Project endo, raw and my Dream Team!

Well, it has been one helluva week lovely readers and I feel like I need to give you a fly-past update to keep it all logged, blogged and tidy.

So. Last Saturday I felt so ill. So, very ill, and I wrote this post; I honestly felt I had reached the stage where I was not living any more, just existing, after months, YEARS or feeling so so ill, tired, sore, fatigued, dizzy, anxious, everything.

I simply cannot explain to you how my life has shrunk, how being so unwell such a lot of the time  makes your world go from being a dynamic and fun filled place to surviving from one sofa and painkiller fuelled nap to the next. Unless your health has ever been so poor it is really hard to describe the sensation of living in such a chronically pained, exhausted body.

So, I reached rock bottom and decided to try. But try harder. This time LISTEN to the universe when it gives me everything lined up in order to get myself sorted.  I have been high raw this last week, something I spoke about here on the blog over a year ago ( have a look through some of the post on the Project Endo category to see my journey).

Here is what the universe has lined up for me this time to succeed...

1. Shazzie and her VIP room
I first discovered one of my heroines, Shazzie, back in 2008, searching for health solutions on t'internet, as you do, from the sofa in pain, as I often do/did. Shazzie was local to me in Cambs, and wrote a blog starting in the year 2000 of her journey from being really unwell, bloated, achy, sore, fatigued, depressed (ring any bells?!), and how she turned to a raw food diet and lives a totally vibrant, ecstatic life. This woman is a single mother, breastfed her child for 4 years, runs a large and hugely successful business and lives in a dream house in Sussex where Spring water runs from taps and she works for herself flexibly. AMAZING. I love her, and Shazzie has, over the years, inspired me through her blog, books and sites to delve into the world of raw food and it's benefits more and more.

I have tried twice to go high raw, and have managed for up to 3 or 4 months before my old habits come in. This time, I seem to have such a team of support around me to get well it's just unreal. So Shazzie has been supporting both in person from the sidelines, and from her amazing VIP Room site which I joined this week. I am literally astounded by the amount of information on there, from videos to audio interviews, recipes, books...and the ability to ask Shazzies accumulative experts direct advice.

2. My Bude Dream Team!
This is just amazing...so, we went to Bude on Cornwall just over a month ago for a week, having been last year with the family. I loved staying in Widemouth Bay, and it just so happens that my friend Tracey of Vert PR lives there too, so we had a little catchy up. I had been dreaming of spending a month or so in Bude next year before the Minis start school, and Tracey told me of a friend  of hers called Rachel, as someone I should really meet and talk you; she looks after rentals in the area, and is also someone who runs chronic health retreats having recovered herself from M.E/C.F.S and Fibromyalgia. Wow. Despite staying a stones throw from Rachel's door we didn't catch up until I came back to Cambridge, when we had a chinwag that just made me feel like there is so much hope.

Essentially, Rachel has been where I am now.

She knows how it feels to be so so unwell and living in a sick body. She met some amazing people on her recovery journey and is now putting together a "Dream Team" to help others do the same. This has been my soul's desire for the last few years, to be able to get better and show others how to do it, and the fact Rachel is living proof of this and already has a project in hand for chronic illness sufferers made my heart sing.

Rachel worked with an amazing lady called Dilys Gannon Bone, a real tour-de-force kinesiologist and nutritionist who healed herself from cancer. Twice. She also worked on the mind side of things by by using NLP techniques. NLP has featured heavily in my life recently, with the wonderful Jo James of Amber Life reminding me of it's immense power as we worked together, and I have been reading up a lot around the practise of transforming the way we think.

So, this week I made contact with Dilys, who has analysed my diet, my condition (both physical and spiritual/emotional) and has advised some supplements and other dietary tweaks which I can bring into my high raw regime. More on this later.

I have yet to make contact with Paul Barlow, the NLP contingent on the Bude dream team but I will be connecting soon to get some conversations rolling.

3. Farm Club!

So Farm Club has been in our lives for the last month or so, and the fact I am now eating high raw just makes it all just perfectly timed; Farm Club in St Ives is a community led by a wonderful visionary woman called Carol who has devised a community smallholding. Along with my brother Tim and his fiancée Emily, Miles and the Minis and I have a shared plot on which to grow produce, a wondeful clubhouse and marquee for events and social gatherings, as well as ducks, goats, pigs, a donkey...and a whole bunch of lovely people to get to know.  We are swapping social media awareness raising for our plot, which just feels like such a natural exchange; we have access to the club and our plot, fresh free range organic eggs every week and help to plant and grow out lovely veg. Now that's pretty well timed I would say.

So, this week I have made big changes in my diet, really upping the raw fruit and veg to around 60-70% of my consumtion, I would say. Today, Saturday, I have had only 2 low dose painkillers, and no coffee. At all. This is huge for me - usually I am on so many meds that I have a few strong fresh coffees to wake me up an help me stay awake, and a few weeks ago I was on at least 10 30m codeine cocodamol a day...as well as 20mg amatryptalin. Having such high doses of pain relief does buy me some rest but also, obviously, gives my body grief in many other ways, so the fact I have been able to reduce my meds and caffeine so much is just really heartening. I have been doing a lot of yoga just from You Tube, and have found some great resources for endo and adrenal fatigue, so classe have come to me for this week via the MacBook ;)

This week hasnt been a steep curve upwards in terms of feeling good - in fact, far from it. I have had patches of severe pain and fatigue, alongside hangover like headaches from my poorly body detoxifying itself. I am still exhausted, sore and very very under par. But, I can feel a change. I can feel that my inner core seems to recognise that something fundamental is shifting, that energy is coming back and that I have not given up the fight.

I will be sharing my good diary and journey here on Dex Diva, and I would love, LOVE as many of my chronic heath and endo sisters to stick a toe in the water and join me on the journey. Hold my hand as we take teeny tiny steps to feeling better, without losing hope.

 

So, are you in?

If you are, check out Rachel's site and follow her on Twitter. Give her a wave and tell her Jo sent you.
Next up, make contact with Dilys - email me for her contact details or ask Rachel who will help.
Join Shazzie's VIP room and delve into a world of information, amazing resources and brilliant advice from people who have studied and reseacrhed the hard and personl way about ways to live a healthy, vibrant life.

Oh, but I warn you - people dont like it when you make changes for your health. It's not "normal" to cut out alcohol, sugar, coffee...I wrote a post last year about the social acceptance of being sick and when I read it again I know I am going to have some battles ahead, both with myself and others.

All I know is, over the last few years I have been finding and meeting so many amazing people who "get" what I need and how to do it that before I resort to butchering my womb and ovaries out to live a live on HRT in the chronically fatigued state I am now....I have to try.

(ps, just had this brilliant link sent through as I write this, from another raw foodist and lovely chap Philip McCluskey who is interviewing Elwin Robinson, a guru in adrenal exhaustion who has been there himself. Have a look if you have a few mins.)