host posted on April 05, 2008 12:52
I’m a recovering allergy sufferer.
Every year as long as I can remember, when spring arrived, so did the sneezing and the itchy eyes. I played baseball my whole life, and was so excited to get out to the field each year. But I also knew that to survive out there in the Oklahoma dust and wind, I’d need to pack some kind of antihistamine with me.
The thing about allergies is that it never ends with the allergies, themselves. If you’re like me, you also risk having upper respiratory infections. For me, each spring started with the sneezing and ended with antibiotics. I’d recover for a while, but then the cycle would start all over again.
It’s no fun being an allergy sufferer. Whether you have seasonal allergies, or are allergic to dust, pet dander, pollen, or grass, it’s important to know that you can overcome these.
As recently as 1995 or so, I wouldn’t have believed it. I was in college and having the love/hate relationship with the change of seasons as I always did. I’d take the antihistamines and then try to stay awake in class. Then I went to the doctor, and he prescribed me a wonderful prescription allergy medication that I took up until the day the pharmacy stopped filling it. The reason? It had been taken off the market because it was linked to several deaths. So much for my “safe and effective” remedy!
A few years later, I found this guy on TV who I really liked – Doug Kaufmann! He talked about carrot juice and vitamins and probiotics. He helped me to fall in love with nutrition and supplementation all over again.
He also talked about something that I initially didn’t pay much attention to. Fungus. “Ho hum,” I thought. “I don’t have fungus, I have allergies.”
How wrong I was!
Thankfully, I was a Doug addict and watched the show every day. Little by little, he began convincing me that virtually every disease could have a link to fungus. Since he didn’t have a book out at the time, I listened to the names of the researchers he mentioned, and went to the local medical school library and began researching it. Sure enough, the research was exactly as he said it was!
So, I became convinced that my symptoms were due to fungus. I thought about my apartment and how often it leaked during the rainy spring season. I thought about how the moisture mixed with the warmer temperatures raised the ambient mold count. It all was making sense.
And then, I thought about my diet. Ugh. (You know, it’s one thing to get an air treatment system. It’s another thing to stop eating cereal, toast, sandwiches, pizza, and every form of sugar. I was a college student, after all; what else were we supposed to eat?)
But I knew I had to change, so I started by replacing my normal breakfasts with protein and berry smoothies. Delicious. Then I started adding a little more meat and removing grainy carbohydrates, like breads and pastas. I added good fats like olive oil and fish oil. And I slooowwwly started eating vegetables, which was the hardest thing of all for me to do. (By the way, I did this first by adding things like wheat grass and spirulina to my smoothies, and after a while, I actually developed a taste for veggies.)
Luckily, I had a great health food store nearby, and I loaded up on good supplements like a solid multi, fish oil, probiotics, grape seed extract, caprylic acid, and quercetin.
Little by little, I simply stopped experiencing allergies. This is unbelievable to many of you who are reading this with a box of tissues nearby. But it’s true. Today, I take zero medications of any kind after being “that guy” who always had a prescription for every ill. If the grass needs mowing, I can do it, whereas I used to be sick within minutes of starting. When it’s time to teach my son to play catch outside, I can do it. And the reason is simple. Instead of chasing symptoms with artificial symptom-blockers, I learned what the cause of my condition really was, and I fought it.
Listen to people who have read Doug’s books and watched his show for a number of years. They sound like people on a mission. It’s because the conditions they had – from allergies to zits – have been overcome with the simple knowledge of Doug’s fungus message.
How sick are you? Sick enough to change your diet? Sick enough to add a few antifungal supplements to your regimen? This is so simple! This year, make the changes that Doug outlines in his books, and start enjoying spring for a change.