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Inger´s results
I want to document a little too, because it is so easy to just forget about things on the way.
I started the vitamin A depletion the winter 2 years ago, after having had 2 whole deer livers the previous weeks. I should have written down already then how I ended up on this journey but I didnt and now I remember just part of it..lol
I was carnivore based with organs intermittently, for about 10 years. The last years I started to feel not so good in my gallbladder area, and also skin did not look so good anymore, kind of thin and I thought I was aging way too fast. I had some weird tiny "warts" on my legs I could just scrap them opp and you could not really see them just feel small bumps but why should I have things like that? Also on my face small patches of dry coarse skin that also one could not see, but I could feel it and it was annoying, they took years to disappear.. moisturizing did not help... I just felt something as not right. My gallbladder felt tense and I could feel it almost constantly. Especially when eating certain things like butter, or nuts, etc. My issues really was pretty minor but annoying.
First year of my vitamin A depletion I ate mostly meat, and also home made spelt bread. Then I worked too much and ended up getting a mini burnout, which lead me to Karen Hurds bean protocol. So last winter I started doing that in February. I stopped all stimulants and started eating beans. I am doing a low vitamin A version of it. It helped me being able to continue working, even if I worked 2 days a week less now. I have not been perfect with it, some days I have had chocolate, or a glass of wine, or one cup of coffee, or some ice cream, but I am proud to say that most days, I have had none of that. Just beans, veggies, animal protein, nuts. Some days I have fruit, I do fruit from Finland only, like apples, pears, berries.. when i do.
Okay so have I got any results so far? Yes! The bean protocol have made my sleep so much better, my gallbladder does not hurt anymore, the tension is gone. My hair has gotten thicker, my nails have gotten stronger. The tiny bumps/warts on legs are so much less, practically gone. I am feeling so relaxed, like I would have been taking some drug. Its really crazy what happens when you stop any stimulants (also all parfumes has to go) and start eating beans instead. I am sooo chilled now.
Dry patches on face skin has also diminished but is still not entirely gone, and also dry skin on lower legs is still there, even if a tiny bit better. I have suffered from this annoying very dry skin on my lower legs for many years now. No creams help. I am so curious if it will ever heal. I so hope. I do believe so because it is a tiny bit better. I do take foot baths with mineral salt some days/week and then I also scrub off that dry skin off my legs and feet and it is amazing how much skin the body produces because even if I do it every other day there is still skin to scrub off! My feel look much better now though, when i have this routine I get baby feet. In the beginning of the vitamin A detox my feet looked so not pretty. So dry and swollen and ugly I was shocked. I am a bit of a feet fetischist so I like when my feet are pretty, it really bothered me. Thats when I started doing the regular foot baths and scrubbing. Like the first year I did it almost every day. Now I do them several times / week. I have a feeling the skin producing has slowed down! That would be a great thing.
I wonder if anyone else here do the skin scrubbing thing to help detox the vitamin A faster. It must be the vitamin A toxicity that has dysregulated the skin to replicate way too fast, I cant come up with any other theory why the dry skin.
Another little progress I noticed the other day is, that my cellulite has gotten a little less... yay! I have not lost weight really, because I am not focusing on that yet, maybe soon, but first I just wanted to give my body lots of nutrients to help the healing, even if I would gain some fat. I dont care too much about weight right now. Bikini season is not yet here, and it is also not bad to have a little extra fat layer in the cold winters of Finland. Still that cellulite is slowly disappearing makes me thing my body has finally gotten rid of so much poison from the liver, so that it slowly can start healing other tissue.
I used to weight 56 kg at 166 cm, now I am 67 kg. Yeah its a bit much but somehow I am very confident I am going to weight way less comes spring! First and foremost I want to heal my liver, I am so sure it was totally clogged up from not eating any soluble fiber at all, being carnivore and eating organs and lots of oysters, crazy amount of oysters. My poor liver. Also using nicotine gum every day for 8 years, drinking lots of wine, and coffee. So much stress working as a waitress late nights. What a disaster.
Now I have decided to not work at all this winter and only concentrate on healing, which feels like such a luxury. I am not even going to think about what am I going to do when spring comes, I am just going to live day by day this winter and not stressing about anything. Just chillin and eating beans 🙂
Being chill is a really good sign. Congratulations on making the effort, sticking with it even when progress was minimal, or when you actually doubted that a low vitamin A diet would do anything. That's probably the hardest part of any lifestyle change. It is usually only in hindsight that we know something was actually successful. Change happens so gradually and slowly that it's almost imperceptible. So it's easy to have doubts. Social expectations can also get in the way. Especially family can be tough. I stopped talking about my diet a long time ago. My family would tease me about things like grounding. Most of the time I can take it, it's just when I'm not feeling so good that I wish there was more interest in the means I'm trying to help myself.
