Kristi and I have seen some really encouraging improvements in my health over the last four months. As of today, we have completed 123 days on our life changing diet plans. But this week, we hit a bit of a speed bump.

After watching the documentary Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead, I decided that I wanted to do a juice fast, so Kristi has been juicing three times a day. But this week, I realized that a juice fast probably isn’t the best thing for me. The problem is that when I’m only drinking juice, I’m not getting enough calories or fat, and my muscles seem to get weaker.

When I have bad days, like two days ago, I get so weak that I cannot transfer myself off of my wheelchair or back onto it by myself. I have a hard time roaming around our condo, and when you add the fact that I don’t have energy because of juice fasting, it just becomes unbearable. There are other factors at play too. For instance, when I get too hot, I become this blob of goo that can’t be moved. It is a heat intolerance that comes with MS, and it really stinks to be so easily affected by heat when you live in Texas.

Well this is what happened to me two nights ago. I was not able to transfer myself back onto my wheelchair when I was in the bathroom. It is bad enough that the toilet is a very hard surface, and it was quite late at night. After one try of getting up, I started feeling very dizzy. My right arm felt like is was completely numb which means I might be starting to overheat. This is a really bad sign.

It always starts off with my right arm going numb. Then I start to lose feeling in my legs followed very closely by my body swaying because of dizziness. I cannot even begin to explain what I am feeling at the time except that I am afraid. I can barely speak, my arms become useless, and my understanding of what needs to be done to get me up does not make sense to me. Simply put, I feel FEAR!

I cannot even imagine what Kristi is feeling at the time. It seems that it is almost entirely up to her to get me on the wheelchair. She’s not a tall girl, but I will tell you that she is by far the strongest woman I have ever met. Now as you know, I am not a small guy. I mean I ate complete garbage over the last few year. Kristi has no problem picking me up from my wheelchair and throwing me on to the bed.

She does have a problem getting me back onto the wheelchair in the bathroom. We have a very cramped bathroom as you can imagine with our condo only being 834 sq feet. How did we get me on the wheelchair? We started by giving me a B-12 supplement. B-12 gives me a lot more energy and seems to “wake” me up. Then we added turmeric (which seems to loosen my tendons up) and ascorbic acid. She then brought a fan into the bathroom and had it blowing directly on me to cool me down. On top of all of that, we did a lot of praying.

After taking that stuff and waiting about an hour, we were able to get me back on my wheelchair. The next transfer onto the bed was a breeze. Needless to say I slept very soundly that night. I was exhausted from that event. That day was a horrible day. We both thought those days were in the past, so it was a bit discouraging to have to deal with it once again. I was thinking so much about how horrible that day was that I forgot about the awesome day I was about to begin the next day.

This happens every time I have a bad day. The next day always turns out to be a stellar day. And it was a great day! I had no issues with strength. I did not get tired as much. I was very energetic. The best part was that I had a great attitude and I was happy.

I wanted to share this with you because I want to be as real as possible about our journey. I don’t ever want to give the impression that this whole “getting healthy” is simple, and that we never have any frustrating moments. And I would never want to give that impression especially if someone is reading this who also deals with MS or a similar disease. But even though we still have those frustrating moments, Kristi and I try to look at the big picture. My overall health has improved dramatically since the end of last year. Overall, my quality of life is 150% better than it was just four months ago. Things are getting better.

From time to time in my journey of dealing with MS, my gallbladder has caused some pretty serious issues. But for the longest time, we had no idea it was my gallbladder.

I remember visiting my in-laws one time, and not being able to get up off the floor after I had fallen. We had no clue as to what was happening to me. I was losing strength, and found myself having to rush to the bathroom.

At this point we had not accepted embraced that I had M.S. We thought that I had just mistreated my body so badly in the past that it caused me my symptoms, and later we have decided that it caused the MS. I have done a lot of rotten things in my life: drugs, alcohol, eating fast food on every meal, drinking tons of soda, steroid use in my younger years, and smoking for 14 years.

