You'll Outgrow It

In my last blog post, I told you about my casein allergy.

When I was ten days old it was Christmas time in the late 1970s and I was in the hospital. My mother thought I was dying because there was blood in my stool, my paternal grandmother told her it was the milk causing it, and the doctors confirmed it. My father told me that they did 'nuclear medicine' on me. He had never heard of it and had asked the doctors if it was safe. They assured him it was. I believe that it was probably a barium test that was performed on me. I had extreme inflammation and was bleeding internally. Because many people who have casein allergies also have soy allergies, they put me on an amino based formula called Nutramagen. My dad said it cost $25 a canister. That's about $100 today. I was not a cheap baby.

The doctors told my parents I would outgrow said allergy. I'm not sure that even happens with things that are autoimmune. I think that the milk became less of a part of my diet and I grew bigger so that I was able to tolerate it. I do not think I tolerated it well, and I believe the milk is the original cause of me being nearly 300 pounds. I believe that my gut was inflamed from the time I was allowed to have milk, until three years ago when I gave up all milk products entirely. You may find this hard to believe, but people have lived with far more intolerable things for longer periods of time. I also think as I grew older, that I was tolerating the milk less and less.

Symptoms:

If I were to sit here in front of you and drink a glass of milk, in approximately five to ten minutes, I would feel as if someone were stabbing me in the gut with sharp daggers. This feeling would subside in an hour or two, and is mediated by consuming other food with the milk. The next day and for several days after, I have bad joint pain to the point that moving is painful. I also become a very bad bitch. It's probably from the joint pain, but I am entirely unpleasant to be around if I've been exposed to milk.

I have never had soy by itself, and so I am unsure if it causes the same sort of stomach pain as the milk does. It however does affect my mood, and since it may also be causing low-level inflammation, I avoid it.

It took us a long time to figure out what my problem was. I had known since I was a kid that I'd been in the hospital because of the milk, but I had never heard of a casein allergy, only of lactose intolerance. I didn't think that it was a big deal, and there was no internet, and so I was none the wiser.

McDonalds has good coffee

I backpacked in Italy in 2012. One morning I got a cappuccino from the McDonalds across from Termini station in Rome. If you've not traveled in Italy I'm sure you're thinking McDonalds? Yeah, they have pretty good coffee in Italy, and in the States too. I drank my cappuccino, not having consumed any food with the intention of finding something to eat after, as all they had at that McDonalds was pastries. The Italians need to be introduced to the breakfast taco, seriously, desert for breakfast is not breakfast. Anyway I digress. I didn't get but about two blocks down the street before my stomach started protesting with a vengeance. I thought to myself, "Oh, yeah, coffee is so hard on my stomach, I need to find something to eat quick." No, just no. It is so obvious now that it was the milk in the coffee. In fact, I had made it a point never to drink coffee before I ate breakfast because I thought the coffee upset my stomach. You would think that we would have figured this out sooner, but none of us did. I do wonder how many other people suffer from the same thing, or something similar, and have no idea what is going on with them.

Another interesting thing occurred after I gave up milk. Hiccups used to hurt me bad. I hated getting them, because I would be in agony. My husband thought I was full of it. He would tell me that hiccups don't hurt and that I should buck up. It turns out that my gut must have been so inflamed from the milk, that hiccups did hurt me. They don't any more. I've had them several times in the last three years since giving up the milk, and they've not hurt me once.

But the best thing that happened since I gave up all milk products? The weight that had been plaguing me since the age of eight fell off me. I was and still do eat a low carb diet as well, but I don't count carbs. I just sorta watch that I don't eat too many. How many do I have a day? It's probably akin to the Atkins Maintenance diet. Maybe 60-80? It varies every day. Some days I have less. I rarely go over 100.

