On September 26, 2018, Chew Digest was born. It was born out of a life of recovery that began on June 01, 2016. The first thing I removed from my life of toxicity was alcohol. Eventually, I removed caffeine and nicotine. And somewhere in between, in late 2017, I quit eating junk food, fast foods, and processed foods. I basically removed anything with a food label that had an ingredient list. Just good home-prepared/cooked foods using whole ingredients. The foundation for what I would later discover is called a whole-food diet.
That first iteration of a whole-food diet resulted in some pretty massive detox or die-off symptoms. What is called a Herxheimer reaction (Jarisch-Herxheimer reaction) is a temporary inflammatory response that occurs when the body rapidly kills off a large number of pathogens (bacteria, fungi, parasites, or other toxins), leading to a surge of endotoxins or cellular debris into the bloodstream. However, it can also occur during detoxification processes such as fasting, oxalate dumping, or significant dietary shifts (e.g., keto/carnivore adaptation).
It was one hell of a ride for a good six months before my body started finding balance again. A roller coaster of ups, downs, emotions, and extreme weight loss. I got down to 132.5lbs. It’s not a good look at almost six feet.
At that point, I understood very little about the inner workings of the human body, but I decided I wanted to better understand what had been happening and how I could prevent my life from ever finding itself back in that bad place that could have very well wrecked my life had I not made changes. So, I started reading and self-education, which has led me to where I am today.
What followed was a little over five years of many skin problems that, at some points, were rather scary. It’s not that my dietary changes triggered these problems, it is, as I understand it, what what allowed my body to continue purging from itself what had been going wrong under the hood(epidermis) for quite some time. My body had simply been walling off what it perceived to be a threat to its homeostasis. I would later come to understand that this is a common mechanism in our body’s bag of tricks to maintain homeostasis when it encounters something that it is having trouble processing out. It simply walls it off and forgets about it.
You may be wondering what those skin problems were. I certainly didn’t know what it was, and it wasn’t until a couple of years into my journey of recovery that someone put a name on it. A rather scary name, at which point I decided to involve a practitioner of Western medicine to get their input, and they confirmed what I had been made aware of just weeks earlier. He had a suggestion of how I should approach it according to the standard of practice. However, I had a different idea. I wanted to keep treating it as I had been on my own. Even now, I look back and think I was a little cavalier in my own handling of it, but I’ve come through it, and it is no longer a problem, and I did so without any external interventions.
To be continued…