In the beginning...

  

Well, here we are. This blog has been bouncing around in my brain for about 6 months, living way in the back dusty cobweby area, filed under "things I want to do but haven't and just need to get off my butt and do them 'cause what the hell is stopping you??!!" (It's a big file back there... I'm working on it). I am really still not sure what the flow of things will be around here- mostly recipes for nourishing foods and homemade body care, healthy tidbits and personal stories here and there- but I am going to let it evolve into what it wants to be on its own (no pressure!)

Maybe the best thing to do is to tell you who I am, and why I am here, sitting in front of my computer on a sunny July day, starting this blog. My name is Stepheni. I am 31 years old, soon to be 32. I am married, and I have two furry babies, a dog named Ptilota (I'll get to explaining her weird name) and a cat, Miss Cosmo. My husbands name is Jared, he may appear on the blog from time to time (he has been encouraging me to write for a long time now, so look honey! I'm doing it!) I have an education  in Marine Biology (sidebar- my dogs name is Ptilota, which is a marine red alga -a seaweed- I LOVE SEAWEED. We call her Pty, and to make it more complicated the P is silent, 'cause she is cool like that). I live in Santa Cruz, California, and I grew up in Manhattan Beach, California. I love all things nature, love dogs, love all animals really (except I am really freaked out by spiders- I know, being a biologist, that they are super important for many reasons, but they scare the crap out of me none the less). I really like cooking, which is becoming more of a love lately, I love gardening, I love really strong black tea, I love kale,  and I love red wine (only a little though, 'cause man do I get wicked hangovers!)

About 3-4 years ago, I started to get sick. It started gradually, a bloody nose here or there, increasingly bad headaches, tummy troubles, occasional random chronic full body hives that lasted for weeks. Horrible, but honestly nothing that I really paid much attention to or thought might be caused all by the same thing (I was in grad school at the time, I was busy... and not in tune with my body at all). Then, in the spring of 2011, I broke my knee. How does one break their knee, you ask? Well, in my case, I was training to run a 10k and apparently was so vitamin deficient (my vitamin D level was at 17- healthy is between 80-100) that the repetitive motion of running caused stress fractures and a tibial bone bleed. How does a late 20's "healthy" woman have such severe vitamin deficiencies?! At the time, my doctors couldn't figure it out, and told me to just eat more dairy (now I know better). The other crap continued, and got progressively worse. I got to a point, in fall/winter of 2011/2012, where I had a headache EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.  A pounding headache. Nasal bleeding. Polyps in my sinus cavities that the ear nose and throat "specialist" told me to take Sudafed for the rest of my life to deal with. I actually named my sinus polyp (Sally) and would tell my husband that Sally was acting up on a bad headache day. That, combined with some really lovely digestive trials and tribulations that I won't gross you out with, was not awesome. On top of it all, I was just starting to process a family trauma that had happened to me when I was 17 and had internalized and never dealt with. I was a mess. And it all came to a head. And that's when I freaked out, and decided to overhaul my life.

We moved, out of the fog, into the sun. I stopped speaking to some family members who were treating me like I didn't deserve to deal with my sh*t and wanted me to just shut up about it. I started going to acupuncture weekly. I stopped working. I started sleeping more.  I spent hours online and reading books, learning about food allergies and trying to figure out what the hell was going on with my body. I started going to therapy weekly. I started going to the chiropractor. I eliminated gluten and dairy from my diet entirely, as that I had a suspected that gluten was the cause for many of my ailments. I went off my birth control pill (all those artificial hormones- no good). I got rid of as much of the plastic in the house as was humanly possible. I removed anything with an ingredient in it that I couldn't pronounce from my kitchen and my bathroom. I was a CRAZY WOMAN. Luckily, my husband is very open minded and supportive, so he went along with all of the craziness (and maybe even added some of his own- more on this another time). And I started to get better. Slowly but surely, the pain lifted. 

I ate bread (a few slices of gorgeous bread with olive oil) one evening in the summer of 2012, after a few months of avoiding obvious gluten sources (but not the tricky weirdly labeled sources that are hidden in lots of foods). I looked like I had two black eyes the next morning. My head was pounding. I had hives starting to break out. I had horrible digestive upset. My doctor and my acupuncturist were both like "That's it! you're allergic. No more gluten." I didn't have formal testing done for Celiac disease, since my doctor felt that the required 3 months of ingesting gluten daily before the testing process would be too damaging, and it was clear that I was having an autoimmune reaction. So there went all forms of gluten, and along with it most processed foods. Most of my favorite places to eat out were no longer safe, and at parties and social events I became the girl who couldn't eat (thank god I live in Santa Cruz, where living g-free isn't weird at all). And I got better. A lot better. I haven't had a gluten exposure in 10 months. And almost all of my symptoms are gone. Hallelujah! 

The one last thing that was sitting, waiting to be looked at a little closer, was that, since I chucked my birth control pills in April of 2012, I have been hoping to get pregnant. Now, I knew my body needed to do a lot of healing, and that it still may. I still had that little hope that once I got the poisonous gluten out of my system, and started processing my family trauma/grief, that I would just get pregnant, like *poof*! Here we are, 15 months later, and I am not pregnant. They say it can take Celiacs years. So we are working on that too. Always a work in progress. 

Sooooo.... long story, NOT so short, this blog is my foray into putting information into the world, about my health and experiences and recipes and lifestyle tips in the hopes that it may encourage other people to take charge of their health. Who knows, maybe some of this will resonate with someone the way that some blogs resonated with me when I first started learning about food and the body and how toxic we make ourselves, and most importantly, how to heal.  And if not, maybe someone will like a recipe or a tidbit and take it with them in their life. Either way, it's mostly about me putting something out there. Hopefully you enjoy it. Mazel Tov!