Hey look! Another brain fog post. 😉
Over the Easter holiday weekend, we ate mostly prepared foods (things like Applegate Farm beef hot dogs and roasted turkey lunch meat, Tings, and potato chips) to make running around easier and to give me a break from cooking. I had a major hiccup and even had fudge covered Oreos. It has been a LONG time since I splurged like that. Was it worth it? Nope. Double bummer. There was no Easter candy around so I was safe there. We ended up in full crankitude – crankiness with a side of attitude – by Sunday and even skipped Easter dinner with some extended family due to my adrenal exhaustion. We’ll be doing a make up next week with our more immediate family instead.
With all of this pervasive yuckiness, I thought we should ‘clean house’ today and did a mild detox for Katie and I. Last night, I started watching the first of a few documentaries on the Gerson Therapy to cure cancer and other serious diseases so spent part of my morning poking around on their website. It was a good reminder to juice as a powerful and also gentle cleanse. I focused on fresh juices and ferments, and we ate meat only when we craved it.
We feel better and had more energy today after our first juice. My adrenals are still tired since I wrung them out to dry with too much activity over the last week and less than optimal food over the weekend. My skin started getting itchy today and I’ve had a few itchy bumps I believe are a reaction to the dying candida from juicing and extra ferments. We should have both had detox baths today but I wanted to conserve our energy. We’ll both have Bragg’s apple cider vinegar (ACV) baths in the morning to beat back any candida that may have been ‘stimulated’ by the extra cheats. I know I’ve been affected by it. I have brain fog that I haven’t experienced it for months and am randomly itchy. I can safely say I didn’t miss the symptoms.
Here’s our food for the day:
(all ingredients are organic except honey, salt, elderberry, sardines, and wakame)
Juice #1: carrot, celery, ginger, water kefir
Smoothie: frozen banana, avocado, blueberry, raw local honey, maple syrup, Great Lakes beef gelatin, unrefined sea salt; took Enzymedica Digest Spectrum digestive enzymes*
Lunch: grass-fed hamburgers, lacto-fermented sauerkraut juice, and zucchini sauteed in olive oil & unrefined sea salt (I still use olive oil on occasion for low temp cooking just because we like the taste); took Enzymedica Digest Spectrum digestive enzymes
Katie’s sweet craving after lunch (that’s a bad sign): water kefir with about a tablespoon of Natural Sources elderberry concentrate
Juice #2: apple, celery, ginger, beet, lacto-fermented sauerkraut juice
Late afternoon snack/early dinner: Katie – leftover hamburger & zucchini from lunch with lacto-fermented pickle and wakame flakes (seaweed); me – sardines, lacto-fermented pickle, leftover zucchini, wakame flakes
still hungry Katie: potato chips while I try to complete my grocery list :hangs head in shame:
(impromptu) Dinner/before bed snack: a mixed dish of sardines, lacto-fermented pickles, crushed potato chips [Katie was begging for sardines]
* I happened to pick these up at Whole Foods Market on a whim and am so happy I did. I tried Betaine HcL with pepsin on Katie and it seems to help her digest for a meal or two and then enhanced her bellyaches thereafter. The combination of enzymes in Digest Spectrum have done an amazing job to help all of us digest our meals better with no side effects. I only use them when we have sluggish digestion, bellyaches, or when hubby takes a dose of fermented cod liver oil (FCLO) so he doesn’t burp it up all day. I will start doing some more research on enzymes and how they work throughout the body soon.