The Thyroid Chronicles

I still can’t reach my stove, and it’s still a little hot, yet a girl’s still gotta eat.  I have a bowl of ripe tomatoes thanx to my BF’s garden bonanza, so I pulled up a recipe I was emailed from Lee Kum Lee a while back.

Mine was not this pretty.

Ingreds:

Soy sauce and sesame oil – starting to salivate.  Amazingly, I had all the ingredients on hand except for the cucumber, so I went full steam ahead.  If you are not a lazy ass like me, you will just walk down to the store and get yourself a cucumber.

Here’s what you do:
1. In a small mixing bowl, combine soy sauce, sesame oil, olive oil, black pepper and seasoned vinegar. Whisk well.
2. Assemble the mozzarella cheese, cucumber, tomato and basil on a platter.
3. Drizzle saucy mix on top of the vegetables and cheese before serving.

The verdict?  It’s f*cking awesome.

Incidentally, you have to get one of these:

I have killed every one of my basil plants except the one my man planted for me up in here. You can plant all sorts of things in it, not just strawberries. It’s totally righteous.

It’s hot. You don’t want to turn on your oven, your stove, or even your toaster. (Or, you’re like me and you’re painting your house and everything from the living room is in the kitchen, so you can’t reach the stove anyway.)

What do you do? Do you get takeout, which means spending a lot of dosh and feeling like bag full of assholes afterward?

OR do you make like Smarty McSmartersons, dust off your food processor/blender, and whip up a batch of cantaloupe carrot gazpacho in less than 5 minutes?

1/2 cantaloupe
1 medium sized carrot
Handful soaked almonds/cashews
Freshly grated ginger (to taste – I added a lot)
1 T of lemon/lime juice

These ingreds are also in the original recipe, but I didn’t have coconut milk handy and I killed my mint plant:
2 T of coconut milk
1/2 bunch of fresh mint leaves (to taste)

I like Smarty’s choice.

Eat this in the comfort of your air conditioned home.

I know some peeps who love to get their kombucha on.  It turns out that the fermentation process creates alcohol, so Whole Foods pulled it off their shelves.  Lame!: http://renegadehealth.com/blog/2010/06/21/whole-foods-pulls-all-kombucha-products-from-shelves-due-to-alcohol-content/

Do not despair!  You can brew kombucha yourself at home like I do.  Here’s the recipe: http://www.happyherbalist.com/kombuchaquickrecipe.aspx.  It’s so easy, it practically makes itself.  Get yourself a SCOBY and you’ll be ready to go.

Put your scoby in the brewed tea and you're ready to go!

I also belong to a Kombucha makers’ Yahoo group: http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/original_kombucha/?yguid=351881601

Did I mention brewing your own is cheap?  Like, making your own tea from a tea bag cheap.  So get on with it, ya hear?

I view my usual morning health shake as integral to rebuilding my health, but I just moved into a new place so don’t have all the fresh ingredients at hand. Whilst lacking ingredients for the shake, I am also lacking the counter space to get my cook on because I am still unpacking. I did, however, have some TJ’s unpasteurized OJ kickin’ it in the fridge. Thus, the idea for the orange creamsicle shake was born.

So good for you, you can have one every day!

Ingredients:

• 8-12 oz unpasteurized OJ (I used tangerine, same deal)
• 1 frozen banana
• 1 packet Isogenix vanilla shake
• 1 packet VidaCell (optional)
  

It’s that freakin easy!  I should mention that I’m full right now.  This is actually a meal.  A tasty, tasty meal.  This is the fastest breakfast ever!

Anywho, some notes about the ingredients:

JUICE: I do not approve of conventional “pasteurized” juice.  Pasteurization is the process by which certain foods are heated to slow down microbial growth.  It’s this process that kills the enzymes in living foods, making them less useful for our bodies.  While pasteurized orange juice is little more than a sugar bomb, unpasteurized orange juice and all of its lovely vitamins and minerals are easily assimilated into our bodies.  How can you tell if the juice you’re buying is unpasteurized?  Usually, by location and price.  Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and other health stores sell it (I get mine at TJ’s for about $5.69 for a half-gallon).  If you go to a restaurant or farmer’s market that is serving “fresh-squeezed” orange juice, you can be confident that it is not pasteurized.  Large chain supermarkets will not have it.

ISAGENIX: If you are substituting another brand of shake, make sure it has a similar nutritional profile.  I am an ardent fan of TJ’s, but none of their shakes have this level of vitamins, minerals, and amino acids, and its enzymes are active, which means they can be easily assimilated by the body.

VIDACELL: This is another product I use to speed nutrition directly to my cells, but it doesn’t change the flavor.

I think I’m gonna have one every day!  DANG that was delicious!