So how much weight did I lose? Well I had been stuck at about 190 on low carb for several years and despite doing the Atkins Induction, zero carb, highly ketogenic, I couldn't budge it. However, I had maintained a lower weight than before without struggling and wasn't hungry, so I'd made the decision that if that was as far as I could go, I would be fine with it. I felt so much better eating low carb after all. Then after I removed the milk, I went from the 190 range to about 150 now. I cannot believe that I wear a size 31 in men's Wranglers and I tried on a dress at the mall that was a size 8 and it fit me. I lost forty pounds. Without worrying. Without trying. Without much exercise. I walk my crazy deaf cattle dog down the road a mile or three every day. That's it. It had to be the milk.

Fat and Sick: The Big Lie

I'm not sure exactly what day it was, but it was about three years ago when I came to the realization that most of what we are told are lies. I know, you're thinking, but how can that be? How can everything be lies? Hang in there, and I'll explain. I'm not saying that there is necessarily malice behind the lies, although in some cases there might be. I think that part of it is the sheer volume of information that is out there, the inability of most people to sort through all of it, and the powers that control the narrative that 'goes viral'.

In the Spring of 2010, I read Gary Taubes book Good Calories, Bad Calories. I got about a hundred pages into it and was so angry, I wanted to destroy something. Why was I angry? I was angry because medical science has known about the carbohydrate hypothesis of weight gain since at least the 19th century. THE NINETEENTH F*ING CENTURY! Now, I weighed three hundred pounds in high school. You read that correctly, three hundred pounds. Do you think anyone ever at any point in my life said to me, hun, maybe you need to cut back on carbohydrates? Hell no. They said I ate too much (I was so hungry). They said I didn't exercise enough (it's difficult when you're so fat). They said fat was bad for you. But carbohydrates? I didn't even know what a carbohydrate was until I was probably twenty-five. No one in my world talked about carbohydrates. People may have on occasion said that sugar would rot my teeth, but I didn't drink regular soda. I also don't particularly have a sweet tooth for candy either. So I never made the connection.

My problems went beyond the carbohydrate consumption however (this is not the case for others in my family whose problems were solely carbohydrate driven). I was born with a severe casein allergy that caused internal bleeding and I was in the hospital when I was ten days old. My parents thought I was dying. My grandmother figured it was the milk. I was put on Nutramagen, an amino based baby formula that was prescription. The doctor told my parents that I would outgrow the milk allergy. By the time I was five, my mother let me consume things with milk in them, but I was never a fan of milk straight or on cereal because it made my stomach hurt. If taken straight with nothing diluting it or a large amount, milk would make me feel as if someone was stabbing me with knives in the gut. No one in my family investigated why milk made my stomach hurt, or the insane weight gain that began after I started consuming milk products. It was bad healthcare all around. I had severe and chronic ear infections, which is associated with milk allergy. Did the doctor think, hmm, this child was milk allergy when an infant and has ear infection every other week, maybe I should look into this. No. Not no, but hell no. Instead it was tubes, scarred ear drums, and adenoids removed. No one had a clue about anything. So I suffered from ridicule and scorn for being three hundred pounds for something that I had no inkling about and therefore no control over. I was three hundred pounds, not because I ate too much or didn't exercise enough, but because of a milk allergy causing severe intestinal inflammation and elevated insulin from probably consuming excess carbohydrates in conjunction with said allergy.

If you are normal weight without trying, congratulations! You have a correctly functioning body. That's all. It's nothing you've done. You're not magically eating right and exercising. Your endocrine system is whirring away keeping everything operating in the manner it's supposed to. So next time you see a three hundred pound person and think to yourself something, I want you to think, they have something physiologically wrong with them. Because no one wants to be three hundred pounds. No one. Eating less and moving more doesn't work. If it did work, there wouldn't be anyone overweight. And no one has bloody told them that they should try something else. So, there's one lie. There's of course many others, most outside the scope of a single blog. I'm not sure how anyone can say this lie with a straight face, it being so obviously wrong, but they do. The powers that spout said lie, might not be privy to the fact that it's a lie, but I think in most cases, that is not the case. They know. It's monetarily beneficial to a lot of people that you remain fat and sick. Fat and sick people are easily controlled. They don't care about politics, or what is going on in the world. They just want to feel better. This is human nature, and the powers that be know it.