What Were We Meant to Be: Part 2

Well I’m on a role regarding this subject because we can really apply it to so many aspects of our existence. But today I’m going to take a different angle on it. I’m going to talk about food and what we were meant to eat. Now this is nothing new and I’m certainly not the first to understand it or write about it. Many have done that. I’m just reiterating it because it’s so important and because I have recently taken in this information and put it to good use. I lost fifty pounds in the process and have embarked on an eating plan which will just become the way I eat as far as I can tell.

Trust me, I have had the same problem as a lot of you out there. I’ve been overweight since I was a young woman and I have lost and gained the same fifty pounds many times over. It’s ridiculous. But it’s the way I am. On May 21st I had to have my gall bladder removed…quickly. It was the first disorder I have had that was related to what I put in my mouth. For those of you who don’t know this, gall bladder disease is at least in part due to fat consumption and I was doing plenty of that. So it was gone and I made a decision to make a change. Problem was I had made that decision before and nothing had ever stuck. A day or two later my husband was listening to talk radio and heard somebody talking about an interesting book, Never Be Fat Again, by Raymond Francis (http://www.amazon.com/Never-Be-Fat-Again-Permanently/dp/0757305318). The title sounds a little gimmicky but it’s a serious book about our food and food sources. Suffice it to say I read the book, followed the plan and in 6 months had lost 50 pounds without starving myself. At no time during the diet did that old thought of looking forward to getting back to eating “regular” food ever insinuate itself into my head as it had with diets past. I really do think I have changed the way I look at food and the way I eat food…for good. I can’t swear to it, but right now, as it stands I think it’s for good.

But the point is that humans were meant to eat a certain way and the sooner we get back to that way of eating the faster we will get back to the way we were meant to be. We were meant to eat whole foods. We were meant to eat mostly fruits and veggies. Think about it. We were hunter gatherers. We picked things up off the ground, off trees and plants. It was a while before we figured out that little animals tasted good and even longer probably before we figured out that cooking them was a tasty thing, thereby beginning to put charred meat in our mouths (which is probably responsible for our high rate of colon cancer). Just like we didn’t appear at the same time soccer fields and snow skis appeared, we didn’t come on the scene at the same time as Hungry Man dinners. We were not ever meant to eat processed foods. There were no buckets of refined sugar and flour for Fred Flintstone. We had to cover large areas on foot in order to find enough food to fill our stomachs. And somewhere along that evolutionary path we developed a most wonderful hormone, insulin. Insulin helped us have a big appetite when food was available and then it helped us store fat and slow down our metabolism in response to eating so we would have a source of stored calories for those periods when food wasn’t as available. Great then. Formula for disaster now when so much food is available and cheap.

So to keep it simple…what would a caveman eat? Fruits and veggies, nuts and whole grains and the occasional squirrel. Keep it whole (whole foods) and whenever possible, keep it organic, because that’s how foods were back then.

And let me remind you of exactly what sugar is. It’s white, brown, beet and cane, turbinado, and confectioner’s. It’s molasses, syrup and honey. It maltodextrin and dextrose, corn syrup and …chocolate.

And let me remind of exactly what refined flour is. It’s bread and rolls and tortillas and wheat bread, corn bread and biscuits, pancakes and…doughnuts.

And it’s all processed and it’s not what cavemen ate and it’s bad. And if you stop it cold turkey in about a month you will no longer even want it. And you will lose weight, even if you can’t exercise because you have bad knees because you did things humans weren’t meant to do.

Finally, A Cure for Plantar Fascitis

There has recently been a major breakthrough in the area of treatment for plantar fasciitis and I don't know why I didn't figure it out sooner. When my symptom began to present itself a month ago; that little annoying stretchy feeling on the bottom of my foot, I did what any fat, fertile, female over the age of forty does...she blames her weight (see archived article from January 6). And even though, as I said before, I am no longer overweight, I knew I was paying for having been so. Frankly, I think I'm like an alcholic; once overweight, always overweight, if not in body, then certainly in mind. People tell me I look thin but when I look in the mirror I see fat. But I digress.

So I simply blamed the four F's and moved on with traditional medical approaches to treating my condition, sans medications. I stretch, stretch and then stretch some more. It was actually working a little, but remember, I do not expect this treatment to work quickly. It's a slow process. Each morning I was noting slight improvements in my level of discomfort.

But this morning I was almost pain free and I halfway expected to be, because I did something yesterday which I have not done in about 2 months and in retrospect it coincided with the onset of my symptoms. I rode horses! Heels down! I rode horses. About 6-8 weeks ago my horse sustained a serious injury to his hoof. Basically he ripped half of his hoof off. I will be unable to ride him for 6-9 MONTHS! This was on the heels of another accident with another horse, in which she fell and broke her pelvis. So she was on stall rest for 3 months and is only now starting to recover. I have been horseless for 6-8 weeks. Now, I've been horseless before, but never quite this long and usually I find a friend's horse on which to tool around. But this time I got a little fed up with the situation, could I say "depressed?" I don't know about that, but just didn't want to ride. Stayed away from the barn. Except for the obligatory weekly check up I prepared myself for the worst (foundering and death of the horse) and essentially separated myself from the situation. I know you horse riders out there will think I'm not right, but as with all horse stories...there's more to it. Suffice it to say I haven't been riding at all.

