My Autoimmune Taming Morning Routine part 1

Why is a morning routine important?

I hated routines because I thought they would make my life very boring and predictable. Well, it was quite the opposite and you need some kind of routine if you want to manage your autoimmune disease in the long run.

First things last, my routines helped me to better plan and prepare for the challenges of a life with an autoimmune disease.

I start the mornings with celery stick smoothie that keeps my hunger at bay for an hour and the most important part is that it helps my body to fight the inflammation.

After that comes a green smoothie of mixed salad, carrots, curcumin and ginger root. This keeps me satisfied until lunch and is fantastic for the stomach and gut.

In between the celery stick juice and the smoothie, I do my breathing exercises and some stretching to get rid of the morning stiffness. After this, a few minutes meditation and you feel like your mind is ready for anything that the day will throw at you.

Then comes the hard part, the cold shower. You can read about that in my post My Autoimmune Taming Morning Routine part 2

And this kind of routines did not make my life more boring or dull. It was exactly the opposite I had a clearer mind and more time to do the things that I liked and finish projects more easily.

Whats your morning routine? Do you have one? Inspire yourself from these.

Why is this happening to me? The autoimmune culprit!

The symptoms of the autoimmune disorders aren’t visible at first.

The average time for diagnosis of a serious autoimmune disease is 4.6 years.

46 percent of the patients were told initially that they were too concerned about their health.

Maybe the most common question at the beginning of the disease is: “What is wrong with me?”

Then we leave all the responsibility to the doctors, waiting for them to cure us miraculously.

The standard story is as follows: The culprit in most autoimmune disorders is not clear and cure doesn’t exist. But you have to continue your life with your pain and disability. Trying to ease your symptoms as much as possible with medication.

Good news here! This is changing slowly by the contribution of some researchers and doctors.

Nobody wants to get sick. We think again; why did it happen to me? I was sporty, healthy, happy, successful and so on. The scientific research indicates 4 main factors: diet, lifestyle, environmental toxicity, and genetics.

The first one is diet. Nutrition in medicine is not an industry that pays well. There is no broccoli industry to sponsor the clinics and we don’t get the real information about its effect on diseases. Is diet effective in prevention and reversal of the autoimmune diseases? Of course, it is.

The second one is lifestyle. How does your immune system react if you are under constant stress? You don’t have time to exercise, you don’t have time to relax. You can’t even close your eyes for 15 minutes to concentrate on your breathing. Is lifestyle effective in prevention and reversal of the autoimmune diseases? Yes, it is.

The third one is environmental toxicity. We are all exposed to the food, water, air, furniture toxicity. Do we really know how much? Then, we can make better choices. Is environmental toxicity protection effective in prevention and reversal of the autoimmune diseases? Yes, it is.

The fourth one is genetics. If the autoimmune diseases are passed down from parents to children, then why do our ancestors had much less autoimmune diseases? The research says genetics are like switches you can turn on and off based on the other 3 factors I told you about.

Knowledge is power. The right mindset starts with integrating all these information into a daily schedule. You will be empowered as you see improvements and feel better. Power to you! Until you are not only well but feeling much better and healthier than before!

Where to buy prebiotics?

You do not need to buy probiotic supplements!

What do I eat daily? When I say prebiotics, my friends look at me blankly and probably they search it on their phones under the table.

Prebiotics help your gut to grow healthy bacteria and heal your gut problems. I knew that probiotics were important but I felt a tremendous improvement after combining both prebiotics and probiotics. That’s because they work together, who would have thought that!

When I say prebiotics, don’t be afraid. They are the food available everywhere.  They will help you not only in your gut but also immune system. I will give the list of prebiotics I eat every day below, Ready? Go!

1. Cabbage: The local cheap and fresh cabbage sorts (green, savoy, napa, red) are delicious. They are also full of B vitamins.
2. Onion: Another local and cheap produce prebiotic that adds flavour to my meals. It is also an immune supporting antioxidant. Only thing you have to consider is your meeting afterwards for the sake of your relationships.
3. Garlic: It is my favourite prebiotic and full of vitamin B6, good for nervous system and keep people at a distance.
4. Greens: Greens include vegetables such as spinach, kale and chard, both steamed or raw. They give also flavour to my green smoothies.
5. Carrot: My another local cheap and fresh prebiotic source is carrot. I eat carrots both raw in my salad and cooked in meals. Sometimes I realise I ate too much and I look at the mirror if I turned orange.

As you can see, it is easy to get your healing food and make it your daily staples. And the fun part is you will understand the freshness even after e few weeks just by smelling or tasting. Then you can bargain also with your store for discount and they will think you are a gourmet or a vegetable expert.

