have raw cake and eat it
OUR FOOD STORY
When I was in my early twenties, the time I should have been full of energy, someone asked me what one thing would making the biggest difference to my life. I realised that it was not to be tired all the time. I seemed to get lots of sleep yet still felt sluggish and found it really hard to get up in the morning. I thought it was normal to feel like that.
Even before that there were problems. I used to have real difficulty getting up for secondary school in the morning and felt tired all day there, not that I liked it much either. I started to suffer from teenage acne and was given long term antibiotics which cleared it up, but I took them for a couple of years.
I also started to suffer from regular infections around my wisdom teeth for a few years in my early twenties for which I was given frequent courses of antibiotics. I eventually had the wisdom teeth out and the infections stopped.
In my late teens and twenties I suffered regularly from thrush which was unpleasant and treated with antifungal creams. The thrush seemed to clear up after I stopped taking antibiotics for skin and gum problems. However, there were times that I suffered from various throat infections and was readily prescribed antibiotics, most of which resulted in me getting thrush and having to use antifungal creams.
I also always drunk loads of water - much more than the recommended 2 litres a day. I would not go out for the day without at least 2 litres of water in my bag and usually ended up buying more, as well as getting up to drink in the night. Whatever I was doing I would have a drink of water beside me to sip and quench my thirst. In addition to these problems, I suffered from mild asthma from the age of sixteen to my late twenties and hayfever from the age of nine.
I had been brought up on a mainly wholefood diet yet like most of my peers also ate lots of chocolate packed with sugar in my teens. At the age of 15 I decided to become vegetarian. My diet already included pulses but I started to replace the meat with more dairy products. When I was 21 I started eating small amounts of meat again and this continued into my thirties, but I only ate it perhaps once, or maybe twice a week as I never liked it much and also ate some fish. I always ate whole grains and wholewheat bread and lots of fruit and vegetables at home, but I also admit to eating bought cakes and chocolate. I was not particularly overweight and dieting was never something I did really.
When I started living with my husband we decided to start eating as much organic food as possible. We ate lots of fruit and vegetables and made our own bread and did not eat much processed food, apart from perhaps the occasional bought organic cake or chocolate. We started to eat more potatoes and bread than grains and more dairy than pulses. It was quicker to prepare when we were both busy. I thought I had a healthy diet.
Then a big shock came when I was pregnant with my first child - at 26 weeks I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes and by 32 weeks I was injecting insulin every day. I was feeling terrible by this stage, but to be honest I had felt pretty awful and totally exhausted for the whole pregnancy. I researched everything I could on the internet about gestational diabetes and experimented with different foods. I found that the only food that did not really raise my blood sugar to much was raw salad with cooked pulses and nuts and seeds, so that is what I ate a lot of for the last weeks of my pregnancy.
My beautiful son was born and I was ecstatic. I had to recover from an emergency caesarean though, after a failed induction at 37 weeks when my waters broke. Soon after the birth I had a glucose tolerance test and was told all was normal. I was so pleased to b able to breastfeed him but he needed some formula supplementation after birth due to low blood sugar.
After my son was bon I vowed to continue the healthy diet. When I started offering my son solid food at 6 months I had learnt something about raw food and was keen to offer him raw purees made with the Champion juicer I bought for the purpose. I was not really that well informed and was unsure about how to progress after the weaning stages so gradually other food crept in until I was eating the chocolate and cake I had felt so deprived of was back in the diet and even worse, my child was eating it sometimes too.
When I became pregnant with my second child I was told by the hospital that I would definitely get gestational diabetes again. I decided to totally cut out sugar and eat low glycaemic food for the duration of the pregnancy and monitor my own blood sugar regularly so that I knew what was going on with my body. Once again, at 32 weeks, I had to start injecting insulin but with a small child to look after and feeling exhausted again with the pregnancy made less effort with my diet. I took the advice of the diabetic team at the hospital which was to eat normal healthy meals but avoid sugar and use insulin rather than diet to control the diabetes.
My beautiful second son was born and again I was ecstatic. Another emergency caesarean with more antibiotics probably did not do my body much good. He struggled more with low blood sugar until my milk came in and needed formula supplements for a few days to keep his blood sugar stable. Again, I had a glucose tolerance test 6 weeks after the birth and was told all was fine but that I should eat a healthy balanced diet to prevent diabetes in the future.
During my second son’s very early days he was prescribed antibiotics twice, resulting in a candida nappy rash both times. Then all seemed fine until he started to suffer from severe, dry, flaky, itchy skin in his nappy area. We were prescribed hydrocortisone by the doctor which we were hesitant about using and it only seemed to work for a few days and then it came back. Over a period of months it became worse and worse until we could no longer put a nappy on him at all. I became convinced that something in his urine was irritating his skin.
By the time we were desperate for a solution we saw a nutritional therapist who suggested we eat a more alkaline diet and cut out wheat, yeast, dairy, eggs, sugar, potatoes, meat, caffeine and oils that are not cold pressed. We did this while eating very occasional fish and changed our diet to include lots of raw greens, spirulina, chlorella and supplemented with beneficial oils, probiotics, herbal tinctures and supplements. We bought a dehydrator and a high powered blender, experimented a lot with recipes and did lots of research. As I was breastfeeding it was important that I followed the diet too but the only way we felt we could make it work was to do it as a whole family. My husband does eat other things sometimes, but not at home as it would confuse the children.
I was amazed by the difference it made, not immediately, but over time. Our son’s nappy rash started to clear up - it seemed a little better at first but after a couple of months was completely better. I am convinced that his urine was previously too acidic. The other unexpected surprise was that I gradually started feeling better than I had done in years. My sluggishness went and I stopped needing to drink gallons of water. I lost about a stone in weight while eating as much as I wanted and then my weight stabilised and my skin started to glow. Breastfeeding had already had a great impact on reducing hayfever symptoms but since changing my diet it seemed to disappear completely. I also no longer felt the same afternoon dip I used to experience when I craved sugar and caffeine to give me a lift until the end of the day.
Since then we have not gone back to where we were and I do not think I ever will. We do now eat some eggs, meat and fish, but we do not eat soya products and avoid processed food. We now eat a lot of raw vegan food along with some soaked or sprouted, cooked grains or pulses. We try to eat fruit separately from other food as much as possible too, to avoid fermentation which encourages candida growth in the intestine.
I have found out enough about antibiotics causing candida in the intestine, which can cause a whole host of health problems, to avoid them at all cost unless absolutely necessary. Research into diabetes has led me to believe that if a mainly raw, vegan, high chlorophyll diet can actually cure diabetes, then I might have a good chance of preventing it with my diet. I do not want to be one of the 50% of women who have had gestational diabetes who develops type 2 diabetes 5-10 years after childbirth. I now am aware that my liver is quite sluggish and does not like being loaded with animal products and hard to digest fats to process. My sons have a better chance of good health this way too and I am glad they are treading a road of real wholefood rather than the processed food many children of the developed world live on. Even better, as a former chocaholic and cakeaholic, I can still have my cake an eat it, as long as it is mostly raw and sugar free.
Useful Reading
There is a Cure for Diabetes by Gabriel Cousens
Healing With Wholefoods by Paul Pitchford
Evie’s Kitchen by Shazzie
Raw Magic by Kate Wood
The Complete Book of Raw Food by Lori Baird
Green For Life by Victoria Boutenko