The fact that my life took a downhill spiral was no real surprise to me. Now to Kristi it has been quite a shock. When she thought about my past, it really did not bother her. We still did not understand why I was having so much strength issues following each meal. It started out that we thought it was Bush’s Chicken, one of our past favorite fast food (fried food) restaurants.

Every time I ate there, I would get weaker. We thought that maybe the food had MSG’s in it which it probably did, but that was not the immediate cause of my problems. In fact, we went back after months of not eating there, which means we were eating a lot of Taco Bell, and the strength issues did not show up for a few visits. It seemed to happen again when we visited a Burger King. Yeah it is no surprise that we both got so fat.

I had just started seeing a chiropractor that my mother-in-law was so generous to send me too. He was really into this natural healing stuff, and I told him about my issue. He walked over to my right side while I was laying on my back, and pressed on my stomach two inches down below my rib cage on my right side. I felt a horrendous pain shoot up my entire body. That is when he announced the problem to me. It was a clogged gall bladder.

This began my realization of how sugar effects my body. I ignored his warnings and continued slurping down my 96 oz of Dr. Pepper per day. We tried diets on and off, from the Atkins diet, to just eating at home, to only salads from Schlotzky’s. All of those diets ended up with us crashing due to our sugar cravings. The reason our bodies craved sugar was because I had candida issues and sugar feeds candida.

Candida and clogged gall bladders tend to go hand in hand. The candida makes you crave sugar which then clogs up your gall bladder. It is a vicious cycle that is very hard to break away from.

At the beginning of this year, we were able to break free from our sugar addiction. But within the last two days, the problem has returned. No, we haven’t started eating processed sugar or fast food. I was eating something that I thought was perfectly healthy. I was eating honey. The problem wasn’t really that I was eating honey, but I started eating quite a bit of it.

After the problems returned (including the muscle weakness), we decided that we need to get me back on our plan. This means no more honey for me. Not even a little with lemon and water.

Sugar has such an addiction in this household for far too long, but after this year, we know how to break its grasp on our lives. I have been away from honey, and added it to my “do not eat” list, which is a bummer since I have a fantastic all-natural, dairy-free ice cream recipe that we created a week or so ago. I am still planning on sharing that recipe with you soon, as the ingredients really are a great alternative to the processed stuff you get in store-bought ice cream. But sadly for me, I won’t be able to have any. At least not any time in the near future.

Many of you may know me as the anti-medication. I have not gone on any meds in 24 years. I did take OTC meds when I first married Kristi, taking up to 8 Advil and 12 Tums per day, but she got me off of those pronto.

She taught me so much about medication and its side effects. That is what got me started looking into herbs to help with M.S. pains.

When my mother-in-law told me about LDN (Low Dose Naltrexone), I looked it up by the call letters and researched the wrong drug with the same call letters.

Then someone else in one of my groups on Facebook suggested it, and then a friend suggested it. After three suggestions, I decided I needed to seriously research it.

Come to find out that I was researching the wrong medication. I found videos of people with M.S. who were helped by LDN. In fact, it helps a lot of diseases, and it has no known negative side effects. The only side effect that I have experienced is very vivid dreams, so vivid that I’ve tried having dream-related conversations with Kristi while I was still alseep.

Yes, I have been taking it for a week and a half. I have seen little improvements until today. I usually have a lot of problems lifting my legs up when lying on my back. This morning I lifted my leg up about a foot AND HELD IT THERE. That was such a shock. I usually could lift my leg only a few inches then let it drop right away. Today, I actually held it up for a few seconds.

Also, my muscle spasms have been reduced, the tightness in muscles is reduced, and the pain in my back is gone. In fact, I don’t need to take turmeric anymore, which helped a lot with my back pain. Also I am finding it easier to push myself around in my wheelchair and stop quicker.

I’m definitely encouraged by the improvement that I’ve seen in such a short time, and I’m excited to see what happens in the future as I keep taking it.

If you know of someone who suffers from an autoimmune disease (and it can even help those who suffer from cancer), and would like more information on Low Dose Naltrexone, I suggest these resources: