Candida much better, for once
Ok, I'm not going to spike the ball and say I'm cured, but I feel compelled to post how much better I am after being a 3 year lurker searching for answers here.
Original symptoms: extreme thirst, brain fog, fatigue, achy joints, sore foot arches, fibromyalgia-ish pains in neck/shoulders, odd/foul/unpleasant underarm odor (which would sometimes take on the smell of what I ate. How could this be?), intense gas/pains every night. Thought I was just getting old, but the thirst and underarm odor were really intense, enough to prompt me to search for answers.
So I found this website, and there's a LOT of info on candida (and similar). This was much appreciated, and I learned a lot. In the first year I made several "baby steps" toward recovery. I'm just listing what *worked* for me, leaving out the tons of things that did not.
Baby step #1: I cut out as much
Sugar as possible. No more ice cream, no candy, etc. Restricted carbs as they just end up as a lump of
Sugar a couple hours after eating.
Baby step #2: Using various natural antifungals, and adding vitamin D because I tested low, I made *some* progress: my achy joints, sore foot arches, and fibromyalgia-like symptoms were basically gone. So I was on to something - it wasn't just in my head. However, stopping these will cause the symptoms to come back.
Baby step #3: As I learned here,
Liver Flushes can be beneficial. So I tried a couple of different kinds from my local health food store. I found that this got rid of my intense thirst. Prior to that I was thirsty ALL of the time, even right after I'd drink a large amount of water. It's nice to be rid of this issue, although it will come back, so
Liver Flushes are occasionally required.
Baby step #4: As I learned here, molybdenum and pantethene can help with brain fog. Yup, they definitely do. So either I'd take them every day, or as necessary when I would feel like it was difficult to concentrate / brain fog.
So after the above, I hit a plateau: I had made advances, but I still had a bunch of remaining symptoms (like the odd underarm odor, intense gas/pains every night, candida waiting to pounce). And if I stopped any of the above, the candida came roaring back. Very frustrating! 2 more years passed like this :(
So here was the most recent advance for me. I tried to visualize what was going on down there, and considered that I might have Leaky Gut. So waste can actually escape my colon via blood (to the liver), or even to the tissues surrounding the colon (ewww). If the latter is the case, I would think the lymphatic system would pick up some of this waste - perhaps this would explain my odd/foul underarm odor? There are a few websites that say to cure leaky gut, there are a few things that help. The one that really helped me: bone broth. Yeah I know bone broth is "so 2 years ago", but it REALLY did something for me. I'd drink a cup of chicken bone broth (the simple stuff you buy in a box at your store). This is the ONLY thing that would stop (temporarily) my underarm odor. This was a huge "ah-ha" moment for me. If this stops my underarm odor that smells sort of like poop/food I recently ate, this must be big. So I continued drinking a cup a day. Underarm odor now 90% gone. After a couple of weeks I started to notice that some of my other symptoms had lessened, and I could ease up on antifungals and other remedies listed above, and still feel ok. This is good. However, I started to get pains in my ascending and (especially) descending colon. Hmm, what is this? I was also taking a lot of vitamin D. This is my guess, and not based on any
Science at all: now that I "plugged up a bunch of little holes in my gut" with bone broth, some of my absorption problems were lessened. For example, perhaps before with leaky gut, I needed a lot of vitamin D, but now I no longer do - in fact I might be getting too much. I haven't heard of vitamin D toxicity causing these pains, but when I cut way back, the pains went away. My body seems to be functioning much more the way it should be now, so I need to adjust and/or eliminate some of these "meds".
So although not cured, I feel like I'm in control now, and overall feel more like I did years ago. The road to recovery continues... Hope this might help others here - although everyone's case is different, and everyone responds in different ways.
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