Sticking With Us Like a Bad Love Song

So here I am after a medication change with my girl that seemed to calm down some of the irritability.  Only now, not so much.  It's bad.  Little cutting remarks, sometimes big ones, like nobody likes me, don't I know that already?  Like she absolutely hates the new color on our wall and she can't have anybody over because they would hate it, too, and she would tell them that , yeah, she hates it, her mother picked it out. And hand flicking to get me away.  Blech.

This is no fun.  I have recently come to the place where I realize that I can no longer live in crisis mode (you'd think I would have discovered that years ago), but I have to try to have some sort of calm and normalcy in the midst of this tornado.  For her.  For me.  I feel selfish.  How can I have normalcy when she continues to be in turmoil?  When it feels like she hates me?

I am realizing that after medication change and adjustment over and over, the thing that has helped her the most has been the yeast detox diet.  Which is so. darn. hard.  And when we did it before she was 8.  She is now 10.

But it's the only thing.  We've been swimming out in an ocean of much needed medications and "quick" (ha) fixes, but I have to turn around now and swim back to that island that seems so far away.  Kicking yeast to the curb.

I have my stash of diflucan and nystatin and garlic that I have been hoarding, and I'm going to be picking up a couple of more natural antifungals.  We're all going to do it (including Daddy this time).  And I'm starting with 28 days but telling them we have to see where we are after 28 days.

Off to plan the menu.  If you are doing yeast detox, let me know.  Maybe we can "rah-rah" each other.

Oh, yeah....my favorite yeast book ever... Complete Candida Yeast Guidebook.  Awesome.  (But still having to search for kid-friendly recipes.)  I've read some of the reviews, and all I can say is....often ignorance is bliss....For us, we know this stuff is real.  It worked before.  Pray for us that it works again (and that we can be more complete).

http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=book+candida+yeast+everything&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&prmd=imvns&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&biw=1434&bih=789&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=shop&cid=6957211617341954337&sa=X&ei=2MulT9WiMYi22gWq39TfDw&ved=0CHUQ8wIwAA#ps-sellers

Staples of Our Pantry

Before this diet, some things that I had to have in the pantry or fridge were cereal, macaroni and cheese,  whole wheat spaghetti, juice, lunch meat, cheese, bags of chips for school lunches, etc.  Now all of those are out.  As in donated or thrown out, not in the house (or someone would eat them....possibly me!).

Things that I have to have in the house now for snacks (four growing kids and two adults means we MUST have snacks at all times!) and back up for meals are:

                       rice cakes, preferrably organic brown rice
                       Mott's applesauce cups (no sugar added, possibly sweetened with fruit)
                       green olives
                       Beanitos (rice and bean chips)
                       fruit leathers
                       eggs
                       beans (pinto, lentils, black)
                       whole fruit (apples, kiwi, cantaloupe, cherries, blueberries, strawberries, pears, peaches)
                       Bob's Mill hot rice cereal or
                       oatmeal (really should be organic so as not to be cross-contaminated with gluten)
                       almond milk or coconut milk
                       olive oil
                       raw baby carrots
                       fresh broccoli
                       cherry tomatoes
                       Chex rice cereal (my daughter loves cereal)
                       Nuts (like cashews, walnuts or pumpkin seeds, although not everyone will eat walnuts    
                                or pumpkin seeds....)
                       Laura Scudder's natural peanut butter (nothing but peanuts and salt)
                       Smucker's Naturals Jam (all fruit) or some similar jam
                       Some sort of rice pasta and low sugar spaghetti sauce
                             (now we have this in a pinch instead of mac and cheese)

I know that I still have a long way to go.  We have eliminated so much and added a lot, but I'd like to add more veggies.  For now, however, this is what we've got.  I know that I can't rush my family (or me) or this won't stick.  And this really isn't a diet in the usual sense of the word.  We can't ever go back to the way we were eating.  Our lives depend on it.

Yeast, I Hate You.

That last post was sitting as a draft for quite some time.  I felt compelled to post it because I was suspicious that the big Y was back.  Yesterday morning, I did the saliva test on myself and the three oldest kiddos.  Guess what.  I hate you, yeast.

Yeast Detox

Our family did the yeast detox diet for not just 28 days, but for four months.  Let's just say that when this happened, I knew that something was working.  I wanted to make sure that we ran off all the old familiar darkness, and if that meant that we did the yeast detox diet for the rest of our lives, I would have been okay with that!

