A podcast hosted by Karen Bartle, behavioural change & resilience health coach, on Harmful Eating and How to Eliminate It! Additionally, considering things that perhaps should be consumed or ingested to enhance health and well-being and yet we don't do what we know is good for us!
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My special guest today is Graham Henry originally from York in the UK and now living in Berlin.
Graham’s 35-year struggles with overeating and being severely overweight started around 11 when his parents were concerned, he was putting weight and took him to see his doctor who described him as obese and prescribed a diet.
At his heaviest, Graham was 115kg and his lifestyle was significantly affecting his health.
Tune in to learn more about what surprising solution to not only losing weight but also reversing his obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, anxiety, panic attacks and difficulty breathing, transformed his life and career!
And also on Facebook: Henry & Henry The Vegan Breathing Coaches
And Instagram: henryandhenryeurope theveganbreathingcoaches
Endometriosis with Annette Henry
Tuesday, September 17, 2024 • Duration 25:33
My special guest today is Annette Henry who suffered with severely painful symptoms of endometriosis. Towards the end of the 1990’s she had major surgery to try and resolve her symptoms including removing a large cist on her ovary, but unfortunately, the results were not long lasting. To avoid further trauma of having another operation she sought alternative avenues to resolve her symptoms more fully.
Learn more about how Annette unexpectedly came across some simple dietary solutions to eliminate foods that led to the reversal of her condition, and how after becoming ill with chronic fatigue after contracting the flu, she became inspired to support others to adopt a whole food plant-based lifestyle and improve their breathing patterns as a vegan breathing coach, for improved health and well-being.
You’re listening to the Harmful eating and how to eliminate it podcast, I’m your host Karen Bartle, behavioural change and resilience health coach and this is Annette’s story.
Annette can be contacted via the website https://www.henryandhenryeu.com
And also on Facebook: Henry & Henry and The Vegan Breathing Coaches
And Instagram: henryandhenryeurope and theveganbreathingcoaches
Overeating with Julie Kleinhans
Sunday, August 25, 2024 • Duration 24:36
In today’s episode I’m joined by Julie Kleinhans from Arizona in the USA. Julie experienced overeating and binge eating from an early age, which over several decades took its toll on her body and caused her to pile on the weight.
In her forties, after having 3 children, and countless attempts to manage her weight and her eating, she knew she needed to act as her weight had reached 220lbs and she was suffering with chronic pain and finding it difficult to walk.
Julie found a solution that fit in with her values and worked effectively for her. She gained her freedom to become 90lbs lighter and more importantly, keep her at an ideal healthy weight for over 16 years! Julie now uses her Christian based program to help others in the same situation who want to sustainable lose and stabilise their weight and improve their health and well-being.
Listen in and learn what it’s like for someone living and suffering with a chronic overeating problem and what eventually led to her recovery and has influenced the work she does today to help others with this disorder.
Welcome to the Harmful eating and how to eliminate it, I’m your host Karen Bartle, behavioural change and resilience health coach and this is Julie’s story.
Julie along with her husband Tony, hosts the Christian centred podcast and membership program Reshape and Recovery from Overeating. Julie can be via email info@reshapeandrecover.com through her website www.reshapeandrecover.com
Tackling Symptoms Vs Causes
Monday, August 12, 2024 • Duration 11:57
Tackling Symptoms Vs. Causes
In today’s episode I’ll be teasing out the differences between causes and symptoms and why we might choose or need to tackle one, or the other first. We’ll also be discussing when it would be beneficial to deal with them both simultaneously, and when tackling symptoms over causes could be problematic.
Welcome to the Harmful eating and how to eliminate it podcast, I’m your host behavioural health and resilience coach Karen Bartle. If you are experiencing symptoms and struggling to find ways to eliminate them, or in need of some help to identify and manage the driving force of your symptoms i.e., the underlying cause, go to karenbartle.com/contact where you can schedule a 30-minute free call with me to find out what options are available to help you.
If you’ve been tuning into the podcast so far you might have noticed certain patterns emerging with the journey’s that I, and my guests have been sharing so far. For example, in episode 1, I shared my story of having pain while eating breakfast due to a mouthful of ulcers likely to have been brought about by using a toothpaste containing a substance called sodium laureth sulphate which is abrasive to mucous membranes. And by eliminating the toothpaste and using something milder and kinder to my mouth, I don’t have to suffer these ill-effects when I’m eating.
So, in this instance I tackled the issue at cause and eliminated the probable trigger to what was causing the ulcers in the first place. If I had to use that toothpaste and had no other options, then I would have had to find remedies and workarounds to manage the symptoms so I could eat without too much pain e.g., eating a liquid or softer diet.
This would be the same for someone who has for example a gluten intolerance and consumes too much wheat in their diet and experiences symptoms of bloating, nauseousness or gassy, flatulence and diarrhoea. They could either manage the symptoms or eliminate the problem by not eating so much wheat in future.
In episode 2 I talked about losing dad due to chronic heart disease. Dad had a poor diet full of processed and refined foods, he ate and drank very little which caused malnourishment and dehydration, he was addicted to cigarettes, and dealing with severe chronic stress.
