By: Bailey

Today on the blog we’re sharing Annie’s story about how she’s managed her Lupus, an autoimmune condition, with Whole30 and then Paleo. Through using real food, Annie has decreased and eliminated medications, gotten off steroids, lost over 90 pounds, and is living her best life. I know you’ll love reading Annie’s inspiring story of how eliminating inflammatory foods helped her find her healthy.

Find Annie on Instagram, at @wholepaleoannie!

I’ve been overweight my whole life. Growing up, I was always the biggest one in my class, always aware of how tight the desk was around my body, and my appetite for sugar was insatiable. I couldn’t get enough of all the packaged sweets the world had to offer. My mom took me to a dietician when I was 10. I was given a food plan that encouraged me to eat smaller portions and stick to the food pyramid guidelines. I didn’t follow it.

What kid wants to eat grilled chicken and steamed broccoli when their friends got to eat pizza? At 14 I tried Weight Watchers. I didn’t follow that, either. It wasn’t fair that my friends were ordering double portions of lunches in the school cafeteria, while I brought in homemade cabbage soup that had almost zero calories and zero flavor. I used that excuse a lot when it came to eating not-so-healthy food; everyone else is doing it, so I should be able to as well.

Looking back on this, I can I see that my cravings for sweets stemmed from loneliness. I had some good friends, but I knew that people teased me about my weight behind my back. I saw my friends dating and I wondered if I would be alone forever because I hated my body and felt uncomfortable at my size.

At 19, I went to college and had free range in the cafeteria. I knew what healthy food consisted off, but it’s never what I turned to after a long day of classes. That’s the funny thing about most people who are overweight. We know what healthy eating consists of. We’ve done the research, we’ve been lectured about it, but it’s incredibly difficult to break away from not so healthy habits.

My weight continued to balloon upwards. Age 23 brought me to my highest: 309 pounds. I remember seeing that number on the scale in the doctor’s office and just being in pure disbelief. I thought something would have kicked in and stopped me from becoming this large a long time ago. I remember seeing people bigger than me and thinking, “I’ll never get that big.” Here I was, CLEARLY over 300 lb and still not willing to change my lifestyle. It took another 3 years before I decided I was ready to overhaul my lifestyle and lose the weight.

It was January 2015, I had just started a 9-5 contract position in the Finance industry and I was #adulting. Time to get this weight under control! I started by counting calories through MyFitnessPal and taking Zumba classes regularly at the local YMCA. Things were going well and I lost about 35 pounds by mid-summer. That summer I can only call “The Mysterious Summer of Pain.” I’d wake up with swollen, stiff joints, and general achiness all over my body. I chalked it up to the new exercise plan and treated it the best I could. I’d take hot showers in the morning to warm up my joints, pop some ibuprofen, and roll on BioFreeze like it was my job.

These troublesome symptoms continued into the fall and my Dad, my trusted Pharmacist Father who talked me out of every WebMD black hole I fell into, suggested I see a rheumatologist to get blood work done. I met with a Rheumatoislogist in September 2015 and was given my diagnosis: Lupus.

healing lupus through paleo and whole30What the heck is Lupus? Is it contagious? How did I get it? My doctor explained that it’s an autoimmune condition that I had a predisposition to due to my genetic make up. He explained that I didn’t contract it, but that it merely became active in me at this point in my life. The symptoms I’d been experiencing my whole life seemed to come together like puzzle pieces. I’d experienced skin rashes on my legs and arms, Sebborhic dermatitis on my scalp, and was diagnosed with Hypothryoidism at age 22. These are all conditions that fall under the Lupus umbrella as I like to call it.