(Day 7) Detox & Heal: Chapter 1: Healing Is Possible - How I Healed My Rheumatoid Arthritis with Detoxification
This post was originally published on AnnMarieMichaels.com.
Welcome to Day 7 of the daily excerpts from my new book, Detox & Heal.
This excerpt from the book is Chapter 1: Healing Is Possible - How I Healed My Rheumatoid Arthritis with Detoxification.
Here is the link to the Table of Contents.
Here is the link to the publishing schedule.
How to Get Access to the Book Excerpts
The first week of excerpts from the book are free for everyone. After that, the excerpts will only be for my paid subscribers.
For only $5/month or $3.75/month with the annual plan (a 25% savings), you will start getting the excerpts every day in your email inbox.
Detox & Heal
(Day 7)
Chapter 1: Healing Is Possible
How I Healed My Rheumatoid Arthritis with Detoxification
The journey that led me to write Detox & Heal started for me in the mid-1990s.
In my twenties, just out of college, I cured my rheumatoid arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic sinus infections, seasonal allergies, and gluten intolerance. And I did it naturally, with diet and supplements.
If you’re sick and in pain, I know how you feel. I was just like you. When I was in my twenties, I was in pain all the time.
Diagnosed at Age 25
I was only twenty-five when I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. I was about to graduate from college and getting ready to start my first job at a digital ad agency in Silicon Valley. And I couldn’t get out of bed in the mornings.
I wasn’t sleeping well, because the pain in my knees would wake me up at night. And the joint pain was spreading from my knees to my fingers and elbows. I was living on pain medication.
I knew my problems were only going to get worse because arthritis is a degenerative disease.
Symptoms Galore
In addition to the rheumatoid arthritis, I also suffered from chronic sinus infections and seasonal allergies. I was always sneezing and coughing, I had chronic itchy, watery eyes, and post-nasal drip, a white coat on my tongue, and I was always blowing my nose and rubbing my eyes.
To top it off, I had chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS). I used to think these were made-up illnesses made up by lazy people.
I found out the hard way that chronic fatigue syndrome is real and it’s debilitating. Coffee had become my best friend.
No Future
I was only twenty-five and I felt like a senior citizen. I never felt rested in the morning, felt exhausted all day long. And forget about going to the gym or going out swing dancing at night with my friends. Hey, this was the 1990s — swing dancing was in back then.
It was the spring of my senior year at college and I was getting ready to move across the country from Texas to California to start my new job. I had worked hard in school, pulled all-nighters, got straight As, graduated at the top of my class, and landed a job the most prestigious digital ad agency in the world.
How was I gonna pull this off? I was really scared about how I would handle the stress and long hours in Silicon Valley with my failing health.
Searching for a Cure for Rheumatoid Arthritis
I made the decision right then to refuse to accept defeat. I knew there had to be a solution. That's when I started researching for answers.
Finding information back then, in the mid-90s, was daunting in the pre-internet era. You couldn't just google something.
I started spending time in the library, reading books about arthritis. All of the books I found talked about how to cope with arthritis, but none of the authors wrote about curing arthritis. They were just like my doctors, saying I’d just have to live on painkillers and eventually I would need surgery.
I remember one book talking about how many people with arthritis will end up in a wheelchair, and how to install railings in your home. I threw that book across the room.
Rheumatoid Arthritis & Nightshades
So I started trying to find books about “natural healing” for arthritis. There weren’t a lot — this was the 1990s.
After many hours in the library, I found an article about arthritis in cattle. Ranchers found that nightshade vegetables caused arthritis in their cattle.
"Well," I thought to myself, "What if I stopped eating nightshade vegetables?" It was a crazy idea but I had nothing else to go on.
So then I had to look up what nightshade vegetables were. They include include five things: tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, tobacco and peppers.
Giving up eggplant? No problem! I also figured I could easily do without peppers. And tobacco, since I didn’t smoke.
