My Story

Diet coke and peanut butter.

My fridge staples for the bulk of my adult life. I didn’t “do” cooking, let alone kitchens. The kitchen was merely a room in my home for aesthetic purposes and storing wine glasses. Take-out, toast and sushi were my jam.

Bear with me and this will all make sense…

Then I got a hubby. And a baby. Turns out the hubby LOVES food. And I had to feed my baby. So I started to get familiar with this so-called “kitchen” in my home but I definitely did NOT enjoy cooking. In fact, dinner was a daily stress and annoyance to me. I’d get home from work and feed my daughter, but then the hubby would come home and ask what was for dinner and I couldn’t believe he had the audacity to think that I would feed my daughter AND him…like, really? (Side note: the hubby is an amazing cook and loves to cook, but he just doesn’t have the time in light of his profession).

But then…I got sick. And that’s when everything changed.

A few days after my son (2nd child) was born, I woke up and couldn’t move my hands, and I also had piercing, aching pain in my feet and knees. I was initially diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis (got a mega dose of steroids injected in my butt and started Plaquenil) but in the weeks that followed, a bunch of weird stuff started happening to me including flu-like symptoms, insane night sweats, sores in my mouth, a body rash, and more. A subsequent blood test showed that my liver and kidneys were under some sort of ‘attack’. They wanted to admit me to the hospital but I was like, “um, yeah…no, I have a newborn at home”. Two days later I was in an ambulance to the hospital due to chest pain (pericarditis). Turns out I had Lupus – in short – an autoimmune disease that attacks your organs and connective tissue/joints. Awesome (insert sarcasm here).

I don’t know if it was denial or just the fact that I had two babies at home, including a 6 week old, but I didn’t have time to deal or think about this. They switched me from Plaquenil to Methotrexate (a chemotherapy agent often used in the treatment of various autoimmune diseases) and started me on a daily dose of prednisone. For those of you that don’t know, prednisone is a miracle drug but it comes with a shit ton of side effects and can be detrimental if you’re on it for a long time.

May 2017

Today

Everything seemed to settle over the next few months. I was slowly tapering off prednisone and I thought I was doing ok. Cue the post-partum depression (I was at high risk for reoccurrence after my first bout when my daughter was born, so I was pretty much doomed for the 2nd go-around from all the stress since my son was born) and the shocking discovery that my nasal septum had disintegrated. Yep, I could literally stick my finger back and forth in my nose. Turns out two types of people get a perforated nasal septum – cocaine addicts (not me, although I remember thinking I’d rather be a coke addict at this point) and people with connective tissue disease (oh hi Lupus). Worried my nose would literally collapse on my face, I now have a plastic plug holding it up.

Jump ahead another 2 months and my damn skin covering my entire torso and inner thighs came under attack! (At the time, I forgot that your skin is the body’s largest organ – duh.) My skin was literally boiling up and falling off me leaving me totally raw and in crazy pain. I couldn’t walk, sleep or function. Simultaneously, I also started losing my hair. My doctor up’d my prednisone and switched me to another drug (CellCept, indicated for transplant patients but used off-label in Lupus patients). Not only was I bed-ridden at this point (for 3 months actually), on a crazy cocktail of drugs not to mention Oxycontin, and couldn’t take care of my kids, but I had put on 50 lbs in 4 weeks (side effect of high doses or long term use of prednisone). Yup. I was 176 lbs. Keep in mind I’m only 5’2″ and normally 120 lbs.

I was living a nightmare. As was my family. We were desperate. I just needed to get better to take care of my family.

My good friend, Jody, then calls me to tell me about this guy, Dr. Steven Gundry. She was working for him at the time and he was claiming that he was “curing” autoimmune disease along with a whole slew of other issues and disease.

He was curing people with FOOD.

So, I read his book, The Plant Paradox. It is quite a convincing read, layered with science, that details a very strict diet protocol and offers a lot of inspiring anecdotal evidence. I also personally liked that he is an ivy league trained, medical doctor (paediatric cardiothoracic surgeon actually) but changed his focus to heart disease and the spectrum of autoimmune disease. The “ivy league” part is important to me not for credentials but because it means he is rooted in research and academia, and interacts directly with the forefronts of research. (When we met him, he was weeks away from presenting his latest clinical research at the American Heart Association – the largest gathering of cardiologists, internal meds and other specialists – all there to learn about new breakthroughs in medicine).

I was definitely inspired and willing to try his proposed diet but all I remember thinking was, how is this diet even possible? What the “F” am I going to eat when it is basically telling me to cut out everything? Literally – no grains (not just ‘no gluten’ but no GRAINS), no nightshades, no legumes, no dairy, no sugar, no alcohol, etc. Like, you might as well shoot me now.

But there I was…bed ridden and yearning to be able to walk again and take care of my family. After a year in to this disease and what seemed like one thing after the next, my hubby said it perfectly, “there is so much we clearly cannot control, why not put our energy towards what we CAN control… FOOD!” At this point we had nothing to lose (except 50 lbs and my totally depressed state from being so immobile and not being able to take care of my babies) and all to gain.

So, in my bed ridden state, I started researching recipes and food. I started experimenting, at first by literally telling my parents what to buy at the grocery store and then barking at them in the kitchen as I lay on my couch, then slowly experimenting myself in the kitchen. I had very little kitchen skills so I even found myself googling basic terms (apparently, it’s a “whisk” not a “whisp”) and food (I had no idea that a scallion IS a green onion, like just call it a green onion, frick!).

That was June of 2017. As I’m typing this, it’s Sept 2018. I have lost 40 some-odd lbs. I am off prednisone (multiple doctors told me most patients can’t get off it). And I have been “stable” ever since. I put “stable” in quotations because it can mean a lot of different things when it comes to auto-immune issues. For me, it means I have had no major flares, no major set-backs and no hospital visits. I still suffer from crazy fatigue and horrible brain fog (my working memory is very impaired; my dad, light heartedly, nick named me “foggy”) but I’ll take these issues any day of the week compared to what I’ve experienced so far.

I am still on CellCept. I hope to taper off this eventually but I’m not anxious to get off it at this point as I haven’t been stable THAT long. I take a bunch of supplements (specific ones that Dr. Gundry suggested – I talk about these in the FAQ) and I am still following ‘The Plant Paradox’ diet. It’s either totally working for me OR it’s an incredible “placebo effect”, which if so, then great – I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing cause it’s clearly working. Some may argue that it’s the meds that have helped me this much and while I do think they have played a strong role (and still are), I have experimented enough with this diet over the past 1.5 years to know that when I veer away from it, I notice immediate effects including debilitating fatigue, new peaks of brain fog and joint pain.

I will say this. While this particular diet does require work and focus, the irony is that my hubby and I have never enjoyed food more. We absolutely LOVE our meals because not only does it feel so good to eat so healthy but it is also just so damn delicious.