Anorexia Nervosa With Bonnie Killip
Tuesday, August 6, 2024 • Duration 28:47
In today’s episode I’m joined by Bonnie Killip from Queensland in Australia. Bonnie had Anorexia Nervosa for 15 years. She gained a heightened awareness around food in her early teens with education and change being significant triggers for her.
Bonnie had all the classic traits of Anorexia Nervosa which predispose to people to suffer with it i.e., perfectionism, harm avoidance, and people pleasing and fear became her driver to eliminating more and more foods which she felt unable to add back in so her diet became severely restricted.
Listen in and learn what it’s like for someone living and suffering with Anorexia Nervosa, what eventually led to her recovery, and has influenced the work she does today to help others with this disorder.
Welcome to the Harmful eating and how to eliminate it, I’m your host Karen Bartle, behavioural change and resilience health coach and this is Bonnie Killip’s story.
Bonnie is an accredited dietician, clinical hypnotherapist, and mindset coach, who specialises in providing holistic therapy for people with Anorexia Nervosa.
Bonnie can be contacted via email bonnie@fuellingsuccess.com through her website www.fuellingsuccess.com
New Delhi Belly
Saturday, July 27, 2024 • Duration 12:00
Welcome to the Harmful Eating and How to Eliminate It podcast. I’m Karen Bartle, behavioural change and resilience health coach, and thanks for tuning in to today’s episode where we’ll be unravelling a topic I’m very passionate talking about, an enigma called resilience; what it is, why we need it, and what happens when we don’t feel we have it.
Harmful eating comes in many guises but typically falls into 1 of 2 categories: either we’re consuming something or too much of what’s not right for us, or we’re consuming too little of the right things that could be good for our health and well-being.
When we are doing either, especially when it’s a conscious behaviour that we know we know better about, there’s typically something missing, something that we need but don’t currently have much of, and that’s resilience!
When we talk about resilience, we’re talking about our ability to cope with life’s ups and downs, continuing forward and remaining optimistic or hopeful despite it being difficult or unpleasant, and bouncing back from the challenges we are facing by accessing previous skills and resources, or by developing new ones to cope with the current demands of the situation.
Stressful life events such as moving home, changing jobs, planning a holiday or important event, starting a family, dealing with disease, illness or injury, going through a separation or divorce, or coming to terms with the death of a loved one, can all test our resilience to the max, especially if the issue is severe, chronic and enduring.
Building resilience helps us to not only manage current challenges of everyday life, but also to develop better skills and habits that will help us to deal with future similar potential events throughout the life cycle. Resilience is important for our mental and physical health; the greater our resilience, the better equipped we are to manage common responses to stressful events. The better we deal with stressful events, the lower our risk of developing mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression which can exacerbate a current physical health problem or trigger a new one.
I’ve had my fair share of having my resilience tested over my lifetime, but especially so over the last 12 years where I’ve faced medical and psychological trauma, travelled the world as a backpacker with my partner navigating our way through 26 countries in 7 continents over 9 months whilst making our way to starting a new life down under without any predictable roadmap.
Popsticks To The Rescue
Saturday, July 20, 2024 • Duration 12:52
In today’s episode I’ll be sharing an example of how when dealing with severe and prolonged stress, we become more vulnerable to experiencing and developing disease, illness and injury.
We can experience symptoms suddenly or insidiously and very unexpectedly. And how we must be mindful of what we’re eating when we’re experiencing stress. One morning in August in 2016 we sat down for breakfast. I had a bowl of Freedom maple crunch with plant milk, nothing unusual about that, as it was something I regularly ate back then.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t just another ordinary day. Just a few spoons in and suddenly I felt an almighty pain in my right jaw. My jaw had locked in an open position, and I couldn’t close it. After a few minutes of thinking about what was going on and catastrophising that I may have dislocated my jaw, I managed to force it closed but then I wasn’t able to open again without severe pain; it was hard to speak and I could only drink through a straw.
With no idea at all about what just happened and why, I got straight in to see my GP and was sent for an MRI which revealed a right anterior disc displacement. I was prescribed anti-inflammatories, a soft diet, and referred to a dental surgeon for further investigation.
Whilst waiting to see the surgeon I was still having to manage several teaching and therapy commitments. How I got through it looking back, pure determination and not wanting to let my customers down. The way to see my surgeon seem to take a lifetime and when I got there was nothing he could offer.
Surgery wouldn’t have solved the problem so the only thing that could was to get my dentist to make an occlusive splint, and to see a physiotherapist to help me get my mouth to open with exercises and physical therapy.
I had never had anything like this happen before, it was totally unexpected and had no blueprint of how to manage it. We were in the middle of growing our hypnotherapy and NLP training academy in 5 major regions in Australia and I had commitments to be teaching most weekends, yet I could barely open my mouth, how was that going to work?
Talking for any length triggered fatigue in my face and jaw and I couldn’t eat or drink anything that couldn’t fit through a straw. This wasn’t something which was going to be a quick fix, but I felt in good hands with a physio who was a head and neck specialist and familiar with the condition and hopeful we could make some good progress together. Each session he would start by measuring the gap between my upper and lower jaw, and we would aim in session to increase it as much as we could.