But living without pizza and French fries was going to be a challenge. Nonetheless, I thought I’d give it a try.
One week later, my arthritis was 80% better. In other words, my joint pain had lessened 80%.
Not only that, but the other symptoms – sneezing, fatigue, headaches – had also lessened.
Needless to say, I was thrilled.
Why Was My Immune System Broken?
Excitedly, I told a good friend of mine about my success.
“You shouldn’t be reacting to nightshades,” he said. “If you’re reacting to nightshades, you have a problem with immunity. You should look into what’s wrong with your immune system.”
Wow, I thought. He was right. Most people don’t react to nightshades.
If they did, nobody would be eating pizza or French fries. McDonald’s and Domino’s Pizza would go out of business.
So, what was wrong with my immune system?
I was glad I had tested the nightshade theory, because even though it wasn’t the ultimate answer, it had convinced me that you can stop pain by changing your diet. This was huge!
I didn’t know anything about the immune system, so I went back to the library.
The Yeast Connection
I searched on the computer at the library computer for “immune system” and I found a book called The Yeast Connection by Dr. William Crook.
I checked the book out from the library and read it cover to cover, instead of doing my homework.
Dr. Crook said that to have a healthy immune system, you need a healthy gut. Dr. Crook said that in order to have a healthy gut, you need a healthy amount of good bacteria.
Without enough good bacteria, your digestive tract gets overrun with yeast and other pathogenic bacteria. Hence, the title, The Yeast Connection.
It all made sense. I had grown up on antibiotics and sugar. My good gut bacteria had been killed off by the antibiotics. And all the sugar had fed the bad bacteria and yeast.
30 Day Elimination Diet
Dr. Crook recommended that I follow an elimination diet for 30 days. Then after 4 weeks, you could start re-introducing foods.
For 30 days, I cut out all foods containing sugar, yeast, mold, starches and fermented foods. So, in other words… no bread, rice or any other grains, no cheese, no wine or beer, and no sugar or fruit of any kind.
I was only allowed to eat meat, eggs, seafood, and non-starchy vegetables. No potatoes, even.
The first week or so was excruciating. I was ten times more exhausted than I usually was, and I felt like I had the flu.
"Die Off"
The flulike symptoms, I learned were caused by “die off,” which is what happens when the pathogenic bacteria dies off in large quantities. When you stop feeding it all the sugar and starch, it can’t survive.
After the first several days, I started to feel better, and as the weeks wore on, my symptoms began to disappear.
After about a month on the elimination diet, I was feeling 95% better.
However, I noticed that if I even ate one tiny little bite of gluten or sugar, my symptoms would all come back with a vengeance.
Arthritis pain, mucus, itchy, watery eyes and itchy nose and throat, dizziness, brain fog, and exhaustion.
I found this out by testing different foods one by one.
Dr. Vikki, the Miracle Worker
Around that time had moved to Silicon Valley for my new job. A friend at work recommended I go see Dr. Vikki Peterson.
Believe it or not, 20 years later, Dr. Vikki and her husband Rick are still in practice. They do work with patients remotely (you just have to travel there once for the initial visit). If you’re interested in working with them, please tell them I sent you.
I worked with Dr. Vikki for two years, and it was awesome. I am eternally grateful for her for helping me through my process of healing. It took two years for my gut to heal fully.
I had to avoid gluten and sugar for 2 years. But those were really the only things I had to stay away from. I could eat honey in moderation, and all grains and starches.
Fruit was fine, too, just not in excess. I remember once going to the Juice Club and getting a giant fruit smoothie. I ended up with my head on my desk, dizzy and exhausted — too much sugar!
During the 2 years I was healing, Dr. Vikki worked with me and gave me therapeutic grade probiotics.
She also gave me supplements to help support my adrenal glands. When your body is fighting an illness, it taxes your adrenal glands. Being sick had really put my adrenal glands on overdrive, and getting the extra nutritional support made a huge difference.
