Learning and Health - #BlogElul 14 and 15

As I was planning this series of blog posts about Elul, following Rabbi Phyllis Sommer's #BlogElul system that you see here on the left, I knew I couldn't write number 14 on Shabbat, so I figured I'd write it after Shabbat was out. But by then, of course, it would be the 15th of Elul, because Jewish days start at sunset, not midnight.

So I'm combining 14 and 15 into one, which I am posting on the 15th of Elul, Saturday night. No wonder we have got such a lovely full moon - it's the middle of the month already, and Rosh HaShanah is only two weeks away. Yikes.

To me, learning and health have become inextricably connected in recent years, so it is actually more than appropriate for me to combine them in one blog post. A few years ago I suffered a major bout of ulcerative colitis that nearly landed me in hospital. I took my steroids as directed for a limited time to get the flareup under control, but I was determined not to go on the long term, low-dose chemotherapy drugs that seems to be modern medicine's only answer to autoimmune disease. It was first offered to me in 1995, and there wasn't anything better on tap in 2010. It was very disappointing.

So, I started learning about alternatives ways of supporting health (as opposed to treating symptoms and suppressing the immune-system-gone-wild). My travels on the Internet led me first to the Specific Carbohydrate Diet and then to paleo, and to the fascinating concept of n = 1 self-experimentation.

There are a zillion and a half diets and theories and concepts out there, most of them contradictory. A fruitarian like Durianrider gets excellent results, and so do people who eat exactly the opposite way. It's enough to make you throw your hands in the air and give up, and just eat Twinkies until you die.

Alternatively, you can try things out and find out what works for you. Your body is unique (unless you have an identical twin, and even then your life experience will cause epigenetic changes). What works for your buddy may not work for you. What works for you may be disastrous for your sister. Only by taking responsibility for your own health, learning what works for your body, your metabolism and your immune system, can you become healthy (as opposed to merely managing symptoms). Health care professionals can support us in this quest, but we've got to be the ones driving the train - nobody in this world knows your  body better than you do. Learn as much as you can to achieve health.

Wishing everyone a healthy new year!

This Kosher Paleo Steer Has Sharp Horns

Torn between two lovers, feeling like a fool ... loving both of you is breaking all the rules ... remember that song? It's how I feel when I think about keeping kosher, and keeping paleo. Mary McGregor sang about a woman who loves two men at the same time, for the different things they bring to her life. That's how I feel about paleo and kashrut, and living in Winnipeg, they really are not compatible. The horns of this dilemma are getting sharper and sharper as I struggle to bring my health back under control after the stress of Ari's Bar Mitzvah.

I have had an auto-immune disorder since 1987 (at least). At times of great stress and/or lack of sleep (they do tend to come together, don't they?), it will flare up without fail. In the past I have had to resort to steroids and other unpleasant medication. I became a vegetarian in 1992, after a particularly virulent flareup that landed me in hospital for six weeks. I knew something was wrong with my diet, but I didn't know what.

In the last few years I have come to the conclusion that the high-carbohydrate diet we were all encouraged to ingest in the 90s (and which I have inculcated all too well into my children, sigh) is part of my problem. To reduce the amount of carbohydrates in my diet and increase the protein and fat, I have begun eating wild-caught salmon and local pickerel and pike. I have blogged about all this before.

I have not, however, brought meat and fowl back into my life, and this is where the horns of my dilemma are.

It is not hard to find kosher meat in Winnipeg. It would be very disruptive to my home to start buying and cooking it, because right now my kitchen is completely dairy. Fish is considered pareve (neither meat nor dairy). Once upon a time the same was true of chicken, but it has been considered meat (despite having neither hooves nor cud) for centuries now, so I am not going there. In any case, I would have to buy a completely new set of dishes, pots, pans and everything, and make room in my small kitchen for everything to be double.

I might have done all of that, but all kosher meat that I have seen in this city comes from factory farms. And that's where I hit the second horn of the dilemma.

It is not hard to find grass-fed, pastured meat in Winnipeg. But it is not kosher. It is halal, but not kosher. I know Jews who have declared it to be Eco-kosher, meaning that they consider its provenance as grass-fed to be more important than its slaughter with a sharp knife, removal of the non-kosher sinew and everything else that is involved in kosher slaughter. I am not at that point - keeping a kosher home is a very important part of the identity of my family. We keep Shabbat and other laws, and we are not prepared to bring non-kosher meat into our home.

