Start Dec 3
Today is Dec 27, 2018. This is my 4thweek on drugs. This is how it has been going and what I’ve experienced so far.
Pre-christmas and Christmas are not the best time to be on a diet that makes it challenging to eat out. There’s always a good excuse for having that one cookie or that dish with carrots. Long story short: I did not stick 100% to the anti-candida diet which is basically foods that do not contain sugar, do not cause acidity and (in my case) are warming and not too drying (link to killing candida). Hence my diet hence left me with vegetables (and no root vegetables), meat, seafood, eggs. As I wanted to make it as easy for my digestive system as possible, I also ate only very few nuts, seeds and cut down on the fat (coconut oil in my case). Since I’m a Wildfitter (link) it was fairly easy to get back into what we call deep spring, which is mainly a keto diet. From my WF spring experience I knew how difficult it was to make sure that no dish contains root/sweet vegetables or sweet spices. As I love salads (or often have no other choice when eating out), this also meant no fruits in the salad (What is this thing about always needing at least some pomegranate or orange in the salad?) and (much more difficult to make sure) no sweet condiments or vinaigrettes (that’s another one: Why does salad need sweet sauces?If I want desert, I order desert.).
What I did really well on (to give myself some credit) was the cutting out of carbs and – in the beginning – butter. I eat butter by the spoonful. My kids always tease me that I don’t eat bread with butter but butter with bread. In fact when eating butter (like with seeds) I do is giving the butter some “basis”. It is fully, completely, 100% about the butter and nothing else.
With coffee I also did well for two weeks, then I occasionally had one- when there was a chance like going out for breakfast and someone had a coffee with their set breakfast that they didn’t want or a particularly nice café or a morning in my favorite morning café in Panjim with a newspaper. All good excuses and lousy impacts on my battle.
Sugar was no problem unless I came across the free stuff: free samples (as in nuts with dried fruit), a buffet, an invitation. For special occasions I gave myself permission to eat/drink whatever I wanted. That was not a good idea and nothing but another one of these lousy excuses. What it meant was: we attend this wedding, I will stuff myself. I’m at this dinner party, it’s homemade cake. Trouble (and luck) is that the more aware and healthy you become, the more sensitive you are to substances that are bad for you. Right from week 2 it got to the point that I felt sick from every little lapse. Even eating (too many) roasted chickpeas (my emergency food that I carry with me when out and about) made me unwell. The climax was reached when I was at the fantastic Serendipity art festival and took a break at the park where a nice band was playing, food stalls offered their goodies, and kids engaged in creative activities. It was such a beautiful atmosphere- and there were three huge jars of FREE cookies courtesy of Taj Panjim. There was also coffee for an outrageous 110 INR. I wouldn’t say I’d planned it (I did), but I was fully aware of what would expect me in the park. It’s why I went there in the first place. So dished out the sassy 110 INR for the lousy coffee and cleared the cookie jars. I ate even after I started getting really full. Within half an hour I was so tired I could hardly keep my eyes open, then I started feeling sick and had to go home. That was it. Ruined it for me. It did have somewhat of a healing effect, and one day I will learn that I better not start with things I know I can’t stop anymore.
The good news is that I had so overdone it that I was cured from coffee cravings for a week. Then they came back, hurray. Persistent stuff.
Wondering all along how best to use my little miracles in bottles, my essential oils (link), in week 3 I switched from mixing 2 oils in one capsule to single oil only, alternating the oils used, so I would use oregano in one capsule, lemongrass in the next. In week 4 I figured that I needed the concentrated benefits of one oil to get rid of the candida/yeast, kind of like a frequent repetitive bombardment. I stuck to clove until I ran out of it.
Topically I deviated from the original plan slightly only because I received my order of neem oil, so I swapped the coconut oil for it.
In 4 weeks I experienced nothing like a candida dump or anything of that sort. I attribute that to me not sticking fully to my diet. After an especially bad shortfall I excrements were so covered in candida (hanging off like thick cobwebs) that I managed to pull myself together more.
All in all I noticed no significant changes since starting my quest 4 weeks ago. I’m not less tired, no energy increase, my belly still blown up like a football.
In week 2 I did a one day fast just to see whether my belly would retreat if I ate nothing at all (thinking that if it did not I might have a tumor). Luckily it did, which was an encouragement.
On the positive side I eat less (often because I don’t know what to eat), I eat mostly only when I’m hungry (instead of shoveling food into myself at every – self created – opportunity), I am more aware and focused on what I eat, and I’m more determined than in years to achieve food freedom.
The advantage with changing your diet to get rid of candida/yeast is that you have no choice. Our body is sick and shows you with symptoms that you could happily do without. You’re sick and you need to heal. That’s all there is to it. So you actually change your eating (habits) because you have no choice, thereby discovering that you actually feel much much better without eating the crap that got you into this in the first place.