So, here's the thing...

Before I get into everything I just want to say... this whole process to better health and ultimately healing my Crohn's is just that, a process. It's not an easy process. There are good days and there are bad days and through everything I am learning and evaluating and praying. So, when it seems like one thing is great and will be the answer, something happens or things change and we move in a different direction, and it's ok. Because ultimately it's all done to find the best way to treat this disease. And, maybe there isn't a "best" way, maybe there's a few...

All that to say, I'll cut to the chase, the diet... well it didn't work out. Now before you think it was too hard and I quit or I'm a hypocrite for everything I said in the previous posts... well, I mean think what you want, it's fine with me, but I have reasons. Hear me out.

I did quit, but it wasn't easy to quit, I'm not one to quit on things easily. I will push through and do all I can to finish something I started. Until it's something that compromises my well being or health. This diet was healthy and well thought out and I still agree with it and would even recommend it... but it isn't for me. I tried for almost 3 days. The nauseated feeling I had day 1... it didn't go away. I didn't want to eat, I couldn't eat, and it came down to not eating because of the nausea or eating something I knew I could stomach... that wasn't on the diet. I chose to eat. A side note, I'm losing weight, too quickly, mainly because I'm not absorbing nutrients and because of not wanting to eat for the fear of how it might affect me. So the thought of eating, even if it wasn't on the diet, was appealing. So I did. unfortunately it didn't sit with me... it was whole grain pasta... I can't do whole grains, they're too hard to digest. But, the next day was a new day and knowing I wasn't constricted to the diet anymore was very relieving.

Now, I didn't go back to eating just anything. I was very cautious and still kept a lot of the same basic principles of the diet in mind. I went to Earth Fare and spent over an hour reading labels and choosing the best possible products of food to best nourish and fill me. I spoke with a naturopathic doctor and learned a lot (more on that some other time). I am evaluating and praying through the best way to move forward.

I will say, everything I said before about making foods from scratch, not buying bagged and processed foods, eating real foods and as much organic as possible, I still believe. However, I have realized there are so many great companies out there making products, that yes may be in a jar or can or box, but have completely whole, real, natural foods in them. It may be only 10 percent of the store that has them, but if it's food I can eat and gain nourishment from I'll try it. Another side note, just because it says it's all natural doesn't mean it's really all natural. Reading labels, I mean really reading them and knowing what you're reading is a big deal.

All of this to say. Jeff and I have talked a lot about foods to eat, diets to consider, programs to follow, and we have decided to, first take it one day at a time, and second make a diet that fits us, personally. These diets found online or in books are good, helpful and have really shaped my thinking about food, but every person is different, everyone's body is different, and we all need to eat what is best for our own body. That's what my goal is. Finding foods that are healthy, nutritious, and helpful... not harmful to my body.

What I've decided so far... and again, things change, so this isn't set in stone.
1. I'm trying a mostly gluten fee diet. When I say mostly I mean 9 times out of 10 I'll try to choose gluten free but I'm not going to stress if I can't.
2. I'm trying a mostly sugar free diet. Again, it isn't always possible. But I'm trying to find products and recipes that have natural sweeteners like honey, instead of refined sugars or even "natural" sugars.
3. I'm staying flexible. The problem with the diet for me is it wasn't flexible and it ended up stressing me out. I am going to try everything in my power to eat the best I can but if it's not possible 100 percent of the time it's ok.

Wow, I just unloaded a lot. Mainly for my own processing and reflection but also hopefully someone can find encouragement from this... in some way.

For you formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother's womb. I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvelous are Your works, and that my soul knows very well.
 -Psalm 139:13-14

Day 1...

On paper this all sounds simple and motivating. Then when you actually commit to it and do it... that's where it gets tricky. Day one went ok. I mean the food we ate was "by the book" it was healthy, homemade, and for the most part tasty. But for some reason I couldn't kick the feeling of being nauseated when I thought about what I ate. I know that sounds so weird and bizarre. It's weird to me too. I can't really explain it. So, that's the tricky part, getting past that feeling and enjoying the food. It's good food!

The other tricky part is the constant, overbearing thought of food. I think about it all the time... what do we eat tomorrow? What can we even eat? Will I even want to eat? Does that have added sugar? The questions can go on and on. I woke up this morning feeling very overwhelmed. Just thinking about breakfast made me anxious. This all probably sounds silly too, but an average day for me is a bowl of cereal and then whatever I can find in the house for lunch, that's quick, since Ella's eating too and she needs food. So to have to think through every single meal can be daunting. But, like my last post, I need to listen to the words in Proverbs and rise early, prepare food, be organized about it all... it just takes discipline. And much, much prayer.

