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Hey beefriends! If you've been around my blog a while you have surely heard me going off about my weird ass allergy diet before, but it's a contest prompt this week, so I have an excuse. ;)
I have a laundry list of food allergies that completely upended my eating habits. I went from being either lacto-ovo vegetarian or vegan for over a decade to ...not that, lol. But it's so much better for my body. As I've said before, compassion has to include yourself.
Since the prompt was "healthy eating pyramid," I decided to go ahead and make an actual food pyramid of what my diet generally looks like:
My staple food is dairy products. I was always a big dairy eater growing up until I went vegan, and I perhaps should have taken that cue that it always did well for my body, but you live, you learn. When I was in college I was drinking about a half gallon of milk per day, and I do mean just drinking it as a beverage, let alone anything else like using it in cooking or in cereal. I generally only drink it as a drink if I'm eating spicy food now (lol), because that would get hella expensive (in college I worked in my dorm's cafeteria so I had unlimited supply both from meals as a student and at work). The biggest improvement in my well-being from this diet change has been my daily protein shake(s). I use unflavored whey protein and yogurt in that every day, which not only keeps my blood sugar stable (whereas when I was veg I was sugar crashing all. the. time.), but helps my digestion and immune system with the probiotics in the yogurt. I have had lots of dental issues over the years, and I eventually figured out that if I start to feel a toothache, I take extra probiotics, and it almost always stops the pain. Since toothache is often indicative of an infection, it just goes to show how much probiotics help our immune systems to kick ass that it fends off a tooth infection that quickly (in less than a day).
Most people will often cite the fact that the majority of the world is lactose intolerant as a reason that "humans shouldn't drink milk," but if you look at the breakdown by countries, you see that basically, people of European descent are mostly just fine with it. Which makes sense historically as the Celts were raising cattle thousands of years ago, and in the cold, dark northern winters that milk was an important source of nutrients. Since I am mostly Celt ancestrally speaking (and a little Mi'kmaq, which is still "north" tho most indigenous Americans are lactose intolerant), it makes sense to me that my body is happy with foods that my ancestors have been eating for thousands of years.
I did a big grocery shop yesterday. That's four half gallons of milk, one quart of kefir, four of yogurt, and one bottle of cream. I'm not kidding about the dairy intake. LOL
The next category in my pyramid is "white rice and wheat," because I am allergic to almost all grains. The safe ones are white (not brown) rice, and quinoa. I also use coconut flour for cooking. The white flour is technically a cheat, and once which I might have to stop doing soon if I'm right: I test allergic to wheat, period (the reason why white rice but not brown is okay is because that's part of the nickel allergy, and the nickel is held in the bran of the rice so if you polish it off, it's a low nickel food). But in practice, I only get a rash if I eat whole wheat and I don't if I eat white flour products, so I thought I was fine with that. But the other day I was googling because there is a really noticeable thing that happens to me almost every day: I start off in the morning just fine, drinking my protein shake for breakfast and going about my tasks. Then I stop for lunch and my energy, focus, and ability to think my way out of a paper bag falls off a cliff. We're not just talking "afternoon slump" here, we're talking major brain fog and dysfunction. So I finally thought to google what's up with that, and all the returns were basically "food allergies, dumbass." Well, shit, what am I eating that I'm still allergic to ...ah fuck, it's the wheat, isn't it? Because I eat a lot of that in the form of white flour and maybe it's not so safe a cheat as I thought it was. As I have learned dealing with all these allergies, the reaction isn't always your typical swelling/rash/itch kind of reaction. All sorts of issues, including almost all of my "IBS" symptoms, underactive thyroid, a huge ratcheting down in endometriosis pain, a huge weight loss, all got better when I started eating the allergy diet. I would have never thought that those things were allergy related, but lo, they were. So the Super Industrial Brain Fog From Hell may very well be, too. Time to keep a food journal again.
Modified pot pie recipe: what it used to be (with peas, carrots, and celery, all of which are allergens) to what it is now (replace those with garnet sweet potato)
The fruit and veg category is the biggest change, having gone from vegan (so, a lot of that and lots of variety) to the allergy diet, where 90% of the produce section is a no-no. I can't even walk past the bananas anymore without holding my breath, which I found out the hard way when I walked past one time and went, ohhh, I miss bananas, they smell so good, sniiiiiiff ...hork. Yeah I very abruptly had swelling and difficulty breathing and had to run off and take antihistamine. From the smell. That happened when taking a whiff of shea butter, too - also a latex allergy problem (body butters, bananas, avocado, kiwi, and mango are all a serious no thanks to the latex allergy).
General health advice is to eat lots of fruit and veg, lots of variety, mix up the colors, get your fiber ...but my body lets me know with a vengeance when it doesn't like some of that. Green leafy vegetables and potatoes, for instance, turn out to be the two biggest causes of my "IBS" pain where I'd swell up so bad with gas I looked pregnant. I miss salads and spanakopita, but no ...not worth it. That shit hurts.