Ep. 6 Healthy Baking With Rose Huxford
Thursday, July 18, 2024 • Duration 26:41
In today’s episode I’m joined by Rose Huxford originally from California and now living in Bellingham, Washington State. Soon after she finished nursing her first born, Rose found herself having to take action to prevent her son’s picky eating from causing him to become severely malnourished.
Her resilience and dedication to helping her son led to her upskilling as a home baker which was more affordable for the family budget, and where she could pack in lots of good plant-based nutrition using natural healthy ingredients without him resisting it.
This was game changer, as was a realisation that her own self-care was being neglected by her focus on building the family business and dedicating her life to her children. She wasn’t eating well, gained a lot of weight, and after a lifetime of experiencing misdiagnosed symptoms, she had a serious acute epileptic seizure leaving her in urgent need of a large dose of her own nutritional and lifestyle medicine!
Welcome to the Harmful eating and how to eliminate it, I’m your host Karen Bartle, behavioural change and resilience health coach and this is Rose Huxford’s story.
Rose can be contacted via email rosehuxfordlovetobake@gmail.com through her website www.rosehuxfordlovetobake.com or on Instagram at rosehuxfordlovetobake
Diuretics: Do You Really Need Them?
Monday, July 8, 2024 • Duration 16:24
Welcome to the Harmful eating and how to eliminate it, I’m your host behavioural health and resilience coach Karen Bartle. In today’s episode I’ll be sharing my story of being prescribed Furosemide for a condition that I didn’t have, taking it for far long and how it was possibly a drug induced trigger of my autoimmune disease.
Soon emigrating to live in Queensland Australia, I started to notice that my right foot and ankle were noticeably swollen and uncomfortable a lot of the time. Queensland is a sub-tropical climate with warm summers and mild winters and over 300 days of sunshine a year. So, as you can imagine it was no accident that we chose to live here!
I became conscious of my right leg when I was in front of students teaching and felt a need to do my best to wear closed shoes and trousers to hide it so as not detract students away from the teaching. This was okay since we did have to have aircon on in the rooms anyway as it was typically pretty warm otherwise so this wasn’t unusual to cover up in training venues.
I got to the point though where I felt I needed to go and get it checked out, perhaps there was something wrong especially since it was only happening in my right leg.
This wasn’t something new however, I remember first being aware of it when I was 12 or 13 and living in the UK, and I had gone with my friend to help her babysit a friend of the families child while the mother went to work. I remember I was wearing open shoes at the time as it was a lovely summer’s day and sitting down on the sofa and stretching out my legs. The mother was ready to leave and commented on how swollen my ankle was. “Are you pregnant or something” she said.
As a 12- or 13-year-old as you can imagine I had no clue how to reply to that! I just smiled politely probably looking very puzzled. “Your ankle is swollen and that happens when you’re pregnant” she said looking and pointing towards my foot.
I had never been asked this question before, nor ever since. And back then I only typically noticed the swelling when I was in the sun or the heat. Most of the year I was under cloud, drizzle, and fully clothed so it was typically a problem for me to seek help for.
So anyway, I went along to my GP 2-3 years into our new life here and asked if he could take a look at it given it’s starting to really bother me a lot of the time. He looked, felt, and prodded it a bit and asked me all the questions you would expect “have you injured it, had a fall, etc”. He couldn’t see anything wrong and sent me for an ultrasound to assess the problem some more.
Potions & Needles
Friday, July 5, 2024 • Duration 10:11
Welcome to the Harmful eating and how to eliminate it podcast, I’m your host behavioural health and resilience coach Karen Bartle.
In today’s episode I’ll be sharing a current, real, and very raw experience I had this last week of dealing with a serious autoimmune disease flare and how when our body is subject to essential treatment and procedures, which have the potential to cause more harm and damage to the body, we need to have some go to healing solutions to help us recover as quick as possible to prevent more suffering.
Last week I received some devastating news. I had disease activity back in my eye from my AIBD after 4 years of my eye being disease free. I had only seen my eye surgeon 2 months ago and went to see him sooner than agreed to get some lashes lasered that were irritating my eye.
It was devasting for him to see, and to have to report that not only did I have inflammation, but that the graft we had put in to turn the lower lid out just over a year ago, had now been completely subsumed into the body as if it never existed, and it was no-longer providing any protection of keeping lashes away from irritating my eye.
This was serious and so disappointing to hear that after being on immune suppressant therapy for the last 4 years I was potentially back here at square 1 again only to have it all to do again. Remission and relapse are no uncommon with a lot of difference kinds of diseases that we have that are challenging to treat, but I felt that we had got this, so much so, that we agreed to skip a dose of the immunosuppressant therapy I had been receiving as things were going so well.
Whilst we can never know what the outcome would have been had we not skipped a dose of immuno-therapy, as we don’t have a time machine to go back and make that decision differently, discontinuing treatment too early can be crucial to enabling relapse back into disease activity.
