“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again & expecting different results” ~ Albert Einstein

Lately I have felt a bit like I’m going insane! My sleep has been getting worse and worse, my water retention is still no better, my energy has been on a downward slide and my back has been hurting again. Tiny bits of anxiety have been coming back and no matter how many potatoes I eat I just can’t seem to feel any better. Hence the Einstein quote above. I can’t keep on doing what I’m doing because it’s just not working for me anymore. In fact, thinking about it, it hasn’t been working for about the past 6 months. So I think people may be forgiven for thinking I’m pretty insane, especially considering about a couple of months ago I figured the problem was that I just wasn’t eating enough potatoes so I’d better eat more! Doh! Initially that did seem to be helping but not for long. I’ve been getting bugs galore and my lips were constantly dry and cracked and so were my elbows. Then a few days ago my feet went like lizard feet – really dry and scaly, and my toes were swelling up. Eek! Not good!

For a few days earlier this week I’ll admit I started to freak out a bit. I hadn’t quite got to the ‘perhaps I should eat something other than potatoes bit’ and I was failing to come up with a plan. Usually the thing that keeps me going is that I have a plan, something to try out, that might just be the thing my body needs, but I had nothing! Nada! And very little sleep either! The thing that panics me the most is ending up back where I started 3 years ago, with raging anxiety. That’s a dark place that I never want to return to. I guess some of you may be wondering why on earth I clung to the idea that eating so many potatoes every day was a good idea (which would be a reasonable question!). Aside from the fact that they cover a lot of bases in the vitamin and mineral department, they helped me get out of the hole I was in and the thing that scares me most is ending up back in that hole. I guess if you’re lucky enough to have never experienced raging anxiety that stops you from leaving the house and paralyses you from doing, well just about anything really, then you might not understand why I clung so hard and fast to potatoes. Potatoes were my version of a life raft for a drowning man!

Thinking back to my first visit to see Billy (when I was a mess) I am reminded that, although he would never tell anyone what to eat, some of his main advice was to just ‘eat a variety of foods’. Yes, seems I took that advice on board well! No wonder he thinks I’m a bit, what was it my sister said? Oh yes, ‘wacky’!!  Oh well, in my defence, I was in a bad place and clearly not thinking straight!

So potatoes are out and variety is in! Potatoes are so last week don’t cha know! This is a strange feeling that I don’t really know how to describe. Because I was so fixated on the ‘potatoes are fixing me’ I hadn’t realised just how strange that was. It was like I had created a weird ass prison for myself and I could go nowhere and do nothing without thinking about how I was going to eat potatoes. I wouldn’t have minded if that was really the best solution but it wasn’t! Balance is key. Variety means you are more likely to cover all nutrient bases, even if the one food you choose is fairly nutrient rich.

I always think you can tell when you’ve been doing something particularly weird when, afterwards, you have no idea how to proceed! I was suddenly free from potatoes but had no idea what to eat. How strange and a little bit sad. So I mooched around the supermarket wondering what I would actually like to eat and eventually settled on ingredients to make a prawn risotto, and a chili. I also picked up sourdough bread and some marmalade. For the first time in 2 ½ years I had something other than eggs and potatoes for breakfast! [Cue song: For the times they are a-changin’!!] I chowed down on boiled eggs with sort of soldiers (chunks of sourdough bread), some bread and marmalade and a cup of coffee. It was lovely!

I’m happy to say that I can still manage to cook things other than potatoes! My risotto and chili were both lovely but it was weird eating them. I still had a weird sense that eating something else would bring my anxiety back. Just goes to show how deeply fear can ingrain and entangle itself in your beliefs. I had no anxiety though for the main part, just a tiny weird feeling following some stewed apple, so I’ll just introduce fruit slowly. I’m doing better today and the fear is slowly subsiding. Hopefully I’m heading towards a more normal – pah! What’s that? – nay, a more balanced view of food and eating.

So, after a full day and a half with no potatoes already my feet, lips and elbows are less dry. I think I slept better last night – it’s hard to tell because I’m full of cold and was coughing quite a bit. I woke up twice to pee but on both occasions went straight back to sleep. Previously I was finding it harder and harder to get back to sleep and would be up for 2 or 3 hours in the night.

My blood sugar no longer feels like it is rolling around all over the place and I can go for longer than 2 or 3 hours without eating. Yesterday I had breakfast at around 9.30, lunch at 1.30, snack at 5.30 (got hungry whilst waiting for family to join us for tea!), tea at 7ish and supper at 11.30 (it got very late as we got distracted by Mario Kart on the Wii U!!)

I seem to be able to tolerate milk and coffee better now. I was finding that I wanted it less and less anyway when I was stuffing my face with potatoes, which is probably because my metabolism was slowing down with all the potatoes instead of speeding up!! Doh! Previously I couldn’t do coffee first thing because it just didn’t sit well with me and I never liked it. Now it’s absolutely fine and I thoroughly enjoy it :-)

My thirst and cravings for coke (coca cola – nothing more exotic than that!!) have totally gone away. I was craving so much coke before (maybe because my metabolism was struggling so much?) but then when I’d finished drinking it I would still be thirsty and no amount of drinking would quench my thirst. A definite sign of stress hormones rising.

Lastly, (and don’t read this if you’re squeamish about bodily functions!!) I noticed yesterday that my pee smelt really strongly of ammonia, like back to how it was 2 ½ years ago. Another confirmation of how stressed my body was getting.

I’m a little sad that even though I say all the time to ‘listen to your body’, I totally missed the signs. I was so ingrained in my potato eating that I was ducking and diving all over to find a solution of why things were going wrong, when the answer was so blinkin' obvious! But hey, that’s how I learn things. I’m a bit gung ho. I follow paths that I maybe shouldn’t follow, or that I should leave sooner than I do but hey, they are my paths! I learn lessons every single time  ;) Slowly, slowly I’m learning to trust my body again, and to trust that I don’t have to cling to any one food as my salvation! And I’m delighted that I can once again leave the house without worrying about potatoes and where I will find them every few hours!

As always, I hope you’ve enjoyed my ramblings, and that they have shown once again why you should listen only to your body and never to anyone else (and certainly not me! Haha!) There are many paths to good health. Thanks for reading and sharing my journey. Huge thanks to Briana who helped me realise that potatoes might not actually be the answer (in the most tactful way without even telling me I was being ridiculous!!), and answered all my panicked messages about things going wrong – she is a superstar and runs the Facebook group Health Recalibrated – so go join for some great discussions!

Feel free to share any comments, questions, stories (similar stories of foolishness especially welcome!!)-  I always love hearing from you. Sharing stories and connecting with others is a great way to share information. Take care x

One of the real problems about reclaiming your health is how to go about it when you don’t realise it’s slipping away from you again. It’s a real quandary! When things start to regress it affects your concentration and your ability to think properly, yet you need to be able to think about things properly or you miss the fact that you are regressing. So if you can’t see that things aren’t working for you then how do you put it right, when you don’t notice what it is that’s going wrong? I only knew that my mind was fuzzy and that I couldn’t concentrate well, i.e. when I was reading at night my mind would wander all over the place! This is unusual for me as I normally love reading. Hmmm!
​
I puzzled and puzzled over it but initially didn’t get too far. My sleep was becoming increasingly disturbed and when I woke I was finding it nearly impossible to get back to sleep. I became horribly intolerant of milk (especially with my morning coffee) and I was running to the toilet often. I was getting small bursts of anxiety again and I just had hardly any energy. I felt like my mind was just going to sleep and I couldn’t think. That’s what led me to my doxycycline experiment (see my previous blog post).

