I weighed myself today. It didn’t quite go according to plan. Urgh, I’ve been here before.
In 2013 I went onto Banting which was wildly successful for me. I lost 38kg. Yay! I also lost a lot of my hair, my nails started breaking and my health took a tremendous knock with the onset of Multiple Sclerosis. Now, I’d like to be very clear here. I do not blame the Banting for my misfortune. Many people enjoy a much better lifestyle with Banting and they are perfectly healthy.
Over the 7 years that I was on the diet, I had become obsessed with my weight to the point that even when I drank a cup of coffee I would be making calculations in my head as to how I would lose the calories. I took it too far and I was far too strict with myself. I was painfully thin for my height and build and while nobody knows what causes MS, the thinking in my case is that I had the gene, and the trauma that I was putting my body through triggered the illness.
I can’t work out exactly when I started exhibiting symptoms as they creep up on you without you realising it. I was struggling with fatigue, spasms in my chest, head, and legs, blurry vision, intestinal problems, sleeping problems, struggling to swallow food and drink, and a myriad of other symptoms that couldn’t be explained. I saw doctor after doctor after doctor and each one told me that I should join a gym or, “it’s all in your head.” No shit Sherlock. I was told I was a hypochondriac, and that I needed psychotherapy. I was made to feel that I was a drama queen, overreacting and that something was wrong with my personality, not my body.
In 2017 I started having problems with my teeth. Sensitivity to the extreme. I was struggling to chew food and couldn’t have anything cooler than room temperature. So I went to my dentist. He did a check-up and couldn’t find anything so he prescribed a bite guard, not a cheap exercise. I did this and followed the instructions but there were no changes. So I went back to the dentist, and this time he decided I need a cleaning. This was so painful for me, not to mention another expense. Again, no change. On my third visit to the dentist, he took X-Rays but found nothing. On the fourth visit, he poked around, said he doesn’t know what was wrong, and sent me another bill. My bank account was suffering as much as my teeth.
Out of pure coincidence, it was around this time that I moved to a new area and needed a new doctor as I had a new symptom, pain in my jaw and neck. I found a lovely GP who was old-school and patient with me. He didn’t tell me I was imagining things. He sent me to an ENT doctor. At that visit, I was told that I had trigeminal neuralgia. This feels like you’re getting electric shocks in your jaw and can last from a few seconds to a few minutes. This was not a symptom I described though. My problem was a constant pain going from the jaw down the back of my neck. So, you guessed it, I was told I need to join a gym and lose weight. I asked him if I needed an MRI and he laughed at me. Now, at this point, I was painfully thin and despite all my pain, I’d been working out regularly. So, I joined an exercise program which I couldn’t afford because my medical bills were now so high it made me dizzy but I was so desperate I would try anything. He also prescribed the most horrendous pills, Lyrica, which made me incredibly dizzy 24/7, and nauseous. I have never experienced such drastic brain fog before. It was awful!
When I next saw my GP he was horrified and decided to bypass the usual paths of elimination and he sent me directly to a Neurologist.
Within 5 minutes of being in the Neurologists’ office, he knew what was wrong with me. He believed every word I said. Not once did he make me feel ridiculous or like I was overreacting and being a drama queen. He listened to me. He believed me!!!!! He BELIEVED me!!!! Yes, I am using a lot of exclamation points but I am trying to help you understand just HOW extraordinary this was. He organised for me to have MRI the following day and when he saw lesions on my brain, he immediately booked me into the hospital and performed a spinal tap. That was fun. He was able to confirm that I was in the first stage of Multiple Sclerosis.
Over the next few years, I learned how to make changes to my lifestyle and I learned how to live with the pain. I was still Banting though. In 2020 I had two flares that could only be helped with steroids. I was booked into the hospital and I did three days on a steroid drip each time. I put on 20kg! I was heartbroken. All that work was gone in 6 days. I continued with the Banting but it was doing nothing. No changes. Obviously, it wasn’t working for me anymore. This was a hard pill to swallow, or chew in my case.
So I thought, “fuckit” and I started eating carbs again. I enjoyed it. I missed it! Oh boy did I miss it. I knew I’d have to try something again to lose the weight I’d put on, but I took some time to just try to be healthy rather. Not focusing on weight loss but rather on my health. Listen to my body. Be kind to my body for once. Poor thing has been through a lot.