If you're wondering why I keep putting "IBS" in quotes, it's because they pegged me with that diagnosis without doing a single test of any kind, while condescending to me that I must have anxiety and I should learn to meditate and it would go away. Maybe if they had taken me seriously years ago when I first started complaining about it to doctors I could have gotten the allergy tests then and saved myself years of misery, but no. They patted me on the head and told me I was a worrier and it was just stress. IBS may be a fair diagnosis in some cases, but in so many like myself it seems to be a diagnosis they lob at you that just means "we don't know why you're like this and we're not willing to investigate or try to help you in any way." I'm a big advocate of anybody who's got an IBS diagnosis to go and beat their doctor with a wet noodle until they do a round of allergy tests, because if that's the cause for you, too, it can make a world of difference. Maybe they won't find anything, but if they do? World changing.
"You have an 'irritable bowel' because you're a 'nervous Nelly.'" BTW yes, all the anxiety/worrier/stress/nervous Nelly words I'm using here are not to demean actual diagnoses of anxiety, they are words that were thrown at me when I do not have an anxiety disorder and my THERAPIST agreed that that wasn't what was going on, but GPs would just smile when I told them that and say, 'yes, you do have anxiety.' Binch you've spoken to me for 15 minutes, my therapist has seen me for hours over the course of months, but go off, I guess.
Meat and eggs, oils and sweets: Even though they are safe for me, I'm still just not a big meat eater. I average probably a pound of meat per month. Not vegetarian anymore, but not avoiding it, either. Sometimes I'll eat it as part of a meal - that chicken pot pie for example, or chicken in a burrito, or a hot dog or burger on occasion - but I've never been a "slab of meat on a plate" person. It just doesn't do it for me.
When I first started making the switch away from veganism, eggs were my jam. I ate so many eggs, I felt like Gaston from Beauty and the Beast. There was obviously some nutritional need that they were filling that my body was just like, "MORE!" But after several months, I got over it and now I'll have a dozen eggs last me so long I'm really pushing the boundaries on how old they are. So for both of these, I'll eat them, but not lots.
The only safe oils for me are olive and coconut. The biggest issue with this is that most olive oils are adulterated with cheaper oils (that's a link to a study about testing showing soy and rapeseed oils, but I searched and I couldn't find the original report I had read years ago that was more reader-friendly and comprehensive), so I have to be careful about which brands I buy (the quick and dirty advice was that if it comes from Italy, it's probably adulterated as the literal mafia is involved in the olive oil business and will do a scam with a quickness, but in practice I have a few brands I stick with that were specifically recommended from California). As far as sweets go, I use regular cane sugar, honey, and maple syrup. Stevia causes trouble breathing (again found out the hard way ...they don't test for that one) and it tastes like aspartame, anyway. 😂 I know people like to harp on sugar but it's safe for me so I'm not worried about it.
Homemade chocolate syrup ...because store bought is mostly corn syrup (corn is, you guessed it, an allergen)
So my healthy eating food pyramid is full of cooking at home, from scratch, alternative ingredients, and more restrictive than being vegan ever was. But my body is way happier for it, so it's for sure worth it.
This whole experience in figuring out what works for me and that broad-brush advice about nutrition was actually bad for me (and before someone says it, no, I wasn't "doing veganism wrong," which is what usually gets lobbed at someone if they're having trouble with a vegan diet, like, "oh you must be a junk food vegan" or something. I was seriously considering going to school to become a registered dietician as I was so interested in it, and so I shadowed the RD one day when I was working in the hospital. She told me later that I knew more about vegan and vegetarian nutrition than she did, so, yeah, I knew what I was doing), is why I am such a believer in the idea that hey - guess what - our bodies are all different, and what works for one person may not work for another. I mean, the stats about lactose intolerance that I cited earlier are a fine example of this. I can chug milk all day but my auntie who is lactose intolerant would suffer if she did that. Someone else can eat one of those giant ass salads that restaurants give you (I really don't know how anyone's stomach can hold all that at once) and be fine, but I would be doubled over for it (and rashing. I hate the rashing!). We have different needs and different health issues and it takes a certain amount of experimenting to figure out the right diet for you. So, no matter what claims that bestseller diet book may say, it may be that you have to throw all that out the window because your body is not the same as the author's.
I am one of those people who can't eat a lot at once. I am regularly floored by the hollow-legged people who can just pack it away, and always have been. So it makes sense that my body is happy with nutritionally/calorically-dense foods like dairy products. Someone who can happily eat that whole mixing bowl of salad is probably happy with a lighter diet like veganism. This, actually, is my main suspect as to why I dropped so much weight when I started eating my allergy diet: when you don't get enough calories, your body tends to hang on to what you do eat in starvation mode. Whereas when I turned into Gaston for six months eating all those eggs, my body said, oh, you're getting the calories now, okay ...and let it go and cranked up the metabolism. That's generally the opposite of most diet advice that wants you to limit and restrict your intake, but it's what worked for me.
So yeah, if that program or another doesn't work for you, don't feel bad about switching it up. Your body may be way happier with a you-diet over a fad-diet. ;)
Originally posted here: https://hive.blog/hive-120078/@phoenixwren/the-outlier-in-healthy-eating-when-conventional-advice-does-not-apply