​I took doxycycline for 26 days (1 per day) out of a packet of 35. I stopped for a couple of reasons – firstly, I just forgot to take it on day 27 (!), and then I was pretty sure it was contributing to my weird sleep patterns, i.e. sleeping for a few hours but then waking and being unable to get back to sleep, so I decided to have a rest from it. I initially took it to help with the issues I was having drinking milk, but I’d also heard that it could help with concentration and just help with feeling better in general. So, did it help? Well, I can indeed drink milk like a boss now with no side effects. It didn’t help with my sleep or my concentration though, and, as always, I think that there were other things complicating the picture!

​Firstly, I’m not sure that it was really the milk causing the problems. What? I know right! That’s why I took the doxy. I only ever really drank milk in my coffee (usually around 150 ml – so half coffee and half milk) so I just assumed it was the milk causing problems. The day after I’d finished taking the doxy I had a coffee and boom, I was straight back to the toilet. I was like ‘what on earth is going on?’ Just the day before I was fine with milk so surely one day hadn’t set me back like that? I turned it over and over in my mind (slowly! haha!) and eventually had an epiphany! Lol! What if it wasn’t the milk but the coffee instead? So a bit later I tried a chocolate milkshake instead and was absolutely fine. 

​The other thing that I think was contributing to the problem was not eating enough. I knew that taking the doxy would increase my need for calories so I had tried to add in puddings as well as my meals. I was having some fruit with a meringue nest and some cream, plus a bit of added sugar as I find most fruit quite sour! This didn’t work out so well though. I started to have digestive issues again (quite painful) and I got my weird cough back. I also lost my appetite a bit and had cut back to 4 meals, which at the time I thought I felt fine on! As I already said, I was waking in the night and really struggling to get back to sleep, and I was waking with a blocked nose – definitely a sign that CO2 production is low (that needs a whole blog of its own!! Lol!) I just couldn’t understand what I should do next to try and get myself back on track. Why was I feeling so much better a year ago and now I’m feeling like I’m falling apart all over again?

Luckily, as I often do, I was skirting over some comments on a post in one of the groups I follow, and one of the comments really jumped out at me. It said something along the lines of ‘if you’re going to use fresh produce to get the bulk of your carbs/calorie needs, then you need to eat an awful lot of the fresh produce as there are not a huge amount of calories in it’. Bingo! When I really looked at what was going on I noticed that my portions of potatoes were getting smaller and I was trying to sort of cheat again by getting lots of my calories from sugar or butter (with my potatoes). I remember that was what I first started doing on my path to recovery (all about the carbs but forgot about the vitamins and minerals!) which led me to another bad place! I know that my potassium is low (or it was on my hair test) and I do much better with more potassium. The other thing about eating more potassium is that it seems to be closely tied to sodium, and when I eat more potassium then I can eat a lot more sodium. This is a good thing as sodium is wasted in hypothyroid people and you tend to need to eat a lot of it to feel better. The trouble is that without the potassium I just don’t like eating salt. It’s amazing how your body can let you know by taste whether or not you need something, or how much of something you need. I think the ratio between sodium and potassium is important.

Anyway, I drastically upped the amount of potatoes I ate. Initially it was hard because it felt like too much food and it was a bit uncomfortable. I felt like I might pop!! That only lasted a few days though and now I can eat potatoes like a boss! The amount of salt I can get on my potatoes now before I can taste it is quite phenomenal! Finally I also have my sleep back. Yes I sleep like a boss! I still wake in the night to pee but I go straight back to sleep, and I mean straight! I sleep pretty deep as well. The problem was that I think I had been starting to run on stress hormones again, so that when I shut them off I felt so tired that I felt I could sleep for a hundred years!

​Then a few days after that I started to feel crappy, like I had a bug or something. You know like when you finally relax in the holidays and sods law you get ill! My throat hurt a little and I ached a bit, and I just could not be bothered doing anything at all. So after a couple of days I thought, hmm, I still have the rest of those doxy tablets?? So I started taking them again a few days ago and not a single problem with sleeping now. I definitely wasn’t eating enough of the things that mattered the first time I took them. I also feel miles better, although I’m still sleepy, constantly sleepy! To give you an idea of just how sleepy I feel, this week I have tried to make a milkshake without putting the lid on and covered the kitchen in chocolate milk, and I have reversed my car into a lamp post turning the car round outside my house! Lol! I just need to sleep all day and all night, only waking for potatoes every few hours! 

I assume that because I had lowered the amount of potatoes I was eating (which I have no clue how that happened) then my body just didn’t like the coffee. Coffee acts to give your metabolism a boost but if all the carbs and necessary vitamins and minerals are not in place then it’s not always going to be a welcome boost!! It’s probably the same reason why I just can’t take thyroid without problems. I’ll probably try adding coffee back in to my life in a little while and hopefully it’ll be fine, but actually I’m not missing it at the moment. I’m totally and utterly addicted to chocolate milkshakes!!

​I just don’t know how I missed the fact that I was eating less and less potatoes. I would tell people I ate loads, and when I entered it in to Cronometer then it would seem like I was eating enough on the face of it. That’s the thing though I guess, you can enter what you like into Cronometer, it’s not going to actually make you eat it! I was leaving quite a bit of the portion on the side of my plate because I felt a bit full. Ultimately, although the goal is to eat intuitively, when you’re in a bit of a mess you often need to be a bit more structured in your approach to eating, just to make sure you don’t end up eating too little like I did! 

​So finally I feel like I’ve made some actual progress. I’ve been a few steps back and a few steps to the side, but hey, always learning and always trying to move forwards. I have no idea how to solve the quandary that I first mentioned but I guess the first place to start is to make sure I keep a check on whether I am actually eating enough. Once you start to lose the power of thought it’s so difficult to keep a check on what is actually happening. There are always so many factors to consider – like a big puzzle that you just can’t quite figure out! I’ll keep on trying though! I feel so much better now. My thoughts are clearer and I feel a bit more motivated, I just need a lot of sleep – then again I’ve missed quite a bit these last few weeks!

​The twisty turny journey to health continues! As always I hope you enjoyed my ramblings. Please remember that we are all different and that different things will help different people. I share my experiences and experiments in the hope that you can take something from it, just like the odd comment I read that can really inspire me to have ideas about my own journey to health. Thanks for reading and if you have any comments, thoughts, or questions then leave them down below. Always love to hear from you. Take care x

​It feels like ages since I’ve put any of my ramblings down on paper! I’ve been meaning to write something for a while but life has a habit of getting in the way. Also I was getting to the point where I was feeling pretty lethargic again and I just didn’t really feel like writing. I was also losing the ability to focus and I would find my mind wandering whenever I sat down to try and read something. Just as I was pondering what my next move should be, the worst thing happened and my milk tolerance began to get even worse. I was usually able to drink some milk with my coffee but suddenly even when I had a few sips I would find myself running to the bathroom. Not good! My teeth were also starting to hurt and I still had the weird metallic taste in my mouth. I knew that I wasn’t anywhere close to meeting my daily calcium needs, so what to do?

​In the midst of this I happened to have a conversation with a couple of people about my teeth and calcium, and they suggested trying vitamin K for the teeth sensitivity problems. I had forgotten all about vitamin K but as I had some in my kitchen cabinet I thought I would give it a go! They also suggested trying different types of dairy to try to get some calcium in, wondering if perhaps I might tolerate something different than milk.  