I felt energetic enough to get up early, work long hours at the office, and even go out dancing and on dates at night. Even though I had to avoid gluten and sugar, I was getting my life back!
How the Digestive Tract Heals
The digestive tract is made up of good bacteria and bad bacteria. One of the main jobs of the good bacteria is to keep the bad bacteria in check. You’re always going to have some bad bacteria, but when you have too much bad bacteria in your gut, you get overrun with yeast and other pathogenic bacteria.
I always compare this to a city that gets overrun with gangs and violence. Neighborhoods explode with crime and drugs, and nobody wants to live there anymore.
This is what happens when your gut gets taken over by pathogenic bacteria. You need to starve out the bad guys. You do this by reducing and/or eliminating sugar, starches, fruit and anything you react to. And you have to bring in the good guys – probiotics – to kill off the bad guys.
It can take a couple years for the gut to heal. I’ll explain why… There’s something called villi, which are tiny finger-like projections that grow along your small intestine. It’s like grass or a brush lining.
One of the other jobs of good bacteria is to keep the wall of the gut healthy — kind of like fertilizer for a lawn. The villi are like green grass when your digestive tract is healthy. When you don’t have enough good bacteria, the lawn dies and you end up with a bald digestive tract.
The villi is there to secrete enzymes that help you break down and digest carbohydrates. For example, your villi produces the enzyme lactase in order to help you digest lactose from dairy products.
It takes time for the villi to grow back, which is why it can take months or years before you can start eating the foods you are allergic to again.
Full Recovery from Rheumatoid Arthritis and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
After around two years of avoiding gluten and sugar and taking therapeutic-grade probiotics, I found that I could start eating gluten and sugar in moderation and not react.
In other words, I didn’t have any symptoms.
It's now almost 30 years later and I have been able to eat anything I want ever since. This makes me very happy.
I started my food blog, Cheeseslave (which is now this blog), in 2007 – and I called it that because I really love food. And I hate not being able to eat the foods that I love.
Even more importantly, degenerative disease is just that, degenerative. And disease begets disease.
My Stepmom Didn't Make It
If I had stayed on the course I was going, I would have gotten sicker and sicker. I would have ended up like my stepmother, who passed away in 2007, just a few months after my first daughter was born.
My father came home one day after a long day at work to find her dead on the floor of their home.
She had had rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia for a long time, and she just kept getting sicker and sicker.
The doctors gave her more and more drugs. And they ended up killing her.
I felt so bad for my father and my stepmom and what they went through, and that’s what drives me to continue to share information. I know there are so many people out there who are suffering.
I want you to know that there is hope and recovery is possible.
My experience of healing myself – and watching the doctors kill my stepmom – is the bedrock of my understanding of health and dis-ease.
It is based on the Terrain Theory, which we will explore in Chapter 2. Dis-ease isn’t a life sentence but a signal that the body’s “fish tank” needs cleaning.
My Pain Led Me to Service
My health crisis became the crucible in which my life’s purpose was forged. It was ultimately the thing that launched my career as a health blogger.
In 2007, a few months before my stepmom died, my first child, a baby girl, was born.
As many of you have probably experienced, when you have a baby, you become obsessed with health and nutrition. And these days, this is not only a passion, but a way to keep your child alive and uninjured. Pediatricians are literally the enemy (not all, but most).
That fall after my daughter was born and my stepmom died, I started the Cheeseslave blog and began writing about health and nutrition. The blog allowed me to interact with lots and lots of people who had health challenges.
How Blogging Led Me to More Answers
I spent the past few decades learning about health, immunity and detoxification.
While my healing in the 1990s was miraculous, it was relatively slow-going, because I was limited by the tools that I knew about back then.
What I know now can help people heal a lot faster.
A few years after I started the blog, I launched an online video class called Reversing Food Allergies to teach others what I had learned and help them start on the elimination diet.