The good and most important thing was I was admitted the next day to hospital by my immunology team to receive 3 days of intensive and heavy-duty doses of immunosuppressant and steroid therapy to get control of this disease before it could cause any further damage in the eye. I felt nothing in particular from the inflammation of the disease itself, but I did experience side effects from the therapy. Not surprising really given the intensity of the treatments that are given for systemic inflammatory diseases like mine, especially where there’s a risk of damage to the eye.
Dad was subject to what’s called in the health psychology literature unmitigated agency, where he had a reluctance to seek help, had difficulty with emotional expression, experienced low self-efficacy, and demonstrated non-compliance with professionals advice or adherence to prescribed treatment.
For example, one of the signs of his heart disease was his right foot being constantly cold. I would nag at him for weeks to see someone but he would always retort “nah it’s alright; stop worrying about it”. It then started to turn blue and was getting numb and he was having difficulty walking on it, and he still wasn’t seeking help. Eventually nags turned into threats, and he saw how anxious it was making those around him, andl under duress, he went to see his doctor.
In his heart of hearts, he knew something serious was going on but fear was the driver to preventing him from seeing anyone about it. He had good reason to be fearful. His chronic smoking habit which he’d been doing since he was 16, and his poor nutrition and lack of exercise, had got the better of him and after being diagnosed with peripheral artery disease in his right leg cutting off the circulation to his foot, and after a failed attempt to bypass the clogged artery, he had to have his leg amputated above the knee and spend the rest of his life in a wheel chair.
He suffered in silence past the point of no return before seeking help with his symptoms. A big motivator for me after losing dad was to change my diet and lifestyle so that I could mitigate my risk and potential predisposition to suffering with chronic lifestyle diseases such as cardiovascular, kidney, metabolic diseases and cancers which are all prevalent in my family. So, for me it was all about prevention rather than trying to arrest or reverse an already existing disease.
I figured if I could for see a future where I had these kinds of symptoms would I prefer to eliminate them before they arise or fight a harder battle of living with the suffering of having them. Obviously for me it was a no brainer and I took action to change and influence what I could while I could which put me in the driving seat and empowered me to do something about it.
In episode 4 I shared my tragic story of having a disease flare with my autoimmune blistering disease mucous membrane pemphigoid. The recent graft on my eyelid which provided relief by taking the in turning lashes away from scraping on my conjunctiva had been subsumed by the disease i.e., it no longer existed!
In this case disease signs and symptoms were that my lashes were turning back in again and needing to be epilated more often, the graft had completely disappeared causing the eyelid to turn back inwards, and I had redness in the eye evidencing inflammation. The cause was the disease becoming more active, which we don’t have the answers as to why that happened but could be due to a temporary break in therapy. So we had to start treatment to manage the inflammation and to prevent more damage to the eye, and also have more frequent and increased doses or immune-suppressant therapy to eliminate my rogue B cells and prevent them from triggering disease activity in the first place.
In episode 6 Rose Huxford shared how her harmful eating and self-care neglect was due to other priorities taking her attention. The main issues were her worries about her son’s health and well-being as he was a picky eater and she had to learn skills and strategies with her home baking to get good nutrition into his diet. She and her husband were also building a family business and she was dealing with daily symptoms of her own which soon materialised to be associated with epilepsy.'
These were all stressful triggers which severely impacting her health and well-being and required her to focus on changing aspects of her own lifestyle and nutritional habits to manage stress, reduce overwhelm, and eating healthier.
In episode 7 whilst the obvious cause of my jaw to lock while eating breakfast was the cereal being hard, the cause was so much further back in a long chain of events. I, like Rose Huxford, had been experiencing a series of very stressful life events over a few years, which had been causing wear and tear on my bodily systems.
Whilst I was outwardly seeming pretty resilient in coping with them, something had to give somewhere, and for me it was my immune system mistaking my own healthy tissues as foreign, and attacking them causing inflammation, which lead to fibrosis and scarring in my eye.
For others it might be developing cancers, having strokes or heart attacks due to cardiovascular disease, or developing metabolic syndrome such developing symptoms of hypertension, high cholesterol, and diabetes.
In 2021/22 I had to have 2 basal cell carcinoma’s (BCC) removed from my face and scalp. They are a locally invasive skin cancer triggered by environmental and genetic predisposing factors such as being exposed to ultraviolet radiation and the onset of autoimmune diseases. In the latter case, when immunosuppressant therapy is being administered in high doses to manage disease, as was occurring in my case, the drugs reduce the ability of the immune system to detect and defend against cancer and other autoimmune diseases.
So typically, then when we are experiencing symptoms, we notice things appearing in our minds and bodies, such as tension, aches and pains, emotional dysregulation such as mood swings, depression, impatience, forgetfulness, intolerances to food and behaviours, skin complaints, and recurring coughs, colds and infections which we can’t shake off.
We might find ourselves managing these symptoms by emotionally or comfort eating more, eating things that aren’t good for us, using substances to cope such as alcohol, over the counter medications, cigarettes, or watching hours of TV, gaming, not exercising, or spending time on social media, all as a form of distraction and comfort.