Before I had chance to buy anything different though (might have been the same day or the day after) I decided just to heck with it and I was going to have a glass of milk (with some milkshake mix) to see what happened. So I downed it and waited (brave I know!! Lol!) I got a bit of a tummy ache but then the weirdest thing happened: I just wanted to fall asleep in my seat, at the table! It was quite a nice day outside so I stumbled outside and slumped into one of the garden chairs, then promptly fell asleep! I never normally fall asleep in the daytime so it felt extremely bizarre. Then I remembered that the same thing happened a few weeks ago when we were camping. After I’d had my tea, followed by a milky coffee, I just felt myself nodding off in the uncomfortable camping chair, so moved to the blanket on the grass, and promptly fell asleep (and apparently starting snoring! Lol!) At the time I thought it was because I’d had a rough night the night before (daughter was sick over her airbed and sleeping bag at 2am! Just what you want when you are camping!) but even when I’ve had terrible nights in the past (and I’ve had plenty!!) I’ve never ever just felt that wave of sleepiness come over me and almost immediately fallen asleep. So I wondered if it was something to do with the calcium. 

​My tummy was quite up and down after the glass of milk so the following day I went out and bought some Skyr yoghurt to try. It’s very high protein and I had to add sugar to it to make it taste just right for me! I had some later on in the day after my tea. It seemed to be ok. I got a bit of bloating but nothing too horrendous. That night I had the most amazing night’s sleep. I slept for a solid 6 ½ hours! Yes, it could do with being a little bit longer than that but being used to normally getting up to pee after a few hours (and sometimes it could be after 1 hour!) then I’ll take it! I wondered if it was a one off but the next day I did the same (had some skyr yoghurt in the afternoon) and I slept through the night again (still around the same amount of time). I was also taking the vitamin K so this might have added to the effect as well? The next day I got a bit bolder and had some yoghurt in the morning (after breakfast) but very bad idea! Stomach was in bits and I was on and off the toilet. Grrr! 

What to do? I wanted to be able to tolerate dairy without problems. Milk is a great pro thyroid drink, plus I love chocolate milk, so I want to be able to drink it without worrying about consequences. Often tolerance of dairy can be lost in hypothyroidism and the way to get it back is to up your thyroid function. I’m pretty sure I need calcium though to get my thyroid function back up and running high enough to tolerate dairy! A proper conundrum! Lol! I’d heard that Danny Roddy (www.dannyroddy.com) got his tolerance to dairy back after taking antibiotics. Now I don’t mean that you can just rush out and get any antibiotics (all antibiotics are not created equal! Lol!), but the right antibiotics can help to remove endotoxin from the gut. I found this quote (which I think is from Dr Peat’s work) from an old Danny Roddy article:

"Bacterial overgrowth in the small intestine can be caused by hypothyroidism (Lauritano, et al., 2007), and the substances produced by these bacteria can damage the lining of the small intestine, causing the loss of lactase enzymes (Walshe, et al., 1990).

Another hormonal condition that probably contributes to lactase deficiency is progesterone deficiency, since a synthetic progestin has been found to increase the enzyme (Nagpaul, et al., 1990). The particular progestin they used lacks many of progesterone's effects, but it does protect against some kinds of stress, including high estrogen and cortisol. This suggests that stress, with its increased ratio of estrogen and cortisol to progesterone, might commonly cause the enzyme to decrease."

He goes on to add:

Once these issues are overcome, the addition of small amounts of milk can provoke the intestine to once again secrete the lactase enzyme:
​
"When a group of lactase deficient people have been given some milk every day for a few weeks, they have adapted, for example with tests showing that much less hydrogen gas was produced from lactose by intestinal bacteria after they had adapted (Pribila, et al., 2000)."

I’m guessing that I am still hypothyroid (given that I still have lots of water retention and problems to overcome!) so I probably have bacterial overgrowth and a progesterone deficiency, making it harder to overcome my lactose problems. So, enter the antibiotics!
​
A week and a bit ago I chose doxycycline from the tetracycline group of antibiotics. I started by taking 1 per day, in the evening, after food. The first evening, after taking 1 capsule, I felt pretty weird! Hard to pinpoint why (and I’m often pretty weird anyway!) but I just felt weird. I slept pretty well (all night again for approx. 6 ½ hours) but felt very sick the following morning. Yuk! I was maybe guessing that I just didn’t eat enough whilst taking it so I endeavoured to eat more the next day. I had lost a large chunk of my calories from not having coffee anymore (as I just couldn’t tolerate the milk and I didn’t like coffee without it!) so I needed to add something sweet after my meals. I decided to go for meringue nests, strawberries, sugar and cream! Yum! I added this after 2 or 3 of my meals and by that evening I was feeling much better. I had no bowel movement that day (probably because I’d had such a rough day the day before, after my yoghurt shenanigans, and I don’t think there was much left inside!!!) I took another antibiotic that evening (in for a penny and all that!) but was fine the next morning. I had a great, pleasantly firm bowel movement after breakfast, and felt pretty pleased with life!! Haha!

​The following day I added milky coffee back into my regime without any problems. This then led to some over excitement on my part, and when my daughter was having a milkshake later that afternoon I also decided to participate. I only intended to have a couple of sips but it was so good that I downed half the glass! Half an hour later I was doubled over and back in the bathroom! Yuk! I noticed though that I had a horrible after taste from the milkshake and wondered if it was actually the milkshake mix that was causing me some problems? I don’t know as I haven’t tested it out again. The after taste was enough that I don’t actually want to use it again. It was the Crusha mix that I used to love as a kid! Mind you, thinking back, it always gave me stomach ache as a kid too!! Lol!

​So I’ve taken one doxycycline tablet each day for just over a week. I take it in the evening after I’ve had plenty of food. Today I had a small glass of chocolate milk – no reaction whatsoever! Whoop whoop! I’ve also had coffee each day, along with sterling bowel movements! Lol! I sleep right through the night every night; albeit still only around 6 ½ hours (I’m hoping that will start to improve soon!) and my teeth are absolutely fine now, with no sensitivity at all. My gums also used to bleed a bit when I brushed them but now that has stopped. My nails have started growing faster again and they are not breaking as easily. I’m feeling more focused and have more energy. My only question is, why didn’t I do this months ago? 

​As always, I hope you have enjoyed my ramblings and that you get something out of them. Please remember that what works for me might not work for someone else, and that everybody is different. Do your own research and go at your own pace. I’ve been cautious about taking things, mainly because until now supplements and whatnot have always caused me problems of some sort, so I took some time to think about whether I wanted to try antibiotics or not. That’s actually another thing to note, that throughout this experiment I have had not one single twinge of anxiety! Even though I was mostly free of it before, I would still get the odd bit now and again. Life is definitely looking up! A couple of weeks ago I felt I was in the middle of a huge step back in my recovery, now I feel like I’ve actually made a few cautious steps forward! Hurrah!

Big thanks to Billy (www.billycraig.co.uk) who is a never ending source of fantastic help and advice when I pester him about trying something new in a bid to move forwards!
​
Feel free to add any comments, thoughts, questions, stories, whathaveyou (!) down below. I always love hearing from others. I really believe that through sharing our stories we get to move forward in ways that we wouldn’t necessarily think of just by ourselves. Take care x

I was just going to update my page with a few comments about eating liver but it got a bit long! Lol! So I thought I’d put a quick blog piece together for you and that way I can answer some of the questions I’ve been asked.
​
If you’re new to this blog or can’t remember what I did then here is a quick recollection: I was getting dry skin again, my lips had gone very dry and cracked, my appetite was a bit blunted, and my sleep wasn’t great. All signs that things were taking a big step backwards, especially after I spent a day in the sunshine (a lovely, relaxing day) and then barely slept at night. Before I messed with stupid diets and ruined my health I would get the best night’s sleep after being in the fresh air and sunshine all day! I pondered what might be going on and decided I would add in some liver (as I’d not had any in a while and it ticks a lot of nutritional boxes!) So I had a small amount with mash, just for one meal, for a few days on the run (3 I think). Then I started to feel a bit strange and had a tiny, uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. So I stopped eating it. After a couple of days my sleep was still a bit off so I decided I must need more liver!! Probably wasn’t the best idea I’ve ever had (but then again not the worst either! Lol!)

