Dental Nightmare

I seem to have trouble finding and hanging onto a dentist. One will have scheduling problems, another drops my insurance, another never took my insurance in the first place. I go every six months, but lately it’s been to a different dentist every time. I jokingly call this my, “dental curse.”

Today, the curse reached critical mass.

In searching for my next new dentist I consulted both my dental insurance company (to see who would take their coverage) and then Yelp. I found a conjunction of taking my dental insurance and having many, many glowing and positive Yelp reviews in the form of Best Dental Care PC and Dr. Lucy. I called to make an appointment and spoke to a very friendly, helpful, and funny receptionist who walked me through the process of changing my insurance info over to them and filling out all my new patient paperwork ahead of time on their lovely website. I mentioned how good their Yelp reviews were and she said something a bit odd to the effect of, “I wish people wouldn’t rely on Yelp so much because anyone can put anything on there.” In retrospect, this probably should have been Red Flag Number 1. 

Regardless, an appointment was made.

Red Flag Number 1: When I first walked in the door today, I noticed that the name Dr. Lucy wasn’t on the front door, which was odd, because she was the dentist all the positive Yelp reviews were raving about. “Odd,” I thought, “where is Dr. Lucy?”

Red Flag Number 2: At the front desk, the extremely chatty and friendly receptionist told me that there was a problem with my dental insurance and that I hadn’t been switched over to them from my previous dentist. Puzzled, I pulled out my new insurance card (recently sent to me by my insurance company) that clearly listed their name on it. She explained it was still incorrect because they were NOT “Best Dental Care PC” as was listed on the card, but rather they were, “Best Dental Care.” She said that insurance companies kept mixing them up with the other practice. She also said that soon they’d be changing their practice name to something totally different anyway. Nonetheless, they would honor my appointment and do my cleaning for free despite the mix up, even though they probably wouldn’t get paid. However they warned me that any subsequent treatments I required would cost me out of pocket. “No problem,” I naively told them, “I almost never need any treatments.”

Red Flag Number 3: Back to the exam room I go and the extremely friendly, pretty and chatty hygienist begins taking x-rays. A lot of x-rays. Probably about 20 x-rays. She also took extensive photographs with a very small camera of the bottom of each and every one of my teeth. Please note: she did this PRIOR to doing my routine cleaning.

Red Flag Number 4: The handsome and charming dentist arrived to do my checkup, again, prior to the routine cleaning. Thinking back on it later I realized that I have never in all my years as a dental patient had a dentist do the exam before the cleaning. I’d never really thought about it before but it does make sense. After all, they don’t want to mistake a stain for a cavity or have to look at things through a film of tartar buildup. Also they're the dentist, they get to see the patient after the hygienist has already done all the gross work. This, however, didn’t sink in like the red flag it was until a few minutes later.

Like most people I do in fact brush my teeth before going to the dentist, but I can’t remove the past six months worth of coffee stains and tartar they way a dentist can with their tools. That's why I go see them every six months without exception.

He begins his exam and things rapidly go sideways. Really sideways, really fast. 

Immediately he identifies a cavity here, an occlusion here, cavity here, cavity there, occlusion here, here, and here. I honestly lost count. It sounded like he was saying I had somewhere in the neighborhood of five, maybe eight cavities? He also mentioned that each and every single previous filling I had in my mouth needed to be removed and replaced. All of them. Then he asked me if I’d like to straighten my teeth (I have cute little vampire looking fangs because my two front teeth tilt in slightly) and blamed the TMJ I’ve had since I had my wisdom teeth removed on “misalignment.” Then he told me I needed a night guard to prevent tooth grinding during sleep. Then he smiled charmingly, wished me a wonderful day, shook my hand, and went home for the night (I heard him say goodbye to the people at the front desk as he left).

At this point I have become pretty sure that I’m sitting in the chair of my very first bonafide dental scam artist and I am getting very afraid, but I’m too shy and accommodating to get up and run out. So with grave misgivings I let the hygienist do the cleaning. She is gentle and careful and does a decent job. This is the first, last, and only good part of this story.