But I am also not prepared to eat factory-farmed animals. I don't think that eating them would improve my health in any way, and I don't want to support that industry. While I find that I am not emotionally attached to being a vegetarian, per se, I do not want to take part in the maltreatment of animals. This quite aside from the indisputable fact that factory-farmed animals produce inferior meat, high in Omega-6 and low in Omega-3.

There are companies out there that provide grass-fed, kosher meat. The nearest buying club that I can find is in the Twin Cities. The buying clubs give a certain discount for bulk, and you have to pick it up from a JCC or synagogue, four times a year or more if there is demand. Otherwise you really need to be near NYC.

Bringing this meat to Winnipeg would be a huge undertaking. Am I talking myself into it? Or should I just accept that I am not going to be able to eat a truly paleo diet, to support my body with the nutrients it needs? And what about that desire to support local farmers, rather than bringing in frozen food from far away?

What I really need is for somebody to start slaughtering locally bred, pastured animals in the proper kosher fashion. Even if it is just chickens, to start with. I wonder if that is an even huger undertaking than bringing it in from the United States?

What to do, what to do?

A New Year

Happy New Year to all my friends and readers, which are probably completely overlapping sets.

Here's wishing everyone a healthy, happy, successful 2012, in which you conquer your Lizard Brain, achieve wonderful things, and the Maya calendar quietly rolls over.

For myself, I've just come out of a nasty colitis flareup, and I need to make sure I get it to quiet down. One of the major ways in which I kept it under wraps for the two years since my previous one (which just happened to coincide with a period of major stress, including my oldest son's Bar Mitzvah and two transatlantic flights) was by reasonably strict adherence to the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD). This is a 90s version of what we would call a low-carb diet - a complete reversal of the low-fat, high-carbohydrate paradigm we were all brainwashed with in the 70s, 80s and 90s. When it came out I thought it was completely crackpot and paid no attention to it. For some reason I seemed to think that low-dose chemotherapy (6-MP) would be better for me. Of course I spent most of the latter part of the 90s either pregnant or breastfeeding, which not only kept me partially immunosuppressed (and therefore mostly flareup-free), but also mercifully kept me off the 6-MP. Alas, it has been almost five years since I regretfully weaned my youngest child, so I really cannot claim any more benefits from that.

After my latest flareup, I really did not want to go back on the bad stuff. I'd been reading about how it increases your chance of leukemia, for example. I spoke with a friend whose ex-husband is now dying of liver failure brought on by many years of taking it. It just doesn't seem worth it. So, how to keep the colitis under control? It could kill me a lot more quickly if I just left it. Short-term prednisone was pretty reliable in the perpetual game of whack-a-mole, but doing it too often is not healthy, either.

A providential meeting with a friend at the gym was the turning point. She told me about her cousin, whose daughter had been desperately ill and who had found great benefit in the SCD. The cousin generously corresponded with me and encouraged me to take the plunge. I did it. I cut all grains and sugar from my diet, and that made a huge difference. For two years, I was completely symptom-free. I started running, and even ran a 5K.

Then I fell off the wagon. How do these things happen? Is it the Lizard Brain? Or just stupidity? Regardless, I suddenly found myself getting into the kids' cookies. Staying up too late at night and feeding my face with all the stuff that I KNEW was bad for me. How surprising is it that I flared up again? Stupid, stupid, stupid.

As of now, I have done my whack-a-mole again, and I need to keep things quiet. I have lots of things I want to do this year, including more 5Ks and maybe even a 10K. I want to teach and write and have energy to do things with my kids. I've got my second son's Bar Mitzvah coming up this year. I don't have time to mess around with stupid processed junk that causes my innards to explode. I don't want to keep myself immunosuppressed, with whatever chemical means. I want to be healthy.

So, I am going to use this blog to keep myself honest. Along with the other things I like to natter on about, I'm going to bore you to tears with my accountability. Sleep and diet are the main issues that I have identified. I hope you will stick with me on this journey ... and lend me your support when I find myself sliding again.

What are the issues you find yourself wrestling with in this brand-new year?