Quote from Hermes on December 10, 2023, 3:16 pmBeing chill is a really good sign. Congratulations on making the effort, sticking with it even when progress was minimal, or when you actually doubted that a low vitamin A diet would do anything. That's probably the hardest part of any lifestyle change. It is usually only in hindsight that we know something was actually successful. Change happens so gradually and slowly that it's almost imperceptible. So it's easy to have doubts. Social expectations can also get in the way. Especially family can be tough. I stopped talking about my diet a long time ago. My family would tease me about things like grounding. Most of the time I can take it, it's just when I'm not feeling so good that I wish there was more interest in the means I'm trying to help myself.
@christian, thank you. It has been darn hard at times, not going to lie. So I am very proud of myself! Even if I do deviate from plan once in a while. But mostly I hold tight. And its so hard to give up the drugs. Coffee, nicotine, sugar... wine.. and there is nothing you can soothe yourself with. Just staying with the own pain is darn hard. But it is just for a moment. And then the pain goes away and instead comes this good good feeling in the whole body. It IS worth it.
The healing is such a bumpy road and sometimes gets worse before better and its so not linear.. and it takes so long time! Kudos to us who do this 🙂
But now when I wake up in the morning I am not looking like a monster in my face like I used to haha.. That is so worth it. And the feeling is the best. Like being on opiates. Our body must make a shit load of opiates when we stop stimulating it from the outside, that is my hypothesis 🙂
The family thing... oh yes. I moved from Germany to Finland 2 years ago and moved in to my parents big house where I rent an apartment. And I can tell it has not been easy. Thats why I dont eat with them except when they really beg me. Normally I eat for myself always, I also need my own space I am so used to live away from my parents/family. Yesterday I did eat dinner with them because my dad so much asked me to join. But later I did regret it because it just does not make me happy. I do go down always when my siblings come and we eat together but that is enough. I dont know how I am going to survive Christmas! haha.. I want to run away somewhere. But then I think maybe just one moment in time and just stay present and not give in to the indulging of sweets and alcohol... because thats not going to make me feel good. Its just that I got severely traumatized from the whole religion thing and its very triggering to hear all the talk and reading from the bible at times. But then I am thinking, I could use the trigger to heal my trauma, if I just manage to stay present in it. So it has its good sides like all pain probably has 🙂
Religion: is like supplements. I suppose, like Jordan Peterson, I'd rather live in a world with religion than without. But, like supplements, religion can sure lead to problems too LOL. Praying, listening to God and doing good works are all going to help you feel better IMO. Whether religion is true or not is kind of a moot point when you look at it that way.
Hermit-ness: Sometimes I wonder if it's not that I don't like others, maybe I don't like *myself* around others. Afterwards I just want to take all the things I said and jam them back down my throat. Maybe it is a type of self acceptance to start to like yourself around others. It feels weird tho. Some of the stoic ideas like "you don't have to have an opinion on every subject" and "you have two ears and one mouth for a reason" help a lot. :). Also coming up with ways to make people laugh makes you feel good after.
Quote from lil chick on December 11, 2023, 11:17 amReligion: is like supplements. I suppose, like Jordan Peterson, I'd rather live in a world with religion than without. But, like supplements, religion can sure lead to problems too LOL. Praying, listening to God and doing good works are all going to help you feel better IMO. Whether religion is true or not is kind of a moot point when you look at it that way.
Hermit-ness: Sometimes I wonder if it's not that I don't like others, maybe I don't like *myself* around others. Afterwards I just want to take all the things I said and jam them back down my throat. Maybe it is a type of self acceptance to start to like yourself around others. It feels weird tho. Some of the stoic ideas like "you don't have to have an opinion on every subject" and "you have two ears and one mouth for a reason" help a lot. :). Also coming up with ways to make people laugh makes you feel good after.
You might be into something there. I do love true spirituality, I just cant endure all the crazy clothing or other rules and judging of others and all these things that religion just brings. God is for me the same as also Love and acceptance. So here comes the challenge, can I accept that people have religions and weird rules? haha.. Sure thats what I am learning. Like mentally I accept it but when it comes to practice its a whole other thing. I can sit at the table and feel so much inner disturbance when those talk starts. Like my innermost is screaming.. NO. But if I learn to just sit with that, accept that it feels uncomfortable.. without haveing to act on it, then I am maybe learning something.
