Over the last 3 months I've lost 20 pounds, most of that within the last month I think. Being on an elimination diet certainly didn't help, and neither did the infection. So now I'm supposed to be focused on calories, calories, calories! But as you know from reading the info on the rest of my website, not all calories are created equal. So getting enough calories while still adhering to a modified SCD and the rules of food combining has been difficult. The worst part of it is that I have lost my appetite almost completely, and the minocycline and bactrim leave a bad taste in my mouth so that some foods taste funny. Ugh. 

Anyway, I've been on the SCD for over a month now and given that I need to gain weight, I am making some adjustments based on what my body says is okay or not okay. Therefore, I added white organic sushi rice this week. I saw an amazing acupuncturist last week who told me I have a yin deficiency and therefore should be drinking a lot more water and eating a lot more oils. So I have decided that adding sushi rice (a very simple and easy-to-digest grain, relative to other starches) may play an important role as a medium for lots of oil. 

So I made a rice congee and added ghee and rice vinegar. It was delicious and I had no adverse symptoms from it. I had it again the next day with tamari with no adverse effects. Two days later I made sushi rice in the rice cooker and ate it for breakfast at work. But this time I added two tablespoons of flaxseed oil and one tablespoon of sesame oil, plus the regular rice vinegar and tamari. About an hour later I started to feel a familiar feeling in my intestines, which I can only describe as the sesame oil cramps. I realize now that I had felt this same thing many times in the past year since I began using sesame oil (unrefined, cold-pressed, organic), especially when combined with protein. So I think, unfortunately, that I am sensitive to sesame oil and/or it has gone rancid (polyunsaturated oils do that easily) so I can't digest it well. Bummer, it's so delicious. But I still have ghee, olive oil, and coconut oil, which seem to do me no harm. I've got to test flaxseed oil alone to see what happens. 

I also discovered that I am sensitive to almonds (alone) and almond butter. The almond butter is the biggest bummer, since it's so sweet and fatty and delicious. But it's ridiculously expensive, so maybe it's best I not indulge anyway. I've switched to tahini instead, but it doesn't have the same sweetness. But I like the astringent quality of it on tart green apples. It's curious, however, that when my osteopath tested my electric field to see if I was sensitive to the foods I brought in, my electric field got stopped up with the whole almonds, but was fine when I held a Larabar that had cherries and almond pieces in it. Those bars seem to do me fine, but I noticed that almond butter slows down my digestion and can give me cramps and a feeling of constipation. 

In order to gain weight I bought a case of guar-gum free coconut milk, and after the first 5 cans I began to get sick of it. I never thought it could happen, but now I wonder if I can force myself to chug down yet another coconut smoothie (the only way to get 36 g of healthy fat in a glass!). One can has 72 grams of fat! And it's mostly made up of an easier to digest fat called medium-chain triglycerides, which is also highly antibacterial and antifungal. So I just need to suck it up and chug it, or get my damn appetite back. 

Update (7/30/13): I have decided to eliminate rice from my diet altogether, so now I am completely grain-free. I decided to do this because although I can tolerate rice without G.I. symptoms, it could be causing inflammation that I cannot feel, as well as triggering my leaky gut and preventing my digestive system from fully healing and recovering. Plus, I've discovered a lot more recipes and ways to get in calories without rice, so I don't really need it anymore anyway. 

Since my last post I made when I made that huge discovery in my dietary regime, things have gone downhill a bit. Unfortunately, about a week after this discovery my family visited, and the energy that it took to host them knocked me back and my immune system couldn't handle it. I stayed on the regime, and even started the Intro Diet one more time, thinking I had introduced new foods too quickly. But eventually it came down to a simple but hard to admit truth - the stress of my family's visit had allowed the MRSA to overgrow, and now I had a lung infection. Phooey. 

So last week I started oral antibiotics again (minocycline and bactrim combo) and I felt better within two days. In fact, I responded more quickly to the drugs than I ever have before, which to me seems like another indication that my diet has removed some blockages to the small intestine's uptake of nutrients, or in this case drugs. Plus, it is the first time I've been on antibiotics in 4 months! That is the longest time I've been antibiotic-free in years! So, I can pat myself on the back for that at least. I made it a long time, and it was only my family's visit that triggered my decline. Well, I'll never know that for sure, but it sure was stressful and I have proven to myself over and over and over again that my body is VERY sensitive to stress. 

Actually, stress is a huge trigger for inflammation and infection in all CFers, so a big part of every CFer's medical regime must be de-stressing time. When my family was visiting, my de-stressing regime was disrupted, and I was not able to do my daily hikes in the woods or silent contemplations. These things are more important to my health than I realized! For me personally, I must live a mostly silent, solitary life in order to conserve my energy for healing. It's important that all of us reflect on this regularly - am I spending enough quiet time with myself? Have I set aside time to clear out the mental debris today? How much energy am I expending on other people or other physical phenomena? For CFers, these are important questions to be asking ourselves. 

One of the clearest tools of communication my body uses to give me strong messages is coughing up blood. If I'm not listening to my body, if I am not regularly clearing mental debris, if I am not hiking or reflecting enough, if I am expending too much energy on external things, my body lets me know (in an unavoidably loud voice) that I need to stop what I'm doing and look inward. When my family was here, I was too distracted, and so I could rarely stop and reflect. I felt the consequences by coughing up blood almost every night for a week until they left. I started antibiotics and began my reflection regime again, and haven't coughed up blood since. Sure, the antibiotics have helped reduce inflammation, which may have led to the hemoptysis, but I've had big bouts of hemoptysis on antibiotics before. It seems to have much more to do with my spiritual/mental state than what drugs I'm on or not on. I've tracked this trend in my health log, just to make sure. I am an empiricist, after all.