I found myself crying out to God for peace, strength, wisdom, and overall guidance in all of this. When you feel overwhelmed and anxious and hungry it's hard to think straight. And, the wonderful thing about God is He gave me peace, He always gives me peace, because He is faithful. He reminded me of that so many times just this morning, through emails, conversations, and His Word... in Matthew 6:25-26
25 “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 

I am valued by God, my Creator, I am loved, protected, and cared for, even when it comes to food. I have nothing to worry about for God will provide, He always provides. So I rest in His goodness and trust in who He is.

So, here we go... the run-down of what we ate yesterday. As a quick guide to this diet, in the first phase, you can eat meat, poultry, fish, goat's milk cheese, vegetables (no starchy ones), almonds, lemons, limes, and berries, and honey... no grains what-so-ever. There are other things too but those are the main ones.

Breakfast: Almond flour biscuits and scrambled eggs- this was very filling, when baking with almond flour things turn out pretty dense. It's hard for me to stomach sometimes... hence the nauseated feeling.

Lunch: Salad with cucumbers, tomatoes, and shredded chicken and a homemade dressing

Snack: Strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries

Dinner: Grilled chicken with broccoli and zucchini sauted in thyme and a little balsamic vinegar

Snack: Blueberry muffins... made with coconut flour

Like I said before, for some reason I was feeling queasy just thinking about the food I ate... so weird I know. But then I look at the cutest baby in the world in a summer outfit, capris and all (my new favorite thing on babies) and everything is all better. :)

I promised a post with pictures, no one said they had to be all food ones! I can't get enough of her and her personality, and I could stare at those blue eyes all day... well I pretty much do.

  

Proverbs 31 and Crohn's Part 2

So, as of the last post we now all know what the problem is and what the hopeful solution is to that problem...

Now, about Proverbs 31. The woman in this chapter is remarkably beautiful, hard-working, generous, kind, passionate, and full of love. I want to be that woman. And when it comes to how it relates to my Crohn's, well it really relates to everything in life... and right now it specifically relates to how I am going to do this 'diet.' 

There is a lot of convenience now-a-days with the food we eat. You're hungry grab a Snickers, you have a hankering for sweets, grab a scoop of ice cream... a big scoop, you crave salty, open up a bag of potato chips and have at it. Easy.Simple.No thought. at.all. So, to do a diet that means no packaged, processed, or bagged anything I need to be creative, and I need to be disciplined. And to do a diet that requires fresh, organic, real food, I need to be on top of meal planning and preparing food, for every meal. 

All of this is good and honestly it's how it should be, I believe it's how God intended it to be. But, I'm not gonna lie... it's hard. I'm a born and raised American who likes things quick and my way, right away. That just doesn't sound right though... does it? And it certainly doesn't sound like the woman so eloquently pictured in Proverbs 31.

I love every verse of this chapter starting in verse 10. And I would encourage you to read it... but I want to point out a few verses that really stuck out to me, in other words, verses that God convicted me with, as in, do you see what that's saying? listen, I'm talking to you...
Verse 13- ...And willingly works with her hands.  
 I love that it says willingly... that's the convicting part. I want to wholeheartedly, completely, joyously do all I need to do for my family and home... willingly. 

Verse 14- She is like the merchant ships, she brings her food from afar. She also rises while it is yet night, and provides food for her household

"rises while it is yet night"... so confession, I'm not a morning person. I want to be but it doesn't come easy. I do have to say that after having a baby and waking up at any time you have to for your child, it did get a little easier. But I need to heed those words. To rise before my family and provide them with food... simply put, make sure my husband leaves the house with a full belly and not a handful of cinnamon swirl bread and a granola bar.

Verse 27- She watches over the ways of her household, and does not eat the bread of idleness

That's a big one... idleness. It's easy to say, especially when talking to other women, "Oh, I was so busy too, I just have so much to do during the day." And in the back of my mind thinking back to how I perused a few blogs, looked up a bunch of random stuff, spent a little extra time in bed before getting up. Yeah, that one hurts. 

When it comes down to it the most important role and job this woman had was to her Maker and Savior,  

"Charm is deceitful and beauty is passing,
But a woman who fears the Lord, she shall be praised." vs.30

So, in a nut shell with my Crohn's and in everything, I am trying. Well, I am praying, that God would strengthen me, direct me, and help me as I aspire to be not only a woman who's children call her blessed, who's husband praises her, but a woman who God tells, "Well done, good and faithful servant."

Tomorrow... how day one of The Maker's Diet went... did we survive? Dun, dun, dun!!! (hopefully that one will have pictures... posts are so much better with pretty pictures) 

Proverbs 31 and Crohn's

First of all... yes it has been a while. And honestly this may not be a regular thing. I just need somewhere to write my thoughts and unload what's going on inside my brain... and heart.

What does Proverbs 31 have to do with Crohn's? Let's back up a bit... I'll try to make this as brief as possible..

