Relinquishment, Inflammation, and my Eight-Week Cleanse

Cutting vegetables is dangerous! I’m typing this with nine fingers and a band-aided, injured health soldier.

Onward!

I have been developing a theory I call Fucking Inflamed. This is what it looks like: I believe it is likely the only times I have been truly “healthy” in my life were when I was too sick to eat or drink the flat Ginger Ale my mother usually gave me when I was ill. All the other times I was either high or low from sugar, artificial sweeteners, or caffeine.

After birth I, like many children of the 1960s, was fed a formula made with evaporated milk and corn syrup. We were not built to process these sugars and chemicals. We were built to start with breast milk. Did you know that in some sections of the gut, there is one cell dividing the gut wall from the rest of the body? It’s not like we have this super-sonic rubber hose in our middles that can handle anything. We are the Maseratis of creatures! We require special care!

Childhood can be deceptive: I ate so much brownie and cookie batter instead of meals and I thought I was fine. Sure, I was moody. Sure, I cried easily. Sure, I got dizzy during track practice and would have to walk, but I was fine.

My stomach hurt most of the time, but I was fine. I was fine because I seemed alone with this kind of constant, seemingly unnamable pain, and the few times I mentioned it to friends or parents or doctors, the results were never helpful. No one I talked with knew about trauma. No one had read The Body Keeps the Score.

The problem with being inflamed, with having a gut that hurts, that makes you poop your pants out in public, is that nothing seems to help. Or at least in my case. I had no idea what the solution was.

I had no idea that maybe it was my whole life that was causing my body to exist in a state of inflammation: the trauma I experienced in utero and in birth, the food I was eating, the Diet Coke I was drinking, the stressful thoughts circling in my brain, my belief that, all the time, the other shoe was about to drop. Constant headaches. Stomacheaches. Fatigue. Muscular weakness. Difficulty sleeping. Difficulty concentrating. All of these things are signs of an inflamed body.

I learned about leaky gut. I started chewing my food more (sometimes). I started taking L-Glutamine on an empty stomach each morning. I thought about going on 4-day bone broth fasts in order to supposedly give my gut a change to heal, but I never jumped on that train because I am afraid of hunger, of how I will behave when I am hungry.

Recently I learned about leaky brain, and that was the last straw for me. If you tell me a string of three numbers and then ten seconds later ask me to repeat them, chances are good I won’t be able to do that. I keep a journal now of what I did every day and it is a struggle to remember. Usually I just put “worked” down for the morning because it’s all black to me. I have no idea what I did.

I don’t feel like defining the terms leaky gut and leaky brain here because my finger really hurts when I use it to type, so please google them if you are curious.

I bought the book The Inflammation Spectrum by Dr. Will Cole, and three days ago I started the 8-week protocol for gut/brain inflammation. I now take krill oil in the morning and have ground mucuna in water three times a day. I eat mostly vegetables and fish. I can have most fruits and grass-fed beef and lots of healthy fats.

My belly is already changing. It’s certainly flatter. It’s like I used to house an angry, anxious creature with spiky hair in there, and she’s gone. The room she occupied, disturbing me, is vacated. It’s so quiet without her! I meditate after meals and hear my stomach gurgle, doing its work. The creature used to keep the gurgling to a minimum. I wasn’t digesting as much as I was housing anxiety.

Pam Cordano told me that a decision you know you won’t break is called a bright line. I like that. This way of eating and living (more exercise, more meditation, less screen time) is a bright line for me because I feel my brain losing its strength, and even more than my belly, this scares me.

I want to be here, awake, aware.

I have this feeling that so many of the things that cause adoptees problems: ADD, ADHD, depression, skin conditions, adrenal issues, hormone-balance issues, chronic fatigue, Hashimotos, on and on and on, could very well be the result of inflammation.

I’m super curious to see what my brain and gut will be like if I don’t poison them.

I’ll work on my knife skills.

Thank you, Susan Stojanovich, again, for taking a photograph I love.