I’m so tired
These last few days have been pretty rough for me. Not that anything bad has happened. My relationships are great; my job is great; my home life is great. I’ve just been so tired.
It all started two weeks ago when my mom fell very ill. We didn’t know what her ailment was, but she was completely bedridden, and couldn’t bear lights or sounds. The doctor eventually concluded that she had fungal pneumonia. The cause? She had been cleaning out boxes in our moldy basement the week before, and the mold had gotten into her lungs somehow.
It’s remarkably hard to get fungus out of your lungs. Most antibiotics kill on contact, but you can’t easily get antibiotics in there. But one way to do it is through proper diet. If you don’t eat the food that the fungus thrives on, it will die.
There’s a diet that my family did a long time ago (maybe 10 years or so) that at the time really helped us a lot. We kids always had terrible allergies, but after doing this diet, we weren’t sensitive anymore. That diet was called GAPS. It involves cutting out everything except the things your body can digest super easily (ie boiled meats and vegetables), and then very slowly adding other things back in. Potatoes? rice? beans? Out. Carrots, onions, amd squash boiled in broth? That’s more like it. You can’t even have seasonings other than salt at first.
So because of my family’s earlier success with this diet, and because it should help with my mom’s fungal problem, we decided to give it a go again.
It’s now been just over a week since we started, and we plan on going for about a month (full GAPS lasts for 2 years, but our goal is to just use the GAPS intro period as a bit of a gut reset). And things are going pretty well! My mom is and sister are masterfully good at creating delicious meals from basic ingredients, and they make sure we don’t get too repetitious in our food. I really can’t complain about how it’s going.
The only bit that’s been hard to adjust to is the lack of carbs. Usually I thrive on a very carb-heavy diet. That’s where I get most of my energy. But with the majority of my carbs coming from carrots now, my body is feeling the deficiency. Which leads to an overall lethargy and lack of energy.
So when I started this post by saying that I have no energy, that’s the reason. I’m just still adjusting to this new low-carb diet, and my body hasn’t caught up yet. Hopefully it does so and I can get back to normal. But even if not, I can stick this out for a month.
-Jakobus