After the cleaning, she begins to talk to me about all the dental work I need, and she pulls up the little camera pictures. Many of my teeth do, indeed, have faint brown lines on the bottom of them. They look, to my untrained eye, a lot like coffee stains (I must remind you now that these photos were taken BEFORE she cleaned anything, and I wish in retrospect that I’d thought to ask her to take the photos again now that the cleaning was done).

At that point I asked her if I could level with her person to person. She said yes. I said that I’d been seeing a dentist for a routine cleaning every six months since I was about eight years old. Between those cleanings I brushed twice (or three times) a day and flossed daily per the usual instructions. Last year, I even switched to a groovy high tech electronic spinny toothbrush that ensured I’d grow no unpleasant fuzz between cleanings. In all that time I’d had a very few cavities, most of them from when I was younger and slightly less careful with my teeth than I am now. However largely, what has happened my whole life is that every six months someone had cleaned my teeth, patted me on the head, complimented me on my good oral hygiene, and sent me on my way – including the person who’d done my last cleaning six months ago and somehow missed every single one of these problems.

I then paused, looked at her for a moment and asked, “do you see why in light of this I might want to get a second opinion at this point in time?”

I feel as though the words, “second opinion” may have set of some manner of emergency secondary protocol. She showed me the pictures again, and again pointed out the faint brown lines. I nodded and admitted that no, I don’t really know what I’m looking at (other than something that really looks like coffee stains) – which again reinforced my desire for a second opinion. She said she understood, gave me some toothpaste and ushered me to the front desk.

I can say in their defense that everyone was very, extremely NICE the entire time. Though toward the end when my suspicion started to show their niceness got sort of creepy – like in a Children of the Corn kind of way.

The lady at the front desk gave me one last spiel before I left. She pointed out that I have very cheap-o dental insurance. My dental insurance is, indeed, cheap – part of my problem with finding a dentist is that almost nobody takes it anymore. The lady at the front desk said that for years now, it’s possible that whoever is taking my cheap dental insurance has been ignoring all my problems (gasp!) because they know they won’t get paid for fixing them. She even had a personal story of a friend who was a hygienist and got yelled at by her terrible dentist boss for recommending a filling for a patient who desperately needed one, but the mean dentist wouldn’t get paid for fixing something so small, so he hollered at her and heroic friend got up and quit on the spot.

Queue me nodding and smiling, eyeing the door, nodding and smiling. I asked them if they would email me my x-rays and photographs. They said they would. We shall see.

Then I was back out in the parking lot. Confused, worried, a little angry, honestly feeling kind of violated, and pretty convinced I’d just met my very first professional scam artist with the word “doctor” in front of their name. I’d read stories like this; horror stories of people’s mouths getting drilled and filled all to pieces for tens of thousands of dollars, all for no reason whatsoever. I’d heard horror stories of such terrible betrayals of the trust that people put in their medical professionals, but never ever thought I’d get to see it, up close and personal, handsome and smiling and offering me their hand in friendship.

I’m literally revolted and creeped out that I let these people touch my teeth, my gums, and have my personal data. Although they said I wouldn’t be billed, I’ll be watching the mail very carefully in the coming weeks.

Also, I’d really like to know what they did with Dr. Lucy.

To Probiotic, or Not to Probiotic

Content Warning: Frank discussion of gross but fascinating science stuff and possible TMI follows.

Bacteria. It’s invisible, and yet hugely a part of our lives. It can help us maintain a state of good health or it can kill us, and each and every human being is in possession of an entire colony of gut bacteria that helps us with the process of digesting food. When we die, the bacteria we’re already toting around eats us and helps us to turn back into dirt (insert song ‘Circle of Life’ here…)

When we get sick and a doctor prescribes an antibiotic to help us get well, the antibiotic can’t differentiate between the invading bacteria that are making us ill and our helpful colonies of digestive gut bacteria, so both die. This is why some people experience digestive problems during and after antibiotic treatments. How long it takes our helpful gut bacteria to recover after antibiotic treatments and how best to help them recover is a matter still open to debate and probably varies a lot from person to person.

