​It’s been a while since I felt like writing anything for my blog. I assume that’s because it takes energy to think about things and then to share them, and I ran out of that sometime around my last post lol! So I figured I would talk about what’s been going on with me and the effects of overdoing things, amongst other stuff.

Going back to mid-July, I was building a chicken run, decorating the front room, and frantically tidying before our guests from Texas arrived. Now having guests (for 3 weeks) was an interesting scenario because we hadn’t met them before. If you’re thinking, gee, that sounds a bit stressful, then you might be on to something! Hey ho, I’m sure if you’ve been following my blog for a while you’ll have realised I’m not a half measures kind of gal, so I thought it sounded like a fun thing to do!

​Back to before they arrived though, and I had a million things to sort out. I was only just starting to feel really good and the sensible thing would have been to take it easy and not overdo it. Ho hum! Delighted at the fact I felt better I threw myself into everything with gusto. Many items in the house were bagged up, door handles were fixed, shelves were added, tip runs commenced, along with the work I was trying to do on my tree project. Although I was still eating a good amount regularly, it just wasn’t enough to support me (plus there was other stuff going on that I’ll get to in a bit!), and about 5 days before our guests were due to arrive (with the house still a mess) it culminated in a break down that went something like this:
Me doing dishes: start to cry (I never cry!), finish dishes in sink so I can wash paint roller, accidently splash paint everywhere (all over clean dishes!) as I wash roller, redo dishes, cry harder!
Go up to daughter’s room: Cry in doorway, daughter looks alarmed and askes what’s wrong, I state that I can’t do this anymore, the house is a mess and I’m not getting chance to get my work done.
Daughter tries to calm me down: Sit down mum, let me get you some pineapple juice…
Me: cries harder whilst proclaiming that Tesco didn’t have any pineapple juice!!
Whilst this is now funny to me, it’s a stark reminder of how easy it is to run out of energy when we overdo things. The world is not perfect and it wasn’t necessary to get the house looking perfect before the guests arrived. It was clean and (fairly!) tidy, with quite a bit of stuff shoved in to the built in wardrobe, shhhhh!

​So I dialled it back and accepted that was how it was. I also had work to do and tried to get this message across to our visitors, that if I sometimes had to work then so be it, surely I could not be expected to entertain for 3 weeks! I was still tired but no longer feeling on the edge of a breakdown!
I didn’t sleep well the night before we went to the airport (early morning!) to collect our visitors but I wasn’t sure why. By the time we got back from the airport I was exhausted from not sleeping well, and they were certainly exhausted from not sleeping well on the plane (or at all!), so we all went to bed haha! 

​I’m not really going to comment much on the period that the visitors were here for, I guess it’s my blog to talk about me but not fair to talk about others per se. I’m only going to say that no matter how nice people are (and they were nice), having others share your house for 3 weeks is stressful, especially as I’m used to it being just me and my daughter, and we’re both pretty independent, doing our own thing! I’m happy in my own company and am not always in the mood to constantly chat!! Lol! I find that chatting, and engaging in conversation, actually takes quite a bit of energy and if someone chats a lot to me that I can be left feeling a bit like I’ve been swept up in a hurricane or something after about an hour!! I’ve actually observed that a lot of hypothyroid people talk a lot, which is strange because of the energy needed, but maybe because of stress hormones? Hmmm!

​Anyway, about half way through their visit I got that god awful pain in the side of my face/teeth again, the pain that makes you want to shoot yourself in the head!! It caught me totally unawares and given that the last time I fixed it by taking vitamin K, and this time I was already taking vitamin K, I was totally perplexed. No point in going to the dentist (they’re as useless as the Drs!) and the pain was all over my face, no specific tooth, so they weren’t going to be able to help. I pondered and pondered (as well as feeling sick and disorientated from the pain) and decided it must be to do with calcium again. I’m also taking Vitamin A and thyroid, both necessary for strong, healthy teeth, so calcium is the only other thing I could think of and I know my calcium intake has been low. I’ve played around with it, upping it but always felt it made my skin drier. Feeling like there was nothing else for it I immediately poured myself a mug of milk, warmed it up and added some sugar. I drank that down and took about an 1/8 teaspoon of egg shell calcium (boiled the egg shells, dried them off in the oven on a low setting, then put them in my coffee grinder). After about an hour the pain had eased a bit, so that seemed to confirm it was a calcium related problem. I was only having around 400 ml milk per day, which is definitely not enough to support a high metabolism. Plus my calcium:phosphate ratio would’ve been awful. So I set about making some of Billy Craig’s Milk Powder Bakes, and added them into the mix. (You might remember from one of my blog posts that the last time I added them in, probably about a year ago, I spent all night vomiting!!) Anyway, no vomiting this time, always a good thing! After a couple of days the most amazing thing happened. The skin on my arms, which has been dull and fairly dry for a long time, suddenly went really shiny. I wasn’t expecting that. Looking at some stuff now though I think calcium is involved in skin metabolism so it totally makes sense. All this time I’ve been avoiding more calcium thinking it made my skin drier, when it was actually the complete opposite. It just took a couple of days to have that effect! I’m always saying listen to your body as it’s always talking to you, lol, it’s just that I usually get to the point where it’s shouting at me before I take note!!

​I’d like to say that was the end of my tooth/calcium problems but no, after a couple of weeks the tooth pain came back again. Now I was truly mystified! So I had a momentary panic and cut back on the calcium again. I felt ill, my sleep went crap, my skin went dry again and my teeth/face still hurt. So I gave myself a bit of a talking to! No point in going backwards. I knew that low calcium was causing me a problem so it was silly to drop it right down again. I was about to go down other rabbit holes about what might be causing the problems but I managed to stop myself in time! Haha! Starting to recognise the patterns to my own behaviour now. I think I just took it to the other extreme and upped my calcium too fast. I also think my body likes the warm whole milk with coffee more than it does the skimmed milk powder in the milk powder bakes, maybe, possibly, lol! So I’ve gone back to having plenty of milky coffees with sugar and the tooth pain has gone. My skin is semi-shiny but I’ll take that for now if it means upping my calcium slowly and avoiding tooth/face pain!!  The other problem I had when I upped my calcium intake a lot was that my mind went very foggy and my memory got worse. Not a great trade off hey, shiny skin for the sake of my memory, no thanks! Note to self, balance is key, and slow, steady change is usually better than a large shock to the body!

​Now I’m sitting here, typing away and looking around my house. It’s still not completely tidied from when the visitors were here. There are many things I need to tidy up/put away. There is wood to be cut to finish things on the chicken run. There is work to be done in my garden and flowers to be planted up. I have work to do for my project. For now though, it’s one thing at a time, with plenty of rest and food in between. Tomorrow is another day and there is no need to have everything done right now, at least that’s the mantra I have going on in my head right now lol! As I’ve said over and over, patience is key, and throughout this journey I’ve come to see that more and more.

Billy (billycraig.co.uk) always says that your energy status is like a bank account. Usually by the time people get to him they are well overdrawn on their energy status! You need to let your account build up again before you draw on it. I tried to draw on it too heavily once I felt a bit better and it all went to shit! Lol! Back in the overdraft. So for now I’m cautious. Happy to feel better once again and to have no pain in my face/teeth, and to have energy! 

​As always, hope you’ve enjoyed my ramblings. That’s all they are, my ramblings, trying to make sense of things to enjoy better health. It’s important that you listen to your own body and do your own research, take control of your own health if you want to feel better. In my next post I’ll share what I’m eating, how much, and what my calcium:phosphate ratio is at the moment, along with the supplements I’m taking. I’ll also do a post on my 23andme results and what they mean for my health (I just have to fully understand that myself first lol!)
Take care,
Karen x

​This is just a quick add on from my last blog post which, if you have looked through my food for the day that I listed, you will have noticed I had quite a lot of pineapple juice. Which is yummy, but it was too much liquid for me, even though I was adding plenty of salt to my other food. A few days after I’d written the blog piece I started to feel quite unwell: my bowel movements became, erm, quite explosive, sleep was shallower, and I was clumsy and all over the place! I clocked what was happening fairly quickly and pondered what to do about it.

​I decided in order to get some solid food and plenty of salt inside me I’d go back to adding a little bit of rice to a couple of meals, along with some root vegetables. This did make me feel better pretty quickly but after a couple of days I was farting a bit and my lips started to go dry around the edges again.

​So I took the starch out again!! Just no need lol! I’ve just jiggled things around a bit so I don’t have a lot of liquids. I use homemade orange jelly and marshmallows quite a bit for my carbs, along with sugar in my coffee, and I’m starting to add bits of fruit in to the mix as well! 

