Inflammation Flares Part 2

by Maggie McCarey

LIFE CHOICES THAT STOP INFLAMMATORY FLARES

NUMBER ONE

No processed sugar.

Not even.  Nope.  Nada on a regular basis.  Okay, once in a blue moon.

NUMBER TW0

Drink half your weight in ounces of pure water every day

NUMBER THREE

Have a plan and necessary meds or herbs to act quickly.

The good news is that when it first appears like the cavalry, you can’t mistake it for something else.

Learn how to act quickly to reduce inflammation when you experience an inflammatory trigger like a fall or a shock or an insect bite.  Think of all the home remedies and over the counters you know about. My daughter, Catia, swears by a penny taped on a bee sting remedy because it works for her.  Treating my daughter Stef’s no-see-ums poisoned inflamed upper body a few years ago was not so easy and far more urgent.  Most people get a tiny red mark at the site of a bite.  Stef went into full inflammatory flare within an hour. The inflammation spread quickly throughout her left arm, her upper body, even her eyelids. She knew that the inflammation was caused by histamine, a symptom-causing chemical released by her immune system during an allergic reaction and that she needed a strong anti-histamine to subdue her oh so helpful immune system. She took Zyrtec which reduced the swelling, heat, redness, and pain in her arm and the healing process began.  Lipese need a plan.

Herbs in Ointments, Tinctures, Balms and Teas

One of our lipese on a recent forum shared that her legs ached from humidity and too much standing so she massaged arnica cream on them and the pain improved. Why?  Because arnica root is an anti-inflammatory herb. It’s believed that the plant contains derivatives of thymol, which seems to have anti-inflammatory effects. Herbs are often anti-inflammatory.  That’s how they work.  They reduce chronic swelling.

A small list of Anti-inflammatory Herbs

Turmeric, ginger, guggul, neem, boswellin, holy basil, bromelain, aswagandha, blue vervain, butcher’s broom, calendula (marigold), cat's claw, chamomile, fennel, queen of the meadow, skull-cap, buplerium root, dandelion, rutin, and my favorites: Rosemary, Lavender, Lemon Balm, Raspberry Leaf. 

If you ask me, these four herbs should be in every sauce, gluten free cupcake, meat seasoning, and toothpaste ever made.  I have seen rosemary reverse heart and lung issues. I make burns literally disappear with lavender because a burn makes your skin acidic and lavender turns it back to alkaline. I baked rosemary so often on chicken, my grandson once said to me:  How come you always make me eat these sticks on my food?” An herbalist friend told me a week ago: “Every woman on the planet should take raspberry leaf on a permanent basis.” Lemon balm tea can change a horrid, back-cracking monthly into a pain-free event. 

     

All inflammatory diseases are about how we nourish our bodies. The modern world nourishes with chemicals.  Herbs that detox us from chemicals are essential to recovery.  You can cook with herbs, bathe in them, shampoo your hair with them, and drink them in teas.  They come in gels, oils, and balms. You could literally be healing yourself with  herbs that also improve skin tone. And, they are inexpensive.

 NUMBER FOUR 

Drink Tea Daily to Reduce Chronic Inflammation

Green, White, Oolong, Black is the proper order of most to least effective anti-inflammatory tea.

All teas are not the same. White, green, oolong, and black refer to the leaf at time of harvest and the oxidation process of each tea. Pekoe, for example is a white tea because it is harvested with unopened baby buds, slightly sun baked, and lightly oxidized (bruised).  White is the purest of the teas and I believe, based on aging as deterioration, one of the two best to drink. Green tea is exactly what it means.  The tea plant is harvested when the leaves are at their greenest and at the peak of fullness and medicinal strength.  Green tea is generally not oxidized. It is almost always considered the healthiest of teas with Dr. Mercola, a lone dissenting voice, who is concerned with high levels of fluoride present in green tea.

      

Oolong is tea that is picked while the tea is brownish green, placed in the sun for a short time and then oxidized. Darjeeling is perhaps the best-known oolong tea. Oolong and almond tea is one of my favorite teas. Finally, black tea is made from older brown-to-dead leaves and it is most oxidized. English Breakfast is a black tea blend of usually Assam, Ceylon and Kenyan teas. Earl Gray is a black tea with oil of bergamot added.  Rooibos, South African tea, is technically a member of the legume family and extremely high in flavinoids and antioxidants. It is a fabulous anti-inflammatory.  Any tea is better than no tea, but regarding anti-inflammatory properties, white and green are preferred.

     

A caution: If you open up the bag of a tea that is labeled pure, you will find hard wood like dried shards of tea that can be mixed with anything, including weeds along the road.  When the bag sits in hot water, the mixture inside barely swells to half the size of the bag.  It is probably better that you not drink tea at all than to drink this “pure” potpourri of tea and sprayed weeds.  On the other hand, a good organic tea looks like a rolled leaf, and when placed in a tea strainer will swell four times its size.  Its color will be vibrant, its touch moving from soft white to twiggy black.  This is the tea you want to develop a habit of drinking for the rest of your life.