My husband takes a daily probiotic pill to treat his IBS. IBS is the condition he has that causes him to digest food much too quickly, thus failing to put on body weight despite consuming a high calorie diet. Although eating what you please sounds nice, believe me – what he goes through isn’t worth it. My dad recommended he add a daily probiotic pill to his diet and pleasantly, it has improved his condition a great deal.

Usually, when I’m taking antibiotics for an illness, I eat a serving of yogurt containing live cultures every day and for at least a week following treatment to try and help my gut bacteria recover from the process. However, I’m not the biggest fan of the flavor of yogurt and I hate spending calories on a food I don’t like very much, so after a round of antibiotics used to treat a sinus infection last winter I just swallowed one of my husband’s probiotic pills every day instead.

It seemed to work fine, and though I don’t suffer from IBS I decided to keep on taking one every day. We checked with our GP and Doctors view probiotics as being not harmful and potentially helpful, but the jury is still out on just how much good they really do.

I decided to keep taking one every day after reading this article and also this one about how a woman with a naturally low body weight rapidly gained 50 lbs. after receiving an intestinal bacterial transplant from a person with a naturally higher body weight to treat a stubborn GI infection. It looked as though someone’s gut bacteria and the way it functions might be at least partly responsible for how much they weigh.

It’s not a smoking gun per se, it’s also entirely possible that the woman gained weight because she was sick with a GI-related illness and after getting healthy she put some weight on as healthy people do. However, scientists performed studies on rats and found that when they transplanted bacteria from the intestines of fat rats into those of thin rats – the thin rats quickly got fat and vice versa. And that gave me pause.

So I’m not yet going out and seeking an FMT transplant from a skinny person because… well… ew, but I figured doing something every day to help my existing colony of gut bacteria have a happy and healthy life certainly can’t hurt. I have noticed that my digestive motility, which is usually on the annoyingly slow side, has sped up since I began the regimen. Regularity is a good thing, at least.

Autumn Equinox Yoga Practice

So today is the Autumn Equinox – meaning there will be equal hours of light and darkness today. Last night I had my weekly Yoga class. My teacher told us that it’s traditional to observe the equinox by performing 108 sun salutations, and asked us as a class if we would like to do so.

When she looked to me for my opinion what I said was, “I can’t say I’ll succeed but I’ll always try.” I didn’t mean to sound quite that Zen, it’s just what came out, but it’s the truth. After nearly half a year of yoga I’m still quite poor at it, the only thing I have going for me is my stubborn will not to give up.

Sun salutations aren’t easy for me because from downward dog position you’re supposed to step or jump your feet to where your hands are on the floor, and the interaction of my erm… abundant thighs vs. abundant stomach prevents this. So in order to get back to standing position I sort of awkwardly kneel and then scramble upright again rather than making a smooth transition. Additionally, when I go to plank position then lower myself in a controlled manner to the floor, I’m reverse bench pressing over 200 lbs. No easy thing to do over a hundred times.

Still, I was game to try. My teacher often suggests that we dedicate our practice to someone who needs our “energy” more than we do that night. I figure that’s the same idea as dedicating a fast or prayers to someone, so last night I focused on a friend of mine who is going through a tough time medically and decided to do my best for her.

We did the sun salutations in sets, and I can honestly say that during the first set of twelve, I actually did twelve. After that, things diverged from the plan. During the second set I did about ten, during the third set probably seven, and so on. In total I would estimate I did around 50 sun salutations, and for a beginner like me I’m proud of that.

I would have done more but somewhere around the sixth or seventh set I felt like I was stepping on something, which is weird because I was barefoot on my yoga mat – there was nothing to step on. Finally checking things out I realized that the skin on the underside of the big toe of my right foot had quite simply slid off and was hanging by a strip (yes, it was as gross as it sounds). Since nobody else had this problem I’m guessing it’s another issue related to being so heavy on completely flat feet. My flat feet were an amusing novelty as a child but now at middle age my total lack of an arch is a more serious problem.