When you are hypothyroid you lose salt quite quickly and a lot of liquid will wash you out and make you feel lousy. I add salt to everything I can, but when I’m eating fruit and I’m not keen on adding salt then I’ll just add a quarter of a teaspoon to a shot glass of fruit juice and swig it down. I also use one of Nathan Hatch’s (www.fuckportioncontrol.com) suggestions, which is to use sodium acetate: 1 tsp baking soda and 2 ½ tbsp white vinegar. You can find his explanation of making it at   http://www.fuckportioncontrol.com/blog/2017/9/18/the-cure-for-sibo. There is also tons more useful  info in his book: http: //www.fuckportioncontrol.com/new-products/ and he has a Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/Fckportioncontrol/

​I feel much better now. Last night I slept for just over 7 hours straight, but even better, when I woke up I actually felt awake. Usually it takes me 30-45 mins to wake up out of the fog!

​My next experiment is to add some casein protein instead of some of the meat that I’m eating. As I’ve said before, I’d like to reduce my meat consumption so this is where the casein protein comes in whilst I work on increasing my dairy. I’ve chosen Pink Sun Organic Micellar Casein Protein Powder as it has no nasties added. Check the ingredients before you buy things as you’ll be surprised (or not!) at what gets added to your food & supplements!

​I’ll update soon to let you know how I’m getting on. In the meantime you’ll find me mostly planting out my now pretty big seedlings, and cutting, sanding and painting wood for my chicken run! As always, I hope you’ve enjoyed my ramblings. Listen to your body; it’s clever, it knows!! Lol! It’s just that we often lose touch with it. Take care, Karen x

​It might have taken 4 long years but I am finally so so happy with how things are progressing. I feel better, my energy is improving and my sleep is pretty good (I’ve even had a few nights where I’ve slept right through the night!) I’ve been waiting to write this blog piece, as usually when I write how well things are going it lasts for a couple of days and then all falls apart! I’m happy to report that this time it seems to be legit and there’s been no fall out.

​The last time I spoke about my health on the fb page, it was to say that the increase in milk (or coffee- as it was milky coffees I was drinking) was not working and that a lot of symptoms had returned, such as insomnia, loss of appetite, sore fingers, and unpleasant odour from feet again. Not good! So I reduced the milk drinking and went back to just eating lots of rice with my meals again. Boring but at least I felt more on an even keel. 

​My fingers were getting increasingly dry again and my thumb got so bad it split open into a nasty cut. I couldn’t feel the ends of my fingers properly. I’d given up taking the vitamin A and zinc as I thought they weren’t working, and the vitamin A just didn’t make me feel too good. Anyway I decided to add the zinc back in again. It helped a bit but my fingers were still ridiculously dry. It was pretty bad as I hated to touch anything as things stuck to my fingers like they were velcro! What to do, what to do?

​Then I got my 23andme results back. The ancestry composition wasn’t that interesting! I’m 79% British and Irish, 5.9% French and German, 1.6% Scandinavian, 13.2% broadly Northwestern European, 0.3% Broadly European and 0.1% Siberian!! The other results come through in a mass of raw data. Reams and reams of genotype call data. Nothing that makes any sense! Lol! So I used StrateGene to analyse the data and produce a report. I have various gene mutations, some heterozygous and some homozygous. I have asked Billy to produce a small report in laymens terms as to what these mean and what is the best course of action, so hopefully I’ll be able to share that with you soon. 

​One of the suggestions he made, once he’d looked at my results, was to supplement vitamin A. Hmm, ok I said, I’ll give it another go. This time, maybe because I’d been taking the zinc for a little while, the vitamin A didn’t give me any problems. So cautiously, after a week of taking just one drop (2500 iu) I upped it to 2 drops. I wasn’t seeing much improvement in my dry skin though so I upped the dose some more. After a couple of days at 20000 iu my skin started to improve and I began to feel a bit better. I wondered if a lack of vitamin A had been causing my anxiety problems when I was having fruit so I decided to add in some orange jelly. Halle-bloody-lujah!! No anxiety. So it’s taken 4 years to realise that I was deficient in zinc and vitamin A and that’s what was causing my problems. Doh! It took a coupe of weeks at 30000 iu vitamin A/per day to fix the skin on the ends of my fingers but finally I have normal hands back again and things have stopped sticking to them as if they are velcro!!

​I now drink orange juice or pineapple juice. Actually I’ve been obsessed with pineapple juice lately! I much prefer that to Coca cola now, which was always my previous drink of choice. I also have lots of orange jelly and marshmallows!! Life is good.
*Stands up* *Clears throat*
Hi, my name is Karen and I haven’t eaten any starch for 2 weeks now!!!

​Whoop whoop! This is the place I’ve wanted to be in for a while but have always seemed to have problems getting there. Mind you, before this last week I did instigate potatos again for a week or two, haha! But my body didn’t like them particularly and I got weird pains in my legs. So I gave myself a bit of a talking to and because I didn’t want to eat rice (probably ever again!! Lol!) I decided to just stop eating the starchy stuff. I don’t miss it particularly either. That’s not to say I wont ever eat it ever again. I do still have a hankering for home made fries, cooked in beef dripping! Just that they wont be making a regular appearance in my diet.

As for the calcium/dairy saga, that is still ongoing! I’m still doing a few milky coffees each day and that seems fine. I tried to swap out some of my protein for cheese (instead of meat) but I didn’t feel so great, so I swapped back to a bit of meat. I also tried to add in ice cream as well but that didn’t work either. I get tummy aches or loose bowels from it (and who wants that?!) A good chunk of my protein comes from milk, fish and eggs though and I only have small helpings of meat so it’s not too bad. My aim is to gradually get to most of my protein coming from dairy.

​So this is what I’ve eaten/am planning to eat today:

A few observations then are that you can see I’ve eaten 2336 calories today. When I went to see Billy for my resting metabolic rate (RMR) test the result was 1240 calories (that I burned at rest), which is, quite frankly, PANTS! Lol!

“Total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) refers to the metric used to calculate the total calories required to function optimally…the most common used method is to multiply by an activity factor. However, these commonly accepted multipliers seem to have little evidence to support their use and the physical activity level (PAL) seems to provide a more accurate estimation of an individuals TDEE and are more in line with the suggestions made by the IDECG and FAO/WHO/UNU” – taken from the book ‘Consistent Eating’ by  Billy Craig.
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Billy goes on to show a table that suggests standing work (e.g. housework, shop assistant) should be given a PAL of 1.8-1.9. So in laymens terms that means we should times our resting metabolic rate by the PAL  of our choosing. I’m choosing that one (1.8-1.9) as I want to be able to get busy around the house, get it tidied up, decorated, and of course I want to complete the chicken run!! So if we times 1240 by 1.9 we get 2356 (by 1.8 = 2232), so my calories are enough (as I forgot to add my raw carrot and coconut oil snack) to hit the 1.9 level. 

 ​I do feel pretty good but I have to be careful not to over do things. Last weekend I cut, sanded and painted the long roof batons for the chicken run and then wielded my new cordless hedge trimmers around the garden!!! They cut through the hedge like butter but they’re quite heavy lol! I was quite tired for a couple of days after that.

​Anyway, getting back to what I’ve eaten today. You can see I had 370g carbs, 110g protein and around 50g fat (which would actually be around 58g as I added some coconut oil to my raw carrot!) I’m totally happy with that. If I lower the fat any more than that at the moment then I don’t feel good. My feet get cold and I just feel a bit meh! Considering my fat used to be over 80g per day then I feel like I’m making progress.

My calcium is looking better but it’s still lower than phosphorus so that’s something I’ll be working on too. Calcius:Phosphorus ratio is important and you want your calcium higher than phosphorus. The only way you can do that is to have more dairy and very little meat, which is what I want to aim for anyway. The only other things that look low are vitamin E & K, which I take supplements for.

​So overall a very happy camper! Things are finally coming together. I can tell because I feel good and my sleep is getting better and better. Signals that I watch out for, that tell me things are off track, are sleep not so good or taking longer to fall asleep, feeling a bit anxious or stressy about things, not feeling motivated to do anything, strange pains in shoulder or leg, and a loss of appetite.

