How changing my diet has helped me
Since I was a kid I’ve had problems with my body, but it took the doctors 31 years to give me my Crohn diagnosis & 44 for Ehler Danlos Syndrome (EDS) & Fibromyalgia. Finally getting them all made so many things fall into place. My body reacts very strongly to certain foods, which took me a long time to figure out & understand where the reactions came from, plus what they did to my body.
My somewhat twisted relationship to food
When I was 14 I quit eating meat. Back then the vegetarian options were very limited. I wanted to become a chef back then, but if the options to eat vegetarian food in a restaurant were slim, that was nothing compared to the non existent culinary schools for plant based food. I’ve always loved animals, which was the main reason I quit eating meat, but I also quit because I thought it would help me lose more weight.
Somewhere in Middle school I developed eating disorders, Anorexia, Bulimia & Orthorexia (an excessive fixation on working out). After 5 years & a visit to a really bad psychologist that I went to, to get help, but who did the opposite, I decided to help myself & stop the purging & starving that I put myself through. It took a few years to build up my self-esteem, something I managed to do when dropping out of High-school & starting to hang out with much older people. Best decision of my life.
But my relationship to food was very complicated for many years. Eating out was mostly a stressful experience. Trying to get people to understand what I couldn’t eat & their knowledge of how to make tasty vegetarian food was not the best. It can still be an unpleasant experience, but now my attitude towards people’s ignorance is a lot more laid back so it doesn’t affect me as much, which also means that I don’t obsess as much about food as I used to. But that’s probably also dues to the fact that my stomach is doing better. Until I spent a year traveling through Asia & got to taste so many different amazing flavors, food was mostly sustenance to me. Not a lot of enjoyment there. Finding food that I could eat wasn’t always the easiest since I can’t eat any type of onion, but I managed & I was blown away by all the amazing things that happened in my mouth. I was no longer destined to always eat a salad, or some bland vegetarian dish. There were so many flavors that I could eat & not get sick from.
Being ill & changing my diet
After a few years of being seriously ill I started making changes in my diet & that made an enormous difference to all my conditions. The Asthma I used to have was basically gone, I haven’t used my inhaler in years, knock on wood. I removed all cows milk, my body can’t digest the lactose nor the protein. Fortunately sheep & goat cheese work. When I quit eating meat I was vegan for 6 months, but got so depressed because I missed cheese & ice-cream, so I switched to being a lacto (very rarely ovo) vegetarian. Having to remove my bellowed cheese was a hard blow. I removed all gluten & added sugars, which might have been the hardest of them all… I love candy & all things sweet.
I was off everything for a while & I started noticing changes in how I felt. I got a bit more energy & together with all the stress management, yoga & meditation I did, I was finally starting to feel better. My body didn’t hurt as much. It’s funny how when you’re in the middle of something & are in utter chaos you have no idea what all the signals are, it’s just a big blur, but once you start removing things & then have them again you get instant reactions. Like after having been off sugar, gluten & cows milk for a while & I tried them the reactions were instantaneous. They were very different from one another, which is how I now know how to distinguish them.
Now that my ulcers are basically gone, knock on wood, & my body’s in balance I can sometimes eat both gluten & sugar. I’ve tried every single vegan & gluten free candy there is. Some I have strong reactions to & some work. Sugar remains my vice & I’m ok with that, but I do try to eat an amount that doesn’t give me reactions. Cows milk still doesn’t work. I actually had a curry, that contained like half an onion the other week I literally picked out half an onion… And it didn’t make me sick! For like the first time in 20+ years! To me that’s a huge win!
So how do the different foods affect me?
For more than 20 years all types of onion have had the ability to make me feel like I’ve got a stomach flu, (I’m sure you’ve all had them so I don’t need to go into more detail), like I’m 9 months pregnant & yes am very gassy, which all hurt like crazy when you have an intestinal disease. Having sodas can have the same effect of bloating & agony. Oily foods are very hard to digest, & easily make me nauseous, so I try to avoid using too much oil or eat deep fried too often.
Products made of cows milk also make me very nauseous. If they are fat, like whipped cream, which I loooove, they are much worse, & if eaten with sugar the nausea is amplified.
Gluten made it feel like I was burning from the inside of everything it passed through. It started in my mouth & continued all the way through my stomach & intestines.
Sugar made, & can still make me feel like my body is on fire from within, it’s like my connective tissue and muscles are on fire. They can both also make my joints hurt & get very stiff.
Alcohol, I quit hard liquor when I was in my early 20ies, but continued to drink wine & beer, until I was in my last flare. For maybe the past 10 years I hadn’t had more than a glass of wine or two per year which worked. But when I was in my last flare, before it had been detected by the doctors, I knew it was there, I had 2 glasses of wine & 2 mocktails for my friends birthday. Something I had to pay for for the following week. It felt like I had been drinking pure acid. It burned my insides. So I decided to quit alcohol all together. It just wasn’t worth it. My body had to work too hard to get rid of it. I mean I love a good red Cabernet Sauvignon, but no wine in the world is worth feeling like utter crap for days. So the fact that I still eat, maybe a bit too much, vegan ice-cream & candy, is something I’m good with.
Shifting focus
A friend of mine helped me with a meal plan that catered to my needs when I was in the middle of my last flare. That helped me enormously. To get inspiration & a set plan for what to eat when, for a month was the kick I needed. First of all making decisions when you’re completely knocked out is literally impossible, so for someone to have made them for me was transformational. Secondly, getting a bunch of recipes that I hadn’t tried before helped me get my love for food & cooking back. I shifted my focus from all the things I had to remove from my diet, to all the amazing things I could do with the things I actually can eat.
I started experimenting a lot. Baking & making lots of deserts without added sugar. Only using fresh or dried fruits as sweetener. Using lots of new spices that I had never used before. Something happens in your mouth when you start making everything from scratch. I now make 90% of all that I eat from scratch, home-made ketchup & mustard are so much better than store bought. That way I know there aren’t any additives or strange substances. It takes a while to get used to food without them, because everything contains something to enhance the flavour or to make it last longer. Very often that something is sugar. Today I often get chocked at just how much sugar there is in things. It’s not even tasty anymore. I make my own chocolate, cookies, everything doesn’t have to be rawballs… They are awesome, but you can only eat so many. It’s like salad, everyone’s go-to for people who can’t eat everything. My next project is starting to make my own vegan ice-cream, so I can quit eating store bought, & reduce the amount of sugar I eat even more.
Finally becoming a Vegan Chef helped me develop my taste buds and experiment in the kitchen even more. I can taste something and feel what it would be good to pair with.
Seeing new opportunities
Shifting my focus has made me see the endless possibilities of what I can make with what I can eat, instead of focusing on how unfair it feels to have to forsake all the things I love. I have found new things to love that are so much tastier & that make my body feel so much better. I no longer eat to be a certain size. My body is absolutely amazing & fiercely strong. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t want to fit into pants that I used to, because thoughts like that can still cross my mind, but I eat to nourish my body & soul.
Food should be filled with pleasure & enjoyment, not restrictions & feelings of guilt.