Symptoms may be acute or chronic and go away of their own accord once the driving force behind it has been managed, such as stress at work. Eliminating the cause can manage the symptoms in many cases, however, if the cause is recurring, it’s likely we’ll have to go through the whole fiasco again each time it comes around. Symptom managing can often be an easier option to cope, especially if we’re already at capacity.
However, when we use coping strategies to eliminate one thing, we can often find ourselves dealing with another one which is equally, if not more, problematic. This is called the dandelion effect, for example, when we quit smoking to feel healthier or to save money and the driver for smoking is say stress, if we haven’t addressed why we’re stress, we very commonly find another something fills that void of helping us to cope with stress.
Commonly this becomes food or drink, and people then find themselves overconsuming food and/or drink and putting weight on, or becoming addicted or reliant on sugar or alcohol to cope. In these instances where there are clear drivers for the habits we do e.g., harmful eating or drinking, smoking, vaping, depressing, etc, it would always be advisable to explore and address the driver alongside the symptoms rather than simply eliminating the symptoms.
So if someone was stressed at work, developing strategies to eliminate the cause in the first place might be to e.g., assertively discuss the problem with a manager and find ways to reduce their workload. If that didn’t work it may be time to take more drastic action of changing jobs or taking a pay cut to have less responsibilities in the current job to reduce stress.
It’s a case of different strokes for different folks, isn’t it? And the most important pathway through all this is that if we use the right strategy to solve the problem at the time. For example, if it’s not feasible to take a pay cut or change jobs, then we could learn some better strategies to predict, plan for, and manage the stressful times when we know they are likely to arise which enables us to emotional cope better with the demands coming our way.
Remember, if you are experiencing symptoms and struggling to find effective and sustainable strategies to eliminate them, or you want support to identify and manage the driving force behind them, go to karenbartle.com/contact where you can schedule a 30-minute free call with me to find out what options are available to help you.
When we’re coping well it’s a smooth process, we feel secure in our convictions, no self-doubt or avoiding situations or people that make us feel unsafe. We reduce our overwhelm and emotionally cope with the challenges we’re facing by slowing things down, feeling we have time for things, taking our time to think things through, engaging in behaviours we know are good for us and will enhance our ability to cope rather than harm us, we become more accepting of setbacks and when things don’t go our way. We’re also more likely to seek out positive support and accept help from others when it’s offered rather than thinking we should or must be able to cope by ourselves or else it’s a sign of weakness or a flaw we have. When we’re resilient, we also tend to use another form of coping called problem focused coping, where we feel we have the ability to influence our destiny and change either ourselves or the situations we might find ourselves in for a better outcome.
When we left the UK in 2012 to emigrate, we decided to roughly plan a world travel itinerary over 9 months on our way to starting our new life down under which was to take us to every continent and over 26 countries. In a very short space of time, we had 2 properties to sell, one of which had a lifetime of personal belongings, furniture, car, and artefacts to be completely cleared by giving everything away or selling it. Anything that couldn't fit into a couple of backpacks had to go!
For the last 2 days having only just sold and cleared our properties in time, we were still conducting training and stayed in a hotel and on a houseboat on the canal. Our adventure of being completely outside of our comfort zone had already begun and we were extremely excited!
Our first destination was India. We had a visa and a plane ticket but that was it. No accommodation, no contacts, and no one to greet us at the airport. On landing in New Delhi, we experienced the biggest culture shock we never could have even imagined. “Where are you staying?” Asked the guy checking our passport and credentials at security. “Staying?” we said, to bide us some thinking time. “Yes, what hotel are you booked in with and how will you be getting there?”. I knew there must have been a YHA somewhere so quick on my feet said that’s where we were staying. He didn’t look too convinced and if he had questioned us any further, I expect we would have been marched out of the airport the same way we came in.
On leaving security we were clueless and felt so very lost and what to do and which way to go. When we conducted our training or had travelled to other places without a plan in the UK, we would arrive at the airport and there would be a helpdesk or a range of options to book hotels and other places to stay. Not here!
We walked out of the airport and were faced with a barrage of taxi drivers vying for our custom so we jumped in one who had a pricing machine running and asked him to recommend somewhere to stay that was fit for English backpackers.
On the way there, well, for anyone who has ever been to New Delhi you’ll know that it has to be experienced to really believe it. The rules of the road seemed non-existent, the noise and pollution was overwhelming and how we arrived there alive and in one piece was beyond us.
Our driver thought nothing of scraping a car on route without stopping or weaving between other vehicles within a gnats whisker. It was truly frightening! When we arrived at the hotel we were exhausted from the journey from the UK and went straight to bed. The next morning, we ordered breakfast in our room. Reception came to take our order and we found ourselves unable to open the door. The lock had broken and we were locked in! The staff member was unable to open the door from the other side either and had to send someone via a small bathroom window which had to be removed to let one of the guys through.
An hour and about 6 guys later, having been shown and transferred to another room, we had our breakfast! We stayed in the room for the day sleeping off our exhaustion and had a wonderful meal in the hotel for a ridiculously cheap price – curried veg, fried rice, etc. We had a feast again that night and the next morning we ordered parantha and pickles for breakfast.