As always I hope you’ve enjoyed my ramblings! Listen to your body, it’s always sending you signals. I love all the things I eat now, and I’m so happy not to have to eat rice anymore. I was trying to listen to my body but I just couldn’t understand what was going on. It’s a bit of a puzzle sometimes – good job I enjoy them (puzzles that is) hey! Take care, Karen x

A couple of weeks ago I went to see Billy to get a RMR test done. Although I haven’t been feeling too bad lately, I still felt that I wasn’t making much progress. My skin was still going intermittently dry and the vitamin A & zinc that I thought was making it better just wasn’t always working. In fact my fingers started to swell up like sausages and get even drier just underneath the nail. Fruit juice was taken off the table again as my lips just kept getting sore and rice has to be kept in or I just feel weird!
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You have to be in a fasted state to get a RMR test done but I didn’t want to drive 2 hours to Derby first thing in the morning when I hadn’t eaten all night. That would be a recipe for disaster. Billy said I had to be 4 hours fasted so I decided to eat breakfast at 8 and arrive at Billy’s at 12. I’ve driven to Billy’s before and know the way so I set off at 10 figuring that there would be no problems. Bad assumption!!

​Things started to go awry when I drove the wrong way on the M6! For some reason I decided I needed the M6 north and purposefully got in the northbound lane whilst singing along to the radio. 5 mins later I was like ‘what on earth am I doing? Of course I need to go southwards to get to Derby!’ and came off at the next junction, which happened to be the busiest junction ever!! It didn’t take long to correct though and 10 minutes later I was travelling in the right direction. I knew what junction I needed and I could still make it in time. Then when I came off the motorway I started to follow signs for the A50, which I thought was a little early but no worries as that was the road I wanted. I followed the signs thinking ‘this is strange, I don’t remember this’ and then ended up out in the middle of nowhere with no more signs! Hmm! So I brought Google maps up on my phone and plotted a new route, although I still couldn’t understand why I’d ended up where I had. I was nowhere near the A50. I sorted a new route and came towards Derby on the slowest road in the world!!! It ended up taking me 3 hours instead of 2. Good grief! It didn’t even take that long the first time I went, although I also went wrong on that journey, missed the A50 and ended up in Shrewsbury!! Haha!! 

​Luckily Billy could still see me and do the test. By this time I was 5 hours fasted and you can see what a difference glucose (or lack thereof) makes to your brain power. I usually pick at sweets whilst I’m driving and have no problem remembering a route from Google maps. Especially now as you can place the little man (or woman!!) at points along the way so you know what to look out for!! On this journey though, with no food, I failed spectacularly to drive a simple route that I’ve driven before, even picking the wrong direction to start with!!

​The RMR test takes very little time to do. Firstly I needed to lie on his couch for a little while to be totally rested and unstressed. Then the test is done by breathing into a tube with your mouth and having a clip on your nose! It feels very strange and unnatural, especially given that I spend my time making sure I never mouth breathe normally!! You also hear yourself breathing in the tube, whilst Billy says things like ‘breathe slower’, ‘breathe more deeply’, ‘a little less deeply’, lol. After a couple of mins I had my result: 1240. This is the amount of calories my body burns at rest. Pants! I knew it must be pretty low though, as I wasn’t getting any better. My skin was still dry, I still store a lot of fat in the belly region, and I still have a lot of water retention in my arms and legs.

​“Of particular note should be the RMR/kg/24 hrs, which gives a clearer picture of the efficiency of the metabolic rate. When a subjects RMR data is available, it is then possible to divide this by the subject’s weight and derive the RMR/kg/24 hrs, which can then be compared to suggested norms for adults (25 kcal/kg/24 hrs).”
~ Billy Craig, “Consistent Eating”

​The above quote is taken from Billy’s new book ‘Consistent Eating’ which will be out soon. My weight is 86 kg so my RMR/kg/24 hrs is 14.4, more than 40% lower than the suggested norms of 25. I have some ways to go then!

​We talked about why it would be so low given that I was eating nearly 3000 calories per day. When we broke it down though, it showed I was eating a lot of those calories from fat. So I needed to have a rethink. 

​Billy also proceeded to tell me a lot of interesting information, which, as by this time I had been fasted for over 6 hours, I struggled to keep up with. In fact I was tempted to say could you write all this down for me!! It turns out he has though, in his new book (although not written specifically for me haha!) 

​I was also given a reminder of compensatory behaviour, which is likely to occur after a state of dieting or fasting in order to get the body the food/calories it needs. As I left Billy’s house I thought of only 2 things: how bloody hungry I was and how I had forgotten to go to the toilet! So I drove to the nearby marina and raced to the toilet block, ricocheting off a picnic bench in the process! When I got back to my car I literally inhaled the food I had taken with me. If I had had 6 of those meals with me I think I would probably have eaten them all! 

​My journey back was uneventful and I made it home in just less than 2 hours. Amazing what some food, coffee and sugar can accomplish hey! I also looked up why I had ended up so far away from my correct route when I followed signs to the A50. It turns out there are two A50’s! How ridiculous! And no, I don’t mean one in each direction as Billy suggested I might!!! FFS!!

​Once back home I had a ponder as to how to proceed. Clearly my current plan wasn’t working too well and I needed to cut some fat out. So the first thing I decided to do was to lose the sliced peaches that I was having for a pudding, along with meringue nests and cream. I’d tried before to have the fruit without the cream but a. I didn’t like it much and b. it caused me problems. Thinking about what Ray Peat had said about it sounding like I had difficulty digesting fruit and veg, I decided I could do without the peaches! So I proceeded cautiously with similar meals as I had been having (still with a bit of rice) and instead of the peaches and cream I’d been having, I added a milky coffee with plenty of sugar or just some sweets. Amazingly, once I’d dropped the peaches I was able to add in more milk without it causing problems. Previously when I tried to increase milk then I just wouldn’t be able to sleep. Now I’m sleeping pretty well, and I’m up to around 900 ml of milk per day now, which I have with coffee and sugar. I’m assuming the peaches were interfering with digestion or something. I always had the urge to drink lots of milk but then I was confused when I couldn’t sleep and it didn’t seem to work for me. Now I love milk and it seems to love me back! Part of my plan is to start swapping out the full fat milk for semi skimmed, but all in good time.

​A few days after my trip to see Billy I got to proof read one of the chapters of his book. It was all the stuff he’d been telling me whilst my poor brain struggled to keep up! So I got to read and remember all the interesting things in the comfort of my own home with a well fed brain!! Brilliant! I can’t wait to buy the book.

​As always, I hope you’ve enjoyed my ramblings. Listen to your body, it’s always talking to you if you just tune into it once in a while. It’s taken me a while to get to grips with it but I’m getting there slowly (even slower than the drive to Billy’s house lol!) Hopefully this is another step in the right direction. Take care xx

​So this is a happier blog post for me to write as I am definitely getting closer to where I want to be. After the last blog post I carried on keeping things the same but after a little while the lysine started to affect me. I wasn’t sleeping properly and I was getting stomach aches, so I stopped it.

Just before xmas it had been suggested to me to take some zinc. I was having problems with vit A, in that every time I tried to supplement it, or I had liver, I would feel cross or not very good! Zinc is very important in vitamin A metabolism, so I ordered myself some zinc chelate. I took 1 tablet a day for a few days but then stopped as I didn’t want to take too much. I didn’t notice much from it so I didn’t think much of it. Then, a couple of weeks ago, when my fingers were getting really dry again, I remembered the zinc and started taking it again. After a few days of taking the zinc I decided to add in one drop (2500 iu) of vitamin A to see how things went. Things went pretty good! I didn't feel cross at all! My dry skin on my thumb and fingers started to clear up. Thinking this was mainly from the vit A I stopped taking the zinc. The dry skin on my fingers & thumb came back again! So at the moment I’m keeping on with one drop of vit A and one zinc capsule each day. 

Hopefully you can see from the above photos how much better my fingers & thumb have got.

Taking the zinc & vit A has made a HUGE difference to my food choices as well!! I started slowly, cautiously adding in a small glass (100 ml) of freshly squeezed orange juice from M&S (I love it!!) after my lunch. No problems (coldness or anxiety)! Then I suddenly craved potatoes again for my breakfast, so I added in just a handful of fried potatoes to my eggs. Again, no problems. I started to add in extra cups of coffee, until I was having one with every meal. No problems at all. Sleep was still good. So my calcium is increasing to a nice amount and not affecting my sleep anymore. 

​Today, for one of my meals I had cottage cheese with pineapple, some cooked apple (with a tiny bit of cream) and some M&S fresh lemonade. AMAZING! And my temperature after it was 36.9. Finally I feel like my problems are being sorted out. I know that was a good 36.9 & not a stress response as I actually feel pretty good right now. I have energy again! Although let it be said, I don’t waste it lol! No unnecessary running or exercises! I still like to stretch and my flexibility is coming along nicely, but that will be all for now.

