I have started this blog at least 6 different times with just as many different aspects of life to focus on. This time, I have intentionally made the change in our lives and waited a good solid 2-3 weeks to make sure it would stick at least that long before trying to talk through life with myself. My focus has always always been on losing weight. I hate being overweight (as I'm sure every overweight person in the world does) and have to fight exceptionally hard to lose any weight at all. I think that I'm finally in a semi-emotionally healthy state and am ready to focus on overall health for my whole family. I am ready to be proactive about living life to the fullness that God has intended for us to and to stop dealing with individual health events instead of trying to prevent them in the first place.
We walk a delicate balance in our family from really wanting to be in the crunchy, hippy state of medical care and really knowing that until things drastically change (and even probably after that) we all require some level of daily medical intervention. We are a walking mess of asthma and allergies and all sorts of other things. As a bit of background, I'll fill you in on the things that we fight against medically and some of the background on why we are eating the way that we are and doing the things we're doing.
I have a thyroid disorder (Hashimoto's, causing your thyroid to attack itself) and PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome) and those have been the two biggest focuses on my journey to being healthy for quite a while. These two conditions breed a whole host of other issues and make endocrinologists give you that look that says "Yeah, I'm really sorry you're overweight...." without a whole lot of hope for change. Since May, I have 100% cut out soy from my diet. I have known for a long long time that soy was bad for thyroid production. When my endocrinologist and primary care doctor both saw my thyroid numbers jump up I knew that I needed to do whatever I could or my thyroid would be totally gone forever and I was only 26 and hopefully have a long long full life to live and would love to do that with all body parts that I can working. Since making that one change, my thyroid meds have been able to be dropped twice and are feeling like they could probably be dropped again sometime soon. I consider that in and of itself to be a success.
Jason has always had some sort of gastrointestinal issues and has always struggled to gain weight. Talk about opposites attracting...He constantly feels sick to his stomach and is commonly up in the middle of the night with some sort of stomach upset. He is a typical man though (whom I love greatly) and went to see his doctor once, they ran some labs, told him his thyroid was fine, told him to make some diet changes, and told him to come back if it didn't get any better. Did he? Absolutely not. He instead has continued to be uncomfortable and to be honest a bit cranky about the whole thing. After I jumped on this ride and have started to have some success with better health overall, he decided that he wanted to try cutting out gluten from his diet. That is totally the cool diet right now, but it makes for an easy transition for our family so I said sweet, lets go with it. He has had almost immediate relief. He is no loner frequently in pain, he is slowly but surely gaining weight and is a much much happier person. He hasn't been back in to have the test done to see if he is a celiac, but at this point if it said he wasn't I probably wouldn't believe it.
I mentioned above that I have PCOS and Hashimoto's and that it leads to a whole host of issues. One of those is infertility. It is awful and horrible and gut wrenching, but it is what it is at this point. Jason and I have been married 8 years. We have never not tried to get pregnant. Jonah is the result of a whole bunch of stuff before starting fertility drugs and then 6 months on fertility drugs. Since then we've tried to start them again, but my liver is not loving the drugs so until I can get clean scans and labs on my liver (and hopefully that will come with losing weight among other things) we are totally put on hold with that unless God decides to work a miracle. I have days when I am completely mad and angry with God over the whole situation and then I have days where I'm ready to go and do something about it. Our prayer when praying for Jonah is that we would have a baby and be satisfied with one (even though we always dreamed of a big family) if that's all we were intended to have. Most days I am satisfied, but some days it just feels like it isn't fair.
Back to Jonah. Jonah is a walking mess of a four year old boy. A very allergic, itchy boy. We drive 3 hours to see our allergist in Waco (his name is Dr. Russell Perry in case you're in Waco and need a spectacular allergist) because he moved...and he loves our kid, and our kid loves him and he's the only person we've found willing to work towards a solution instead of putting bandaids on the symptoms. Jonah is allergic to all sorts of outside things (we're not even completely sure what yet, since allergies continue to come up until kids are about 5 or 6), nickel, wheat and a chemical called ethylene diamine. Doesn't sound to bad...until you realize that wheat is in just about everything...and ethylene diamine is in almost all allergy medications. That's right, my kids allergic to allergy medication (except a few random ones and benadryl) . Ridiculous I know. We have known abut Jonah's allergy to wheat since he was about 15 months old when his very observant preschool director picked up on it after snack time. He has been on a gluten free diet since then so we thought that we were doing pretty well diet wise for him. I am now thinking that we were not doing so great. We were just replacing most of the gluten with corn, which is almost all genetically modified anyway so I was still putting junk in.
We are on a quest to eat as closely to the way that God intended us to as possible in a crazy busy, modern family situation. I am a teacher (so I'm sure that will find it's way into this blog somehow when school starts back), Jason builds EHR software (medical records software for doctors) and Jonah goes to preschool full time so extra time is not something that we have a lot of. I tend to overcommit to life and am so ridiculously ADHD and scattered that there's no telling what I've got going on at any point in time. So there's us in a really large nutshell, and here's to hopefully using this blog to document a transformation in our family.
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