I hustled out to the front desk for a band aid, put it on, and continued, but things got a bit trickier after that. The studio floor is not the cleanest and most of what I was thinking after it happened was that I really needed to get my foot clean. Thankfully, the actual pain didn’t set in until this morning.

Overall I’m glad I gave it a try, and I hope to do much better next time. I can tell that I’m much stronger than I was when I began (downward dog doesn’t quite feel like a resting position yet, but nor is it as difficult as it was at first). My goal now is to develop a habit of practicing at least a little bit of yoga every day.

Pre-Diabetic

It’s that time of year again, time for our annual physicals.  My Doc now works with a health care network that lists all of a patient’s blood work numbers on a website so that if you want to, you can go over them yourself.  Honestly all I really needed to hear from her was, “everything looks fine,” and I didn’t obsess over each number like I used to.  Primarily I wanted to know that my liver levels were normal a year after my liquid diet induced liver failure scare, and happily – they are.  I seem to have recovered completely.

My husband didn’t fare quite as well.  Although every other number for him was textbook normal, his fasting blood sugar came back high, earning him the “pre-diabetic” label.  His Doctor wants him to work on his diet and check back in three months, so we’re planning on reversing this situation with dietary changes so that he doesn’t have to take an oral medication.  He already walks two to three miles about four times a week, which I’m sure is helping the situation a lot.  We’ve both been walking that much for over a year, and annoyingly he can still walk faster than I can jog.  I’ll always be jealous of his long, gorgeous legs.

I digress…

As I’ve mentioned previously, my husband has had a medically “normal” body weight his whole life, so he is now a living contradiction to the assumption that fat = diabetic, and thin = healthy.  He has an unlucky genetic predisposition toward the disease since his Mom has it, and like Ted my Mom-in-Law has never been overweight a day in her life.  That being said, my husband is a healthy eater but has also spent his entire life eating pretty much whatever tasty thing he wants when he wants it.  Fortunately he often wants healthy things, but he also adores anything made from meat, fat, flour, and cheese (heck, who doesn’t?) Looking at a food he wants and telling himself that he can’t have it isn’t going to come easily to him.  Me, I’ve been practicing that behavior since I was 12.  Although a person might always be naturally thin, as time passes they’re still not going to get away with indulgence eating the way they could as a twenty-something.

After discussing the idea of dietary changes with him, I decided to take a look at my own fasting blood sugar number from my recent test.  Turns out it came back as 68.  The ideal range is 65 – 99, so mine is about as perfect as it can get even though I’m still classified as obese.  When I mentioned this to Ted he said I just had, “good genes,” but I know in previous years that score has come back as high as 102, so I believe it’s my current eating patterns that are causing the number.  I sat down and thought about what it is about my eating that would contribute to the effect based on my own nutritional research, trial and error.  For what it’s worth, here’s what I came up with:

1)      I eat about 2-3 cups of raw vegetables at least four times a week.  This isn’t really salad since I skip the lettuce and dressing parts and just cut up a bowl of whatever looks fresh and good at the grocery store, focusing on getting a variety of colors and textures: cucumbers, celery, carrots, mushrooms, tomatoes, bell peppers, etc.  I rough chop them into a bowl, sprinkle on some seasoning like 21 Season Salute from Trader Joe’s and a little salt, and I’m good to go.  A word of warning: if you choose to do this it will give you gas until your stomach adjusts to that amount of raw fiber.  At this point I’m so accustomed to it I could probably digest the front lawn with no gastric distress.

