Step Two

Colon Hydrotherapy

Yes, it's as unpleasant as it sounds. 

The second step in preparing for a fecal microbiota transplant is to get colon hydrotherapy 8-12 days before your first treatment. 

It's not too common, so I drove about an hour to get there. 

Let's just say I would never do that if I didn't have to. First off, it just seems like a bad idea most of the time and clearly removes plenty of good bacteria, if you've got 'em. I could maybe see doing it as sort of a "cleanse" (God, I hate that word), if you know you have serious gut dysbiosis and are starting a healing, gut-cleaning diet, like GAPS or SCD. But once you get started and you have a healthy diet and are seeing improvements in symptoms, it seems counterintuitive to then go and flush all that hard work out. 

Literally. You essentially stick a thin, gentle garden hose up your butt, and then turn it on and let 'er rip. You basically spend an hour or so feeling like you have awful watery diarrhea–cramps and all, which I wasn't expecting. The insertion was also uncomfortable and er... difficult. I had a hard time believing it was going to stay in. I'm sure others with IBS/IBD histories feel similarly about that orifice being a strict one-way street given the torment it has caused me my entire life. 

But I digress. The woman was very kind and professional. She offered to stay for the procedure. Not exactly my idea of comfort, but to each their own. And it was uncomfortable, and I don't just mean because of the cramps. There's something fundamentally and viscerally uncomfortable about experiencing diarrhea and not being on a toilet. Think about it. Practically your whole life you've been trained that finding a toilet is of utmost important when you gotta go. So to be deprived of that is.... uncomfortable. 

After the procedure they send you home with a printout about what to do for the next 24 hours and how to eat for optimal colon health in the future. For the first day, you're just supposed to eat light, pureed foods, which is fine. However, for optimal health in the future, they're a big fan of the whole raw vegan, ra-ra soy thing. Oh, well. 

AIP Gazpacho

Ok, this isn't exactly an appetizing photo. 

But I can assure you it's delicious and will hit the spot if you've been missing regular gazpacho. These have all sorts of flavors, without inflammation-inducing nightshades.  Ideally I'd get even more ambitious and fancy with the ingredients, but these were born out of an over-the-hill bag of salad greens and whatever else was in the fridge already, because it's crunch time, baby. 

Ingredients:

Big bunch of salad greens (whatever mix you like, but avoid added herbs)

One large cucumber, cut into pieces

1 T of apple cider vinegar 

1 T of 'kraut juice (I used this) 

A few basil leaves

A few chive... strands? 

2 T of olive oil 

Salt and black pepper to taste 

Add coconut water to other ingredients in a blender and blend until you reach your or your blender's desired consistency 

Served with left over baked chicken thighs, dunked right in. 

Variation on a theme (because I ran out of cucumbers and had something else):

Big bunch of salad greens

3 C of watermelon

1 T of apple cider vinegar

A few basil leaves

A few mint leaves

1/2 C of red onion, chopped

2 T of avocado oil

Salt and white pepper to taste

Add coconut water to other ingredients in a blender and blend until you reach your or your blender's desired consistency  

Served with half a duck breast. 

*I do realize pepper isn't AIP, but I can eat it, and I trust that if you can't, you'll just leave it out. 

Study Week Breakfasts

Classes are out, which means breakfasts happen a little later and are more involved. 

Here we have ginger kombucha, hard boiled eggs (I'm totally converted), pork sausage, asparagus with duck fat, and dog-rejected pumpkin swirled with dog-rejected applesauce and coconut butter. 

Rooibos/nettle tea with hard boiled eggs, bacon, prosciutto, pears with pumpkin seed butter (the only kind I can eat), and red sauerkraut (because, vegetables). 

Ice Cream Fail... or Gelato?

I followed the trusty recipe, this time adding a generous amount of cocoa powder and gelatin while the coconut milk and yolk mixture was warm. Turned out it was also a generous amount of gelatin. 

It tasted pretty good pre-ice cream maker as a custard. Once in the ice cream maker, it didn't change much in volume. 

However, I did end up with something a bit like gelato - dense, chewy, and warm. 

I made 1.5x the original recipe, and probably ended up with 1.5 T of gelatin. 

So go ahead and see how you like this dairy-free gelato. Just because it doesn't turn into ice cream doesn't mean it's not a great dessert. 

Breakfast Fuel

To fuel a rainy day of cardio studying.

We started with a quick hike and came home to this:

Pork sausage (nightshades? Probs. Undercooked? There's a slight chance), asparagus baked in duck fat, and an ugly sweet potato with butter (had to warm it up in a pan on the stove... Don't ask). Ginger kombucha on the side. 

You gonna finish that? 

Step One

A new opportunity for success in healing

This has been at least six months in the making at this point, but as of June 2, I will be flying to England to receive a fecal microbiota transplant at the Taymount Clinic.

