Saturday, September 4, 2010

Toxic

I had a long visit with Dr. Rothfeld yesterday and it was very interesting.  I was all set to tell him how difficult and weird things have been since I saw him last except I didn't need to.  He pretty much told me.  He'd talked to the nurse practitioner I'd seen three weeks ago and knew that I was feeling fatigued, moody and ill and that my weight was zinging up and down for no apparent reason.  Why?  I have the type of body that is very bad at clearing toxins.  What has all the weight loss been doing?  Dumping toxins into my system.  He said that my body's default way of dealing with toxins, since I was a little kid, is to store them in fat rather than moving them out of my body.  This explains why I had been getting consistently more overweight as time went on.  It also explains why, when I have lost weight in the past, I feel crappier and crappier and hungrier and hungrier until I finally give up and start eating more.  I've always noticed that when I start eating more after dieteing for a while, I immediately feel better.  It is hard to feel like dieting is good for you when you feel like crap the whole time and only start to feel good when you go off the diet.
My weight fluctuating up and down is also a sign of flares of inflammation from all the toxicity.  I eat something that wouldn't usually set me off and suddenly I'm retaining five pounds of water.  After a couple of days, it lets up and my weight goes back down.  It is disheartening but not the result of anything I'm doing wrong which is an entirely new concept for me.
So, what do we do now?  Well, starting Tuesday, I'm going to go on a fairly drastic cleanse for a few days and then I'll slowly start to add back foods that are very non-allergenic.  Dr. Rothfeld is hoping it will clear out the existing toxins and, maybe, teach my body to clear them rather than consistently trying to put them back into fat.  First thing Tuesday morning, they are taking a bunch of blood for allergy testing so that when I go back on a normal diet, I can avoid foods that are going toxic in my body to begin with.  The cleanse is going to be fairly drastic for me, though not as drastic as a lot of cleanses I've heard about.  The hard part is that it's going to make all my symptoms worse in the short term before things start to get better.  I'll deal with it because I've got to break my body out of this cycle somehow.

2 comments:

  1. That is fascinating. Not fun, I'm sure, but absolutely fascinating. It's amazing what our bodies can do to us! I can't wait to find out what you're irritated by/allergic to.

    Also, I'm still curious about this too-much-fruit thing!

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  2. Hey Lucy -- I wonder if there are any herbs that might help with what you're going through. Does your doctor do herbs? I used to go to this great acupuncturist/herbalist in Central Square.... I bet he's still there, so lemme know if you ever decide to look at that kind of thing.

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