2)      Minimal white foods.  A friend of mine who is an avid runner once told me that she eats nothing that is white.  At first I thought that sounded crazy, but she was pointing out that things like processed cane sugar, bleached white flour, and white potatoes really aren’t the best nutritional choices.  I absolutely cannot live a happy life (or permanently stick to any eating plan) that doesn’t include bread, pasta and pizza, so I don’t adhere to this rule as religiously as she does, I just keep it in mind as a guideline.  It includes having swapped mashed potatoes with sweet potatoes at dinner time and substituting spinach and steamed broccoli instead of pasta when I’m having pasta with meatballs.  Vegetarians will disagree with me on this one, but if I have to choose between pasta or meatballs, I’ll take the meatballs every time.  The protein gives me good fuel, is satisfying, tasty, and keeps me full a lot longer.  I also eat limited bread.  Don’t get me wrong, I adore bread and I’m not an anti-bread, gluten free by choice, no-carbs person by any means – I just acknowledge that floury breads and pasta are high in calories for a low volume of food, and I know that the white flour converts very quickly to glucose in the blood, causing blood sugar spikes, so I stay aware of how much of it I’m eating and keep it limited.

3)      This is the really hard one for me: I ditched daily desserts.  I have a single serving of white flour, fat and cane sugar-based dessert about once every two or three weeks.  This means saying no, on a daily basis, to doughnuts, cake, candies, cookies and pies that appear at work for general consumption.  With very few exceptions, I’ve flipped a switch in my brain that says if it’s in the office and I didn’t bring it with me, it’s off limits.  Period.  I’ve had to, because trying to mitigate the damage done in the office environment by a constant influx of refined sugar was just too difficult.  Although I do eat one to two pieces of fruit on most days, I’ve had to let go of the beloved tradition I grew up with that dessert always follows dinner.  Fructose (the sugar found in fruit) and sucrose (white cane sugar) act very, very differently in the body.  One is perfectly fine for me to consume on a daily basis, and one is unfortunately not.  It’s hard at first, but gets easier over time as it becomes a habit.  When I do have dessert (and I absolutely DO still have desserts), it’s out in a restaurant, or to celebrate a special occasion, and I make sure ahead of time that it’s always exceptional and always totally worth it.

Since my husband isn’t much of a sweet eater it’s probably number 2 that he’s going to need to work on.  He adores soft pretzels, potato gnocchi, mashed potatoes and chewy hoagie rolls like a true Philadelphian.  These are all fine, tasty foods that I wouldn’t ask anyone who loves them to live a life without – I incorporate all of them into my own diet after all.  It’s just going to be a lowering of volume while simultaneously increasing the things that don’t cause a person’s blood sugar to spike like Old Faithful going off.

This is going to be a challenge.

An Unexpected Word for Weight Loss

A friend of mine recently posted an article on Facebook about how long-term research is revealing that the several million Americans who fall into the “overweight” or “obese 1” categories on the BMI scale are actually at lower risk for certain diseases (like diabetes and heart disease) than people in the “normal” and “underweight” categories.  Additionally they are finding that people who change their body weight (be it gaining or losing drastically) are at highest risk of all.

Since we’ve all been force fed a steady stream of insistence that we must all be skinnier to be healthy for so long now, I can understand why these statistics would be surprising to some people.  Since I’ve been eating, breathing and sleeping weight loss and nutrition research for five years now they are not surprising to me.

There is a word for losing weight via calorie restriction: that word is starving.

When you lose weight because you are deliberately not giving your body the calories it needs to maintain its weight, you are starving to death.  You’re doing it very slowly, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually good for you.  Those of us with enough extra calories stored up can successfully starve to death for years and years without dying, but rest assured if we do not eventually stop it will kill us one day.

Regardless of what the FDA or the CDC or your own Doctor tries to tell you, there is absolutely nothing whatsoever that is medically healthy about starving.  Changing your body weight is a dangerous process and it needs to be done carefully, and preferably slowly.  I am aware that right now as my weight is dropping I am more at risk for a heart attack than I ever was while maintaining a steady 275 pounds.  When I get to my goal weight, once I stop changing, my risk factor will drop back down again – but right now in the process of changing is a dangerous place to live.