NUMBER FIVE

A good strong cup of brew? Not.

I love my coffee.  I will die drinking coffee like some really old ladies keep smoking.  But I have to be honest. Yes, coffee has the highest level of antioxidants in the universe (for the first 15 minutes after it is brewed), but it has other issues with recognizable words we coffee-lovers don’t want to hear.  Be brave, dear breve misto venti extra light, extra hot, no sugar Starbuck’s gal.  Read on:

           

“The most potent ingredient in it….is caffeine. This compound is -a -known stimulant. Ingesting stimulants, like caffeine, cause an adrenal response in the body. This response increases cortisol which raises blood pressure and heart rate, as well as interferes with other hormone production in the body. People with elevated cortisol levels produce less DHEA, testosterone, estrogen, progesterone and other hormones that give the body balance at both physical and mental levels. Excess cortisol can suppress the immune system as well. “

Cortisol is that hard to lose belly fat. Sigh.  And it hardens our capillaries.  Diddleydang.

            http://renegadehealth.com/blog/2011/01/31/coffee-does-have-antioxidants

NUMBER SIX

 Mother’s Breath

Continually Exercise Your God Gene

When I went through MDL, I had a wonderful therapist who could tell me when my lymphatic system released and drained.  She could not, however, apply any technique to make it happen.  Sometime during the first few sessions, I realized I was gripping the table like a life raft, my teeth clinched and my breath shallow.  As a part of allowing God rather than fear to be present in me, I began to do the Mother’s breath. The moment I started breathing properly, she jumped back and said, “What did you do?  Your lymph system just turned on like a faucet.”

     

This was great confirmation that I was actually changing my body with this ancient breathing technique.  I explained to her that I often breathe a prayer that I learned from the Sufi’s in Alaska.  They believed this to be the perfect God/child of God breathing pattern.  Seven count in.  Pause for one count.  Seven count out.  Pause one count. Seven count in, etc; for several minutes.  With the 7-1-7-1 cycle, I was encouraged to find seven-syllable mantras that I believe.  In Christ all things are made whole, and I am the oneness of God became the two mantras that I choose between.

     

Now in any situation that I attempt to control my external world out of fear, I do the Mother’s Breath. Because people with lipedema often forget how, and, no, it is not caused by a crushing weight on our chests from obesity, we need to be taught to breathe. The Mother’s breath is one that I use for myself and in healing sessions with others.

     

Every MLD session after that, my therapist said, “ Let me try first. Dang. Okay do that breathing thing you do.”  I breathed my mantra and 7 count.  “There goes the faucet,” she would laugh.

     

So often the lipese bear the weight of others who are also ego-damaged and looking for someone to target, or we take things to heart more than others, or we find out early in life being helpful keeps us safe. But after awhile our lives are so stressful that if we then come upon a real life change, or even a common stress, a worried day over a child, or a late credit card payment, bald tires, a missed appointment, etc. The old legs get tight, indicating that we have unconsciously called for help where we hold stress--in our legs.  That feeling of tightness in your legs? Check it out.  If they are suddenly feeling heavy use the Mother’s Breath.  When you do, the lymph system flows, channels open, toxins  release and you are the Oneness of God in the process of being healed.

Inflammation Flares Part 1

by Maggie McCarey

Looking backward, the first lipese woman I remember was a member of my church.  She was very old and quite plump.  She was also expansive, and a NY kinda storyteller.  Every time I visited her she had a new version of the spider bite that changed her life.  Different angles, once even spider as narrator, but the facts of the story never changed.  She was in her mid-40’s.  She woke up one summer dawn with a spider bite on her leg.  From that moment on, she filled up like a balloon, and no matter how little she ate, the weight just never came off.  Now she went by ambulance several times a year to fight off cellulitis from the lymphedema that started in her legs. Sound familiar to any of you?

 

I have a similar story though my trigger was the death of my best friend.  In the months following her death, I gained significant weight while not eating, I got asthma, and developed panic attacks.   Through the last few years, I have heard many such stories, especially around lipedema knee surgeries, death of loved ones, and sometimes even the slightest injury or insect bite.

 

One woman shared with me that she fell off of the lowest step of a stair in a yarn shop.  This woman was a sharp cookie and had been riding the tail of the fat beast for a long time.  She had undergone by-pass, she knew herbs, she tried any and every diet and she was obese, but she never stopped trying.  She had been doing remarkably well as of late until her fall, which did not in anyway hurt her.  Even so, the next morning, the leg she fell on had begun to grow first 1, then 2, then 3inches.  She could watch it grow before her eyes.  Soon her other leg caught up. She went to her primary who did not distinguish inflammation from leg fat.  Unfortunately, the inflammation spigot was turned on and was not likely to turn itself off.

