The month of September was just so sunny and beautiful in my area. I was basking in the sun and enjoying every minute of it knowing that it was short lived. Last week the weather changed and the clouds rolled in and stole the wonderful sun away and brought with it the rain. That is when I found out that I could hardly get up from bed. I also could not stop crying and for no reason at all. It was extremely hard just to get my kids of too school and getting through the days was all I could do. It was getting worse and worse every day. This definitely was not normal!

I don’t know how it can happen so quickly – that one day I just can’t get out of bed anymore. I was feeling emotionally beaten up and had no fight left in me.

Four days of this was enough for me to go out and splurge on some vitamins. Usually I make a great effort to get sun on my skin everyday and take Cod Liver Oil all for the Vitamin D. However I picked up some Vit. D pills just to get me through the winter. I also picked up a Multi B vitamin as it is generally known to fight depression and good for adrenals and stress management.

I took my supplements that night which consists of:

• Vitamin C 1000mg
• Multi Vitamin B 100s
• Vitamin D up to 4000iu depending on sun exposure
• Vitamin E mixed Tocopherol 400 IU
• Cod Liver Oil
• Handful of Dulse for iodine
• Magnesium Powder

After adding the Vitamin D and B vitamins I feel like a whole NEW person. The sun did not shine for days but it did not matter anymore. The tears went away and the energy came back.

One thing that I was also looking to buy was full spectrum lighting to put in my kitchen as this is the place in my house that I spend a lot of time. I don’t need that right now but as the fall and winter season arrives I will probably have my husband install the new lights.

Absorbing Nutrients

I am eating a healthy and nutritious diet and getting lots of Vitamin B through my food as well as getting Sunshine. Why is it that adding these two “pills” would make such a difference. Why can’t I get the same effect from eating liver which is rich in those vitamins?

I am assuming that the food has to get digested and broken down by the digestive bacteria and fed to the cells and a vitamin pill is a lot easier to absorb.

A healthy gut is the KEY to optimal health.

Food digestion is critical to health and that is why I blog so much about my Candida Yeast issues. I am also an advocate for fermented foods such as yogurt, sauerkraut, beet kvass, kefir which replenishes the gut with healthy bacteria and fight yeast and pathogens. Fermented foods also aid with digestion problems like diarrhea, constipation, acid reflux, gas, bloating and food allergies.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Anxiety

My OCD normally gets worse when we start burning the wood stove for heat. So far it has not been so bad. I check the stove before leaving the house or going to bed like I always do but the anxiety around it is not there. My anxiety in general has gone down. Not totally gone away but I am able to fall asleep without worrying about the house burning down, my kids dying or someone breaking in.

This is a breakthrough! It is absolutely horrible to feel afraid to sleep.

As I wear my heart on my sleeve I hope that someone may be helped with my battles and breakthroughs. Instead of reaching for medication I try to find out what nutritional needs might not be getting met and then try to remedy it. This is the long way to healing but at the moment it is the only one I got. Hiring a holistic doctor is not affordable at this time.

My History Note: When I was battling suicidal depression as a teenager my father sent me to an Iridologist. This Iridologist put me on vitamins and I pulled out of the depression rather quickly. Vitamin D and Multi Bs were part of my vitamin cocktail. I thought that I was just growing out of the teenage hormones change and did not give much credit to those vitamins. Eventually I stopped taking them.
Right now I feel a lot better than when I was taking St. Johns Wort and Sam-E. Those are natural anti-depressants and supposedly work as well as medications prescribed by doctors for mild depression.

At this point I give the credit for my well being to the vitamins.

An exciting update: after I wrote this post I talked to my father and spoke of my health issues. He was witness to what I went through as a teenage kid so he understands greatly what it is to be “unbalanced”. So he has offered to pay for me to go to an alternative doctor! I am absolutely ecstatic!!!

This post is part of Fight Back Fridays hosted by Food Renegade

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Did you know that 1 out of 150 children will be diagnosed with Autism? That is a staggering statistic. Jenny McCarthy’s son was one of those children diagnosed with Autism. She wrote a book about their journey to recovery titled Louder Than Words: A Mother’s Journey In Healing Autism.

I picked this book up because I knew that part of her son’s recovery was through healing gut issues. Specifically Candida Albicans overgrowth.

I really enjoyed reading this book. Actually I could barely put it down. The book starts with how Evan got diagnosed and chronicles his healing. At the beginning Jenny is so traumatized with her son’s seizures that she allows the doctors to make the decisions for her son. She soon realizes that she has to go with her own gut feeling and starts to become more informed by asking the question “Why is this happening?” The doctors continually just wanted to treat the symptoms (ban aid solutions) and not the true cause of the illness.

Today her son is fully recovered from autism. He has gone through behavioural programs, diet changes (gluten free, casein free), as well as healing from Candida Yeast. She touches on Candida near the end of this book. Her son Evan started to regress and have Obsessive Compulsive Behaviour (OCD). His behaviour would get so bad that she would get scared of him. An example of this behaviour: Evan would bang his head on the floor for hours.

Evan had gotten a stool culture that had showed severe yeast overgrowth. Evan`s DAN doctor (Defeat Autism Now) thought that that his OCD behaviour was a result of this yeast. So Evan went on Diflucan (anti fungal medicine) and a sugar free diet (including eliminating fruit). The Candida die-off period was extremely hard on Evan. He had physical die off symptoms as well as behavioural outrage, teeth grinding and in Jenny’s own words “he went full-blown Exorcist on me”.  After two weeks of Candida die-off Evan had a major breakthrough in regards to his Autism.

Evan stopped taking Diflucan after a while and switched to the probiotic Threelac.

I was hoping to get more medical information out of this book. However it is more of a mother’s emotional story and her struggles in parenting an autistic child (and what happens in a marriage when a child is sick). She does have some websites that she refers to in her reference section that I have yet to check out.

It is great to find out that doctors that treat autism are finding the gut/brain connection and are actually treating it!

You can find out what my doctor said about the candida/gut/brain connection at this post.

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