Growing up I was taught that germs are bad and that they’re everywhere. And while these statements are completely accurate, they’re, as I would come to find out, only part of the story. But regardless, my fam lived within this mantra and lived a life of obsessive handwashing and antibiotics and just downright fear much of the time.
Flash forward to college during my freshman year at the University of Kentucky. I found myself encapsulated in a dorm tower with hundreds of other freshman as well as of course, classes…point being, I found myself constantly around people and OH NO, GERMS. But of course it wasn’t that strange when I got Bronchitis three times freshman year because it’s honestly pretty dang normal to get sick a lot in that type of environment. I, as well as everyone else, were constantly in this incubator just "festering" away (dramatizing here). What perhaps didn’t make sense, though, is that over the next four years in college it seemed I had a knack for developing random ailments/sicknesses/etc. and that would often just stick around and would take a while to go away. This continued, even to a worse degree, once I graduated college and got my first (stressful) job. When these weird things would pop up I’d always call one of my closest friends that was one of my roommates in college and that was in medical school and pick her brain on what she thought could possibly be going on. I distinctly remember her telling me one time “Gosh, I really don’t know what to tell ya. You get the weirdest sicknesses. It’s almost as if your body turns on itself. Maybe you have Lupus.”
In 2015, three months after I got married, I recall noticing that my wrists were hurting, like bad, and one of my knuckles in particular was swollen. Long story short, after a series of doctors I wound up at a Rheumatologist who told me confidently when she walked in the room that “diagnosing Lupus is a very difficult thing to do, but your bloodwork is a slam dunk case.” I remember that feeling of my heart sinking and the hopelessness of that statement. Thankfully I had my husband there for support. The saving grace here though is that she followed up that statement by telling me that she couldn’t diagnose me officially until she had asked me a series of questions (essentially about other symptoms) to which all of my answers wound up being no. After the questioning and a few X-rays, she informed me that I actually did not have Lupus but I could go on to develop it. Well, that was all I needed. I’d recently gotten really into reading how diet affects our health and I was committed. If I could help it at all, I wasn’t going to let this progress into actual Lupus.
And thus, my journey was catapulted forward. Of course diet alone is not all-encompassing of "health" but it was one thing I could change and so I began a dairy-free, gluten-free, nightshade-free, reduced caffeine type of “diet” that would help me cut down on inflammation in my body thereby attempting to heal myself. At first, the thought of sustaining such a strict set of guidelines was not only scary but downright depressing. Especially because I am such a foodie! I mean, I majored in FOOD in college for crying out loud. I love everything about food. BUT, when it comes down to it, the idea of using food as medicine to heal your body is amazing when you think about it.
But how does this tie into germs? And stress? The widely-accepted theory is that it’s all connected. By keeping my exposure to bacteria/yeast/germs in general to a perceived minimum all those years and through perhaps years of unnecessary antibiotics as a youngin', I’ve stripped my body of “good bacteria” that resides in my intestinal tract and with that, all sorts of problems developed for me from food allergies to perhaps the progression of my auto-immune issues. Meanwhile, stress can exasperate it. And while I understand that it’s very likely there’s an underlying genetic component to all of this, I think there were parts of my diet and hygiene that advanced it.
Now, two years later--I’ll preface by saying that I cheat on this diet all the time…like probably have never gone longer than four-five weeks without gluten—but I feel so much better and have been able to keep my “lupus” diagnosis undiagnosed-- a massive victory for me! I’ve also been intentional about not being as “uptight” around germs and handwashing, etc. as well as made deliberate attempts to lower stress.
Needless to say, I'm now super passionate about this topic and it's led me down a really great path of discovery that I hope can help others. So let this stand for encouragement to all that reversing pain just may be possible through lifestyle modification. :)
Shay
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