Stay Healthy, Stay Humble – An Update on Our Health Journey…

To stay healthy, you must be willing to stay humble.

It’s been 10 months since we did our last Sip & Chat, Part 1 of Our Journey into Biblical Health. (Visit our YouTube channel for that video if you didn’t see it the first time.)

I know we said Part 2 was “coming soon”, but we still have yet to follow up on that promise. 

So I thought I’d hop on here and provide our followers with an update.

After that last video, we encountered more health challenges. When I was pregnant with Eden, I developed an eczema-like rash on my hands. I’ve struggled with fatigue, severe brain fog, hot flashes and low libido… (just keepin’ it real, y’all.) I’ve also had postpartum hair loss like I’ve never experienced with my first three kids (at least a handful of hair falling out every time I take a shower.) And no matter how much we ate “healthy” (dairy-free, grain-free, mostly plant-based), and exercised, our bodies seemed to want to hold on to an extra 10-15 lbs of stubborn belly fat.

So we decided to get tested. Our chiropractor is a big proponent of the “don’t guess … test” philosophy. A lot of people supplement blindly, swallowing 20 different vitamin and supplement pills a day, because that’s what the literature and most alternative health practitioners say that you need to do to be healthy, so when we heard the phrase “don’t guess … test,” it was kind of a relief.

Until it wasn’t…

My test revealed that my body hasn’t been efficiently breaking down food (likely due to my high-stress workload and lifestyle.) It also revealed that I have yeast overgrowth in my gut, as well as 19 different food sensitivities, including cow dairy, wheat, bakers yeast, brewers yeast, eggs, flax seeds, chia seeds, kale, tomatoes, and more. I was told I’d need to avoid those 19 foods as much as possible for the next 12 months in order to heal my gut and restore my body to a healthful state. At that point, I’d want to re-test, which could reveal a new list of foods that I’m allergic to (though, hopefully, many of the old sensitivities would be gone as long as I stick to my treatment plan.)

Jereme’s test also revealed a bacterial gut imbalance, along with 29 food sensitivities, including wheat, bakers yeast, brewers yeast, eggs, flax seeds, kale, almonds, cashews, coconut, rice, and coffee. So not only would we need to be grain free and egg free … now I had to figure out how to cook without using many of the substitutes that grain-free baking requires (like flax seeds, chia seeds, coconut flour, coconut oil, almond flour, rice flour and almond butter.)

How the heck was I supposed to feed my family for the next year? What on earth were we supposed to eat?

The stress that resulted from answering that question alone was enough to deteriorate my health even more than eating the foods I was apparently “sensitive” to.

Shortly after these discoveries, we went on a 2-week vacation in Florida. The first week was … a challenge (to say the least). Jereme and our 3 oldest children all came down with a horrible stomach bug. Thankfully, due to prayer, activated charcoal, and drinking copious amounts of grape juice, I didn’t get it, but I’m pretty sure watching the rest of them vomit their guts out for 8 hours straight gave me slight PTSD.

The second week was better, but Jereme broke out in hives following the stress of the stomach bug incident and then came down with flu-like symptoms as we were getting ready to leave. Shortly after we got home, I caught it as well. We were convinced we had caught “the thing” that’s been going around since 2020, but then a week after getting over that sickness, we came in contact with someone who had a confirmed case of “the thing” and were even more sick for the next 2 weeks.

Long story short: our family was sick for an entire month with 3 different illnesses.

While in the thick of all that, a good friend sent me a link to a Vitamin E supplement and said she felt like she was supposed to tell me about it. So I started researching it, which sent me down a long rabbit hole of unlearning everything I thought I knew about health.

That brings me to the reason why Part 2 of our Sip & Chat health series never happened. After struggling with sickness, I felt like I didn’t have the authority to sit in front of people and talk about health on camera. If I couldn’t keep myself and my family healthy, I had no business educating other people on the subject.

The more Jereme and I started diving into everything we’d been taught about health, the more we realized how little we actually knew. In fact, much of the advice we’d followed for years after listening to various mainstream alternative health practitioners, may have actually been doing more harm than good.

And then it hit me: being healthy often requires being willing to admit that you don’t know everything there is to know about what it truly means to be healthy.

Being willing to unlearn the lies, and re-learn the truth as you discover new information … it takes humility.

And Yahweh has definitely humbled us quite a bit over the last few months through these struggles.

All that said, we both feel amazing, now. Though we still have a ways to go, we’ve started implementing a lot of the things we’ve been learning, and I have more energy and much better mental clarity than I did before we got sick. I finally lost those stubborn extra 10 lbs and got back to my pre-pregnancy weight. We’ve also been eating many of the foods that were on our “avoid” list without the ill effects we’d experienced before. And that skin rash I had before is just about gone.

There are many other positive things we’ve noticed as well, and we’re excited to share what we’ve been learning with anyone who wants to listen.

So if that’s you, stay tuned for Part 2 of Our Health Journey Sip & Chat series, coming soon.

(For real this time!)