The Most Important Thing

Mornin’!

I’m back on the couch in front of the fire, steaming mug of coffee at hand.  I use the word ‘mug’ loosely because although it looks like a mug, I’ve seen thimbles with a larger capacity.  Thus, I am grateful that this beach-side studio comes equipped with a percolator and decent ground coffee.  I flicked on the telly when I woke up – mostly because it was there – and flipped channels just in time to see some TV evangelist selling little packets of ‘miracle spring water’ so that he could bless people all over the world right from his armchair in wherever-he-was.  Luckily I was only subjected to the last 1 ½ minutes of that whole performance because otherwise I might have felt obligated to call the number on the screen since apparently my life would irrevocably suck if I didn’t get some of that water in me (on me?) stat.  Next thing I know my studio is filled with the pulsating sound of hip-hop music – brightly colored lycra-clad bodies gyrating across one half of the screen while the other half could barely contain the ebullient 52-year-old breathlessly exclaiming how her body had been entirely transformed after purchasing a very pricey DVD containing 30 minutes of dance music.  I sat here soaking it all in, mesmerized by how compelling the argument to just call that number on the screen was.  What is wrong with me??  All these miracle cures I am just tossing away today.

The biggest frustration I have faced since I started on this whole journey back in 2012 is that despite eating a fantastically healthy diet, I never saw the amazing results that so many other folks do.  Sure I felt {somewhat} better.  Sure I lost {some} weight.  Sure {some of} my symptoms lessened.  But I still had headaches, migraines, psoriasis, depression, and joint pain, and I even added things like Bi-polar, adrenal fatigue, and ear infections.  It made no sense.  But, it also made no sense that trying yet another diet would work any better.  In terms of nutritional density keto is as good as it gets.  I watched and celebrated as others had remarkable keto success, while I was left to just keep plodding along hoping that at some point something would shift.  I was clear that low carb wasn’t the problem – we’re all different and I assumed that it was my age, my metabolic history, my sex, my medications, my genes, or any combination of those and / or other Carrie-only variables.  Either that or there was something else going on.  Initially I resigned myself to having got my health to the best it could be, but when things started going sideways last December I got more frustrated than I could tolerate.  By July I was left with little choice other than to drag myself out of resignation and figure out WTF was wrong with me?

In the process of unraveling the mysteries of my body over the last few years I learned The Most Important Thing.  Which is this:  All the time I had unaddressed underlying conditions it didn’t matter that I was eating the healthiest food on earth, I was not going to get the amazing results such a diet would typically bring.  On the surface this might not make sense – surely if you are only eating fabulous foods that are flooding your body with essential nutrients you can’t help but sort out your hormones, heal your body, and fix your metabolism, right?  Wrong.  It’s impossible for someone to be eating so well and also be getting sicker and fatter, right?  Wrong.

So how can this be?  Here’s a few ways how:

• I was severely deficient in all those pesky B vitamins, which are super important for all sorts of things.  Eating the food I was, how could I possibly be that deficient in all of them?  Turns out it was possible in at least three ways.  1. I can’t methylate – which means (among a lot of other things) that I cannot convert B’s to anything usable.  It doesn’t matter how many B vitamins I ingest I cannot get any benefit from them.  2. I have a defective CBS gene – which means I take in a lot of nutrition and it just keeps leaking out.  3. I had Leaky Gut – which means that food was leaking out through the walls of my gut without being properly digested.  It didn’t matter how much great food was going in – if it wasn’t being digested properly then I simply wasn’t getting all the nutrition I needed from it.
• I had a ridiculous number of food sensitivities.  It doesn’t matter how keto or healthy a food is, if your body cannot tolerate it (for whatever reason) you’re going to get sicker by eating it, not healthier.  It’s like having a peanut allergy that stops short of killing you.  When you don’t know that you have sensitivities to the foods that a keto or low carb diet focuses on you can be right up the creek without a paddle while thinking that you are doing everything right.
• I had a massive E.Coli infection which completely changed the bacterial balance in my gut, altering the way food was digested, processed, and utilized.

I could go on, but you’re smart peeps – you’ve got the point.

Have you ever thought, “I have tried every diet out there and nothing works!”, or, “I have been eating fantastically for 6 months and nothing is happening.”?  Does, “Initially I lost 20lbs eating this way and now I’ve stalled and nothing I do starts the weight-loss again.” sound familiar?  How about, “This way of eating makes total sense but after 3 months I put on weight not lost it”?  Or, “I generally feel good eating this way but my long-term symptoms are not getting any better.”  I know a lot of you think these things because you let me know.  And that’s why writing these posts and sharing my story has become so important to me – it may unlock your struggles too.

What if there is some non-food-related hiccup that is stopping all the goodness of the food from doing it’s job?  What if there is some non-food-related hiccup that means your body does not do what it is supposed to?  What if some of that goodness you are ingesting is something that your body cannot tolerate?

Then you, like me, might have something else going on.  You might want to consider identifying any underlying problems before you throw up your hands in frustration and start eating cake like it’s an essential food group because you reason that either this whole just-eat-real-food thing is BS or you are just too broken to ever get healthy and slim.  Maybe you are not doing anything wrong at all.

This is why I now say The Most Important Thing is to understand that if we have underlying conditions it doesn’t matter how fantastic a diet we eat – we will not get the results we should.  If this was not the most important thing to understand then I would still be where I was back in July instead of where I am now.

I used to think that the most important thing was for me to create truly healthy recipes so that all you lovely people had delicious food to eat that was also wildly nutritious and all kinds of good for you.  I’ve changed my mind.  The most scrumptious, healthiest recipes in the world are all for naught if your body has a glitch that stops the whole process working quite right.

You have to fix the glitch first.

This changes everything.