I started to get bursts of anxiety coming back. I felt jittery and unmotivated. My sleep was all over the place and I would wake often in the night to pee. I had a weird metallic taste in my mouth and my gums would just suddenly start bleeding. All very strange and not particularly pleasant!

It took about a week to feel normal again (whatever that is! Lol!) My normal is feeling relaxed, pretty motivated (if sometimes a little distracted!), being able to come up with good ideas, mostly get stuff done, and have a reasonably good night’s sleep.
​
I just want to stress at this point that I don’t believe liver causes anxiety per se. I don’t believe any food causes anxiety as a blanket statement but I do believe you can overwhelm your body with some foods or you can become slightly intolerant of foods for various reasons. I puzzled over what was going on for a little bit and the liver (or the nutrients contained within the liver) definitely overwhelmed my body. It took a week for the small bursts of anxiety to calm down. I also had small bursts of anxiety after eating steak, lamb, and eggs (all with potatoes of course!) at various times during that week so for a few days I just ate foods like sausage, beans and mash, which my body seems to like a lot! Eating steak and chips doesn’t normally cause me any anxiety so I can only assume that the steak had too much of some particular nutrient, on top of whatever was in the liver. I thought it might be to do with vitamin A to start with but after checking out the nutrient profiles of these foods then I’m leaning more towards it being something to do with an overload of B vitamins (or one of them!) I’ll never know for certain though so I’m not making a big thing of it. It’s all calmed down now so I can eat steak (or lamb, or eggs!) and chips with no negative symptoms.

Just after it had started to calm down I had a strange afternoon where I was putting some ice cream out for one of the kids and I suddenly really fancied some. I guess that isn’t really so strange but I haven’t been bothered about eating ice cream for ages and when I last tried eating it, it dropped my temperature like a stone!! No idea why but as I wasn’t that bothered about eating it then it was no big drama. Anyway as I suddenly wanted some I decided to give it a go. So I grabbed a spoon and the tub and sat down to enjoy it! It was cookie dough and it was delicious, so I carried on eating it! Haha! I think I nearly ate half the tub in the end! Yum! Happily it did not drop my temperature this time. Then the strangest thing happened – I was starving about an hour later. So I ate more food. That night I slept really well and I thought ‘My God! I’ve cracked it!’ Ha! Well no, as in all things health related, nothing is ever that straight forward hey! The following day I was pretty hungry again (think I added in an extra meal each day, plus quite a lot of ice cream) and then the weirdest thing happened to me: I felt starving and really full at the same time. I’ve heard of this happening to people but never had it happen to me before. I carried on as normal for a bit but then began to feel really bloated and by the end of the day I felt like I could not eat another thing ever again. I then had a pants night sleep! So much for that! The next day I just felt a bit sick and a bit weird (again!!), so I stopped the ice cream (I didn’t fancy it anymore anyway!) and went back to the usual small meals (again! I can see a pattern forming here! Lol!). I felt a bit out of it and a bit cross for a day or two and then normality returned! Again!

I can only assume that the extra ice cream and the extra food served to try and increase my metabolism and, similar to everything else that has tried to do that, overwhelmed my body, which I think does not like to be rushed! Haha! All in good time I guess. It’s more important to me that I feel nice and relaxed and in control of my life, not stressed, anxious, and cross, whilst trying to get my metabolic rate higher!

Anyway, as always I hope that you have enjoyed my ramblings and that they might be of use to some people. Remember that they are just my ramblings and my mini experiments to see what works for me, but everybody is different. I just think it’s good to talk about our experiences! Follow your intuition and ponder about things – it’s amazing where a bit of pondering will lead you. Take care xx

​This post is in response to the messages we are bombarded with on a daily basis: that to have an acceptable bikini body you must look a certain way. Actually, it’s not even just about having a bikini body! We are constantly told that we must look a certain way to be accepted and to be worthy. Here’s just a sample (of the thousands) of magazines that encourage you to have a bikini body:

Gwyneth is apparently ‘crazy fit’ (whatever that means?) and ‘totally uncensored’! Well, erm, good for her! Can’t beat a bit of uncensoring!!?
​
When I first started eating proper meals again (including a healthy dose of carbs) my weight shot up by a massive 80 lbs in 6 months. It was pretty horrifying to be honest. I’ve been a size 8-10 all my life so to suddenly find myself with a sort of pregnant looking stomach, water retention all over, and buying size 18 clothes was like torture. I was no longer acceptable. I started lifting weights because I knew building muscle could help your metabolism and I wanted the weight to come off. Alas though, my stress  hormones were still too high and my metabolism was barely doing anything, so all that happened was that I made myself feel ill as well as being fat. I bought stretchy clothes and tried not to think about it! My relationship didn’t help as that was falling apart due to my ex not liking the way I looked anymore.

I didn’t really start to feel comfortable until I started feeling better, and by better I mean that the anxiety had mostly gone and I had some of my energy back. This took me about 18 months. Then 6 months after that, when I moved into my own home, and had no one judging me or watching me, I started to relax.

Now that I feel a million times better, my energy is getting much better, and my head is in a really good place, I don’t give a flying monkey’s butt about my weight or what I look like! When the sun comes out (which is a monumental occasion in the UK!!) then I want to be able to enjoy it, not cover up as if I’m something to be ashamed of. So the other day, when the sun was shining brightly and the sky was beautifully blue, I donned my new bikini (a nice little bargain from Figleaves!) and spent plenty of time outside with my daughter. We snapped some pics to share with you, to show that having a ‘bikini body’ only requires a bikini and a body and an ability to ignore all the noise that comes from people protesting about the ‘fat’ or ‘inappropriately dressed' people, usually under the guise of worrying about their health!! Which makes me laugh as you can’t tell a damn thing from people’s health just by looking! Also, I haven’t asked anybody to worry about my health on my behalf thank you very much! 

I can't tell you just how freeing  it is to not  be  bothered about how you look in a bikini and to just enjoy the  day, and the feel of the sun on your skin!  If you're repulsed by  the look or shape of my belly then just don't look at it I guess! Lol!  It's just a part of me at the moment, and it's not a part  that I'm willing to let define me.  We had a fab day  in the sunshine, laughing and joking.  Life is short so I feel time is best spent  with people you love, doing things you enjoy - not worrying about  chasing a  'perfect figure' goal that is mostly unattainable. 

Anyway, that's  my  rambling over with for the day! Lol! I just hope to join in spreading the message that  people are all worthy no matter how they look and should be able to wear a bikini without worrying  :-)  

So  enjoy your day, enjoy  life and enjoying wearing a bikini  if you damn well want to!  Feel free to share some positivity  in the comments  if you like  - I always love to hear from people. Perhaps we can start a bikini gallery?  Hope you enjoyed my ramblings! Take care x

After pondering what I thought might be a useful blog post I decided that I would say a little bit about temperature and pulse, and take my temperature at different times throughout the day. Then I could share with you how my temperature goes up after meals, which means things are working as they should be!

“Metabolism is the sum of chemical processes that occur in an organism in order to maintain life. Life depends upon the continual conversion of fuel substrates into chemical energy, allowing cells to perform biological work. Heat is produced by these cellular metabolic processes so the resting metabolic rate can be predicted accurately by the rate of heat production.

A simple way to monitor the intensity of your resting metabolism (i.e. how well you are making energy/heat) is to track the resting oral temperature and pulse rate. Collect this data upon waking while lying in bed, ~40 minutes after breakfast, and between 1 and 3 pm in the afternoon.