A few months ago my Crohn's was kicking back up. Once or twice a month, I would have a day where I would be in so much pain everything in me wanted to curl up and lay in bed all day... like someone was twisting my insides. It would go away though and I would feel great the next day.

To speed things up, I went to my doctor, swallowed a camera, camera got stuck, had 2 x-rays, silly camera didn't want to come out, eventually it must have, symptoms got worse, I don't eat a whole lot, my doctor didn't like what she saw, said it was worse, ulcers in many spots, narrowing of intestines, my medication wasn't cuttin' it, bring on the steroid, I needed something stronger...

Sounds like a few years ago, I know. And nothing changed with how I felt about that dreaded medication. I still had no peace.

This was about a month and a half ago. Since then I have been on a search for anything besides the medication. I've looked into diets, natural remedies, talked to people, emailed people, read books and I think I'm on to something.

I'm not going to go into it too much or even try to explain it, but basically our bodies were not created to eat or digest the foods that our modern-day society has to offer. God did not design us that way. He designed us to eat what He created for us to eat... sounds simple.  My disease, I believe, has everything to do with what I eat. And, I can tell when I eat something bad or unnatural it triggers my body to flare up against it.

After researching a lot and praying, we, Jeff and I, are going to take a totally different approach on the way we eat. It only makes sense. We put garbage in and that's pretty much how I would feel... like garbage.

So we are going to start The Maker's Diet... it's a lifestyle, a refreshing and actually biblical way of living. It's not just about food but our life and how we chose to live it each day. 1 Corinthians 10:31 says, "So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God." Our goal in everything is to honor God and bring Him glory. What we eat is part of that. And God has something to say about what we eat, which is what the whole diet is about (Leviticus 11).

So, tomorrow we are going to start. It's a 40 day challenge (and then continuing it for life), broken up into 3 phases with 2 weeks for each. (You can get more details on the website). But the first 2 weeks are for cleansing and detox. To rid our bodies of the nasty it's been subject to, and to decrease inflammation and put our insulin levels back on track. It should be interesting, proabably a little hard, but so worth it to try and bring healing to my body. That's my prayer. 

So what does any of this have to do with Proverbs 31? Well, this wasn't as brief as I thought so this might have to be a 2-parter. Because I really want to write about what I believe God is revealing to me though His awesome word. 

Bacon Some Cookies

I don't bake. Really. I have, I've tried many times, I've failed many times. For example, I made cupcakes once with my friend Katie and when we put the frosting on them it melted right off... yes we should have let them cool... not the point, I failed. I made a cake for my dad's birthday. I thought I'd make it from scratch, by myself, it called for shortening, I didn't know what that was (in my defense I was maybe 10) so I didn't put any in... yeah it couldn't have been more dry. I made a cake for my mom's birthday... you'd think I'd learn my lesson by now... it was a layered cake with chocolate frosting. When I made it, it was about 90 degrees in our apartment, I had to transport it to my parents, by the time I got there...

Yeah... don't talk about it. (In my defense it tasted really good).

So, I don't bake, except for last week when I decided it was baking something or keeling over from the stench of bacon. Which is where the story starts, with bacon.

Last Saturday morning, Jeff and I decided that we needed a decent breakfast because we had a big day ahead of us. We were going to register at two stores for all the baby stuff we need. We thought it might be fun and tasty to make a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich on a bagel. Well I thought it all sounded good minus the bacon, I've never really been a fan. So Jeff fried up some bacon on a skillet, charred it a little, filled the kitchen with the aroma of semi-burnt bacon, and slapped some on his bagel. I made the eggs and have to say for not being a big fan of eggs either (it's the texture) it was actually really good.

Now our house smelled a tad like bacon... well really bacon was overtaking the entire house and felt like it was seeping into my pores, so we opened some windows and left to do our registries. We got back home pretty late, hoping the smell would be gone, but, alas, it was not. We tried to ignore it, lit a candle, opened more windows, changed our clothes, turned on a fan. It was all in vain, we still had a bacon-scented home. So our solution... cook something to cancel out the smell. Well it was late and so cooking was out which leaves baking. So we decided to bake some sugar cookies. I bit the bullet, swallowed my fears, and thought the end product was well worth my inevitable failure.

Everything was going well. All the ingredients were mixing together well and it wasn't too hot to melt anything. But this time melting something wasn't the problem... and there's always something that can go wrong with me and baking.

I kinda burned the bottoms, not awful, but still. Maybe I'm too hard on myself, it's not like I caught them on fire or anything.

We thought we'd try baking the next batch for less time...

Much better. We even got crazy and added M&Ms to some of them.

But not too crazy, only one M&M per cookie. I don't want to get all creative and start to like baking now or anything.

You may be thinking this was the end, we baked, we ate some cookies, move along. Oh no, you can't have warm cookies without ice cream.

