When I left off yesterday I finished with a little of the why that I chose the natural treatment route.  The main reason being that the Lord was leading me in that direction.  At this point we are around mid November 2016.  I was sent for a thermogram the day before Thanksgiving.  For those who don't know what a thermogram is, it is uses body temperatures and a special camera and software that picks up on sources of heat in the body.  The hotter the temperature the more inflamation in that area of the body.  I am told that thermograms can pick up on cancer up to ten years before a mammogram will detect cancer.  I hesitate to say much more since I am not well versed on thermograms.  The important part of thermograms is that there is no radiation involved as there is with mammography.

I had asked my doctor to wait to begin my protocol until after Thanksgiving.  Honestly, I wanted my "last supper".  There was quite a bit of change I was about to have to undertake and I did not want to miss out on the holiday.  The day after Thanksgiving, however I kicked it into high gear with a detox of my entire system.  For two weeks I drank pea protein shakes two meals a day along with a paleo meal for the other meal.  There was a whole regiment of pills as well.  At one point I was taking eighty pills a day, give or take, over eleven different times.  Everything was scheduled, including meals since just like prescription medication there were certain things I had to take two hours before meals, certain things I couldn't take with other things, and certain things that had to be taken after meals.  I don't remember everything I was taking, but it included pancreatic enzymes, vitamins D and C, iron, and some things that even when I was taking them I wasn't exactly sure what their purpose was.  It's not that the doctor didn't explain it.  It's more that I didn't remember or if I did I've long since forgotten.

As many pills as I was taking, that wasn't the most difficult part of my treatment.  The hardest thing I had to change was my diet.  My entire life I had eaten whatever I liked, and trust me, I didn't like vegetables!  Pretty much any vegetable with a slightly strong taste was off my list.  The list of vegetables that I would eat were beans, peas, lettuce, mushrooms, carrots, and potatoes.  Absolutely no onions and no tomatoes!  My idea of a salad was lettuce, chicken, cheese, and bacon bits.  I was eating the Standard American Diet.  I would eat fast food almost daily and sometimes three meals a day.  Diet Coke was my poison of choice, and I drank probably 90 oz. or more a day.  I would joke that I had a kitchen because the house came with it!  I was addicted to sugar, and cancer likes sugar. I was so addicted that I would go through the bread line at church on Sunday morning and get a slice of one of those delicious cinnamon crumb coffee cakes from Panera, bring it home, eat it for lunch, and skip the roast that was sitting in the crockpot.

So, as you can imagine, changing  from that lifestyle to a Paleo diet was traumatic at best.  Again, for those who don't know what paleo is, it is essentially a gluten free, dairy free, sugar free, whole food diet.  There is no milk, cheese, sour cream, white flour, beans, corn or corn products.  There are things like almond flour, almond milk, eggs, grass fed beef, antibiotic, hormone free chicken, and lots and lots of organic vegetables.  There's a lot more to it, but you get the idea.

I struggled for months with this diet change.  I would try so hard to make sure I ate paleo.  I had to;  I told myself.  This was life and death.  But then, there was Christmas 2016, and I thought, "One day off won't make a difference and I can have all the foods I love again.  I will jump right back in after Christmas and be none the worse for it."  I quickly learned something first hand.  One taste of sugar just feeds your desire for more, and that one day set me back a month.  I went back on my pea protein shakes.  Not that I loved those shakes that much, but it was an attempt to get myself back on track.

 At one point my doctor suggested I change to a ketogenic diet which is similar in some ways to the paleo diet and yet more strict in other ways.  I found myself struggling with having just made one major change in diet and then trying to make another one.  In some ways I'm a little OCD and every time I couldn't stay precisely on the keto plan I would stress out so much that after one month the doctor told me it was better for me to do paleo that I could stick to than stress out so much over the keto diet. For the next nine months I struggled with my sugar and Diet Coke addictions.  Tomorrow I'll tell you how the Lord helped cure me of those addictions.