​Also I am so happy not to have to eat rice all the time anymore!! Although I try to stick to nutritious foods, at the moment nothing is off the table if I fancy it. It’s been so long since I actually craved anything that if the moment arrives then I seize it!! So the other day I enjoyed quite a few Cadbury’s mini eggs. 

​My main aim is to gradually increase the fresh orange juice and dairy products over the coming weeks. I can’t tell you how happy I am right now!
I am still taking thyroid, aspirin, pregnenolone, progesterone, vitamin E, D & K2, along with the vitamin A & zinc capsule. I also add some vitamin C to my juice sometimes.

​I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s happy ramblings! I’ll keep you posted how I get on with the fruit juice & dairy and hopefully share some temperature/heart rate measurements with you (if I remember to take them consistently so you can see the changes in them!) As always, listen to your body (it’s taken me a while!!) and take care of you, Karen x

It’s been a while since I wrote anything, mainly because I haven’t felt well. I think I was ill for pretty much all December. I recovered for Christmas day but then maybe all the tidying and cooking finished me off again, as from Boxing day, boom, down I went again with a sore throat and head cold. I’m just starting to feel much better, hence finally writing this blog piece!
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So I’m going to have to go back a little while to my last blog post where I was happy to be having sugar and not starch. That did not last long! My temperature just will not rise if I do not have starch. It will be 36.3 in the morning and it will remain there, or it will get pushed up to 37 because it’s stressed. I did not feel good. I lost the urge to do things and then by December I was a sitting duck waiting for the first bug/virus to attack me, and attack me they did! I was ill and miserable and something had to change. It’s difficult though because you lose the urge to do things and you don’t realise you are not doing the things you need to do to get better. I stopped doing the raw carrot salad, even though I know how much it can help, just because I became lethargic and not as pro-active about things.

Before I fast forward to December though, I’m going to just ramble about orange juice again and the problems that I have off and on with it. Some of the time it gives me anxiety and some of the time it makes me feel really cold. I figured the problem was lack of starch so I tried to add a few potatoes in again (not a huge amount like I used to eat!) but no, I got more anxiety, sore lips and bad sleep. So I swapped to sweet potatoes to see if they were any better but after a day or two the same things started happening: anxiety, sore back, very dry skin, sore lips and terrible sleep.

It’s been suggested to me that the anxiety is psychological, or that I bring it on myself. For a couple of years now I have pondered this. Am I crazy? Lol! Probably! Do I do it to myself? Lately it’s been said to me that I identify foods as problems for no particular reason! Finally I am saying NO! No, I do not have psychological issues with fruit and veg. No, I don’t bring it on myself. No, I don’t identify foods as problems for no reason. I’ve doubted myself for so long because I know how easy it is to get things wrong, to believe/trust things are working when they’re not, to hone in on the wrong things, I know this because I do it often!! We’re human, not infallible, and it’s often hard to see the wood for the trees. Apart from the anxiety, I was also getting very sore, cracked lips, with horrible sores on them, and I certainly wasn’t bringing them on myself! Nor was I willing my sore back to come back or giving myself dry skin or terrible sleep. 

​So finally in a fit of desperation I emailed Dr Peat again. It was along the same lines as the last email, saying have I broken myself with too many potatoes, or too much potassium! I’ve been feeling kind of crazy about not knowing what’s going on so I might as well sound crazy as well hey! This time he emailed back saying:
“It could be problems with their digestion, rather than the potassium. Milk, eggs, meat, fish and cheese can provide the essential nutrients without the plant materials.”

​Well hallelujah!! That makes sense. That would be why I got all the horrid symptoms, including the anxiety. So at first I was excited and cut all plant materials out, along with the rice. I upped the dairy instead and for a day or two everything was alright. And then it wasn’t! Lol! Sound familiar? I was pretty much doing what I had been doing. It didn’t work then and it sure as heck wasn’t going to work now just because Dr. Peat had replied to my email!! My body just hadn’t got the memo! I think if you are good with a lot of dairy then yes you would get everything you need, but I am not good with a lot of dairy. If I increase it too much then I just don’t sleep. I want to sleep! I like my sleep! 

​So I had to go back to what I had been doing: a bit of rice, butter and salt with each meal, a couple of small portions of butternut squash (which is pretty much all I can tolerate) along with something sweet after it. I also had a bit of a ponder and asked some people more knowledgeable than myself what might help with digestion. I still do the raw carrot every day, which will help, but I was wondering what else I could do. ‘Lysine might help’, I was told. So I ordered some. Studies have shown that lysine can oppose serotonin in the brain and the gut and it can inhibit nitric oxide synthesis. The first couple of times I took it I was really spaced out! I was at the supermarket trying to buy food and I was just staring at the shelves, like I just couldn’t make a decision! Then at home my daughter spoke to me and I just looked at her but walked out the room as I just couldn’t summon up the will to reply! Haha! Not good. After that I started just taking 500mg at bed time, but after a few days that spaced out feeling stopped so I was taking 500mg in the morning and 500mg at night. It took all my feelings of anxiety away and my sleep was great. I was feeling a bit better so what did I decide to do? Mess with things again!

​I thought that as the lysine was taking all the anxiety away I would try and see if I could drink orange juice without bringing it on. I treated myself to the freshly squeezed juice that I love and had it in fairly small amounts. The first day was fine. The day after not so much! I got some anxiety coming back and even though taking lysine took it away again, the sores on my lip came back in full force. Sad times!

​I took stock. I have to make my peace with not being able to tolerate/digest many fruits or vegetables at the moment. I guess this is not so bad in the winter and maybe I’ll be a bit more resilient by the summer, if I stop trying to force it. I need to take my own advice: listen to your body it’s always talking to you. The anxiety I was having after eating certain things was a message to me, but because I thought it was me causing the anxiety or somehow getting in a tizz about stuff then I stopped listening and started trying to make it so! You just can’t force things, it doesn’t work!

​One of the other things I need to be mindful of, still being quite hypothyroid, is that I need a lot of salt. I know this because I can salt my food with a lot of salt before I even begin to taste it. When I decided to swap out starch for all sugar, my salt intake must have fallen quite a bit. This would also affect digestion, among other things. You should always salt your food to taste. Don’t force down more than you need (unsurprisingly I have also tried this! Lol! I just ended up awake for a lot of the night!) and don’t forget to add it until it tastes right for you. When you are hypothyroid your body wastes salt. Salt also helps edema, although I just can’t seem to get rid of mine, but hey ho, it goes with the hypothyroid territory. One day I’ll get all my ducks in a row (and they won’t be sitting!)

​This morning when I woke my temperature was 36.3 °C, which is my normal waking temp if my body hasn't been stressed in the night. (This is a low waking temp by the way, but it is what it is! I consider it an improvement on the waking temps of 36.6 which were just a stress induced raise of temp. At least I've lowered stress hormones now.) After breakfast (and thyroid and progesterone) my temp was 37 °C. I picked on a few M&S foam lobsters in the morning and my temp before lunch was 36.7 °C (heart rate 80). After lunch (and aspirin, thyroid & pregnenolone) it was 36.9 °C (heart rate 84). Before my afternoon snack my temp was 36.5 °C (heart rate 76) & afterwards it was 37 °C (heart rate 80). You get the picture! Meals should always boost your temp & heart rate, so that you feel warm, including your extremities. The only exercising I do at the moment is stretching. I really love it & I just don’t have the energy to spare for other activities at the moment.

My plan at the moment is to carry on doing what I am doing and not change anything (big challenge I know!! Lol!) for a few weeks. Make sure my temp and heart rate are always increasing after meals and that my sleep is good. I think  having plenty of salt,  being consistent , keeping my temperature up, taking thyroid, having a daily raw carrot salad, and the biggie, not trying to force things that my body doesn't want to deal with at the moment, should go some way to fixing my digestion problems. I will also carry on with the lysine and see how that goes.
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I hope you’ve enjoyed my long overdue ramblings. As always listen to your body, as I am finally listening to mine, and do your own experimenting. Feel free to leave any questions/comments below, I always love to hear from you guys! I’ll have an update in the next few weeks to let you know how I’m getting on & if I’ve managed to resist changing/messing with things!! Take care, Karen x

​So after taking a couple of months to regroup, having more ups and downs,  often losing the urge to really talk about my health endeavours, I finally feel like I’m coming out the other side and I feel like talking about stuff again. I’ve learnt some more important things along the way, one of the most important being that you can know certain things, and know that you know them,  but until you really ‘know’ those things then you don’t act on them properly. I’m aware that sounds crazy but I’ll elaborate a bit later on!