The hotel hired us a driver to show us the sights of New Delhi for the day. The traffic was as lawless (and fun) as ever and our driver was stopped for an alleged road offence and fined or rather bribed by a policeman. We stopped at a garage for Indian snacks on our way to touring various temples and shops including the beautiful and extraordinary Lotus Temple.
We arrived back for another lovely Indian delight in our room and booked flights to Kerala in south of India leaving New Delhi the next day. ‘No Delhi belly yet’ we wrote in our journal.
The next morning, before leaving for the airport to fly to Kerala to spend time in a homestay before having a trip on a houseboat. Paul said “I think Delhi belly might have struck, it could just be acid though.” His usual relief wasn’t having any effect and he considered taking his backup more powerful antacids but which reduce immunity by making stomach less acid (so bugs can breed) and also reduce effectiveness of antimalarials which we were taking.
He could only stomach toast for breakfast and then realised Delhi belly had definitely struck. We managed to get to the airport and of course shouldn’t have been travelling on planes if we were sick. Paul was getting more and more ill and vomiting at the airport, but somehow, we made it to the airport in Cochin which was a 1-and-a-half-hour taxi ride to Kerala.
With Paul needing to be near a bathroom we had no choice but to book into the nearest hotel and that’s where we stayed, slept and made constant use of the bathroom for the next two days drinking only bottled water. I thought I had escaped it but oh no I had got the same bug and in no time and was suffering the same.
There was no pharmacy in Cochin so we were making up rehydration fluids with sugar, salt and bottled water. After a couple of days recovering from the worst of it, we managed to visit a pharmacy on our way to Kerala and took some loperamide.
We were warned in the books before we left for our travels and by the hotel staff in New Delhi to not eat street food and definitely not drink anything unless it came out of a sealed bottle. We took the risk with this convenience store in New Delhi as we had no other food and our driver advised it should be okay. We weren’t sure if it was this or the meals we had eaten at the hotel that had caused us to be sick, but we were feeling incredibly weak and dehydrated even despite scores of empty bottles of water piling up in the corner of the room.
Paul got us some loperamide for controlling and relieving our symptoms of diarrhea. It was interesting watching him trying to communicate and gesture with the pharmacist at a kiosk about what symptoms we had as he had no ability to understand or speak English!
The Kerala home stay and house boat trip was a welcome break and time to recover and get our health and energy back. It was a far cry from New Delhi and we hoped we wouldn’t have to arrive back there anytime soon. There will be more harmful eating escapades no doubt coming to the podcast in future episodes, as you can imagine this was only the start of what was to come!
His treatment in session was great and he could really empathise. He was excited as much as I was that we were making progress each week and was amazed at how effort I was putting it to getting better by speeding up progress with the exercise of outside of the sessions. I had to do several exercises each day to increase the opening of the jaw.
He gave me a pack of pop sticks or paddle pop sticks as they are often called, and this became my main go to exercise each day to get more opening in my jaw. The idea was I start with a bunch of them piled on top of one another, put them in my mouth and then keep slipping in one more at a time to gently force the mouth to open wider.
It worked surprisingly well alongside my physio’s treatment each week and soon I was getting less pain and more flexibility back in my jaw. I never did get back to my full potential due to the displacement of the disc, but it was good enough and it became my new norm. So what happened here for a spoon of cereal to trigger my jaw to lock?
We weren’t sure but all the evidence was pointing to tension in the jaw triggered by an abundance of stress! The food I was eating at the time was quite hard but having ate plenty of bowls of it up to that point without any injury suggested the cereal wasn’t the cause of my problem but rather a vulnerability in my body brought about by a series of incidents that were severely bothering me and
I wasn’t necessarily using the right kind of coping strategies to manage them. I knew I had taken on a lot but what I didn’t realise or wasn’t in a position to acknowledge at the time was I wasn’t looking after myself as well as I should have.
Despite teaching about stress and its effects to others, I wasn’t taking a dose of my own medicine and stopping off to realise how what I was doing affecting my own health. I was at capacity looking back; dad was adjusting to losing his leg above the knee due to Peripheral Artery Disease and living life from a wheelchair, mum was becoming less mobile, relying on others to take her places and for her everyday needs, experiencing severe unmanaged chronic pain, and becoming more housebound, I was growing the training businesses, and we were building a new online marketplace for business owners.
With my parents both being in the UK and concerns that they were aging fast with complex chronic illness, and not being cared for as much as I would like them to be, I was spending a lot of time worrying about them and trying to support them from afar.
There was a lot of stress and family dramas happening over there and I didn’t feel they were necessarily getting the care and access to resources they needed or deserved. It was a week or two before my mum’s birthday and I was seeing that her hair had been unkempt for some time and needing a cut.
No-one was making any efforts to help her with this and so I suggested I book her an appointment at a local hairdresser and pay for it for her birthday. The only person who was able to take her was my brother as he had taken over her main caregiving duties and had a car.
So, I asked if he would take her if I booked her in. His belief was he was doing enough already and refused to help her out. I felt angry with him and very sad for mum, and this lead to a series of toxic interpersonal interactions with him on chat which culminated in us not communicating at all which just made the situation for mum worse.
