It’s a personal image this week, from my printmaking class on Sunday.

This week started off so promising – with art – and yet ended with me curled up on the couch dealing with the side effects of bacterial die-off in my gut. What changed?

Because I could tell that I was entering a healing phase, I decided to go full meat-and-water (with a few eggs here and there) to help my body reset itself. This meant quitting coffee and cheese (again), which meant caffeine withdrawls and general malaise and, a few days in, complete starvation of the bacterial overgrowth that is still hanging around in my gut.

It’s interesting to see, as I’ve gone through my journey toward health, how big problems make smaller problems impossible to see. When I was still eating grains and sugar, it didn’t matter if I quit dairy for a month – there was so much inflammation in my body that I couldn’t tell the difference.

When I had a dead tooth in my mouth, which I’m sure caused all sorts of problems, I had a hunch that my SIBO problems still lingered but it didn’t matter if I was drinking coffee or not. Now that the tooth is gone, and whatever infection along with it, giving up coffee actually means something (all that bacteria in my gut suddenly has no food whatsoever).

It sucks to get through now but I’m hopeful that this means that now my guts can start the real healing. If that means meat + water for a spell, so be it.