Upon waking, an ideal temperature is between 97.8-98.6F [36.5-37C] and a pulse rate between 75-85 beats per minute (BPM). Other readings during the day should fall within these parameters as well with temperatures being closer to 98.6F than 97.8F. Data points below the optimal are a sign of a slowed metabolic rate.”

– FPS (Functional Performance Systems)

​So I got my thermometer out and then promptly forgot to take my temperatures that day! Lol! And the next day! Finally I had a day where I remembered to record some readings. The problem was my temperature was all over the place – not at all what I intended to show you! This was a great nudge for me though. I realised that I actually hadn’t been sleeping that great, that my appetite had become a bit blunted (I was still eating but it wasn’t the oh happy days I’m starving, let me enjoy my food kind of feeling!), my skin was becoming a bit drier (and my lips had been quite chapped for a little while), and my head felt quite woolly headed and unfocused! I suppose each thing by itself is only small but definitely not right and together they add up to something being a little off!

​So you can see that on Fri my temp was 36.7 when I woke up. It’s usually a bit lower than that and I didn’t feel like my health had suddenly improved to the point of having a better morning temp! Especially as I haven’t been sleeping that well lately. I also felt weirdly hot in the morning, so it definitely seems like stress hormones were at work. Even though having breakfast didn’t initially drop my temp, you can see that by 11am it had dropped to a more normal (for me) reading. Later on in the day my temp had risen before eating again and dropped afterwards. It wasn’t until the last meal of the day that my temp rose in response to food. That’s not exactly what I want to be happening!
So I pondered what might be going on. I know that if I sit in a hot bath for a while, or out in the sun, my skin goes drier and I seem to have a hard time sleeping. Billy (Craig) suggests about heat:

 “It's like a thyroid surrogate (same as exercise), does increase metabolism and therefore the need for other things which leaves the potential for a stress response”

A couple of weekends ago  (when we had glorious weather in the UK!) I spent all day in the garden and it was fabulous, but my sleep that night was terrible. I woke at 2am and was awake for about 3 hours! Nothing helped, not sugar, not salt, and not food! By 3.30am I had tried them all! Eventually I nodded off again but this is not the kind of thing I want to be experiencing! I think that I’m low in vitamin A (dry skin and dry lips) which can definitely interfere with sleep, and I remember Billy once suggesting that I try B3 (niacinamide) to help with my water retention. Then I remembered that I haven’t had any liver in quite some time, and liver ticks most nutritional boxes! So I bought liver and ate a small amount for the next few days. It certainly seems to have done the trick. My temps are back to being lower in the morning and rising after food. After another day of tracking temps, I remembered to track my pulse as well so you can see what happens to that. It’s lower before food and rises after food. I’m back on the right track after veering around a bit!

​I had a good idea that after a few days of eating liver my body would tell me it had had enough for now. Sure enough, this morning I felt the tinges of not anxiety exactly, but the starting of a tingly feeling in my stomach. Also my appetite was a bit supressed and I felt a bit sick. So I haven’t had any today and I’ll probably go back to eating it once or twice a week (no need to get over excited hey!). My appetite is now back and once again it’s enjoyable to tuck into each and every meal I have.
I’ve been sleeping much better again and even though I still wake up once in the night to pee, I go straight back to sleep. I also haven’t been as hot when I wake up. I had been getting so hot it was ridiculous and I’d had to throw all covers off and stand by the window for a bit. Stress hormones will do that! My skin is also less dry again and my lips have almost completely healed up.
Dealing with your health is a bit like doing a puzzle and fitting all the pieces together! I’m not sure how well my pieces fit yet but I feel like I’m getting closer. My head has been less woolly today and I’ve been more productive, which can only be a good thing!
As always, I hope you have enjoyed my ramblings and that you find them useful. Measuring your temperature and pulse is such an easy thing to do and can tell you whether you are on the right track or not. A useful tool for establishing where your puzzle is up to! If you have any comments, questions or stories to share then please add them below. I always love to hear from you guys. Take care x

​Sometimes, if I have a wobbly day and start to get impatient about ever fully recovering, I find it helps to look back at just how far I’ve come in the process already. I know I’ve already spoken about the main problems I was having (anxiety, insomnia, being too hot or too cold, very thin hair, no energy etc.) but I thought I’d look back again and try to talk through just how many problems I was having, and take stock of where I am now.
​
So, if I cast my mind way, way back (lol! By a couple of years) then I remember it was hard to even get out of bed in the morning. I had to sit on the edge of the bed to will myself to move. When I stood up, everything hurt. My back was the worst; it hurt so much in the curve of my back. I just felt so heavy and achy, and I would stumble around! I could barely walk a few steps without my back hurting so badly that I had to sit down. If I was cooking then I would usually end up sitting on a chair in the kitchen or leaning against the worktop. When I went out to do the shopping (which was just about the only thing I went out for) I would lean against the trolley the whole way round the shop. Everything was such an effort and I would be so grateful to get into bed at the end of every day.

​Something else that persisted for a long time was a pain in my right foot and ankle. It was so bad that I would often limp round the local shop. I frequently parked in the disabled spaces nearer the shop as I just couldn’t walk very far. Then I would think that people would think I was putting on a limp just to park in a disabled space (which always reminds me of Michael McIntyre talking about when disabled people park in those spaces and we expect them to fall out of their cars flat on their faces!! Hahaha!) Anyway, I didn’t have a disability badge but I really struggled to walk on my right foot, so I did steal a disabled spot now and again!

​One of the weirdest things I had was a persistent cough. It’s hard to describe though because it wasn’t like a normal cough, it was literally like something was stuck in my throat and I was sort of retching and coughing. The feeling that I needed to cough would just suddenly come upon me (it wasn’t necessarily after eating or anything) and I would have to cough really hard but like it encompassed a retching motion too. Like I said – weird! That still happens to me every now and again. I think it is my body’s way of saying it is overwhelmed or is lacking in something it desperately needs. After I had been eating my frequent potato meals for a while I decided I would try adding in some liver, so I bought some and had very small portions with mash potato (just once a day for a few days) and my cough mostly went away (thank goodness!). Now I try to have some liver every couple of weeks.

My water retention was pretty bad too. I struggled to bend over and I couldn’t kneel down. Being puffy all over just sucks! It’s got a bit better now and I can kneel down and move around a bit easier, but I still have some. It was suggested to me that I could try some Niacinamide (vitamin B3) to help with my water retention so I bought some and took a small dose. I then proceeded to wake up and pee every 2 hours in the night, which is a stress response (that I didn’t really appreciate!). This was well over a year ago but I haven’t tried taking it since then.

​I suffered from indigestion pretty much every time I ate. I had a burning sensation that made me want to rip my insides out! 

​I had tingling in the ends of my fingers for a while that was very strange. It started to get a bit better as I started to eat lots of potatoes but then I had a short period of mixing things up and eating rice with some meals, or having sandwiches instead, and the tingling returned. I can only assume it was something to do with a lack of potassium, or my body just prefers potatoes (!), as when I went back to eating potatoes at every meal it slowly disappeared after a few weeks. 

​My skin was very dry. I don’t mean dry like cracked and rough to the touch dry (apart from on my elbows), I mean it had no shine to it. That might sound strange if you’ve never really noticed that good skin has a nice shine to it (which, to be honest, I have never considered my skin too much before! Lol!) but my skin was very dull and a little flaky on my legs. It’s been interesting watching it come back to life. I just one day noticed that there was a slight sheen to the skin running down the front of my legs and on the top of my feet, but not around my ankle section or on the back of my legs! Then another day I noticed that the skin on the back of my hands had a slight shine, followed by the skin on the underside of my arms but the tops of my arms are still dull! I wonder how long it will take for it to all come back to life? Also, some of my toes had dry creases right across them but they have now healed up totally. My elbows are mostly shiny and soft now, although I have the odd day where they will go just slightly dry again before healing up (usually if I’m tired or stressed).