That’s also why yo-yo dieting weight changes need to be avoided at all cost.  Dragging your body up and down the weight scale repeatedly is an incredibly dangerous thing to do, and may account for a lot of deaths among obese individuals that have incorrectly been attributed to simply being obese.  I am guessing (and it’s just a guess) that the reason why people in the overweight and obese 1 categories seem to die the least frequently from heart disease is because their weight tends to be stable.  Though they may struggle endlessly to shed those fifteen or twenty pounds they find aesthetically displeasing, the truth may be that their metabolism stubbornly holding onto a state of homeostasis is probably what is protecting them, just as it’s meant to.  Women in particular are biologically designed to hold onto a few healthy, protective pounds around our belly and thighs area.

I won’t argue that steadily being a lower body weight rather than a drastically high one isn’t good for human beings in many ways, particularly with regards to joint issues and negative social repercussions.  However, the process of losing weight is not and never has been a healthy thing to do (just as gaining weight isn’t) and I am really tired of the medical community not only failing to address that fact, but also deliberately trying to hide it.

Maybe if they addressed the truth they could do a better job of helping people find ways to change more safely.

BUNNY - A Walking Game

Note: Bunny is best played if you live in an at least semi-rural area with an adequate population of wild leporidae.

This game can be played with between two and four players, with two being the ideal number (depending on the frequency of your hares).

To play Bunny, simply take a long walk around your neighborhood.  The player who first spots a bunny while you are walking must point and say “BUNNY” in a clearly enunciated tone.  The other player must then look and verbally verify the presence of the bunny, admitting their failure in spotting it first and thus confirming a point for the player who first noticed it.

If you incorrectly identify another animal as a bunny (example: squirrels, cats, walking birds, small children) you are docked a point.

The player with the most bunny points upon arrival back at the starting place of your walk – wins!

Element of danger: If you live in an area with broken / uneven sidewalks, it is very very easy to face plant on the concrete while looking around for bunnies.  Please play at your own risk.

Happy Liver Report

According to MedicineNet.com, normal values for liver enzymes are as follows:

AST: 5 to 40 units per liter of blood serum.
ALT: 7 to 56 units per liter of blood serum.

I know that before I began the liquid low-calorie diet plan my levels for both of these fell into the “normal” range. I also now know that only five weeks into the program, I had shot up to around 450 AST and 270 ALT. No, those are not typos – so you can see why my family Doctor was both concerned and emphatic that I quit the program immediately.

As of today, I am back down to around 50 AST and 70 ALT respectively, so in the three and a half weeks I’ve been working on my own to heal through healthy eating (and many prayers from many people) my liver has managed to heal most of the way, which is super good news! I’ll have one more test in another month just to be sure.

I have also, as of today, lost another ten pounds on my own since quitting my previous program.

The Endocrinologist who was administrating my liquid diet program (not to be confused with my family Doctor) insisted up to the day that I quit that what was happening was not the fault of their products, but was instead the result of my having fatty liver disease because I was a fat woman.

My family Doctor found this claim to be suspect considering the very sharp numeric rise while I was solely consuming their food substitutes and also based on the fact that in the ten years she’s been caring for my health I have never once shown a single sign or symptom of fatty liver disease. She believes I was having a vitamin toxicity reaction to the extremely high levels of artificial vitamins in the products I was solely consuming as food. Also their refusal to acknowledge even the possibility that I was having a bad reaction to the products convinced her that I should, under no circumstances, return to their care.

So here I am. Returning to health and hopefully the wiser for my experience as I continue on this very long road.

My family Doctor (to whom I will be sending a thank you card for possibly saving my liver) told me that she wants me to take one very important thing away from this whole experience: that I should listen to my body, know it, and trust what it’s telling me.

There are no easy answers, no magic pills (or protein shakes) and no quick solutions. Every day of my life that remains I will fight this fight and walk this path.  Even once the numbers on the scale read exactly what I want them to read.

