Tuesday, May 10

I had a sinus headache yesterday, and was kind of blah because of it so I didn't journal. I'm feeling much better today. Even though I am still getting headaches here and there, they are not anywhere near as bad as they used to be, where you feel like your head is going to explode and you can't think straight.

Poop was a little less solid this morning (not bad or anything) but I think that may be due to all the drainage yesterday. I was bound and determined again not to go to the aleve, so I went to the local Vitamin Shoppe to see what homeopathic remedies they had for it. I had a little printout from online of the different HPUS remedies and was trying to figure out what to get, then I looked over and saw the King Bio Sinus Relief and it had almost everything on the list I printed out, so I just went straight to that. It seems to have helped, and definitely took the pain down a couple of notches.

I still used the Sovereign Silver nasal spray, SinuOrega, and Oreganol, but it definitely added to it. I took a tsp of silver orally before bed and slept with my head elevated and woke up fine and dandy this morning. Maybe I still have some stuff draining out of the sinuses and I just need to do that for a while til my body finishes killing off all the candida monsters.

Diet is going great, I may have lost another 1/2 pound but it's hard to tell on the regular scales with the needle. My typical daily diet is a kefir shake in the morning with a cup of organic low-fat kefir, 1/2 cup almond milk, 2 scoops Amazing Grass (raw cacao infused - it has all sorts of raw greens and superfoods), 1 stevia packet, 1 tablespoon raw cacao (additional). It really is awesome and thick like a nice chocolatey milkshake and it holds me for HOURS. Then I may have some raw pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, or almond butter for a snack (morning and/or afternoon). Lunch I'm usually doing some kind of organic greens, either salad or sprouts, with the Bragg Healthy Vinaigrette (organic apple cider vinegar and organic olive oil) and some meat. Either organic chicken or fish mostly. I'm eating a lot of wild caught salmon, and honestly I think I cook it better that most restaurants but it's taken me a little bit to figure it out. The key is brushing the whole top with olive oil to keep it from drying out and then adding the seasoning. Yummy! Dinner is usually salad or sprouts and some form of meat or protein. Sometimes I just mix in some pumpkin seeds or almonds instead of meat. I'd like to be able to add a little goat cheese or something at some point, but I'm holding off for a while on that until I get the Body Ecology book read all the way through and figure out the full game plan there.

I started growing my own sprouts over the weekend. We'll see how that goes. It definitely should be cheaper to grow my own than to buy them and it's kind of fun too to watch 2 tablespoons of seed turn into a whole gob of little sproutlets.

I'm thinking that I'll eventually need to reduce my Prozac dose. Admittedly it is WAY overprescribed, but it has been a godsend to me over the past 17 years. I do remember when I first got on an SSRI how it was like having been in a black and white movie all my life and someone just suddenly flipped on the color. Seriously, it was amazing in that I had been so emotionally dead, numb, horribly shy and then all of the sudden everything changed. All sorts of new shades and new nuances of emotion I had never experienced before became possible for me and I turned into a social butterfly. Far from numbing me down or making me a zombie, I felt completely alive for the first time in my life at 19.

Quite a few years back my doctor, who does a lot of clinical trials and is pretty well known in research circles, wanted to have me participate in a trial to see if my depression could be controlled exclusively through nutrition. He thought I was a great candidate to pull of the meds altogether and go strictly that route. I was obviously an idiot (and very young) and should have tried it, but when I saw how strict the diet was I balked. I had tried once before in my early twenties to get off the meds and use St. John's Wort, but that was a freaking disaster. My GP weaned me off of it gradually and upped the St. John's Wort. I had a complete breakdown and I got mono and was pretty much in bed for 8 months (my immune system and the depression have always been pretty closely tied, whether the docs would acknowledge it or not - now I know why). Never mind I'm pretty much on the diet now.

I was on a lesser dose in my twenties, and I think a good starting point is to go back to that since getting rid of the candida seems to have relieved a lot of the little niggling stuff that I thought was part of the depression but I think now it was the candida monster. Good grief, I've probably had this crap since I was a kid. My doc is very good about advising me to integrate chromium, fish oil, phototherapy and other treatments into my arsenal - as well as letting me manage my medication dosage. In the past I've tended to reduce my dosage in summer, so sometime in the next month or so will be a good time to try knocking it down a bit.

So far I can't really tell much difference between the GTF chromium and the Chromax, but I've only been on it a few days. I was a little more draggy today than I have been, but I remember when I started chromium it took a few days to build up in my system. If I don't feel it's working as well I'll try upping the dose of the GTF chromium a bit. The mcg/lbs of body weight suggested for depression treatment is higher than the 300 mcg/day so I may still need more.