What was intended to be a kind gesture for mum turned out to create more friction than ever in an already frayed sibling relationship. Not having influence and ability to be there for my parents in person to help out with the day-to-day challenges they were having was playing on my mind more and more each day, and whilst I loved where we were and wouldn’t change it for the world, I just wish the timing and circumstances could have been so very different.
It also turned out that the overwhelming amount of stress I was experiencing in 2016 was affecting me more than I could have ever thought. I know from teaching stress and working with people who are suffering from it, that when we’re experiencing persistent and prolonged stressors, all our bodily systems; nervous, hormone and immune systems become elevated as our body settles in to adapt to stressor.
There may be few outward signs of stress but our body is working hard to keep everything regulated. Our organs (adrenal glands, kidneys, and liver) release substances such as catecholamines; adrenaline and noradrenaline, and cortico-steroids (cortisol) that increase blood pressure, fight inflammation, enhance muscle tension and increase blood sugar levels. The overall effect is to generate energy to deal with the stressors.
This process can be very costly to our body, gradually using up the energy reserves, and the capacity to resist becomes depleted. Chronic and persistent stress has been found to cause inflammation, immune dysregulation, and imbalances in gut health, and can be critical in the development of several chronic diseases including autoimmune disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and metabolic syndromes.
When we’re stressed, we also tend to typically eat unhealthily by reaching for comfort or ultra-processed foods and fail to adhere to behaviours and treatment which mitigate the effects of stress such as taking exercise, medication, or seeking out positive support and strategies to help us cope better with stress.
Tension in our muscles, especially in our neck, head and jaw, coughs, colds and infections we can’t shake off, or unexplained aches and pains in our body, are sure early signs telling us we need to take a step back and recognise a need to slow down. As Eva Selhub, MD suggests we need to “Listen to your body's whispers before they become screams".
Unfortunately I failed to heed my own or Eva’s best advice. Around the time my jaw locked, I was starting to experience very dry eyes, especially my left one. My ophthalmologist put it down to prolonged overwearing of my contact lens. So, for 2 years we just monitored it, I was advised to wear my lens less and use my glasses and lubricants more to give my eye a break.
This seemed to make no difference and 2 years later in 2018, I also started experiencing a lot of irritation in my left eye. The irritation was due to eyelashes turning inwards and rubbing on the conjunctiva. So, we had to start epilating my lashes. This continued for another 2 years with the intervals becoming more regular between treatments.
This was inducing a lot of insomnia and more stress and so I requested my ophthalmologist refer me to someone to have them permanently removed since plucking them out only meant they were inevitably simply growing back.
At that first appointment with my eye surgeon, I got so much more than I bargained for and instead of leaving with a clear lid of lasered lashes, I received a diagnosis of mucous membrane pemphigoid; a chronic, rare, and incurable, most likely stress induced, autoimmune blistering disease! I realised I was taking too much on and trying to take too much control in areas I couldn’t, and the more I couldn’t the more frustrated I would feel if I tried.
My body and the symptoms I was experiencing were telling me to take a step back and care, but care less, and only about the things I could influence without friction. I had to choose my battles and know where to back off when interpersonal conflict and overwhelm could be predicted. If you want to learn more head over to www.karenbartle.com where you’ll find lots of free resources and support to help you get you started to eliminate harmful or overeating.
The ultrasound didn’t reveal anything more than we could already see, so he suggested it might just be water retention which he prescribed a small dose of oral furosemide for.
Furosemide is a loop diuretic medication used to treat edema due to heart failure, liver scarring, or kidney disease. It’s also used for treating of high blood pressure.
I remember first becoming aware of it when I was around 9 or 10 and was being looked after by my nan as my mum was taken critically ill in hospital. It was a traumatic time for me not having mum around and we were visiting her every day to check on her progress.
She had been diagnosed with a kidney disorder called nephrotic syndrome that causes the body to excrete too much protein in the urine. It’s often caused by damage to small blood vessels in the kidneys that filter waste and excess water from the blood. An underlying health condition usually plays a role. Her symptoms included rapid onset swelling of her eyes, feet, and ankles, foamy urine and weight gain due to excess fluid retention.
Amongst other things, she was prescribed a high dose of furosemide and never really got off them. I knew she hated being reliant on them but was left on them and just kept taking them which made her anxious about drinking too much especially when she was going places where she didn’t know where the toilets were. She was also put on a low salt diet but I’ll save that for another time.
I took mine for a while but the problem was persisting so I went back some weeks later after trialling it on and off when I felt I really needed it to take the swelling away. This time he doubled the dose to trail whether that did anything.
It didn’t, and I never had the same problem as my mum needing to run to the toilet all the time, anxious about not getting there in time, so I guess the problem wasn’t water retention, but I had nothing else to work with so I continued to take it at the higher dose for several months.