I should send one of these to my family Doctor

Transition

This is a difficult post to write because the temptation to feel like a failure is there.

I have mentioned before that I’m not well in touch with my body and the messages it’s trying to send me.  So for the past few weeks that I have been feeling slightly off (vaguely nauseated, weird burning sensation in the vicinity of my intestines, and a roller coaster ride of bathroom unpleasantness) I have been chalking it up to either anxiety or just me feeling sorry for myself over not being able to enjoy autumn apples.

Last week at the clinic the endocrinologist overseeing my weight loss mentioned that my liver enzymes were “elevated” but that it was probably something to do with my birth control pills and it was fine for me to continue the program.

Concerned and confused, I called my family doctor and asked them to review my blood work and explain to me a bit more clearly just what “elevated” means.

Last Wednesday morning the nurse practitioner called me at work and told me that the numbers for my liver enzymes had gone from textbook normal the week before I began the liquid diet program to four times higher than that.  They also strongly recommended that I cease consuming all products given to me by the weight loss clinic immediately and resume a normal diet.  They said that the reason I’ve been feeling off is because my liver is sick – and whatever I’ve been consuming needed to stop.  Right then.  That day.

This resulted in what I can best describe as a disagreement between the endocrinologist at the weight loss clinic and my family doctor.  The endocrinologist argued that in his 26 years of experience this result is something that happens with some overweight patients, our livers are unhealthy to begin with because of our excess body weight and as it begins to shed the numbers go high, level off, and then drop if we just continue the program.  My family doctor strongly advised me not to take the chance that he was wrong since my liver showed zero signs of being unhealthy before I began consuming nothing but the liquid diet and vitamin pills provided by the clinic.

That Wednesday afternoon I stopped the program.

I lost my gall bladder trying to become slim on Jenny Craig, I absolutely cannot take the chance of something happening to my liver as well for the sake of this vanity.  I was numerically healthy before I began, and now I am not.  There has to be a way to achieve healthy weight loss without sacrificing any internal organs in the process.

I’ll probably never know what really happened.  The endocrinologist could very well be right and in a few more weeks the numbers would have begun to drop off to normal again.  He asserted that a “woman my size” must have had a fatty liver to begin with, and for some reason the test numbers just weren’t showing it.

Maybe I had vitamin toxicity because all the vitamins in the food plus two big extra pills a day were just more than my liver could deal with.

Or my body was really choking on a diet consisting only of pills, protein shakes and saccharine chemical sweetener and its cries for real, fresh food that grows from the ground or off of a tree could no longer be ignored.

So I’m back on real food, but I’m not giving up.  I’m using the Daily Plate again to keep my daily calorie consumption in control at around 1,300 / day as I try to figure out what to do next.  Since I think I need the pressure of a weekly public weigh-in I’m leaning toward going back to Weight Watchers.  A bunch of the ladies I work with go so there would be friends with me at the meeting and people to help and be helped by the entire time I’m at the office.

I’ve immediately quit all caffeine and chemical sweeteners again (which is a huge relief) and begun a daily regimen of lemon cleanses and liver-healing foods.  A lemon cleanse is basically just the juice of one whole, fresh lemon squeezed into a 16 oz. bottle of very cold water and chugged first thing after I wake up.  Tart, but refreshing.  Liver-healing foods are things like grapefruit, apples, garlic, Brussels sprouts, leafy greens and cruciferous vegetables… basically all the foods I’ve been dying for during the last month anyway, so that’s not a tough prescription to follow.

In another four weeks my family doctor will test me again, and hopefully my body will have begun to heal itself.

I need to make it clear that although the diet I’ve been on is extreme, I still don’t consider it “bad”.  It absolutely works for some people, it worked for my father and my sister – that’s how I found out about it.  The good, caring folks at the clinic have helped many, many people to achieve their health and weight loss goals.

Something not being the right plan for me does not mean I think it’s not the right plan for anyone.  Every body is different, and one size does not fit all.

My answer is out there – I’ve just got to keep on searching until I find it.