A lot of people were able to reverse their food allergies and recover. But as I would soon find out, not everyone was recovering, despite being on extremely restrictive diets. They were stuck, becoming more and more limited in what they could eat, and their health problems were getting worse, not better.
I found out why they weren't healing when I helped our former nanny heal her all of her symptoms within a month and cured her of her seizures, ovarian cysts, migraines and chronic acne.
It wasn't the food after all. It was something else...
About My New Book, Detox & Heal
Detox & Heal is a revolutionary guide to overcoming chronic health challenges and reclaiming vitality using basic, natural elements including water, minerals and other essential nutrients as well as frequency, that assist the body in detoxification and rebuilding itself.
This transformative book outlines a five-step detox protocol that fights the hidden causes of illness—microbes, metals, magnetism, and malnutrition.
You will learn how to:
Break down biofilm with chl0rine di0xide (what I call "pool water")
Eliminate parasites, including worms (See one of my posts about parasites and vaxxines)
Detox heavy metals, bacteria & other toxins using chl0rine di0xide, silica water and zeolite (See my post about the health benefits of silica water)
Heal illness with frequency using phototherapy, meditation, and prayer
Rebuild and maintain health with nutrition: traditional, healthy fats, high-quality animal-based protein, silica-rich carbohydrates, fermented foods, and foods and drinks loaded with salts and minerals that restore stomach acid and kill parasites
Packed with practical tools, scientific insights, and real-life success stories, Detox & Heal empowers you to take charge of your health.
Join today as a paying subscriber to get the daily excerpts and start your healing journey.
PS: No, it's not a NY Times Best Seller. Yet. I'm just planning for the future.
How My Book, Detox & Heal, Will Be Published
I will be posting excerpts of the book every day through the end of September.
Anyone who is signed up as a paid subscriber will get the excerpts every day via email.
The final book will be published (hopefully) in the fall, and I'll be offering a special coupon for all my paid subscribers to get it at a discount. I will be selling the book on my site as an e-book and also on Amazon and other booksellers.
Here is the link to the Table of Contents.
Here is the link to the publishing schedule.
Join today as a paying subscriber to get the daily excerpts of Detox & Heal.
Note: the schedule subject to change, but I am going to be very aggressive about sticking to it. I know there are so many people suffering right now from vax injuries and also being impacted by shedding, I want to get this out to my audience as soon as possible.
Sign Up for My Online Class
Want more than just the written excerpts?
If you want to watch videos of all the lessons, sign up now for my online class, Detox & Heal.
At the time of this writing, the online class is completely FREE. I haven't started charging yet – I will start charging any day now.
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The Detox & Heal Online Class Still FREE
I still have not started charging for the online class – a one-time introductory price of $99 for standard access and $199 for premium, which will include the weekly zoom calls.
This is the introductory price – it will be going up to a monthly fee in the near future.
Anyone who signs up now gets in for FREE.
Sign up for Detox & Heal now!
Note: I am asking for donations, since I lost almost everything by speaking out and I am currently essentially homeless after my divorce. Every dollar donated helps!
The donation form is currently part of the sign up for the class – but if you can't afford to donate, you can still sign up for free.
I would have loved to keep this free for everyone, but I am on my last legs financially and need to support myself and my son.
The donations are helping me pay the rent and buy food, since I lost almost everything after I got cancelled and my ex-husband divorced me and took the house and my life savings.
I'm still living in Airbnbs – this is what happens when you tell the truth and speak out – no regrets! I would do it all over again because I know I helped to save lives. Here's a testimonial I got from one of my latest Substack subscribers:
(Thank you, A. Marrs, for your support! I'm so grateful for you.)
Sign up for Detox & Heal now!
If you sign up now, you will get full access for life. This is to thank those of you who have been through me since the beginning.
By signing up now, you will also get FREE access to my upcoming online constitutional law class, Take Back Your Rights. More on that soon...)
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