Today I am finishing up my 5th major round of herbal antibiotics since starting them in June of last year. I did start out slow by ramping up in June so really didn’t hit full strength until July so that means I’ve been taking pretty heavy doses of herbals for seven months with maybe a 4-6 weeks off of them at times while testing and waiting for results. It has been a very up and down and back up seven months. My numbers were high in May, high in June, weird in July, very low in September after Round 3, up again in November after my 4th and what I hoped was my knock-out round and since then I’ve been very strict with diet and we’ll see what it gets me. I head to Portland this week to do the test in person at the SIBO Center so I don’t have to wait 2-4 weeks for the results to come back.
Monthly Archives: January 2015
Interlaken Icicle Dash
Today was the sixth event in the Northwest Trail Runs Winter Trail Series, the Interlaken Icicle Dash held at the very small Interlaken Park in Seattle. I’d only run through the road portion of this park in the Seattle Marathon before, I had no idea there were trails there. As usual I got there early to do registration which got a little crazy for a time, there were about 300 runners total today which was more than I had expected.
Sleep Hacking
My sleep has never been good for as long as I can remember. Three years ago I was prescribed Ativan to deal with my bouts of insomnia, that was a disaster. Yes, it put me to sleep but I very quickly became addicted to it over the course of a few weeks of travel and had to go through a period of weird symptoms that turned out to be withdrawal. Luckily an urgent care doctor figured it out, my MD was prescribing more Ativan thinking that I was just dealing with anxiety. I had to go through a gradual two month withdrawal process to safely get off the stuff. After that I actually slept pretty well for the first time in years.
B.hominis – to treat or not?
I really tried to use the Purge the Whorl to help clear my b.hominis parasite while doing my current SIBO herbals but it just was not meant to be. The first time I tried I got sick off 1t. and the nausea lasted about 2 days. I waited a week and tried again but decided to slowly ramp up from 1/2t. 1x a day up to 1t./3x day over the course of about a week. I lasted 3 days on the full dose and then got really sick from it. The stuff is vile to say the least, it deserves the Mr. Yuck sticker on the bottle. It was never easy to choke down and then just made my stomach very upset.
Absolution Run
The Winter Trail Run Series continued yesterday at St. Edwards State Park with the Absolution Run, a 4 or 8 mile romp through the park. This was the first time I’ve even thought about running at St. Edwards since ripping my hamstring two years ago going up that evil hill on a cold morning and I was only going to do one loop of 4 miles. That injury had me out for most of a season and I wasn’t about to let that happen again. Like most Northwest Trail Runs events I got there early to help with finishing up setup and doing registration which got completely insane today. We were a bit short on volunteers ( get out there and volunteer for events!!!! ) and we had a LOT of day-of registration even given the cold and rain. I was so distracted that when Chris showed up I didn’t even recognize him at first. Somehow we wrapped up just as they were about to do the pre-run meeting and I had just enough time to go change to get ready to run.
Diets, diets, diets…
Over the last year I have been experimenting with several diets to help deal with SIBO – the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD), the Low FODMAP diet, the Paleo diet and the Paleo Autoimmune Protocol (AIP). I have also recently been working on the SIBO Food Guide app and I got to do a lot of research into all of these crazy diets. The app gives the legal/illegal status for each of these diets along with FODMAP ranking of foods with serving sizes where appropriate. The app should be available by the end of the month.