My battle over the last 3 years & my solution The Plan

Well friends, it has been a good long time since I have posted. Since my last post I worked very hard with a weightloss coach on an "eating clean" program. It was HARD, but I loved most things about it. I lost from 216.8 pounds to 189 pounds from February of 2011-July 2011. I felt fantastic in many respects! However, life happened and I just couldn't stick to it for a little while. Then my husband lost his job, and I couldn't afford much more than ramen noodles and mac n cheese. So I quickly gained back to 195 pounds.

And then the most amazing thing happened! One day I ordered some pizza, and the next day I thought I had food poisoning, but when it hadn't even gotten better after 3 days I started thinking. I took a HPT and found out I was 7 weeks pregnant!

It was a rough pregnancy, and I gave birth to a 3 lb 11 oz baby girl on April 15 2012. She was 8 weeks premature, and I was extremely sick with a condition called Pre-Eclampsia. It took me several months to recover. And I lost 20+lbs of retained water in about 6 days. Still I sat around 220lbs, I wasn't pleased.

My parents introduced me to Body By Vi and I became a distributor. I enjoyed the one shake a day, since I was a nursing mom, and I lost another 15 lbs in a little over 2 months.

When she was 6 months old her Father and I separated and I moved back home to Canada. Once I got home to Canada the ViSalus (Body By Vi) just didn't have the same affect. I stopped feeling energized and healthy, and I started gaining weight back. Since I hadn't changed anything about my shakes and I was gaining weight I stopped using them. And I gained up to 226 lbs at the highest.

My daughter is now 16 months old and she is quite small for her age. She was already walking when she hit 20 lbs. One day in July of this year I picked her up and had an intense sharp pain run through my elbow and radiate up and down my arm. It did not improve. The next day I saw my Doctor and he said it was called Golfers Elbow...he also diagnosed me with Fibromyalgia, a condition that causes a great deal of pain and fatigue. It is responsible for my frequent bouts of tendinitis, difficulty sleeping, waking up in the morning in pain and other symptoms. And in the end we discovered that the medications used to treat this condition are just simply out of my price range. Yippee! He had also tested me for Ciliacs disease, which came back negative the month before. He said I had a sensitivity to something, but there was no medical test to tell me what it was. He recommended an elimination diet, which I had discovered, but at the time thought it would be too expensive so I didn't try it.

So after some time my symptoms got worse as my daughter grew. The pain spread from my Left arm to my right, and it began to affect my hands, as well as my muscle strength. I found that I could not hold her for very long before I would begin to experience muscle weakness in my arm and either had to put her down or give her to someone else to hold. This really upset me, not only because it limited my ability to snuggle and play with my baby, but also because I feared I might drop her if I lost strength suddenly. I also began to have doubts about my career choice. I've been taking a course in medical transcription. I thought, " If I can't do repetitive motions such as pick up and hold my baby without almost debilitating pain then how will I ever type at 80+ WPM for 40 hours a week?"  I knew something had to change, period.

I began praying for help. Help to lose weight, help to get healthy, help to find an answer. And I began searching, at first I looked for a miracle supplement...silly I know. I found lots of supplements promising fantastic results, ones that claimed to be simple, one that said you wouldn't have to change anything about your life style, ones that said they also had amazing health benefits for conditions like mine. But I wanted proof! So I searched reviews, and I found one site where a man researched and reviewed all of the ingredients in the supplements I was looking at. What I found alarmed me, and increased my desperation. Many of the ingredients were considered thyroid suppressant, and not recommended for individuals with hypothyroidism. The more I looked at the more I eliminated from the list of solutions.

Then I remembered the diet plan I had found several months ago that my Doctor said would be a good idea. But I couldn't remember the name of it, I prayed for help and within a few minutes I was on the website.

It's called "The Plan" by Lyn-Genet Recitas. Everything about it made sense to me, but I wanted to know more before I put out money. I found the facebook page The Lyn-Genet Plan and read the first chapter Excerpt that is posted on the page. It gave me incredible insight and hope. That night I wrote an email to her staff, and the next day got a response. At the time I was still nursing my baby and they recommended I work with one of their nutritionists. I simply couldn't afford that, and I began to worry. About two days later, after I prayed my heart out about this, my daughter quite nursing, cold turkey! Yes ouch! But it has turned out to be a blessing in disguise. One week later I have started The Plan, I'm now on day 2.

A brief explanation of the plan: It's based on medical information and research that all chronic disease is caused by inflammation. (I already knew I had a major inflammation problem) And that inflammation is a response by your immune system used to protect the body from injury, or a foreign body that would do harm. 70% of your immune system is in your gut. So food you eat that your body is sensitive to can cause an inflammatory reaction. If you then eat another food you are reactive to you cause another inflammatory reaction. And your body stays in a constant state of emergency. This causes weight gain, pain, skin conditions, digestive upset, depression etc. It means that not all healthy food is healthy for all people, because we all have different body chemistry. This means there is no Good or Bad food, just friendly food that doesn't cause a reaction, and reactive foods that do cause a reaction.

So my goals with this plan first is to discover which foods are causing my inflammatory response.
Second to control or eliminate the daily affects of poor health such as, poor sleep, randomized pain, aches, back pain, knee and leg pain, tendinitis, headaches/migraines, acne and redness on my face, poor memory and depression.
The Third and Final goal is to LOSE WEIGHT! And since my 70 pound monster is now more like 75-90 pounds I am really looking forward to finally winning this battle!

I am now on Day 2 of The Plan.
Yesterday I started out at 224.4 pounds, I ate great food, some of which I was skeptical of, but it turned out to be delicious. I began to detox my liver, which has given me a touch of nausea and last night a slight headache. All normal signs of detoxing.

This morning my scale was 221.4 pounds, and while I still have a bit of nausea my headache is gone. Which is a sign that my body is letting go of the inflammation, because inflammation causes mass water retention (her book explains how/why). And a further sign is I woke up with zero back pain! Plus right now my baby girl is having her afternoon nap. Usually at this point I can barely keep my eyes open. Well, here I am and I have more energy than usual. Far more than I can ever remember having in the middle of the afternoon.

Tomorrow is my last day of the detox, and then we are on to discovering the culprits of my inflammation!

Lynae xoxoxo