​It’s been a while since I wrote anything and earlier on in the year I had swapped my diet around to include rice instead of potatoes and I introduced fruit as a pudding. Things got a little better for a while but even when we had a few days away in May I didn’t feel particularly up to doing much, except relaxing, which I guess is okay for a holiday! Not long after that I managed to design and build (with help!) a 3D structure with shelves, a planted area and a door into the garden, so my kitties would have an outside area (they’re house cats). I was well chuffed with myself as it’s the biggest project I’ve ever taken on but after that I felt tired out and ill again. 

​I resigned myself to not doing much again until I felt better. Around and around I went with trying to keep orange juice/jelly in my diet and get enough calcium. Nope, too much orange juice or fruits other than peaches would give me anxiety again and it seemed that too much calcium would give me very dry skin. 

​At some point in July I ran out of my vit D/K2 drops and not being very well off I rummaged in my cupboard and found some vitamin K gel caps that I’d bought a while ago and decided to use them instead. After a couple of weeks my sleep was terrible again, my skin was very dry, I was getting a weird pain in my middle finger (like it was in the bone), and in my tooth, and I just didn’t feel great. I realised then that the gel caps had a much higher dose of vit K than the drops I’d been taking so thought perhaps they were affecting me. I stopped taking them and things calmed down.

​Having resolved to get a bit more sugar in my diet I had started to add in a few sweets here and there. One afternoon I was sitting on the couch playing Mario Kart with my daughter and I grabbed a small pack of M&S milk bottles to have as a snack. I was having fun and enjoying playing and snacking, but as I came to the end of the bag I got a pain in my face like nothing I’ve ever known before. It was everywhere and nowhere in particular at the same time. It was in the nerves and by god it zombified me!! I tried aspirin and other pain killers but they didn’t touch it. Over the next week it came and went, and I tried to function as best I could. I thought about going to the dentist but ruled it out because a. I didn’t want any more x-rays from them, and b. I couldn’t really see how they could help because the pain was coming from all over my face. I couldn’t narrow it down to one tooth or a particular problem so how could they possibly help? Then I realised that even though I’d stopped taking the gel caps, I hadn’t replaced the drops so I’d been taking no vit D/K2. These are essential for calcium metabolism, and as I’ve been having lots of trouble getting calcium back into my diet then I really need to take them. As soon as I got the vit D/K2 drops the pain started to calm down, and after about a week it was totally gone. Phew! Aside from the anxiety, that is absolutely one of the worst traumas I’ve ever had!!

​Things settled down for a couple of weeks but I was still bothered by how little calcium I was having in my diet and I was uninspired by the things I was eating. I saw a recipe for milk powder pancakes and thought I’d give them a go. I decided to throw caution to the wind as I was probably being too rigid about the things I ate and just tucked in. I squirted some golden syrup on top of my pancake and it was pretty delicious. I had a quarter of the pancake for tea and then a quarter later on for supper. The following day I had the other half, along with my usual 2 milky coffees. By supper time I was tucking into some lovely Haagen Dazs vanilla ice cream and I suddenly felt very sick. I mean proper, I’m going to throw up, sick! I sat there in a daze for a moment thinking about why I suddenly felt sick (I very rarely feel sick and I can’t remember the last time I threw up). Initially I blamed some mussels that I had eaten earlier on, although they had tasted fine. I pushed my bowl away and just about made it to the toilet on time! My god, I felt wretched! I got myself up to bed, still feeling awful, and lay there for a while before I knew I was going to be sick again. I was retching like never before. My hands and feet went freezing cold. Actually, if you like dark humour, then I laugh about the sheer awfulness of it all now. I was trying to stand up to throw up in the toilet, but every time I got up off the floor I went so light headed and dizzy that I had to lie down, then on top of that I got the worst cramps I have ever had in my calf muscles, but I couldn’t stand up to stretch them out as I got dizzy and light headed!! I spent most of the night lying on the bathroom floor feeling especially sorry for myself. 

​In the cold light of day, the next morning, it suddenly hit me that I had consumed around 4 times the amount of calcium that I usually had, and I knew that I had problems increasing it. Doh! What on earth was I thinking? I felt fine the next morning anyway, well I was tired, but not ill in anyway so I definitely think it was calcium overdose and not food poisoning. Sometimes I wonder what is wrong with me lol! So I went back to the small amount of calcium I was having and things settled down. I felt ok but not great. 

​I knew that I needed to get away from having so much rice (starch) and to add in more fruit for more vitamins and minerals. I tried again to have stewed apple as my sugars/carbs for a couple of meals but after a couple of meals the anxiety was back (just the same as when I tried to have orange juice/jelly), so back to rice I went. I bumbled along with rice and butternut squash, or rice and carrot & turnip as my main carb sources. I puzzled and puzzled about why I kept getting anxiety but just couldn’t come up with anything.  I decided to make some homemade spelt bread so I could have a change of carbohydrate. The first loaf was a bit of a soggy disaster but on the second attempt I had a lovely fresh loaf and the house smelt wonderful. It tasted divine and how bloody nice not to eat rice! Unfortunately my body didn’t think so and over the next 24 hours my stomach bloated so much that I joked I had alien babies trying to get out of me. It was very uncomfortable, so the bread was off the menu and I was very disappointed.

​Eventually in a fit of desperation I decided to email Dr Ray Peat and see if he could shed any light on it. They say there is no such thing as a stupid question but I think I probably managed it!! Ha! Right from the start, when I got my hair test analysis that showed low potassium, I’ve been kind of fixated with that. I assumed that eating potatoes had helped me for so long because I had low potassium, and who knows, maybe they did, but it may have been just that I was getting some vitamins and minerals eventually, or the fact that I was eating proteins, carbs and fats together at each meal. Anyway, orange juice has a good amount of potassium so I was convinced that that had something to do with the anxiety. Maybe I’d overloaded on potatoes and so much potassium that now I could barely handle any? The only fruit I could do was tinned peaches, which are fairly low in potassium, so it seemed to make sense to me!! I couldn’t come up with anything better so off went my email asking if it was possible to be so awash with potassium that you couldn’t handle very much? Anyway presumably Dr Ray Peat thought I should just sit and think about that for a while as he never answered me!! Haha! 

​My health was not getting better. I was tired and my digestion was not great. I just couldn’t understand how to make it better. I was pretty sure I was eating too much meat but didn’t know how else to get enough protein in. I was already eating eggs and fish, and a small amount of milk, but without more dairy I just couldn’t get enough if I didn’t eat meat. I was losing my appetite and was bored to death of the stuff I was eating but I still couldn’t see a way to make things better. 

​Finally, at the beginning of this week, I was getting ready to make my lunch when I just decided that I could not face another meal of rice and butternut squash, or carrot & turnip, or anything else starchy and unappealing. It had reached the stage where I would take some anxiety if it meant I could just EAT SOMETHING NICE! So I decided on some homemade orange jelly and Cheshire cheese, and to hell with whatever happened afterwards. I tucked in and it was like eating a little piece of heaven. Afterwards I went outside to sit in the sunshine and read my book, awaiting the anxiety that would surely come at me. Nothing happened! NOTHING! I’d had nice food and suffered no anxiety. Amazing! I was puzzled as to why that might be but I didn’t want to dwell on it too much. Some people still suggest it was psychological but I just don’t really buy that at all. I didn’t always work myself up into a state before I had orange juice!! I have had occasions before where I’ve drunk it (or eaten jelly) and nothing has happened, but always after a few times it would start to creep back. Finally after a week of eating this way I think I have cracked the puzzle. By luck, or by listening to my body (not sure which) my attempt at eating the orange jelly was with cheese, and I had no anxiety. Over the following couple of days, in my excitement (!), I added in the still lemonade and extra portions of orange jelly, and sure enough the anxiety started to creep back, plus my lips always start to crack and get sores on them. Instead of freaking out, I puzzled over it some more, and what I think is happening is that I cannot increase my vitamins and minerals from fruits without the extra calcium. So I lowered the amount of jelly & lemonade I was having and made sure to have them either with or after cheese or milk. Et voila! My anxiety has gone away again and my lips have gone back to normal! I guess my minerals are just all mixed up.