Humor is a great thing 🙂 it can ease a lot of tension.
Finally guests left the house and the holiday stress is over. If was hard for me. I am just not in the form of partying and guest at all yet. So I ate a lot of things I dont normally do. Sugar etc. Alcohol. Okay not a lot but still, I have not had any alcohol since fall. And it felt so good, but I just was not able to endure the family stress/trauma trigger without indulging in what was on the table. Not good i know and it made me feel even worse but yeah. Now I was curious how much weight I had gained, and stepped on the scale today morning. I was 67,4 before Christmas.
And I was ready for a shock of weighing close to 70 kg now. But.. I was 66,7 kg. I could not believe my eyes. I had to weigh in twice but it was the same. How can it be, as I overeat many times and really felt not good. haha, so funny! My skin is not nice though. I have gotten several pimples and look tired and not so good.Still I am amazed how i did not gain weight. Also, my cellulite has not increased either! What I lost of it, is still gone!
I do have tried to do my 30 minute yoga stretching every day though, and the lymphatic massage the big 6, I have done every day. Maybe it has helped! yay.
I did fermented lentils before Christmas, and they turned out great, together with some cabbage. But what is so funny is, now they have started to get mini-sprouts in the glass jar in my fridge! I cooked the lentils maybe 15 minutes, until al dente as the recipe asked for. But how can they start sprouting after cooking!! They must have lots of will to live in them 🙂
Maybe the sprout was inside the seed, just about to emerge, and when you cooked them it popped out!
Quote from lil chick on January 3, 2024, 8:04 amMaybe the sprout was inside the seed, just about to emerge, and when you cooked them it popped out!
no no 😉 they were un soaked lentils, and I am very sure the sprouts did not pop out when cooking 🙂
I need to post a picture. Its pretty magical! I have to watch if the sprouts get any longer.
Some weeks ago I started to add 3 cloves garlic every day, spread over the day. Karen Hurd says garlic and bean combination takes out mold, heavy metals etc. from the body. She says this is powerful. I decided to give it a try. There is some minor mold in this apartment I guess, there is a few small spots on the ceiling under the white paint, from where they have attached the solar panels on the roof, I guess the roof has leaked some there. Anyhow, you cant smell anything, and this is a wooden house with pretty good air conditioning so I am not too worried but I thought the garlic thing might be great. Just to transport out mold if there would be any.
So what I have noticed from this is, and I am pretty sure that must be it, since doing that the vascularity in my eyes have lessened. On my left eye it is pretty much totally gone, and the right eye have some little bit left. It is also constant, this improvement. My eyes used to be like this; sometimes the vascularity was worse sometimes better, it could vary during the day. When I went to the lake and stayed there for the day, grounded in the sun, the vascularity was pretty much gone. But it came back.
So this is pretty exciting for me. It shows me the garlic does something. I will continue with it.
I wonder what causes vascularity in the eyes.
I have also since a couple days, started eating more raw.
I have been eating almost all things cooked for a long time now and all of a sudden I got this craving for raw things. Like my body really wants it now. So I decided to give it a try. I used to eat almost everything raw for many years and I do love the taste and the light feeling it comes with. I even made me salmon tartar on arugula and it tasted so divine! I am not too worried about eating a little beta carotene now when I do eat beans every day, as they take out bile and vitamin A so efficiently. I also have been grating some raw red beet and mixing it with garlic and olive oil and its so yummy. I dried up some raw meat slices too, home made jerky, and made some beef tartare. Lets see where this will lead me..lol I do eat beans 3 times / day at least, cooked of course. But most of the other things I do raw. Like 80/20 raw/cooked. This is just a test and if it goes all wrong I will revert back to mostly cooked.
What have changed too is that I could not tolerate raw veggies just a couple weeks/months ago, I got this very minor intermittent dull pain in my colon from eating them. Thats why I avoided it. Cooked veggies were no issues. So I was very anxious if eating all these raw veggies now will give me issues but it didnt! My colon must have healed, I can eat all the raw cabbage or salad or whatever, and no pain.. in fact my bowel motility increased from once a day to twice a day and my belly bloat has gone down.
I am wondering if cooked protein + cooked starch/veggies was a little heavy for my colon. idk. I remember reading somewhere, raw meat/fish with cooked starch would digest better that cooked protein + cooked starch. It does seem to be true.