You might be wondering why we did the diet in the first place...how did I know that we had a yeast issue? Well, first of all, something was definitely wrong.  Our girl couldn't tolerate any type of clothing by this time.  When we did get something on her that was several sizes too large (and she'd pop the threads in that trying to stretch it bigger), she couldn't wear underwear or socks or shoes, although she could usually wear crocs.  And she was oppositional to say the least.  Everything we said set off a tantrum that would last for hours.  She was angry.  And aggressive.  She'd hit and say the most hateful things.  She would bite, break things, beat up the walls, kick people.  And she was already taking an anti-depressant.  And a really heavy dose of an anti-psychotic.  And those two medications had packed probably 20 pounds onto my 7 year old's body.  She was now getting to be hard to restrain.

So why did we think it was yeast?   "Suspicion" is all that I can say.  My lovely daughter was born a big baby girl at 9 lb., 8 oz., but I was not diabetic...gestational or  or otherwise.  Yet soon after birth we discovered that she had thrush (oral yeast).  And throughout her infancy and toddlerhood, she had bouts of yeast in her diaper area that I could never fully get rid of.  As a young child, she was sluggish...she'd sleep until 11 a.m. or later if we let her, and if we didn't let her, her nap was usually 3 hours.  She was a big sweater when she slept.  Sweet girl had horrible breath.  She developed a strange, recurrent stomach ache when she was four.  It hurt so badly that she laid down on the floor on her belly trying to make it stop.  Her belly was always a little bloated.  She craved bread and that type of food, although she would eat fruit and vegetables.  She had frequent bladder infections.  She was almost always constipated.  And my daughter had been diagnosed with OCD.  Oh, yeah, and did I mention that she had shiners?  Those are dark circles under the eyes that often go with yeast or allergies.  She had very dark shiners. 

All of these things made me suspect yeast, and although we always wanted to look for a nutritional answer instead of medication, she was already on medication, but we couldn't find the right one or even ones to do the trick for her.  So now I was convinced that we HAD to find a nutritional answer. 

Her pediatrician, God love her, knew absolutely nothing about this.  I mean, she knew about thrush and vaginal yeast infections, but that was where the party line stopped. Doctors look at you like you're crazy if you believe that yeast does anything else.  How in the world could it be related to behavior?  Ha.  So where was I supposed to get help to walk through a yeast detox?  I had read a little about it online and had seen a couple of books...I thought that I could do the diet without a doctor.  But I needed a doctor to write a prescription for oral Nystatin and/or Diflucan for an extended period of time.  And my pediatrician would not do that.  (I needed the antifungals because while the yeast detox diet would stop feeding the yeast, the antifungals would actually kill the yeast.)

I started looking for a holistic doctor, and luckily, someone on my mom's group message board mentioned a "wellness doctor" fairly close to me.  She didn't take insurance, and you had to sign up for the expensive program, not just a visit or two, but I needed that prescription.  And "the program" came with a nutritional consult at a local grocery store to help me pick the right kinds of foods. 

The wellness doctor immediately started my girl on Nystatin.  Immediately, as in, as soon as we could start the diet.  That is a whole seperate post that I shall write soon.  On her third week of the diet, she was to start Diflucan for seven days.  And we were given several other supplements.  Well, you know, we weren't really given them.....

So the protocol initially looked like this:

nystatin a.m. and p.m.
yeast detox diet
2 Tbsp. fish oil
5000 iu vitamin d daily for 5 days and then every other day
Biopro probiotic from Complementary Prescriptions 2 in a.m., 2 in p.m.
1/2 capful of NutraMetrix Advanced B-Complex
1 capful of NutraMetrix Vitamin C
1/2 capful NutraMetrix Isotonix Multivitamin & Multimineral with Iron
1 capful Nutrametrix Isotonix OPC-3
(All of the Nutrametrix powders were mixed into an 8 oz. glass of water for girlie to drink.)

During week 3 we added Diflucan once a day.
Later we added 4 magnesium capsules daily--2 in the a.m. and 2 in the p.m.  These were from Complimentary Prescriptions (which I got from my wellness doctor).

I understand that intially, all symptoms can become worse, and we were given something called Nutra-Tabs for that.  We only used it once or twice, however, when my girl complained of a stomach ache. 

Results?  Amazing.  This diet brought my girl back to me.  Praise God!