Let's drool at, uh, I mean look at some more pictures of this marriage between warm cookies and ice cream, shall we?

Yes, I believe two similar pictures are needed to show this true beauty.

So there you have it. I baked, I failed a little, but I redeemed myself with adding ice cream to make it appear flawless. It tasted flawless... and that's really all that matters.

Blue Baby or Pink Baby?

Since I shared the news that I am  having a little bundle of joy, I figured I would share what that little bundle is... yes a baby of course, but is it a boy or girl. Oh the suspense!

We had our ultrasound in February and decided that we wanted to find out whether the baby was a boy or girl, but not right away. We asked the nurse to write down the gender on a piece of paper and put it in an envelope. She also printed two ultrasound pictures, the ones we couldn't look at or it would give it away, and typed on them what the baby was. We gave the envelope to a baker and she was going to make a cake with blue or pink frosting on the inside to be cut at our gender reveal party... What's that? It's a party to reveal the gender of our baby, clever right? I saw a bunch of ideas on different sites and thought it would be fun to have family and friends share with us in finding out the gender. And that's what I'm sharing with you, all about our gender reveal party and what our baby is... is the suspense killing you?

We had the party at our friend's, Stephenie and Bryan's, house. It was fun decorating with blue and pink and thinking of cute little details to make it festive.

 We had little activities for our family and friends to do during the party. They voted what they thought the gender was and they wore the color of ribbon on their shirts.

I was very sure it was a boy

We also played a game where Stephenie asked me a bunch of old wives tales related to my pregnancy and charted the results.

Like I said, I was pretty convinced the baby was a boy. Not that I believe old wives tales... I just had this feeling.
Olivia, Stephenie and Bryan's daughter, predicted that I was going to have a "pink baby"

So, who am I to believe, old wives or a two year old? Good question.

Let's get on with the cake cutting then. Everyone was pretty anxious to cut into it and see.

Boy?

Girl?

Blue baby?

Pink baby?

A GIRL!!!

Not to burst anyone's bubble but we have a little secret... we shared it before we cut the cake... Jeff and I peeked at the ultrasound pictures the night before... gasp... I know. But we really wanted to have the moment we found out what our baby was to be between the two of us. It felt so much more special that way. And we are so glad we did, it's a great memory for us. Plus, we were really able to focus on everyone else and their excitement since we already knew. So... gotcha... we knew the whole time!

The rest of the time we enjoyed cake and cupcakes... so yummy, and talked about how exciting it is to think we're having a little girl.

A daughter... we are so thrilled!

Chicken Bundle of Joy!

I know you've all been on the edge of your seats in my absence from this blog. Since my riveting food diary has been on hiatus for so long I feel there are a few things to catch up on... but on with the food.

So, the dinner featured in this post is probably one of the tastiest, comfort food-like, fills your belly till you're satisfied, eat it every night if you could meals I've learned how to make. Before we got married, Jeff's mom had me over and showed me how to make Chicken Bundles... which happens to be one of Jeff's favorite dinners. And now I have the pleasure of introducing this salivating-inducing meal to you... it had to be a good one to make up for lost time.

Chicken Bundles are exactly that, bundled up chicken. There are a few steps to it so I'll do my best to go through them as detailed as possible because believe me you'll want to try them for yourselves.

First two different crackers are thrown in the food processor to make a bread crumb mixture. I chose these two. They're pretty much the equivalent to Ritz and Saltines.

This mixture is what the bundles get rolled into... but I'm getting ahead of myself. The chicken mixture has to be made first, to put in the bundle, to then be rolled into the crumbs... yeah if you really want to make these you're better off getting the recipe from me, I'm all over the place.

So, once the chicken mixture is made (chicken boiled, cooled, cut up, added to sour cream, and some other things, and chopped up in the food processor) it goes into these...

Mmmmm.... two crescents pinched together to make a buttery, tasty home for the chicken to be rolled up into and dipped in butter, yes butter, and rolled all around in the crumbs.

oh, my, butter

And there they are. Really anything rolled up in crescent rolls and drenched in butter is ah-ma-zing. They get baked in the oven and come out all golden brown. I never said this was the healthiest meal you could eat... just one of the tastiest!

To go with these I made mashed potatoes and roasted carrots. Oh man, roasted carrots, this post may never end.

In a nut shell the carrots are peeled and sliced

and slathered in olive oil, salt, pepper, and parsley, then roasted in the oven.

This is by far my favorite way to eat carrots.

And, the finale, the whole dish on a dish.

Pour some gravy over it all and oh my good night, it is a good thing, a very good thing.

Now these bundles give me that feeling in my belly that comes pretty close to joy but not as much as a different kind of bundle in my belly.

The other thing to catch up on other than food... Our little bun in the oven has been cookin for 24 weeks now. That's about 6 months. We feel so blessed and excited to meet our baby in July!

 Very excited!