As soon as I heard of these things a couple years ago, there was a voice in the back of my mind that said, "This is for me. This could be it." With every development that would allow me to receive this treatment, my excitement grew: there was a reputable place in England, it wasn't that difficult to get to, my father (who was enjoying keeping up with the research unrelated to my interest) was willing to pay for me to give it a try, Chris Kresser recommended it to me in case all of the things he knew to suggest didn't work (they didn't)...

I'm doing my best to reframe my thinking to not get my hopes up too high. I realize that even if I do see great results, it's not because this treatment is "it." This is only one (large) step of many that I've taken recently to regain (or finally, for the first time, be) healthy. I long ago gave up looking for a magic pill to take away my myriad of diseases and other symptoms. The microbiologist I spoke to last fall said they consider a successful treatment one where the patient is able to get off his/her "survival diet." This is in no way my marker of a successful treatment for me. I am fully entrenched in the real food world and won't be looking back, no matter what specific label may be most appropriate for my diet at any given point in the future. It has woven its way into all areas of my life and has made me who I am today and who I hope to be in the future.

That being said, my goal for this treatment is to get me to a place where real food and alternative therapies actually and finally work for me, like they seem to for many other people, because I have yet to see more than very minor improvements from the drastic upheaval of my diet and lifestyle these past few years.

The timescale for improvement (if there is any, and apparently improvement is only seen about 70% of the time, but that's for their entire population, and not the people who are willing to do whatever it takes to keep their new bugs healthy–Chris said the rate of improvement for his patients is nearly 100%, albeit the sample size is smaller and degree of improvement is varied) is several months to a couple of years. However, I've definitely proven that I'm in this for the long haul. My only fear is that the necessary stresses of vet school's third and fourth years will impede my true healing potential.

Step One

The first step is to being taking a bowel softener one month ahead of the start of treatment. The ingredients are very clean - it's essentially just a high dose of magnesium and vitamin C. 

No matter what your bowels' preferred state is, you have to take this to help clean things out. Surprisingly, given that I can count the number of times in my life I have been constipated on one hand while one hand more often than not would not be enough to count the number of diarrheal episodes I have had in a single day over the last fifteen years, I've been having to take more than I thought. They advise taking 1 more each day until soft stools are achieved, and I have to take three. Ah, the mysteries of the human body... 

In other health news...

My thyroid antibodies have been elevated ever since they were first tested over two years ago; however, this time they've reached the danger zone (a TPO of >60). My actual thyroid values are still within normal limits, so hopefully I will be able to avoid adding another autoimmune disease to the list. 

After one and a half years of intensive supplementation and sun exposure (relatively speaking for this ginger), my vitamin D levels are finally in a normal range. Some might actually argue they've gone too high, so I'm going to be backing off the supplements until I enter the cave that is a New England winter again. I credit this supplement far more than any others (yes, even including FCLO, which did nothing to raise my values over the last three years), because that's the only thing that has changed since I had my values tested in December. 

Early May Meals

Breakfast: sunny-side up eggs, red chard, Japanese sweet potato with butter (yay more starch!), and local Jasmine kombucha. 

Breakfast: ham steak, fermented ginger beets, and sweet potato fries. 

Lunch: Wild Planet canned shrimp, arugula, baby romaine, cucumbers, fermented ginger carrots, and a clementine (fruit in salad is the greatest) with a dressing made of avocado oil, toasted sesame seed oil, raw apple cider vinegar, ume plum vinegar, salt, and garlic.

This trusty recipe (I think this was the first time I followed the "make a custard on the stove" part of the recipe and was not disappointed) with additional gelatin, 1.5 tsp of mint extract, a handful of mint leaves, and Equal Exchange bittersweet chocolate chips. Oh, and I multiplied the recipe by 1.5x. Duh.

I've decided that a dog-free couch is a futile endeavor.

So close, Martha, yet so far.

Lamb Shoulder Roast

I'm getting pretty ambitious now that it's the end of the semester, so the other night I made this recipe (just the lamb part) with a US Wellness Meats lamb shoulder that had been in my freezer for who knows how long.

I was a little short on fresh rosemary (my herbs took a hit when I moved them back outside, but they're rallying), but it turned out ok. I still tossed in the carrots, peas, and red onions with about 1.5 hours to go. 

Green peas! WTF?!

I've been doing some reintroductions lately. I dabbled in LDN and it might have been a coincidence (I was feeling pretty good the day or two before I started), but it really helped my digestion. I'm back off it now but have plans to restart it soon. I just think I worked up to a higher dose too fast and was left with a bad lingering headache (something that hasn't been a problem since middle and high school), so I'm just taking a break until I'm sure it's gone, then I'll start even slower (spending a month at each dose instead of a week). 

The green peas seemed to go over just fine - they were even in my chicken soup a few weeks back. 

I even made some rice!

As utterly amazing as rice cooked in broth and served with butter was (why did this never occur to me or my parents growing up?), that was a little overly ambitious. My digestion took a bit of a hit, but I'll try again one day. 

On an unrelated note, we're not really sure what happened to spring, but we sure are enjoying a non-winter season.