My buddy Sarah suggested that I blog my experience with my Candida Cleanse, so welcome back. The fun begins today.
Basically, the plan is this: take anti-fungal meds and maintain a special diet for two weeks, in hopes of killing off yeast that may have taken root in my system. For those of you who like Latin, we are talking about Candida albicans, a kind of fungus that can overgrow in the body thanks to taking a lot of antibiotics, or other causes.
(For those of you wondering whether I have taken a lot of antibiotics and some point, look here and here, or really just start reading in April 2007 and come forwards for a while.)
The alternative medicine world is big into Candida as a health problem. The lame stream medical world is dubious. I figure, will two weeks of a limited diet kill me? Probably not.
Maybe.
But I hope not.
Briefly, I can eat any meat and veggies, beans and legumes (except peanuts), any nuts and seeds (except peanuts), any oils, whole grains (whole only, without yeast or sugar), and herbal tea.
After the first week, I can eat 1-2 pieces of fruit a day.
Attentive readers--or is anyone reading this?--will notice the exclusion of these items: sugar of any kind, yeast, vinegar, caffeine, alcohol, dairy products (butter is OK), dried fruit, melons, malted products (like soy sauce), and other fungi (like mushrooms or truffles).
So starting today meant that I did some shopping yesterday.
If you would like a good primer in processed food, try this fun exercise: go to the store and look for packaged food containing no kind of sweetener. Find anything? I didn't think so.
Or, if you did, is it yeast-free? Vinegar-free?
Prepare to cook for yourself.
So last night I made a big pot of Mexican-inflected beef stew, which we ate with quinoa. And of course there are left-overs.
One setback this morning: I opened up a package of fancy organic chicken sausages to cook some up for a snack, only to find that something was very very wrong, and that opening the package had released an odor of raw sewage into the kitchen.
Mmmmmm breakfast.
So far today:
BREAKFAST
cup of herbal tea (which did exactly nothing to help me wake up)
bowl of oatmeal with butter and slivered almonds
Downside thus far: Caffeine is my wonder-worker for migraine attacks, and thanks to the weather, I got a doozie this morning, worsened without my usual morning cup of tea. Excedrin migraine is out. And triptans were overused to get through the holiday, so I'm bearing through on heat pads, cold packs, and naps. And nice kitties. And an accommodating PP.
SNACK:
a few nuts
Then I was already to cook up a nice sausage, because I had been napping and dreaming of hamburgers, but then the sewage smell and here we are. Luckily for me, PP offered to go out for some other kind of meat and some other things.
So stay tuned. "Two weeks" seemed very manageable when it was off in the distant future. This morning it feels like an eternity.
UPDATED TO ADD: Here is the rest of my food from the day.
LUNCH:
a pre-cooked and so just warmed up chicken and sun-dried tomato sausage that the PP kindly found me at Whole Foods
more of that tasty beef stew from last night
AFTERNOON SNACK:
popcorn with butter and salt
DINNER:
grilled spiced halibut with asparagus
fizzy water with lime juice
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3 comments:
Good luck! I've been really curious about the Candida theory - well, skeptical, really, but am very curious about whether this will work for you.
We shall see. I'm a little skeptical, too, but I figure it's worth a shot. And I do have a friend whose daughter had Candida, and was super-sick, and then got better this way.
But I figure a spell of better eating might be good for me in other ways, post-holidays.
Can you find something you can eat that will feel like a real treat? Avocado with lemon juice, olive oil, and parsley. Coconut butter (available at whole foods--a mix of oil and meat) melted and mixed with macadamia nuts, then pour on a sheet of wax paper and sprinkled with sea salt to make a candy bar. Pumpkin white hot chocolate made with coconut milk, pumpkin puree or cooked squash, pure cocoa butter (available at whole foods), pumpkin pie spices, and a little vanilla. Cauliflower roasted with butter and curry powder.
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