​This week has been amazing! I’ve had lots of orange jelly, Cheshire cheese, milky coffees, ice cream, fish, eggs, some beef and roast potatoes (cooked in coconut oil) and lots of gummy bears and marshmallows! Oh, and my new favourite, freshly squeezed still lemonade from M&S! It’s like nectar from the gods! I’ve literally never been happier. 

​Finally I am where I set out to be, about 4 years ago! Oh well, some things just take time I guess. So this is where I finally realised that you can know something and know that you know it but not really ‘know’ it. Even though I’ve known for a few years that I wanted to eat sugar and not starch, I didn’t truly ‘know’ it. It’s hard to explain exactly what I mean by that but it feels strange, naughty somehow, to be eating marshmallows or gummy bears. We have been told for so long, and so often, that sugar is bad and sweets are naughty, that eating them as a source of carbs (energy if you will) for the first couple of times seems wrong, like you are somehow cheating at something! Then it really clicked and I understood how your body needs glucose for energy and sugar provides it better than starch does. 

"Starch and glucose efficiently stimulate insulin secretion, and that accelerates the disposition of glucose, activating its conversion to glycogen and fat, as well as its oxidation. Fructose inhibits the stimulation of insulin by glucose, so this means that eating ordinary sugar, sucrose (a disaccharide, consisting of glucose and fructose), in place of starch, will reduce the tendency to store fat" (Dr. Ray Peat: ‘Glycemia, starch, and sugar in context”). 

​You can’t live on gummy bears and marshmallows alone though, haha, hence the orange jelly, fresh lemon juice, eggs, cheese and milk for nutrients.

​When I was suffering from a bloated belly last week (after the bread) I had momentarily forgotten about the carrot salad which would help with it. I was reading an article with lots of different ideas from Dr Ray Peat when I came across information about the raw carrot salad. I read it and then reread it, and then had an epiphany moment. The raw salad is so simple, so easy to prepare, and so totally awesome for helping to normalise progesterone, reduce the reabsorption of estrogen, and protect against bacterial endotoxin, and yet I still wasn’t making it a daily habit. It’s the natural equivalent of antibiotics. I felt really perplexed that I wasn’t making the time to eat this simple salad every day when it could make such a difference. And that is what I mean about really ‘knowing’ something. I’ve known about the carrot salad for a few years now and have eaten raw carrots sporadically, but only because I’d read they were good for you, not because I truly ‘knew’ how good they could be for you! You only really know something when you know it! Now I make sure I have not only a raw carrot, but the full carrot salad (grated carrot, white vinegar, coconut oil & salt) every single day, because finally it has become really important to me, an important tool for getting my health back, and I will use every tool I possibly can.

​So there we are, the last few months in a rambling nutshell!! I’ve been perplexed, I’ve been despairing, I’ve been banging my head on the table, and I’ve been sending emails!! Eventually my body led me there though, because I couldn’t stand to eat the stuff I’d been eating anymore, and there was nowhere left to go but towards the good stuff!!

​There’s still a way to go though, whilst my body adapts to more sugar and I slowly bring my dairy up so that a large percentage of protein comes from milk and cheese. This means that your calcium to phosphorus ratio will be much better, but that’s for a future blog post when things are starting to head in that direction. For right now, finally, I am happy that I am making the changes that I most wanted to make but for some reason haven’t been able to. I feel like this is where my health journey will really get interesting, so watch this space!

​As always, I hope you’ve enjoyed my ramblings. Listen to your body; it’s always talking to you. We just lose the ability to hear it as it becomes drowned out by the constant bombardment of ‘health’ messages we hear and the strange things we put our body through. The adjustments we make because we are told they are better for us, regardless of whether you actually like what you are eating, or whether it actually does make us feel better. Usually, if it doesn’t make us feel better then we’re on to the next thing that we’re told will ‘most definitely make us feel better’! And on and on we go, further and further away from what our body actually wants or needs. 

​Luckily I love puzzles. I’m happy to spend as long as it takes figuring things out. For this reason I’ve always loved maths. As Jo Boaler says “There are two versions of math in the lives of many Americans: the strange and boring subject that they encountered in classrooms and an interesting set of ideas that is the math of the world, and is curiously different and surprisingly engaging.” I’m pretty sure this goes for any country and not just Americans!! Being able to think about, and solve problems is such an awesome skill to have but you’re going to have to feed your brain well in order to think effectively! I’m so happy that my brain is coming back to life and I’m enjoying embarking on journeys to learn new things. Hopefully you guys will come along for the ride and you can see first-hand what a difference getting your diet spot on (with all the sugar, vitamins and minerals it needs) can make to your life. It’s probably going to be a bumpy ride but who cares!! 

​Thanks for reading! I continue to share my ups and downs in the hope that they help others untangle what might be going on with them. Listen to your body and not me! Remember this is just me ‘thinking out loud’.  Please feel free to share any thoughts, comments, stories down below – I always love to hear from you guys. Take care, Karen x

It’s been a while since I wrote anything. It’s been a crappy few months and nothing was flowing! I was struggling to get my anxiety under control at the beginning of February and then I was hit by the worst flu bug in a long time (or probably more likely I was just in a bad, run down, low thyroid place, and I was an easy target for a bug!). It totally knocked me off my feet for a couple of weeks and I was beginning to think (once again!) that I would never get better. But by the end of February I was starting to recover, although I was still having bits of anxiety, albeit a bit more manageable.

​I had to shift my diet around again as I had been eating a lot of melon, which I absolutely love, but I was getting cold feet/hands/nose and I just could not get my temperature to come up at all. Then my bladder started acting up (like a bladder infection) and I started peeing every half hour. I tried adding more salt to everything but it didn’t make much of a difference, I was still cold (although my anxiety was a bit more under control). So I pondered what to do (and had a few conversations with Sarah) and decided to add some starch back in. I started having a bit of rice with each meal but also having something sweet with each meal, such as tinned peaches and meringue nest, so that my carbs were coming half from starch and half from sugar. 

​I had to take it easy when adding in the sugar as too much would easily overwhelm me. I had terrible hypoglycemia and too much sugar would make my blood sugar swing all over the place, even though I always have protein and fat with my meals. If I overdid the sugar I would feel starving hungry an hour after eating, but it was a weird hunger and if I went with it and ate more then I just wouldn’t sleep at night. So I paced myself and made sure I ate roughly every 3 hours, even if I was starving after an hour! The feeling would pass, I assume when my blood sugar sorted itself out. So I started just by having a bit of fruit & sugar after meals. Then I started to add in the odd milky coffee with sugar. I made Billy’s ‘no flour chocolate cake’ and had that as a pudding sometimes. Gradually throughout March, things started to improve. One of the defining moments was when I went to the pictures with a friend to see ‘Hidden Figures’. I was wondering what to do about my eating schedule, as I was still having a bit of rice with each meal but didn’t want to take a full on meal to the pictures! So I decided to take some of my chocolate cake and some homemade orange jelly. Now, I’ve not been able to drink orange juice for quite some time as, for reasons unknown, it would just kick off my anxiety and I’d feel awful. However, I decided to make it into a jelly and see what happened! So I boldly took my cake and orange juice into the pictures with me and tucked into it whilst watching the best film I’ve seen in a long time! As I drove home I cried! I must’ve looked a right mess but I didn’t care, I was so happy! It probably seems ridiculous but it felt like such a defining moment to me. To have eaten cake & jelly, no potatoes or rice (!!) and had no anxiety at all was just fantastic! It felt like it was opening the doors to a sort of normality again, whereby I could eat snacks without cooking all the time or panicking about what I would eat.

​I’ve also started to keep a journal. It feels kind of weird at the moment as I don’t always feel like I have a lot of thoughts to write down! Lol! My mind has been awfully fuzzy for a while and it’s been hard to even think about things. Slowly though, my mind is coming back to life. I’m even starting to get back into my research so I can finish the paper I was writing last year! Even better, I feel excited by it again. I have a whole stack of books that I can’t wait to get through too! (I love trees!)

​Today I tidied because I felt like tidying! Over the last few months I’ve tidied because either someone is coming round, or because it’s felt so bad I feel like my house would be condemned!! Today I had energy. I also managed to do some gardening in the sunshine. Only for half an hour, then I stopped because I got tired, and I sat in the sun and relaxed (it was warm enough to put my bikini on!). I have to remind myself that there is no race to get things done. Even though I’m starting to feel better and gain energy, that energy gets used up quickly! Today I danced around my kitchen and sang along to ‘Play that funky music’ (hopefully I didn’t upset the neighbours!!) and I felt more alive than I have done in ages. I’ve not had any anxiety for a week or two now and my sleep has been consistently good as well!

