Jackie's journey to be rid of pain

Exactly two years ago – in November 2019 – I went to Dirk Hartog Island with a group of my besties. Despite being with amazing friends in this wonderful, unique part of the world, I spent much of it in tears. Tears of frustration. Tears of pain. I could not bend to the ground to even help pick up a fallen tent strap. I couldn’t help get things off the back of the Hilux. Every little job required movements that I simply could not do because my body hurt too much.

It was frustrating, to say the least. But what it really was, was scary. It had become clear that my auto-immune issues were getting the best of me. I had been diagnosed with oesteo-arthritis and, after much trial and error, with psoriatic arthritis. I had serious bowel and digestive system problems and just generally hurt. Everywhere.

At the time I was at TAFE doing a Diploma of Fine Art with a wonderful group of friends. Lucky there was a couple of young’uns in the group because they took it upon themselves to look after me – picking things up off the floor if I dropped things, carrying stuff for me, opening jars and tubes and just generally making life as easy as they could for me. The support from my eight classmates was a generous and wonderful thing.

Sitting on my front verandah, I confided to my cousin that I believed I would be wheelchair bound by the time I was 70, so I was making plans to do everything I could while I still had some physical ability.

I researched pain management and learnt a great deal about neuro-plasticity (more on that another day) and I hired people to work in my business for me because I could no longer do it. And I got on with my life. I’m a huge optimist and that makes life easier even when you’re now taking a massive regime of medications, including one called methotrexate which is a chemotherapy.

Fast forward one year. It’s January 2021. My partner Brian announces that he’s “sick of being fat" and is going to try a diet he’s been reading about. Summer and I decided that he would need support, and “hey” we could do with losing a few kilos too. So we starting reading the stuff he was reading and started down the road of a heavily calorie restricted diet. After all, that was the only way we knew to lose weight.

Barely days into the CRD it was really clear that Brian was just not going to be able to do it. He loves eating. Research was needed. Were there options we didn’t know about?

I went to the library. What a revelation. I bought home books and books about “diets” and “lifestyles”. There were so many conflicting stories. Being a journalist and researcher, I headed into the science and discovered a book called “How Not to Die” and companion book “How Not to Diet” by Dr Michael Greger.

It opened a world of discovery. Within weeks we had all started to eat only nutritionally dense food including beans, legumes, pulses, fruit, vegetables, nuts and seeds, eggs, fermented foods, yoghurt (and the occasional bit of meat). We cleared out the pantry cupboards and put all processed foods into a cardboard box and stored it in the laundry – just in case. The box is still there with the contents untouched (except by the silverfish).

Within weeks of just eating whole foods (predominantly plant based) strange things had started to happen. Firstly we all started to lose weight. Rapidly. Second, we weren’t hungry. Ever. There was so much food available. In fact, we learnt we had to eat more!! No problem for me, I love to eat and chew. No problems for Brian. Summer has never been much of an eater, so she’s had to learn to “eat more!”.

Then, something amazing happened.

One day I needed to find a sock lost under the bed. I bent down and retrieved the sock.

I stood up. My mind was whirling. I did it again. I flexed my knees and lowered myself,

I could bend, I could flex. I didn’t hurt.

And suddenly I realised that I hadn’t hurt for a while, my fingers were moving more freely, my neck didn’t ache, my feet had stopped hurting so much. When pain goes away you really don’t notice.

On reflection I realised that I no longer had reflux. I was no longer waking with intense pain in my oesophagus (and worse but I won’t detail that). I had no aortic pulsing, no heart “pulsing” that prevented me sleeping. And weirdly, a chronic low-grade inflammation in my gum where I’d had a crown put on a year before, had just disappeared.

Oh, and I’ve lost 18 kilos – gone from a size 16 to a size 12 again.

While not being in pain is really the life changing stuff, I am really happy to look the way I like to look! I like being a shape I like, just as much as I LOVE sleeping well and not being in pain. And I can pick up my own stuff off the floor.

And it’s all about inflammation; the underlying cause of almost every disease that people in the Western World will die from. Get that in order, and live a longer, healthier, less painful life.