​That’s all (!) I can think of for now, although it was plenty at the time, trust me! Along with the anxiety that paralysed me and the insomnia that stopped me getting more than 4 hours sleep a night, it was quite enough!

​Along the way I have tried various things to hasten the recovery process. One of the first things I tried, after a few months of eating potatoes, was a tiny bit of T3 (thyroid). My anxiety came back almost immediately so I binned that idea! I had a hair mineral test done that showed I had fairly high calcium and very low potassium. I tried to supplement potassium but that gave me stomach cramps and impromptu (read: unpleasant) bathroom visits, so that was binned as well!

​Something that I was happy to try was bone broth. I had read good things about bone broth so I figured it couldn’t possibly do any harm to try it. I went to the local butchers and got chicken carcasses and pig’s trotters to throw into my slow cooker. I made beautiful gelatinous broth! It tasted delicious with a little butter and salt added to it, so I started drinking a mug of it in the morning and then in the evening. Around the same time I started losing my appetite, which was really weird. Since I had managed to get my appetite back I was hungry every day for every single potato (!) meal! Then my anxiety started coming back which made me really start to worry. No way did I ever want that to come back. It took me a couple of days to even think it might be the bone broth as it never occurred to me that that could cause a problem. A couple of days after stopping the bone broth everything went back to normal; my hunger returned and the anxiety faded away again. In hindsight I think I probably just had too much bone broth. It’s always the same for me. If something is good for you then more must be better! Lol! 

​I tried a few other supplements along the way. I had a bath with Epsom salts, as I’d been getting just a few small leg cramps at night, so I figured I might need more magnesium. I used a relatively small amount but my body obviously wasn’t that pleased as I was up every 2 hours peeing again! I tried aspirin (with food) but that seemed to clear my bowels out! So I had more or less decided to stop anything extra and just keep on keeping on with food. After all, I was feeling much better anyway.

​Then, a couple of months ago, I was reading some of Ray Peat’s stuff (as I often do!) and I was reminded about his carrot salad idea. I’ve tried it previously but got bored of (a) grating carrots every day, and (b) trying to chew grated carrot every day. So this time I decided that I would peel them and then just chop them into batons. This was much easier and it seemed to feel pretty good so what did I decide to do? Yes, I decided more would be better, so I had one in the morning and one in the afternoon! Now whilst I was in the throes of eating 2 raw carrots a day I had started getting headaches, well actually it was one long continuous headache, and I never normally suffer from headaches. This went on for almost a week and it was the worst headache I have ever had. I had more or less convinced myself that I was dying of a brain tumour, when I started to think about anything I had changed. The carrots!! Once I stopped the raw carrots the headache went away and never returned. No idea what caused that reaction? Raw carrots are supposed to be pretty good at cleansing your insides and I ate them away from food. Needless to say, that idea has been binned too! Gah! It’s back to just food for me now – until the next time! Lol!

​I don’t know why I keep mincing with things. I feel pretty good now so really just having patience should do the trick. It would be nice to have the water retention go away though I guess so perhaps that’s why I keep trying the odd thing. It has been suggested to me that all the side effects I keep having are in my head, and that it’s my anxiety surrounding them that causes the problems. I’m not too sure about this. Mainly I only try things that I’m totally happy with and then I usually don’t give it too much thought, like with the raw carrot and the bone broth it had never occurred to me that they might cause a problem for me.

​All the problems that I’ve spoken about here (apart from the water retention) have sorted themselves out, and that has happened just through eating food (because no supplements have ever worked/helped me! Lol!). I now have quite a bit of energy and manage to get plenty of things done in a day! At the moment I’m painting my conservatory (something I wouldn’t have even considered a year ago!), helping my mum take care of her ill partner, getting things ready to start a new business, home schooling my daughter, plus all the usual cooking, shopping, cleaning etc. I do have to be careful not to overdo it though (and to eat enough food) or I can end up very tired again very easily!

​My back almost never hurts now (only when I get very tired when I have overdone things) and I’ve suffered with pain in my lower back most of my life (although not to the extent I had it a year or two ago). This is a major triumph! I never have to sit down because of back pain now and quite often choose to stand instead of sitting. I no longer have to loll on the trolley when I’m doing my shopping either! Lol!

​I never get indigestion any more (well maybe the odd occasion – again when I’m tired or stressed), I barely ever cough, and quite a bit of my skin has a shine to it (although still not the tops of my legs or the tops of my arms). 

​All of these things took at least a year to sort themselves out, and I think my back took probably closer to 2 years. Funnily enough I didn’t notice exactly when my right foot/ankle stopped hurting, I just suddenly thought ‘wow, that hasn’t hurt for a while now’. I find that often happens, that I don’t register things all the time, I will just suddenly think ‘hmm, that doesn’t hurt anymore’ or ‘it doesn’t happen anymore’. 

​Something else that I’ve noticed recently is that my head is pretty much always calm. I’ve never really taken much notice of this but the other day I was following a yoga video and the girl doing it was telling us to relax, breathe, all the usual stuff you expect from a yoga video. Then she said to quieten your mind, to try to let all the chitter chatter stop for the day (it was an evening routine apparently!) and to not take too much notice of all the thoughts. I realised that I didn’t really have any annoying chitter chatter going on, and that I can relax very easily. When I go to bed I fall asleep really easily, within a few minutes, yet it used to take me quite a while to drop off.

​So there we are, take from that what you will! I like to think that the couple of years it has taken me to get to this point (since first seeing Billy) have been full of triumphs with only a few setbacks. Sometimes it can feel like two steps forward and a big step back. When this happens, the voice in my head just tells me to keep on keeping on and things always get better again!

​As always, thanks for reading and I hope you’ve enjoyed my ramblings! Some of the supplements and ideas I’ve mentioned here can really help some people so always do your own reading and make up your own minds about things. I don’t know why they don’t work so well with me but hey, I like to think that’s quite a good thing and it gives people hope that you can get better just by using food alone. Maybe my body just doesn’t like to be forced to do things quicker than it wants to do them. I don’t like to be forced to do things either! So my best advice is to relax and only do things you are really happy to do. If you decide that a supplement might be really good for you but then you stress about it the whole time, then the stress is likely to negate any good stuff that might happen anyway! Maybe subconsciously I worry about taking supplements or doing things outside my potato meal plan, who knows? I just think the most important thing is to be able to relax and not worry too much. I don’t want to spend time worrying that I might worry subconsciously, lol, that would be silly! So I just go at my own pace and trust that I’ll get there (somewhere!) in the end.

​Remember this is just me ‘thinking out loud’ and that your body might be completely different, so it’s always important to check in with how you feel. I think it’s easier on your body and mind if you only make small changes at a time. I always love to hear other people’s stories and experiences, so feel free to leave any thoughts or comments below. Take care x

Since I’ve been reclaiming my health and eating ‘enough’ food (which has included lots of potatoes!!), which most people see as a ‘lot’ of food, I’ve had people say things like ‘So you used to eat no carbs and now you eats loads of them? You’ve just gone to the opposite extreme!’ or ‘You put how many sugars in your coffee?’ I just generally nod or laugh or what have you as these days I’m not out to convince anybody of anything, I’m only out to improve my own health!
However, I thought I would give a little context for people who want to pass out at the thought of so many carbs or the idea of putting 4 tablespoons of sugar in their coffee! Firstly, let me say that I don’t put 4 tablespoons of sugar in my coffee for any other reason than that is how I like my coffee. Any less sugar and it tastes too bitter. Life is too short to drink unpleasant coffee! Coffee should be enjoyed… mmmmmm! For those who say ‘But isn’t sugar bad for you?’, I say ‘Why? Our cells run on glucose so what’s the problem?’ Now if you are only relying on sugar for energy you may run into some problems (actually I did run into big problems when I was eating a rubbish diet just to get calories!) because you’d run out of vitamins and minerals and your body wouldn’t function correctly. If, however, you make sure you get all the necessary vitamins and minerals your body needs then I just can’t see a problem at all.