I know many peeps who have been plagued by colds and flu lately, and I tell them, “fOk medicine, this stuff’s the bomb”. I recommend drinking this juice 2x/day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. It is muy delicioso and well worth a couple of minutes of your day to make it.

Green Lemonade Recipe (makes about 16 oz):

* 1 romaine heart
* 5-6 large kale leaves
* 1 whole lemon – peel, seeds, and all (i cut in half so it fits in my juicer)
* 2 sweet apples, cored. that means no granny smith.
* 1-inch knob ginger
* one radish (supplies iodine for us thyroidal folks)

I also add these ingreds if I have them around. They don’t change the flavor much and add a lot of nutritional benefits. These items are:

a few sprigs of parsley for the chlorophyll
a few sprigs of cilantro to remove bodily impurities
one clove garlic for the antioxidant properties

If you have a juicer yet can’t be asked to make this at least once/day, well…you will just be sick and I won’t!

This is your medicine

The US, in the pocket of such agriscience giants such as Monsanto, is currently pushing an agenda to make it illegal to label non-GMO foods as such, so consumers will have no idea what they are ingesting.  Why don’t we want GMOs?  Just for a start, they cause liver damage, kidney damage, stomach lesions, smaller brain growth, sterility, and, of particular relevance to my deathtrap of a body, GMOs trigger immune reactions and cause allergies.

The smaller rat is 20 days old and born of a mother fed GMO soy. The larger rat is 19 days old and has been fed non GMO.

Mind you, when people are afflicted with such maladies as cancer, autism, or an underactive thyroid, we are often told that these things just happen, but that is most definitely untrue.  If a person puts dangerous material in their body three times a day, unpleasant things will surely occur.  Many people miss the forest for the trees and say they eat what they want and are just fine.  Sure, they might not have cancer – YET – but do they have allergies?  Acid reflux?  Bad skin?  Cellulite?  All is not well, my friends, but worse is yet to come.  Read here to get the dirt on GMOs and what they will do to your poor body, but in the meantime, sign this petition to stop the US from forcing this stuff down our throats.

Have you ever seen the Mexican dudes standing on street corners around LA holding a coconut with a straw sticking out of it in each hand?  A sighting is my cue to pull the eff over.  You can get two of them for a fiver, ready to drink.  Coconut water is practically a miracle beverage and contains more electrolytes than any sports drink.  I hereby make a motion to rename it Jesus Juice.

Jesus Juice contained within

It seems a shame to throw away the lovely coco after slaking my thirst with the drink within, so I always keep the empty coconut in the fridge and say I’m gonna do something with it.  Then it sits there for a month til it is well and truly rotten, after which time I finally throw it away.  But not this time, Buster!

I recalled that one of my fave health blogs, Renegade Health, posted a recipe a while back for egg salad without the eggs, so I got out my tomato butt remover
and scraped out all the meat (AKA white stuff that is not shell) and popped it into the recipe below.  Pulse it all up in your food processor and serve over a bed of greens or roll some up in a romaine leaf.  Redonk.

Raw Food Not Egg Salad

Meat from 2 Fresh Coconuts
2 stalks of celery, chopped
3 stalks of scallions/green onions, chopped
3 TBSP Raw Vegan Mayonnaise, or Olive Oil and a pinch of mustard powder
1 tsp turmeric
Pinch of sea salt or to taste
Pinch of pepper or to taste

I always think this same phrase the day before I change doctors and/or change medications.  As a habit, I keep this thought to myself because I’m almost always let down. The way I came into knowing about my newest doc was a bit out of the ordinary; before the Scientologist closed the book on me (literally), she mentioned that she also had a thyroid problem and her doctor was a fantastic MD/naturopath and she’d been seeing him for 20 years.

As I was taking my baby gurl for her final walkiez last night, the eve of my appointment, it occurred to me that I’d not yet thought to check him out online. This, from a woman whose top three phrases includes “Google that shit”. As soon as I returned, I found his website: http://www.privitera.com/, which was not nearly as interesting as his Wikipedia site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Privitera.  It seems it takes a renegade to have common sense these days, so I was still game.

So I got up less than three hours after our 4am earthquake, which is an unheard of time for me, and pulled on the same outfit I’ve been wearing for three days (because it is one of only two outfits that still fits me) and made the trek out to Covina. As soon as I rolled into the office, I heard the receptionist telling a patient over the phone that they only had Nature-throid in stock. I squawked, “WHAT, YOU HAVE NATURE-THROID IN STOCK???” You see, I have been calling around since last fall for Nature-throid, and it was backordered everywhere (at least at the places that had even heard of it). Now I knew this was gonna be good day, and I wouldn’t even have to use my AK!