I had to go back several times to get a new prescription and was given the same dose to work with. On this one occasion I saw a new GP and when I asked for the repeat, he replied well “are they doing any good? I don’t know I said. Well can’t you just drink less rather than taking the tablets. I was dismayed to hear this, when concerns are high about people dehydrating in QLD due to the high heat and sun exposure. I can’t drink less I said and I don’t think I drink too much anyway and if it was that wouldn’t I have water retention elsewhere? Despite his better judgement of not wanting to prescribe and providing me with his concerns that these shouldn’t be used long term due to causing low blood pressure and kidney damage, he wrote me a script and off I went.
His comments still play on my mind to this day, and at the time, although I wasn’t happy with my leg being the way it was and I had no go to strategy to solve it, I did become mindful of taking furosemide less often until eventually I stopped taking it realising that it wasn’t helping anyway.
I can’t remember exactly how long I had been taken it for but it was raising concerns of my GP’s so probably much longer than I should have. Nothing further happened for a few years and I just coped with it the best I could without taking furosemide.
I started researching again about 2-3 years ago since the summers were getting hotter and more humid and I really needed to find some relief for my leg. I came across lymphedema which is a swelling caused by a buildup of lymph fluid in the body between the skin and muscle, a blockage basically in the lymph system. Lymph fluid plays a role in your body's ability to fight infection and disease.
I also looked at treatment options and that it could be suppressed using compression garments, including electronic ones. With a new GP practice opening up in the area I took my opportunity to move clinic and see if he could refer me to someone who specialises in lymphedema since no GP had mentioned this to me so far.
My new GP referred me to a physio who specialises in treating lymphedema and she confirmed that this was the most likely diagnosis which furosemide would be useful for!
She fitted me for some compression garments, ordered them and within a week or two I now had a solution to my problem and I could prevent the swelling happening by apply the garment first thing in the morning and applying a second garment called a Comfort Wave which had ridges within the garment to promote softening of tissues. These were total game changers in enabling me to control my symptoms at last.
Just when I thought I had heard the last of Furosemide it came back in my life after being diagnosed with my autoimmune blistering disease mucous membrane pemphigoid. I received my diagnosis after 4 years of suffering symptoms and I needed to know how it had come about. It’s an enigma of a disease and not very many people have heard about it, even most helping professionals.
For weeks I read journals, articles, watch interviews and attended a conference and webinars hosted by the International Pemphigus and Pemphigoid Foundation (IPPF). I tried to learn as much as a I could about my condition since I was receiving serious amounts of immune-suppression therapy and I was told this is a rare, chronic, incurable, so lifelong condition I could be seeing my immunology clinical and my eye doc for every 3 months for the rest of my life! I needed to understand why, what and how this came about.
Loop diuretics kept being mentioned as a drug induced potential for triggering blistering diseases of the mucous membranes due to their dehydration properties. So potentially all that time I was taking a medication I didn’t need, for a condition I didn’t have, which may have contributed to the onset of another chronic and incurable condition that I may have never had to suffer with!
The main side effects I experienced were from methylprednisolone (meh·thuhl·pred·ni·suh·lown) which is a synthetic glucocorticoid, prescribed for its anti-inflammatory and immunosuppressive effects. It is either used at low doses for chronic illnesses or used at high doses during acute flares.
Due to the lack of sleep, I felt mentally and physically exhausted, had mind fog, and very painful arms as a result of having so many needles and cannulas inserted for the different infusions and bloods taken over the 3 days. My veins were so painful and each day I had to get the nurses to site a new insertion point for a new canular for the infusions. I felt like a pin cushion up both arms.
After going home, I couldn’t use my arms for several days as the bruising and swelling continued to develop where the cannulas had been placed. Even using the computer or making a drink was a chore and so I tended to sleep an awful lot of the time to rest and recover.
I thought back to when I used to have high blood pressure just a couple of years back, which seemed to reverse itself once I started a wholefood plant-based diet in 2022. It’s now normal and the nurses were so very impressed with my bp stats on the ward, congratulating me for having the health of a 20-year-old!
I also remember reading about the protective properties of kale, which we started to grow a lot of in our veg garden after learning about it from Dr Esselstyn in his book Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease. The two are very interconnected and here’s why.
If you’ve never eaten Kale, which I hadn’t until just a few years ago, it was never a go to vegetable in our household as I was growing up. It’s a dark green leafy veg dubbed the ‘queen of greens’ for its healing properties. It’s one of the most nutrient dense foods on the planet and a powerful antioxidant full of phytonutrients which mop up free radicals i.e., those unstable modules in the body which damage other modules and give rise to inflammation and disease.
I was astonished to learn that Kale preserves, promotes and restores nitric oxide which protects our endothelial cells found in most arteries, veins and capillaries of the brain, skin, lung, heart and muscle from injury and rupture thus preventing disease.
Well what d’you know! This was just what I needed to heal my hurts, and we had an abundance of different varieties of kale ready to pick in our own back yard veg patch. As my arms weren’t responding to other treatments and my sleep pattern was returning to normality, I set about doing some cooking, and putting kale into homemade wholesome vegan burgers, sausages, salad dressing, and stir Frys. I couldn’t get enough of it, and psychologically I felt different knowing that I was enabling my body to heal, and physically there was noticeable difference in my arms starting to feel much better too.