​To give you an idea of what I am eating and what supplements I’m taking, then a typical day might look something like:
Breakfast – 9am scrambled eggs & rice followed by tinned peaches, meringue nest and a little cream. Supplements: Vit D/K2 , thyroid
Dinner – 12 Beef casserole, butternut squash & rice, followed by apricots, meringue nest & cream, and a small cup of milky coffee. Supplements: Aspirin, B1, B3, thyroid
Afternoon snack – 3pm Chocolate cake & orange jelly. Supplements: thyroid
Tea – 6pm Prawns in a sauce with rice, followed by chocolate cake and ice cream, a small cup of milky coffee. Supplements: Thyroid, aspirin
Supper – 9pm Cod, rice and carrot & swede mash, followed by masa harina cookies. Supplements:  Thyroid, progesterone & vitamin E

​I aim to have around 2500 calories each day. If I’m thinking hard (about my research or anything else!) then I snack on foam lobsters or bananas from M&S!! Lol! People forget, or just don’t know/think about, how much glucose your brain will use in response to you using it!! Over time I hope to reduce the rice and increase the  simple sugars, such as fruits, juice, jelly etc.  and to increase  the amount of dairy/calcium I have. Slowly slowly!

​This works for me, for now! It may not work next week or for other people. You need to find what foods work best for you. Same with the supplements. I didn’t just start taking thyroid with each meal. I started having just a tiny bit with one meal and worked my way up from there. After a long time (and a lot of lessons! Lol!) I’ve realised it really is better to make small changes!

I’ve also had to try hard to change my thinking about food and the connection to anxiety. Just trying to eat a bigger variety of foods without worrying about triggering my anxiety was quite hard at first but I did it in baby steps!  Sarah also gave me some ideas to deal with the anxiety when it  appears, things like ‘ha breathing’ with have been very useful. Gradually I’ve been able to relax more. Working with Sarah is great as it gives me the opportunity to talk things out, and she helped me to realise that I’d been looking for a magic food to save me, which obviously wasn’t going to happen, and that no one meal is going to make or break my healing process. Honestly, the amount of strange ideas/thought patterns I had in my head was crazy, and I used to be constantly checking to see if the last meal had made my skin go shiny or if it looked like my water retention might have gone down a bit (it hadn’t!!). Just becoming aware of the things I was doing was a good first step, and since then I’ve been more and more successful at stopping, or at least calming down, some of those behaviours! I’m a work in progress! Sometimes I forget and I’ll catch myself checking again, then I remind myself to calm down, relax, and things will get better when they get better! Also, I remind myself that things are already so much brighter than they were just one month ago!

It's just so nice to feel like I'm joining the human race again! To feel like I'm not too tired to do things and to  be able to focus on books & research again. Hurrah! No doubt there'll be more ups & downs & setbacks along the way but for now I'll take the win!! The fact that my sleep has been better consistently and that my anxiety has pretty much gone tells me that I'm on the right track, for now at least.

As always, I hope you've enjoyed my ramblings! Your health is unique to you so you need to experiment until you find the things that work for you. It's taken me a long time to get to this point, but I've veered off the path a lot and learnt a lot of things along the way! It's not all about the nutrition either (although that plays a big part).  Learning to relax and not fear the anxiety has  been a big thing for me. I've often just sat at my table, not doing much, for fear of the anxiety coming back.  That's not a good place to be in! So I've learnt (am learning still!)  to  not let the anxiety  define me, and that I can acknowledge the feeling and still go about my day. Is it easy? No, definitely not. But can it be done? Absolutely!

"You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them."
Maya Angelou

If you have any questions, comments or stories to share, then pop them down below. I always love to hear from you. Take care, and remember this is just me 'thinking out loud'. x

It’s been 3 years, 10 months and 10 days since I crashed and burned following a low carb diet. Finally I feel I can say I’m on a path towards better health, and no, there aren’t any potatoes on that path!!! The fog has lifted and I can think clearly again (I may have got a few brain cells back!!), oh and I’m sleeping better, yippee!!

I’d left you whereby I could no longer eat potatoes and I was wondering what to eat next, so let’s pick up there. I started to try and eat a bigger variety of foods, like chilli con carne, risotto, stews etc. but things didn’t really improve. Bits of anxiety were coming back and I started to hate kidney beans or any veg that was in the stews! I knew I had to keep eating a reasonable amount but what to eat to keep the calories up? Well, I picked rice because it was nice and easy to eat, and goes with quite a few things. So for a few weeks I ate tons of rice with various meats & sauces and I didn’t feel too bad. My sleep was still a bit up and down but the anxiety calmed down.

Then I started to work with Billy again. He recommended thyroid and progesterone. Thyroid was my nemesis! Lol! The last time I tried it (over 2 years ago) it just produced more anxiety so I was a bit loathe to try it again. However, he explained that no one really recovers well without taking some thyroid so I decided to give it a go. It’s really important to start slow (yes I had to have a stern word with myself!! Haha!) and to make sure you’re eating enough calories when you’re taking thyroid. So I may have overdone it on the eating part! I think I was that worried that the anxiety was going to come back that I really ate loads and ended up going to bed with a stomach ache!! However, I slept through the night and got no anxiety, so I thought ‘YES, I’ve cracked it!’ I hadn’t though sadly!
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I continued to take a small amount of thyroid each day but my sleep was up and down and I felt tired and lethargic. I ordered the progesterone from Billy and hoped that would be ‘the thing’ that would turn things around.

Whilst I was waiting for the progesterone Christmas came and went. I was poorly again in the run up to Christmas, so it was a bit of an effort to cook Christmas dinner. It all came together though and we had a lovely day. Just after Christmas, on the 27th, we headed up to Findochty in the Scottish Highlands for a short break. It was fantastic! We saw reindeer, took the mountain train to the top of the Caingorms (where we finally found snow and my daughter snowballed me right in the mouth! That was a bit of a shock I can tell you & no, I haven’t forgotten!!), we saw Loch Ness (but not the monster!), went to the beautiful Lossiemouth beach, and the pièce de résistance, we saw the northern lights 2 minutes from our cottage, looking out from Findochty on New Year’s Eve! The only thing that blighted the trip was that I still felt so tired, more tired than I was last year, and I felt like I was going backwards.

Back home and the tiredness continued, the sleep got worse, brain fog had me in its grip and worst of all the anxiety started to come back. I just couldn’t understand what was causing it. I was trying my best to put all the pieces of the puzzle together but my brain was too fuzzy and I just couldn’t figure it out.
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I tried a new tactic. I contacted Sarah Kennard                                    (https://www.facebook.com/TheRevoltingDieter/) who has been trained by the master! (that’s Billy Craig for anyone who doesn’t know who ‘The master’ refers to!) I asked her a few strange questions (lol! nothing new for me!) because I just couldn’t understand why my body reacted so badly to anything containing calcium, or lately anything containing anything at all!! Sarah suggested that I eat more sweet things and not just rice, such as stewed apples and custard, fried banana in coconut oil with maple syrup, meringue nests with good quality lemon curd and other good stuff. This sounded fantastic so I thought I’d give it a go. I felt great all day, my hands and feet were warm and my skin got a bit of shine back to it, but that night my sleep was dreadful. I was up every couple of hours peeing. Sarah suggested this sounded like I had a problem with regulating blood sugar. I just felt like crap! We had a few more conversations about how much I was eating and what I felt like I could eat. I still clung to my rice idea (plus I was still throwing a few potatoes in to get some potassium, which I still thought was a key part in my problems). Things got worse the next day with tons of anxiety roaring around and I was badly bloated by the afternoon.  I was pretty upset, as I just can’t deal with that amount of anxiety at all. It freezes me in my tracks and stops me from functioning. So I messaged Sarah and she suggested trying the carrot salad again, doing some bag breathing, and best of all she made me laugh!! I calmed down a little bit and went to bed more hopeful.

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​The next morning the progesterone arrived. Most people are drowning in estrogen, which is not a good thing, in fact it’s a very bad thing! I’d offer to write a blog piece on it but Sarah has done a very good one already, which you can find here: http://www.sarah-kennard.com/blog/2016/12/20/your-fisher-price-toy-guide-to-estrogen We’d agreed that I would just start with a few drops of progesterone before bed, as it’s quite prone to making you sleepy (happy enough with that!). So I did 3 drops of progesterone before bed and then had the strangest night!! This was my message to Sarah the following morning:
“Well, that was an experience! Took 3 drops at around 10pm & went to bed round 10.30/10.45. Read for a little then tried to sleep. Didn't happen for a while, then woke up at 1am. Felt very hot & sick. Then needed a bowel movement at 2am! Then was starving at 3am so got up & made food. Eventually slept from about 4 till 7, now I feel a mix of starving & sick and just had another bowel movement! What's going on?”