But I'm over it now. Just like that and with a little help from my best-buddy-web-site-designer- horseback-riding-buddy-horse-boarder, Christi Bacot, I'm over it and went out to her place to ride some of her fine horses. It was then that I remembered...heels down. I spent two hours with my heels down. This was something I did at least two hours, four times a week for the past decade. I passively stretched out my plantar fascia 8 hours a week. Probably exactly two weeks to the day after stopping I began to suffer from plantar fasciitis. And about 12 hours after starting up again Iwoke up almost pain free! Not cured, but on the way.

It's amazing how we women tend to blame so many things on our weight. I have patients with hand pain who blame it on their weight. Now, don't get me wrong; we can blame a lot of bad things on our weight, but a lot of these repetetive strain conditions are due to just that; repetetive strain and lack of flexibility. If you begin to develop a painful symptom, start trying to remember what you may have done recently to affect that part of your body. Or as in my case, start thinking about what you haven't been doing. What has changed? Then start trying to modify those activities.

The question I have now is; will insurance companies pay for a horse? There's logic behind doing it: a horse and one year of board will cost about as much as office visits, night splints, physical therapy, anti-inflammatories, cortisone injections and surgery. And it's the treatment that keeps on giving. What could be better?

Getting Plantar Fasciitis

I have officially become a statistic. It’s not that I haven’t already become one, but this one is pretty hard to take. Several weeks ago I wrote about plantar fasciitis (heel pain) in my blog. I had arisen one morning with the tiniest tingle in my heel and of course I immediately thought: the scourge of plantar fasciitis. So I wrote about it. I started stretching a little more every morning but within a week, I had become one of the Four F’s who statistically are much more likely to suffer from plantar fasciitis than any one else. The Four F’s are also the same unfortunate group who, as medical students and resident’s we referred to with derision when we discussed those most likely to suffer from gall bladder disease. Who are the Four F’s. No it’s not a rock group comprised of stupid people. It’s a Fat Fertile Female over Forty. And what is it about the F word that makes it so easy for some to say with an ugly scowl on your face and thereby say it with disdain. And this group of individuals who, in my experience are some of the most lovely people I treat, are some of the most mistreated. But we’ll talk about that another day. For today, we’re talking about ME, ME, ME and my stupid foot and what I’m going to do about it. Then you can try it too, because there are bunches of you out there suffering from this disorder and frankly it’s just not right.

So sure, if you’re suffering from overweight (and we’re now saying it like that so doctors and insurance companies will know this is a disorder and not just some bad habit, like biting your nails) then it could make sense that there would be increased pressure on the bottom of your foot and that could cause plantar fasciitis in and of itself. But why female? There must be some hormonal component and we know this is likely to be true and it’s so in other conditions involving soft tissues, like ACL tears. But there are plenty of men out there suffering from overweight who really should be getting plantar fasciitis, but they’re not. And why over forty? Okay, so you’ve been stomping around on your feet longer than a twenty year old. That should seem obvious. So what. There are a lot of twenty year olds who weight twice what I’ve weighed in my 53 years. Why don’t they have it? And then, why fertile? What does having babies have to do with anything like this? Or gall bladder disease for that matter? Suffice it to say, it’s just a fact. There are plenty of explanations out there for why we old overweight obese omni-nurturers (I like that onomatopoeia better) are suffering.

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to try to get rid of this problem without taking a single pill. Can’t promise I can do it, but I’ve done it before with two other repetitive strain disorders and have won. No pills, no injections, no surgery! Okay, now there’s one caveat, and that is, you can’t treat a femur fracture or cancer this way. We’re just talking about plantar fasciitis today.
I’m going to stretch, stretch and stretch some more. Before I get out of bed in the morning I’m going to stretch my ankle, foot and toes back, like as if you were going to stretch your Achilles tendon, but more so. Then I’m going to massage the arch of my foot and my heel. I’m going to do this every time before I get out of bed…EVERY TIME, without fail. Well, if the house is on fire or someone is breaking in through my window, guess I’ll jump out of bed and suffer for a bit.

I’m not going to go barefoot, unless I’m in bed or in the shower. I’m going to have a variety of shoes and slippers sitting around so I can always have the bottom of my feet supported and padded.

If I’ve been sitting for a while, I’m going to stretch before standing up and while I’m sitting, I’m going to put my foot further under my chair and stretch my Achilles tendon and the bottom of my foot passively so when I stand up, the plantar fascia is already stretched out.
These things are eventually going to become habit and even though I’m currently only having symptoms on my left foot, I know I’m susceptible to having it on the right, so I’ll do the same on that side. And even when I no longer have symptoms (which could take 6-12 months…no lie…and I’ll expect that and not be surprised when my pain is not gone in 3 days) I’ll still continue to stretch.

In about a week or two, if my symptoms aren’t gradually improving I’ll start using a night splint. That is a well padded splint you can wear at night to keep the plantar fascia stretched out. At night we sleep with our feet pointed down so the plantar fascia gets tight and even though we now know that this disorder has something to do with the Four F’s, once we’ve got it, the nightly contracture of the plantar fascia keeps reinjuring it, like Prometheus and the eagle.

And last but certainly not least; I’m going to drink more water, eat more fruits and veggies, try to eat as much organic whole foods as I can and keep losing more weight. BTW, I’m only 3 of the four F’s now. Which is the one we have control over? Yeah, you got it. My BMI is now 24 and I am officially “healthy.” But I have to pay for past transgressions. Keep following my blog so you can get more updates on how I’m doing.