cervical dysplasia {WHAT?! — yeah, it was that easy} and to take some amino acids to heal the leaky gut, along with cutting out problem foods {from our food sensitives blood work}.
Many people don’t know that I spent about three months with a fever that summer — May, June & July. Most days I ran from a 99.9 to a 102 temp and spent the majority of my time in bed. I kept thinking it would go away or get better … but it didn’t. And before I knew it, I was months in. My friends didn’t realize how sick I was or how terrible I felt. I guess that’s one of the “social media fakes”. You can post a tiny pic {like the one above} and people only choose to see that 3 seconds of time.
I went back for my follow-up blood work and the doctor wasn’t happy the fever was still going strong. I quickly realized that I had a gene mutation that doesn’t allow my body to break down folic acid, so I switched to methylated folate, but she wanted me to wait to take it until we got the fevers gone totally. But the fevers didn’t go away like we thought they would with that adjustment of removing the folic acid. So, the doctor ordered a full gamut of blood work to check everything we possibly could with my hormones and organ functions. We learned that my adrenals were in the tanker. This was July. She put me on an adrenal supplement and said it would take a few weeks before I would start feeling better.
I clearly remember the two-week mark wondering if I would finally feel better … and I was shocked that I did. I didn’t feel awesome, but I clearly felt much better than I had. If you know me personally, I am a pretty fast-paced person and it was so hard for me to just be home and rest. I felt like crap almost every day. If I made dinner I considered it a huge victory. Two weeks past the “ok” day, I walked back into work and told my brother-in-law that he had better watch out, because I was back and FINALLY feeling like myself! Now, it was August. I could finally add in the methylated folate for the cervical dysplasia. After taking the first round, I remember telling a friend at work how much focus I had. That I couldn’t believe I had been missing out on this!
I continued to feel better. I kept losing weight. Pound by pound. It was slow, but it kept coming off. When I went back for my annual pap smear in October, I was shocked that the results came back that EVERYTHING … every sign of the dysplasia was gone. The nurse called me herself because she was so excited! Within 5 months I had started to lose weight and my anxiety was at a point that I could manage it easily and it didn’t interfere with my daily life. There were no prescriptions!
In October, I learned that not only were eggs on my “no go” list but that I am going to be keeping them there. As I was making Jason his birthday cheesecake {sugar free, low carb}, I licked some from the bowl to taste it. I would swear it wasn’t 30 minutes later and my chest was tight, my anxiety was through the roof and I was tearing into Jason about who knows what. I had to put myself in time out and calm down. It wasn’t until later that evening that we both realized the only thing I had eaten off my plan was eggs. Eggs. {wow.}
Today, one year later, I have energy. Today I feel like my brain works. Today I feel like I can take on the world because I FEEL GREAT. I sleep great. My anxiety is at normal levels of caution and not Defcon 5. I am 45+lbs lighter, and the scale keeps going down. I have started back to my favorite Crossfit gym.
When people ask, so “what did you do?” … I tell them to read about leaky gut on Dr. Axe’s website and start with the Whole30. Why? Because it’s my personal belief that sugar is a drug, and it’s an addiction most people have. Learn from your body and listen to it. In October, our oldest wanted to do the food sensitivity testing and we supported him in that. We learned that he was highly allergic to eggs, dairy, gluten and wheat {among some other things like mustard}. Once we pulled those items out, he was a totally different kid. His anger issues were manageable. His rage was gone. He was happy and kind again. He doesn’t fly off the handle at everything that doesn’t go his way.
I hope your takeaways are that – Food is Fuel. If you have health issues with you or your kids … start with food. Why not? What do you have to lose? You have to eat … so you may as well try to cut some things out that could make a huge difference. Research. Read. Learn whatever you can and use Food to heal your body!
