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.