Hi everyone, I thought I'd update my check in thread.
Well, this might be a bit of a long post, but I wanted to tell people here that I have had a very difficult year due to a few long term, horrible illnesses. My HabitCal is nearly all "Yellow" to document this period as a sick period... now that doesn't mean I was taking S days on those days, in fact due to the fact that my digestive system got very thrown off, I actually had to deviate from NoS for several months to a diet which only included low carb fibrous vegetables and essentially *no* sugar at all, including fruits.
Back in the end of the Summer, me and Son got a case of pinworms.. He had picked them up in the end of August, when he was running on very muddy trails for his track team, and had already had some broken skin between his toes due to athletes foot... he had come home with his feet totally soaked in mud and two weeks later he developed pinworms.. the pinworm eggs are in mud and they can be transmitted thru the skin of the feet when its broken, and then they get into the bloodstream and wind up in the small intestine, then move to the large intestine when they are mature..I ended getting them a few weeks later as they are incredibly contagious.. What followed was probably the worst time of my entire life.. It took several rounds of medication and incessant cleaning in our home, to rid us of them, but also, I used lots of herbal remedies and tried eating lots of foods which were supposed to be good for expelling them, like garlic, coconut, pumpkin seeds and other stuff.
It was a total nightmare, as for about five or six months, they just kept coming back
![Sad :(](./images/smilies/icon_sad.gif)
What followed was that I ended up with a massive overgrowth of Candida in my digestive tract, because the parasites messed up my gut flora really badly, and I was horribly ill from that too.. I have been handling this all with diet and natural antifungals, and eating cultured foods, plus taking acidophillus supplements, and I can say I'm much much better now, but I've had to completely overhaul my diet as sugar and wheat, and anything with gluten, oh and caffeine, exacerbates the condition. So I've actually gone down from drinking coffee with sugar about three to four or five times a day, last Fall, to having less than a cup of coffee a day these days.
We've still been sticking with the structure of NoS, but there's been a lot of exception days for me personally, in the last six months, because on some days, I'd be too sick to actually eat a meal, and would just nibble on certain stuff like sauerkraut during the day, and then maybe have a large salad for dinner, so i guess you could call that "snacking" tho over all, I was eating much much less than I've ever eaten before on a daily basis.
Since November I am down another 7 lbs, and at my lowest weight in over two years! I can at least be happy about that.
It's probably gonna take me quite a while to completely overcome the Candida overgrowth, but what I'm doing seems to be working. I'm gradually going to be adding more exercise as the weather warms up, but that will probably just be walking. During my worst months with the pinworms/candida I couldn't even walk to the car from my apartment without massive difficulty and extreme fatigue. I'm grateful to say that I'm not in one tenth as bad condition as I was then.
I've been browsing the forums but have been a little too preoccupied with these problems to be very active in posting here, so please forgive me for being somewhat "awol" in discussions.
By April, I am hoping that I'll be well enough to start being able to track my NoS days where I am not counting almost every day as a yellow sick day and I will start giving myself "Greens and Reds" again.. for now, I've lived thru so much, I am just taking somewhat of a break from the traditional tracking.. I did feel it important that I marked something on my HabitCal's, even if it was a bit perfunctory.. just to keep up the Habit of marking them.
Anyway, I am now down to 225 lbs, which is 7 lbs less than I was in November, and I'm really happy about that at least, and I know as my health continues to improve, my weight loss will just continue as I actually like the way I'm eating now.. Oh also, a big change for me... after reading about some very bad syndromes and symptoms which are associated with eating non fermented Soy, I finally switched off drinking Soymilk after about 8 or 9 years of using that. It's quite possible that the soy was causing a lot of problems for me, including doing damage to my digestive system and immune system, and playing a part in me developing "leaky gut", as well as making it more difficult to lose weight.
Wishing everyone here in advance a wonderful Spring, a little in advance, and I'll be back to update sometime in the nearish future.
![Cool 8)](./images/smilies/icon_cool.gif)
Debs