The nurse had me step on the scale: 136. Oh goodie, I’d gained 10 lbs in two weeks. Some people may think not being able to feel my left arm and leg for that same period of time would be more annoying, but those people would be wrong. I decided not to niggle about this though, because this was the first day of the rest of my life.

First, they did a live blood scan.

Nuva ringz and evil thingz

The Nuva-ring lookin dealies are my red blood cells, and they’re perfect, thank you very much.  Some of the other quasar lookin things are the white blood cells and platelets, which are also perf.  The evil smiley in the lower left is is my folic acid, which was not lookin so good.  There are supposed to be a maximum of two holes, which would account for the eyes, but the four-ish holes comprising the mouth signifies a deficiency.  The gal doing the test said I could remedy this by increasing my intake of leafy greens; problem is, I eat so many greens I have them coming out of my ears – I have a handful of spinach in my daily breakfast shake, then perhaps another pound of greens throughout the day.  She said perhaps I was deficient in hydrochloric acid, which means I am not absorbing my nutrients.  Funny, that – a couple of months back, I posted to my thyroid support group that I felt I was not absorbing my medication, despite an increase in dose, and one of my fellow peeps suggested low HCl may be a problem.  Corroboration, complete!  The great thing is that HCl is cheap and readily obtainable.

Next, she had to collect hair samples to screen for heavy metal toxicity.  She snipped off a wee lock and save only the two inches closest to the root, then repeat til the total saved weighed 1 gram.  Due to my fine, thyroidal hair, this took 13 snips, the most she said she’d ever had to clip by at least double.

Sad little seedlings

Then I met the big man, Dr. P.  He looked at my tests and said, “They’re practically perfect – so what are you here for?”  I said I have Hashimoto’s.  He replied, “Well, that’s easy, just take natural thyroid for the rest of your life!”  “That’s not so easy with the jokers we’ve got in the medical establishment right now”, I said.  From there, we preached to each others’ choirs.  We talked nutrition.  How to relieve allergies by supporting our immune systems with vitamin C, rather than squash our immune response with whatever pill happens to be promoted on the drug-pushers post-its that month.  How to reduce stomach acids and increase digestion by increasing consumption of acids, rather than the common folly of taking antacids to destroy what precious little we have.  We sang kumbaya.

I walked out of there a few minutes later with a couple of months’ worth of the medicine I’d been seeking for months, another appointment in three weeks to go over my hair snippet toxicity tests, and last but not least, a new ally in my quest to be normal again.

Today may finally have been the first day of the rest of my life.

Oprah had journalist Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, on her show yesterday to speak about Oscar-nominated Food, Inc. and what people should and should not put into their bodies.  Quite possibly, I wouldn’t even have this infernal disease if I’d been eating according to his simple principles.  But what caused my cheapster’s ears to perk up was their awesome offer – until March 17th only, you can get your own copy of Food, Inc. for $9.99 at Amazon.com, a bazillion times off the regular price, and then have it for download as well.  Why rent when you can own?  This is a reference tool you can have 4eva. Dooooooo it.

Here are a few of my favorite food rules from Michael Pollan:

Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. “When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can’t pronounce, ask yourself, “What are those things doing there?” Pollan says.

Avoid packaged foods with more than five ingredients, or ingredients a third-grader can’t pronounce.

Stay out of the middle of the supermarket; shop on the perimeter of the store. Real food tends to be on the outer edge of the store near the loading docks, where it can be replaced with fresh foods when it goes bad.

Don’t eat anything that won’t eventually rot. “There are exceptions — honey — but as a rule, things like Twinkies that never go bad aren’t food,” Pollan says.

Don’t buy food where you buy your gasoline. In the U.S., 20% of food is eaten in the car.

Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.

You can get Michael’s “manual on eating” here, for the majorly discounted price of $5:

Jump on that shit, peeps.

I was just about out of my Environne produce wash when an article from Natural News arrived in my inbox about how to make my own fruit wash out of shizz I already have at home. I don’t have any grapefruit seed extract at the mo, so I’m gonna make wash recipe 2 and put it right in my empty Environne bottle.  Dang, that’s smart!

Produce Wash 1
- 20 drops grapefruit seed extract, available at health food stores
- 1 Tablespoon baking soda
- 1 cup white vinegar
- 1 cup water
- New spray bottle

NOTE: The baking soda and vinegar will foam when mixed together. Make sure you use a deep pitcher and pour slowly.

Produce Wash 2
- 1 Tablespoon lemon juice
- 1 Tablespoon white vinegar
- 1 cup water
- New spray bottle

Spray produce. Let sit 5-10 minutes and rinse thoroughly to wash away residue.

You don't want ass-hand remnants on your fruit, do you?