In December 2022, my sister and her family came to visit from New Zealand, and inevitably, one day, our conversation landed on health. Every day is a new ride at the MS theme park, you don’t know what is going to hurt until you get up in the morning and do a full body scan on yourself. Over the last few weeks, I have been struggling tremendously with IBS, excruciating spasms in my gut along with nausea. Just for shits and giggles. That’s right, I said it.
She happened to mention a friend of hers in New Zealand who was into health and well-being and that she was about start mentoring women with a new lifestyle protocol that she had been studying. We don’t know yet how this will work for someone with Multiple Sclerosis, but after learning more about it, my sister and I both thought that I would benefit from it. It should help with getting inflammation around my nerves under control, clean out my gut and get that rebalanced as well as helping with some weight loss hopefully. An added bonus we are hoping for is that it will help with balancing hormones as I know that the dreaded menopause is looming ahead. I’m not there yet, I was just tested.
So, since we don’t know yet how this protocol works for someone with my myriad of health hurdles, I have decided that I will document the journey so that hopefully one day it may prove to be beneficial to someone else in my shoes.
I will be talking about what I am doing and how it is going, but I will limit the amount of information I publish for two reasons. Firstly, this is someone’s job and I’m not going to start chucking out their hard work and research for the whole world to see for free without their permission (I haven’t asked and don’t plan to publish their material regardless). Secondly, one of the key factors of this process is that you have a coach to guide you along the path and a group of others on the same journey as you who are there for support. This is not something that you do on your own like the Banting. You are not flying solo here and I want to respect the process. I also don’t think this is something that you should do on your own and having the coach is really important.
I will tell you that it is called The Estima Protocol which was created by Dr. Stephanie Estima, a chiropractor with a special interest in metabolism and functional neurology among other things. This diet is created specifically for women as other diets are created by men and don’t really take a woman’s monthly cycle into account. This diet has been created by a woman, for women. As she says on her website, work smarter, not harder.
We start the protocol with a 28-day cleanse. This is the hardest part and you really need to be vigilant and stick with it so that your body can go into ketosis. So here are my notes on the first week.
Week 1
So I am now one week into the cleanse in which I have cut out carbs, sugar, dairy, and any processed foods. We have been given a workbook that does give a list of foods that are allowed along with a myriad of other information. Olive oil is my staple! It goes on everything, this includes garlic-infused, truffle-infused, lemon-infused, literally anything infused olive oil. I pour it over everything. You need it for fuel. But wow, it is delicious and it eliminates the craving for mayonnaise. I am also trying to get 3-4 liters of water in a day. Not easy, but there are ways of making it more interesting. Sparkling water with ice, lemon, and mint. Boiling water with just lemon. Cold still water with ice and cucumber. But my personal favourite is iced coffee. When I get up in the morning I make a plunger of decaf coffee which I then let cool down and keep in a bottle in the fridge. Throughout the day I fill a glass with ice, half fill it with the cold decaf coffee and the other half gets vanilla flavoured, unsweetened Almond Breeze almond milk. Wow! It is delicious and refreshing and I drink perhaps 3 or 4 glasses of it a day. I’ve had almond milk before and I hated it. But somehow, this way it’s delicious.
My morning cup of caffeinated coffee is drunk with Alpro Unsweetened Soy Milk and sadly as I cannot find Stevia where I live, I have had to eliminate the sweetener I used to use. I’m adjusting, reluctantly. Almond milk doesn’t work in instant coffee for me, just too awful. It’s fine in a cappuccino though.
For snacks I’m eating the allowed nuts, biltong (dried, cured meat) and sliced cucumber with garlic flavoured olive oil and pink Himalayan salt. I love this!!
Supper is a chop or piece of meat braai’d (BBQ) and an enormous helping of salad or roasted veg. Breakfast is skipped as I am fasting till 12 and lunch is bacon and eggs with some sliced avocado. The problem is, I run around a lot and am not always home so too many times now I’ve missed lunch. This is not an easy diet to follow if you’re not going to be home or able to prepare something beforehand for your lunch. I eat nuts to keep the hanger under control but it’s not how things are supposed to be done so I gotta figure this one out still. I live in South Africa and grabbing something for a quick snack that isn’t processed or full of sugar or carbs is really, really limited. It’s nuts or biltong. Neither of which is cheap here.
Observations
I haven’t had a single spasm in my gut. I am not bent over in agony and I am not nauseous. My system is regular which, wowzer, I haven’t been regular in a long, long time, and I haven’t had any bloating. I feel good.
Excited.