Sarah assured me that it was unlikely to be the progesterone causing the problems. In the midst of our conversation I made my breakfast (egg fried rice, with bacon and fried potatoes) and sat down to eat it but after a mouthful I just couldn’t carry on! It felt all big and starchy in my mouth and I just couldn’t swallow it! I happened to say to Sarah that I thought I wasn’t getting enough potassium because I had a thirst that I just couldn’t quench (goodness knows where I got that idea from) but her reply was that unquenchable thirst was, in her experience, blood sugar problems.
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As I sat there, looking at my bowl of food, the only thing that I wanted to eat was melon!! Honey dew melon! So I dropped my son at school and picked up melon on the way back. When I got home I devoured a couple of pieces and it felt soooo good!! I realise that I’m always going on about listening to your body but I haven’t really listened the whole time I’ve been trying to recover. I kind of listened when potatoes stopped my anxiety, but that was just from fear of it coming back. I quite liked eating potatoes and never felt like I was forcing myself, but if I’m honest I never actually ate them because I really, really, wanted them. I just really, really, did not want the anxiety to come back. Which it did in the end anyway! 

​So, slowly (with Sarah’s help) the penny dropped. Bad blood sugar regulation was, at least in part, causing my anxiety. After the melon, I had 2 fried eggs, and boy did they taste good too! Having some fat and protein with your carbs will help to keep blood sugar more stable. I pretty much kept it on an even keel all day. I drank chocolate milkshake and I made a crustless bannoffee pie! It was delicious! That night I slept like the dead. Brilliant! I didn’t get too excited though in case it didn’t last! It did last though. My sleep was getting much better. Then I had a setback on Saturday when some anxiety came back. I spent some time trying to figure out what was going on. I had added in stewed apples and custard as Sarah had suggested and when I had a second portion of them later that day my anxiety really flared up. I can only assume (because they had a ton of added sugar as well) that they were just a bit too much for me and sent my blood sugar too high, or actually, thinking about it, maybe the calcium from the custard? So I’m staying away from that mix at the moment!

Last Saturday night I slept for 10 (YES 10!!) hours uninterrupted! No peeing! Nothing! Just sleep! This is amazing! I haven’t slept for that long without having a wee for many years, probably since I was a kid. The problem was that I slept too long and by the morning my stress hormones had risen again (because of blood sugar regulation) and I felt like I spent most of the day playing catch up to sort it out and calm down the stress hormones.
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The following night I slept all night again but the night after I woke for a wee. I figured since I was up I would have a quick bite to eat (some melon and some yoghurt) to try and keep my blood sugar more stable. It worked and the following morning I didn’t feel any anxiety at all and I felt on an even keel all day.

​So, things are definitely looking up! My anxiety still flares up if things overwhelm me, such as getting over excited about drinking milkshakes! I love chocolate milkshakes but one day last week I got overexcited and had 2 or 3 of them (one at a time and with meals) but either it was too much liquid or my body didn’t like that much milk, and my anxiety came roaring back! I think maybe I still have some issues surrounding calcium which are causing me some problems so I'm going to try limiting the dairy a bit, but these days I love to eat plenty of fruit throughout the day along with  prawns, eggs,  some meats and other lovely home made desserts! 

I also take vitamin D to help with calcium metabolism. I've not had my vitamin D levels tested but given that I didn't spend too much time in the sun last year as it always caused me problems (lack of sleep, dry skin  etc) then I'm sure I could  use a boost.  I also take vitamin k2 and I have 1 mg of cyproheptadine  an hour or two before bed. Cyproheptadine is a anti histamine which just happens to lower serotonin, which is exactly what we want, and can help you to get a good nights sleep.

​I know I haven't suddenly miraculously  made myself better and some days are better than others. I still worry  that certain foods might trigger my anxiety. Sometimes I  worry that  I'll never be totally better - which actually to me just means having some energy to do things and to not suffer from crippling anxiety! In other words I'm still a work in progress! Lol! In the meantime I'm just extremely happy to be getting some sleep!

As always, I hope you've enjoyed my ramblings! Remember to  listen to your body & certainly not to me! Lol!  You're aiming for a nice high body temperature, warm hands and feet, and a nice calm feeling,  oh and a good nights' sleep!! Good luck xx

Well here we are again folks, at the end/beginning of another year. Where on earth does time go? Last year went wayyyyy too fast! Doesn’t seem a minute since this time last year when I was setting some goals (not New Years resolutions!!) for 2016. If you remember (or just go and re read the post!!) then you will know that I wanted to be able to do a handstand or the splits. Sadly the year hasn’t quite panned out as I wanted it to and I still have a way to go. All the health improvements that I had been experiencing seemed to grind to a halt mid-2016 and the rest of the year has been spent leading a merry dance trying to find the path to feeling better! I’m not sure I’m actually on that path yet but I’ve managed to carve out a small footpath where I don’t feel too bad.

​I’m slightly frustrated that a lot of the time I’ve been too tired or feeling too crappy to work on the stretches for my splits, but I’m not disappointed or beating myself up. I haven’t given up and tossed the idea aside with a ‘well it was a silly idea anyway’ kind of gesture, which I may have done in the past. The goal is still very much in my head but as I’ve said many times on my blog, I’m learning to have patience! Ha! Actually, I’m being forced to learn the art of patience! It doesn’t come easy to me I’m an all or nothing kind of gal and I don’t really see that changing in the near future. I will do the splits at some point, even if I’m in my eighties! Lol! Although I’d like to think it’d be before then! I’ve made a little progress and am more flexible than I was! (Just ignore the dirty feet! I like walking barefoot and this was at the end of summer)

 I dislike the idea of New Year resolutions. Grand gestures that don’t last or vague ideas that you think will improve your quality of life but rarely do they live up to the hype – that’s if they even last a week! The word resolution is a strange one, with its’ meaning being a firm decision to do or not to do something, or the quality of being determined or resolute. What I mean by strange is that, for me at least, it doesn’t conjure up the feeling of being determined, or of wanting a goal so badly that you can’t imagine not obtaining it. These are the qualities you need to feel about something if you really want to obtain it. A feeling of fire in your belly! This is how I feel about getting my health back, and doing the splits (and a handstand). I couldn’t explain to you why the splits/handstand are so important to me but that doesn’t really matter I guess, they are just goals, in my head, that one day I will reach!
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There will be no ‘new’ me in the New Year. What does that even mean anyway? That the me of now isn’t good enough? Good enough for what? I’m me! The me that dives into things whole heartedly (even when it ends in trouble), I’m silly, sometimes (often!) weird, I laugh at my own jokes, I talk out loud to myself all the time (sometimes in a Yorkshire accent (my parents were from Yorkshire!) as a joke), I have silly ideas, I like to travel (we take our cat too!!), I like to go out at 11pm if I think there is a chance we can see the northern lights (even though we usually end up staring into a dark sky, not seeing much!!) and a whole host of other things that just make me, well, me really!  

​The same goes for when people say to me ‘ah, I feel like we’re getting the old Karen back now’. No, you’re not! You can’t go back, ever! I’m only moving forward, ever evolving, ever changing, with newer, sometimes even sillier ideas! And that’s the way I like it. Maybe they just mean that I’m a bit less ill now and I function better than I did a few years ago (can’t believe it’s coming up to 4 years since I really crashed and burned) but even before that I was  heading downhill for several years, making myself ill, and losing my sense of humour. Anyway, even if I could, I would never choose to go back. It’s made me who I am today and I like me! So there!

Maybe, if you absolutely have to make New Year’s resolutions then you could make ones that include being kinder to yourself, not making yourself into a newer model, or learn a bit about cell physiology so you don’t fall for all the hype/baloney that the media constantly throws our way!
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Either way, thanks to everyone who’s read my blog posts and followed my journey throughout 2016. Here’s to 2017, may it be healthy (stay away from mainstream crap information!!) and happy for all of you! 

My 2017 is off to a fantastic start by seeing the northern lights whilst staying in Findochty. It’s going to be hard to top that but I’m going to try!! I’ll be putting all my latest trials and tribulations with regard to my health in a blog piece soon.

​Happy New Year!
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Take care, Karen x