Eat your healthy salad with every meal

Oh yeah, salad again!

The one thing that worked miracles for my autoimmune disease was a big salad with every meal. It really doesn’t matter if you have Hashimoto, diabetes (upward type 2), rheumatoid arthritis, etc… Salads and leafy greens will help you heal your gut and get rid of your symptoms.

When I say big salad, I mean a big salad. If other people are not shocked or not commenting about size of our salads than we are not doing it right.

Here are some examples footage from my meals.

For reference a kiwi fruit resting next to my bowl of salad.

In the previous post, we talked about mindset and the can-do mentality. It really helped me a lot to eat mostly the same things over and over again. After a while, I get used to my salads without dressing. Sometimes I was adding a pinch of salt to my big bowl but that was it as far as flavor enhancers go.

Don’t be intimidated by the salads, try to enjoy them, if you don’t, in the beginning, you will after a while. This kind of disease forces us even to train our taste buds.

Eat your salads, chew them well and stay healthy. Till next time.

AI Guy introduction

Hi,

I’m the guy with the autoimmune disease and we have been reading tons of research and autoimmune related information with my girlfriend factasticgirl over the course of the last year – she is the scientist in the family, so do not expect anything fancy like in her posts:-).

The AI Guy section will have more personal experience related stuff were I will try to share some of the knowledge that I gained from taming my immune system.

Well, we learned a lot and I tried a few things that helped me to get better and have control over my crazy immune system.  I’m still experiencing some hiccups on the way to a better health but overall I’m learning to tame this beast.

Thinking about my immune system as a beast gone wild and the cause behind it helped me a lot.

And taming the beast needs first and foremost the right mindset. So let’s talk about that.

First comes the shock of course. You are in your mid thirties and think you are super healthy because you have a plant based fat free diet and doing exercises. Then severe neck pain starts and you can’t walk one day, ok I could walk but a 100 m distance took me 15 minutes because of my sacroiliac joint pains. Did I mentioned that I also built a six pack in my belly with  just sleeping at night. Yeah that was real fun. Turns out I was cramping my body and abdominal muscles really good while sleeping and after a few weeks I had real nice six pack sitting at my belly. The problem was that the cramping was also taking place at my back and the muscles there were getting tenser by the day until I couldn’t do my morning exercises anymore to stretch the cramped up muscles. A nice vicious cycle, heh?

Then I could not get up in the mornings. Waking up and thinking, Am I paralyzed? I can’t move my body! After a few minutes some movements and in a few hours managed to drag my body out of bed.

These kind of shocks were becoming the daily routine, my orthopaedist still insisting on injections for my stiff muscles and than my blood infection indicator – CRP – shot up. Finally was sent to the rheumatologist and the rest is history.

Yeah but back to the right mindset. I took quite a while to adapt the “right” mindset. What’s the right mindset? Simple said, stay positive and approach things with a can do mentality. Even if the doctors say there is no cure and you will probably never get better, your health will probably deteriorate over time and so on. The one thing that helped was the right mindset.

How I learned to have the right mindset? We can talk about it in the coming blog posts.

Microbiome

What is the humane microbiome? Scientists have been working to specify the definition of the human microbiome and the microbiota that can often be used interchangeably. The  microbiome is defined as the catalog of the microbial taxa associated microbes and their genes whereas microbiota as the microbial taxa composed of bacteria, yeasts, fungi, viruses. The ratio of bacteria in the human body  to the number of human cells (≈37 trillion) is estimated to be 1.3. If we have more of these microorganisms than we have our own human cells and carry around of them about 0.2 kg in our body, what is their relevance to our health and disease?

Most microbes reside only in the colon (which has a volume of 0.4 litres) and yet still not discovered but still in research for its influence in various diseases such as:

• Gastrointestinal (e.g., inflammatory bowel disease, diabetes and obesity)
• Virus (e.g., Theiler’s Murine Encephalomyelitis (TMEV), Poliovirus, Reovirus, Mouse Mammary Tumor Virus (MMTV)), and
• Inflammatory and autoimmune diseases (e.g., rheumatoid arthritis (RA), spondyloarthritis (SpA), multiple sclerosis (MS), ankylosing spondylitis (AS) and reactive arthritis (ReA))

So far we have learnt that microbiome represents an important environmental factor that can influence various disease manifestation. Discussion focuses on the therapeutic potential to modify the intestinal microbial population with probiotics, prebiotics, and taking care of the oral microbiome. We can boost our innate immune and the adaptive immune system improving our diet, lowering stress, and exercising regularly with supporting our body’s microbiome.