The Results Are In!

The long wait is over! After five months, I am finally reporting back to you on the progress of my healing protocol as it relates to the treatment of my systemic candidiasis. If you are afraid that this post may be too medically technical or graphic, I encourage you to look past the two vials of blood in this week's header image and stick around. I'm here to celebrate today and I would LOVE it if you celebrated with me. 

For those of you who are newer to following my life through my writing, I offer a brief backstory. On December 1, 2023, I started a long term eating protocol designed to help starve off a candida overgrowth that had spread throughout my whole body and had likely been living inside me for years. If you want to know more about the how and the why of what lead to my diagnosis of systemic candidiasis, you can go back and read my post titled Slaying the Dragon Inside Me at my website. I just re-read it myself and I think it's one of my better posts of the last decade. 

As I said previously, the eating protocol I have been following is basically designed to starve off the candida infection. If you think about it, yeast is activated by sugar. When one has a yeast infection in their digestive system, everything that you eat that either has sugar in it or can be converted to sugar is exacerbating the problem. It's no wonder that for years I felt bloated at the end of the day regardless of the volume of food that I ate. My belly essentially had a loaf of bread proofing in it on an every day basis.

My functional medicine practitioner Anjitha Thomas cautioned me to be aware that candida is a nasty thing and that it could take a full year to begin to get the overgrowth under control. To my delight, five months later I have had extraordinary results. 

First on the list of celebrations is the fact that my candida antibody test came back fully negative. That means that not only has my eating protocol reduced the damage from my previous infection, but also that there is NO evidence of any current or past infection. In short, my gut has completely healed itself to a degree that there appears to be no remaining trace of anything ever being out of balance. 

My second celebration is related to a little something called C-Reactive protein (CRP). CRP is a protein which is produced in the liver. It is perfectly normal to have low levels of CRP in your bloodstream at any given time. Elevated levels of CRP on the other hand, are a marker for inflammation in the body which is typical when the body is fighting an infection or has some other significant/chronic health condition. In my case, my practitioner theorized that my substantially elevated levels of CRP were due to the yeast infection along with inflammation in the digestive system and throughout the body in general. Over the five months I have been treating my systemic candidiasis, my overall CRP levels have come down by 80% in total, which has landed my levels in the fully normal range. This explain why my joints no longer ache, I feel less puffy and my digestive system is functioning optimally for first time in decades. 

Last but not least, I have seen astounding results as it relates to my total cholesterol levels, my triglycerides and my total cholesterol to HDL cholesterol ratios. Basically, I have had high cholesterol since I was in my mid 40s. My primary care physician introduced the idea of using a pharmaceutical statin to lower my cholesterol many years ago. Over the years I have resisted his suggestion based on the fact that I have no other co-morbidities, I have no history of heart disease in my family and most importantly, because my strong intuition was that taking a statin was going to be more harmful than beneficial for me.

I want to pause here for a moment and be clear that I am in no way suggesting that my doctor did not have my best interest at heart (pun intended) or that people should not listen to their doctor's advice. I am not a medical professional. I am only speaking about my own personal feelings about not over medicating the body with potentially damaging pharmaceuticals when other protocols are available. 

When I realized that the eating protocol that my new functional medicine practitioner was suggesting was going to be extremely low in carbohydrates and high in fat and protein, I wondered what might happen to my already "borderline high" cholesterol. I even asked Anjitha if I should be concerned about eating eggs on a daily basis, animal proteins with almost every meal and a fair amount of healthy fats. Her invitation to me was to not worry about my cholesterol number until we got my gut and liver working at an optimal level again and then see what happened after that. 

My total cholesterol level has not been below 200 in well over a decade. My most recent lipid panel five months ago showed a total cholesterol level of 227. The lowest number I have seen on an annual physical in the last ten years was 219 and that number has been as high as 260. After five months of eating zero sugar, 100% whole food diet that has been high in lean protein and healthy fats, my number total cholesterol number dropped to 179! My triglyceride levels, which can be a marker for stroke, heart attack and heart disease, dropped from 161 to 66 in five months, a whopping 66% reduction. Perhaps most important of all is my "bad" cholesterol to "good" cholesterol ratio dropped from 5.5% (which is well above normal) to 3.4% which is well within the optimal range. 

When Anjitha walked into the office where I was waiting for her last week, she sat down with a big smile on her face. She asked me if I had a chance to look over my test results on the MyQuest website. I told her that I had indeed seen the tests. Anjitha then looked at me with that big smile and said, "How in the world did you do this?"

I immediately began to choke up. 

When I decided to work on Slaying this Dragon Inside Me last December it was as if a switch flipped inside me. I am no stranger to nutrition and eating healthy. I've known about counting macros since I was a teenager. I have done numerous nutritional cleanses over the last 20 years, some of them lasting as long as 60 days. I stopped drinking alcohol almost two and half years ago now. I have earned multiple degrees of black belts in martial arts. I have completed marathons and triathlons. 

Nothing I have ever tried to accomplish physically has been harder that what I just did for the last five months. Every single thing I put in my body had to be carefully selected, almost entirely home made and I had a chance to get REALLY creative in the kitchen to make an entirely bland eating palette have some color and flair. For the first two months, I constantly felt under-caloried and weak. As the candida died off inside me, I felt like claws were being slowly ripped out of my body and the scars left behind were memories of years of living out of balance. The constant brain fog that I had been experiencing for years began to lift, which was nice, but the flip side of that was a shockingly clear view of how intense my life and the word are these days. I was ill prepared to experience the Universe as intensely as I began to feel it! I will save you the full list of symptoms I experienced on my path to optimal wellness, but suffice it ton say that in order to feel better, I would have to feel a lot worse at first.

Today I feel more empowered than any previous point in my life. In two months I will be turning 60 and can truly say that In have never felt more physically fit or in balance in my entire life. As to whether or not I am feeling emotionally and psychologically fit? Well that's a different story for a different day. The work continues. 

Many thanks to all of you for your support along the way. In have spoken to many of you over ther course of this journey. I have sat in circle with countless men who are working on themselves in some way and we have vulnerably shared our challenges and our celebrations in all aspects of life. With each passing day I learn more about what living in balance truly feels like and I can't help but think that the best is yet to come. 

Well that's all for this week. Peace and blessings to you for a wonderful weekend, 

Jim