​I’ve already talked about what I eat and how often so now I’ve put all my daily food into a fab app called Cronometer (http://cronometer.com) for you guys so that you can see just what all that food is providing me with. Cronometer is easy to use (and free!) and you just need to add one food at a time. I generally add things separately, i.e. for mashed potato I will add potato and then butter as I like to make sure I’ve added all the correct ingredients. For the potato you will see that the unit says ‘one cup, mashed’ but it is just the potato (you can tell from the amount of calories). Here you can see all my food from one day (although this is just for 5 meals and 2 coffees, lately I’ve been adding a small sixth meal) listed. The only thing I didn’t separate out was the French fries as I would have no idea how much fat to add in. I cook my chips in beef dripping but chronometer might think I cook with some kind of vegetable oil (yuk!). Anyway, I don’t think that makes a huge difference to the overall picture!

​So you can see I get around 3000 calories (probably a few more) and 350g carbs every day. I also get 122g of protein. It’s just as important to get enough protein everyday as is it to get enough carbs. This is how much I need to thrive and to heal my body. I think you can add specific targets in Cronometer (maybe you have to pay to upgrade?) but no idea why it thinks I’m having double the amount of calories I need!! Clearly you should ignore that! If I halved my calories I imagine I would feel crap and I would stop sleeping (my sleep gets rubbish if I even miss one meal!) 

I’m getting a great supply of pretty much all the vitamins and minerals I need. I might need to up calcium a little bit (not sure as my body seems to be doing fine) but I don’t seem to tolerate milk that well at the moment (I have a small amount with my coffee) and am not that fussed about cheese! I assume my body might let me know if it needs more calcium though! I’m definitely not worried about iron, and sodium, well, you’ll be glad to know that I also add salt to every meal! Lol! I guess that needs a blog post all of its own (before anyone faints at the amount of salt I eat!!)

I hope this overview helps to show that I get a great amount of vitamins and minerals, and that I’m not killing myself with carbs, or sugar, or anything really! Lol! As always though, these are my ramblings and everyone needs to listen to their own bodies for their own individual needs. I love to hear from you guys so feel free to leave any comments below and remember, this is just me ‘thinking out loud’. Take care x

I’ve been asked for a blog piece about how I structure my meals and how I work out the timing, type and amount of food I eat. I have no problem sharing this with you but I can’t stress strongly enough how individual we all are and that what works for one person may not work for another. If you want to implement some changes then do it slowly and see what kind of reaction you get from your body.
​
When I first saw Billy (crikey almost 2 years ago now!) we decided that I should implement small meals throughout the day because I was struggling to eat, as I had no appetite, my digestion was awful and eating could bring on horrendous anxiety. I had become scared of eating as I never knew if I was going to get the crushing anxiety after a meal or not. Still, I needed to get my calories in so small meals sounded like the best plan. As I could only manage about 250 calories per meal I had to fit at least 7 meals in to get a reasonable total amount of calories (approx. 1750 total). In order to get 7 meals in I literally had to eat every 2 – 2 ½ hours. I couldn’t drink anything with sugar in, i.e. orange juice, as that made me sick and gave me anxiety. To begin with the meals were very protein and fat heavy as having too many carbs just seemed to make the anxiety worse. This was yucky as it felt like I had gone back to my low carb diet – god knows how I ate that way for as long as I did!!

​I would cook a pan full of new potatoes every morning and have 2 really small potatoes (with butter) with each meal. I rotated different types of protein with each meal (eggs, sausages, chicken, lamb, meatballs etc.) just for variety, and often made a creamy sauce to go with it for extra calories. There are barely any calories in 2 small potatoes, and usually 100-150 cals in the piece of meat I had so I still needed 100 cals to make it up to 250 cals total. Very slowly I started to add in extra potatoes, so after a few days or a week I would add another potato to each meal. Eventually, after about 4 months I was eating 200g of potatoes with each meal (approx. 150 cals), and I had added in a tiny Petits Filous yoghurt after each meal, so each meal was now around 450 calories, giving me a daily total of around 3000 calories – much closer to where I wanted to be than when I first started out. Here is a section of an email I sent to Billy on 4 July 2014…

"I am still doing what you told me to do and eating every couple of hours. I get 7 meals in per day. I would say I have 3000+ calories per day and at least half, if not slightly more, are coming from carbs (A fact that I was pretty chuffed with, given the state I was in a few months ago!) I can tell I'm heading in the right direction because.... my sleep has improved tremendously (I haven't taken melatonin for the last couple of months, I usually fall asleep within 5 minutes and I am up to sleeping for a good 5 hour chunk now before I have to get up to wee but then I fall straight back asleep again), I am starting to feel a bit less tired (I no longer feel like I'm walking through custard!), my anxiety is a lot less (I get the odd bit coming and going but it is altogether much more manageable) and for the first time this month I got my period after 28 days (previously it had been every 9-10 weeks). Surely all these small signs are signs that things are heading in the right direction?"

​I feel like I should say something about calories here as most people, upon hearing that I eat 3000 calories, start to look decidedly uneasy, like they want to comment about my weight as a reflection of all those calories! At my heaviest a couple of years ago I weighed 202 lbs. I don’t usually weigh myself (I don’t even own scales!!) but this morning I borrowed a friend’s scales just so I could share my weight with you lovely people and I weighed 185 lbs. When I first saw Billy I had already put all the extra weight on and was at 202 lbs. Even through the period where I was increasing my daily calories from 1750 to 3000 my weight didn’t change. I have no idea when my weight decreased, probably slowly over the last year or so, and I suspect that some of the loss will be water. I had quite bad water retention, so bad in my legs that I couldn’t even kneel down!! I noticed a couple of months ago that I could kneel down and I seemed to be getting some shape back and some muscle in the tops of my legs. My point is that people generally equate eating more with gaining weight and eating less with losing weight. Life is never that simplistic!! Some of my previous blog posts explain why that isn’t the case. If you want to keep your metabolic rate high for good cellular energy and therefore good health, then you need to be providing enough fuel for your body. If you have lowered your metabolic rate through dieting or stress or for whatever reason, then when you first start eating more you will probably gain some weight. As your body starts to recover the weight gain should taper off. You have to learn to have patience!!

​Gradually, as my digestion got better, and I started to be able to have more food at a time, I whittled my meals down to 6 a day and then down to 5. Really this was to make life a bit more manageable as well. It’s easy to eat every couple of hours if you are eating some fruit and cheese and juice or something, but when you want to eat potatoes all the time then it’s pretty time consuming!! I still have potatoes at every meal but over time I started to move away from boiled new potatoes to wanting mashed potatoes some of the time. Then a few months later I wanted to have some home-made chips. Initially I couldn’t stand the thought of eating chips. The only reason I can think of for these changes are that new potatoes are more watery so less of a boost to the metabolism maybe? Earlier on my body was overwhelmed by anything that tried to give too much of a boost to my metabolism. Possibly because my digestion was rubbish and I was very low in potassium? I state these reasons as questions because I don’t really know the answers; I just like to think out loud about possible causes! 