She and I worked for a year to stop what doctors call an inflammatory cascade without success.  Her story and the stories of many of the rest of us lead me to believe that lipedema is an over-active inflammatory response.  That’s why we all have a different story.  I had leg ringlets at puberty, many of your experienced your first flare with your first pregnancy, or a surgery, or birth control pills, an insect bite, a drug, or, if you were lucky, menopause.  Think back to those silent terrifying days when your brain became a monkey house, weight loss became your obsession, and you turned yourself over to the doctor for your first diet.  Our events are different but this symptom we share.  “Weight gains” often follow a hormonal or chemical trigger that you can actually point to.

The following article written by Caroline J. Cederquist, MD is the best and easiest-to-understand explanation of lipedema and inflammation I have read. Try to wade through it because you will be tested on this information the next time your body does an inflammatory reenactment of the Titanic after a nasty fall, when it gets an itsy-bitsy spider bite, or if it decides to punish you for that nice big bowl of spaghetti you ate for dinner. 

Dr. Cederquist writes:

Fatty tissue is made up of adipose cells, which increase in size but not number as more fuel is presented to the body for storage. These cells produce something called cytokines, small, secreted proteins that among other things, produce and regulate immunities and inflammation. And as adipose cells grow larger, they produce more cytokines, leading to more inflammation.

Not only that, but in amongst the fatty adipose cells are other cells called macrophages, which also produce cytokines. There are normally a few macrophages in the fatty tissue of even slim people, but as people become heavier, gradually at first and then at an increasing rate, the proportion of macrophages in fatty tissue increases.

Now, you wouldn't want to be without macrophages-- these are the immune system's first line of defense, patrolling the body for infection and cleaning up after cells as they naturally die off. So you want-- actually, need--a normal number of these little guys distributed throughout your tissues.

But it turns out that in overweight people, most of the inflammation promoting cytokines in fat are coming not from the adipose cells themselves, but from these macrophages!

The clean-up crew

So what is it that attracts the extra macrophages, with their dangerous cargo of inflammatory cytokines, into the fatty tissue to begin with?

Recall that as people become increasingly overweight, they do not grow more adipose cells; the ones they have simply swell to larger and larger size. Inevitably, some of them become so overburdened that they burst open, leak, or just die. It is the resultant mess of cellular waste that the macrophages come rushing in to clean up, after all, that's their job!

But with that clean-up mission, you get all that excess inflammation that they bring, and you know what that means: more heart disease, more arthritis, more diabetes, more asthma. (http://newsblaze.com/story/20051101224906nnnn.nb/topstory.html)

….MORE LIPEDEMA!!!!!

Now I want to bring all of this information to its simplest denominator…YOU.  Inflammatory cascade should be the most terrifying words on your lipedema vocabulary list at all times because that’s how we gain “inflammatory weight” a.k.a., fat legs, a.k.a., leg pain, a.k.a., fat upper arms, a.k.a. wheel-chair hell, etc.

 If I say bee sting, you say epipen.

 If I say peanut allergy, you say anaphylactic shock treatment.

 If I say choking, you say Heimlich maneuver.

 If I say, accidental fall, you say hunh?

I am pulling in the driveway now: You can be the best dieter on the best diet in the world, you can have liposuction, obesity surgeries, and good medical care,  but if your environment throws you an inflammatory curve ball, you better also have:

1) awareness that an inflammatory flare, your greatest enemy, may be imminent you and that it can undo all of the good work you have been doing for your body in a second;

2) a real understanding of what your body refuses to tolerate—Give It What It Wants.  It Will Not Negotiate 

3) a list of common triggers of an inflammatory flare:

4) an emergency plan that goes something like this: If I say fall out of bed, you say______________; and

5) an alarm going off in your head that puts you in mental recovery mode immediately.

The longer you wait, and depending on the chronic abuse your body is already attempting to subdue-----from every environmental, pharmaceutical, emotional, not-sleeping-enough, working too hard, consuming processed, radiated, glop, job stress, grief, unexpressed rage burning inward lifestyle—the more difficult it becomes to stop an inflammatory cascade. Weeks, months, years, …never. 

Understand when cytokines are released: cytokine production can multiply 1000 fold.  So, while that little argument you had with you boss may have been “ah, no big deal…” the clean up crew, Macrophage 4 U, is doing serious clean up in aisle 12, unleashing  inflammation producing cytokines on top of now-hardening inflammation from the last toxic spill.  (After 3 years of reducing inflammation in my ankles and calves, I have successfully found my way to hard, sclerosis like tissue (old inflammation) at the bottom of all that soft inflammation in my legs.) If that hardened inflammation could talk, I would travel back in time, and rewrite my life story one macrophage clean up event at a time.

SO WHAT’S THE PLAN

Tip #1   Keep your body hydrated. Drink lots of water and lots of green tea.  Treat yourself to Starbucks on the way to work and on the way home.  Trenta size. Or, drink 75 to 100 ounces of pure water a day.

Tip #2  The Mother’s Breathing technique whenever you feel anxious, or argue, or spend too much money, or, or, or.  I will share this technique and other tips in part 2.