​It’s interesting to watch the small changes you make to your diet over time as your tastes change. After a few months of eating the 7 meals a day with plenty of potatoes, I started to feel like I would enjoy a cup of coffee again. When I first got ill (nearly 3 years ago) I just went completely off tea, coffee, and alcohol. I couldn’t stand them! I still haven’t drunk tea or alcohol since but I do love coffee now. I started off just having one small cup (mixed with half a cup of warm milk and 4 tablespoons of sugar!) in the morning when I had my second meal of the day. I still can’t drink coffee with my first meal of the day, or on its own without food. I just don’t like it then. I love it with any other meal though!

​So what do I eat now? Well, I still really enjoy my new potatoes (with lots of yummy butter and salt) and boiled eggs for breakfast. Although interestingly enough, after about a year, I went from eating my boiled eggs really hard boiled to preferring them to be really soft boiled and runny. Not sure what that means though!! Then usually for brunch I eat mash potatoes, beans and sausages, with a nice cup of coffee. Afternoon tea consists of more mash potatoes, usually with some form of casserole (I often make a large casserole at the beginning of the week, to last for several days). At the moment my favourite is pork casserole with added apples and mushrooms. I just leave it to cook for a couple of hours in the oven and it’s lovely. I’ve found that if I add a tablespoon of coconut oil to the casserole then the pork is lovely and tender. I will probably have another cup of coffee then as well. Tea will be something like egg, chips and beans, and then supper is usually a shepherd’s pie (a la Aldi – because I am totally bored of cooking by the evening!!). I eat at around 8am, 11am, 3pm, 7pm and 10pm (although it’ll probably be slightly different every day!) Doing a rough, back of the envelope, calculation this gives me a total of around 3000 calories still and 300g of carbs. 

Apart from the coffee I drink with my meals, I only drink when I am thirsty and my drink of choice is generally coke, so I have included the calories and carbs from coke in the totals above. All my meals include carbs, fat and protein (although I don’t work out specific macros – I just eat what feels right to me) and I salt every meal to taste. This usually means I add quite a bit of salt, which can be as frightening to people as the amount of calories I eat!! I always make my own mash potatoes with butter, milk and salt, and I fry my own chips in beef dripping.

​My digestion is much better now and I no longer take over half an hour to eat a small amount of food! My appetite is back and I am hungry for every meal I eat. That is one of the reasons the timings vary throughout the day. Sometimes it takes 3 hours to feel hungry again but sometimes it might only be 2 hours, so I’m pretty flexible and if I’m hungry I eat! Occasionally I will add in liver for one of my meals (with mash potato, gravy, sautéed onions and bacon). I find liver ok to eat but am not that keen so it’s usually every few weeks. 

​I did try to change my meals down to only 4 instead of 5, but even keeping the calories the same, I just stopped sleeping as well as I had been. I would wake up a few times in the night and find it harder to go back to sleep. That might be down to less potassium as if I take out one potato meal I’ve lost a reasonable amount of potassium. I already eat the maximum amount of potato I can manage in each meal so maybe I just wasn’t getting enough across the 4 meals? Hmmm, not sure, but I went back to 5 potato based meals and my sleep got much better again.

I should also add that I don't just eat potato based meals because they have helped me recover my health, I eat them because I find them blooming delicious!! If the day comes where I fancy something else in place of  the potatoes then I guess that just means my needs are changing. You just have to be able to roll with the punches, and adjust accordingly! I also don't fret if I'm out and about or at someone else's house and I have to eat something else for one of my meals.  

​As always, I hope you have found my ramblings useful! Please remember though, this is only me thinking out loud and that everybody is different. Just because this has worked for me does not mean that if you swap out all your foods for potato based meals tomorrow you will suddenly feel much better!! Not everybody likes potatoes (are they crazy????) and not everybody can tolerate potatoes (very sad :-( ). If you want to make changes then go slow and don’t change too much at once. You want to keep stress to the body to a minimum.  

Thanks for reading and if you have any comments, stories or thoughts to share then just pop them in the comments below. I always love to hear from you! Take care, x.

Looking back over the last couple of years, it can seem like the whole low carb diet malarkey was a failure of epic proportions! It cost me my health for well over a year, my relationship, and certainly (if I ever had any!!) my credibility for giving dietary advice! Bah ha ha! Friends sometimes like to point out my failings in conversations about the last couple of years, saying things like

‘Ooh yes, that was a really bad mistake, I mean a really, really bad mistake’
​
‘You know what your problem is, you take an idea and you run with it, then you are so focussed on that idea that there is just no stopping you. If you did things more in moderation you wouldn’t have been in such a mess’

Ha! Don’t you just love friends! Always there to point out your flaws! Actually, I do love my friends, and I didn’t take the comments personally, but I did start thinking about this failure side of things. Was it really such a failure? What denotes something as a failure anyway? Can good things come from ‘failure’? When do we start to see failure as a bad thing?
​
At school, failure is always looked upon as a bad thing. If you fail a test or get a bad grade it’s hardly a cause for celebration right? You are constantly being tested for this or that, and if you don’t pass, or if you make mistakes then there are always negative connotations, but why? Surely we learn from getting things wrong? 

I actually think a lot of positives have come out of this ‘epic failure’ experience. Firstly, my health is getting much, much better; in fact I would go as far to say that it is better than it’s been in a long time, not just than the past couple of years. Yes I still have some extra weight and some water retention but in terms of quality sleep, energy levels, and mental clarity, things are pretty amazing. I feel hugely positive, like I can accomplish anything if I set my mind to it! If I hadn’t followed the low carb diet to the degree that I did, with the fallout that I had, then I would probably still be tinkering about trying this diet or that diet, in a bid to get ‘more healthy’. I’ll tell you this though, I’d rather have had a couple of pretty bad years (and they were really awful- I wouldn’t like to repeat them!) and have the next 40 + years in amazing health, than to have never made the ‘huge mistake’ and just have ambled along in ok-ish health for the rest of my life!
​
I’ve learnt huge amounts about health and how a body works. I’m nowhere close to knowing everything about our inner workings but I’m a lot closer than I was before! I can make better decisions about my health and things that will benefit me/harm me. I live more intuitively by listening to my body, whereas previously that would never have occurred to me!

My relationship fell apart following on from this ‘failure’ but we are still good friends. On the surface it seems that my ex didn’t like my weight gain, which was very hurtful, and eventually I left. I’m sure there is more to it than that though. I think the connection I thought we had in the relationship perhaps wasn’t as strong as I thought it was and we just ceased to be a good fit. These things happen. We all have certain criteria that we want or need from a relationship and things break down when they aren’t fulfilled. If it hadn’t come to breaking point over my ‘failure’ then perhaps we would have continued to muddle along for many years in a less than optimal relationship. Who knows? Our relationship works much better now as just friends (living apart from one another!!).
​
As for my credibility, well, I’m not sure that was ever in place!! I try not to comment now unless someone specifically asks, or I may say something once, so people do have different options, but then it is up to them as to whether they research that idea further. Certainly people should research things for themselves, or listen to their own body more, rather than just taking other people’s advice (however well-meaning that advice is!).

​Ultimately, what matters most about the mistakes, or failures, that we make, is that afterwards you can pick yourself up, dust yourself down, and move onwards and upwards, with a little more knowledge than you had before. I think I’ve just about got that covered! I’m sure I’ll go on to make many more mistakes, but you know, so what?

​Hope you enjoyed my ramblings! Remember, this is just me ‘thinking out loud’, and if you feel like it, then share some of your ramblings below in the comments. Take care x