Things are going better. I have barely been sick since I jumped into the allergy-free diet. I have felt SO much better. I've only made a couple mistakes, but so far I've been really consistently not sick.
It's amazing what you take for granted...food was my LIFE over the past few years...it was the only thing I could control when my life was out of control and I felt helpless. There was always food to look forward to and it was something I had control over. The same week I finished graduate school, I developed that massive list of allergies. It was very frustrating to me that the same week that school ended and I should have been feeling great, I developed that list of allergies.
In a way, perhaps it was my body's way of saying that I am living a new life now. I don't NEED food anymore. I have control over so many other things now that I didn't for the past few years. I finally have a life. It's a pretty sick lesson in many ways, to finally make it through a PhD and literally the day after you finish school you become allergic to nearly everything on earth.
I've always been an avid food label-reader, but you really have no clue the nature of what I'm going through unless you really start looking to avoid CORN, SOY, WHEAT, BARLEY, RYE, ALMONDS, ONION, CARROT, PEA, SESAME SEED, FLAXSEED. Those alone are in nearly everything. Just take a look sometime when you're shopping and try to find foods without ANY byproduct of foods from that list alone, let alone all the other stuff on my list. Plus, I used to also avoid dairy and meat, and mostly ate organic food. Yeah...it's just too much to handle now with all those restrictions.
I won't lie that the first couple times I went grocery shopping, I cried right there in the store, looking at everything I could not have. I felt hopeless that there was basically nothing I would be able to eat. But I did find a couple things, including exactly one brand of pizza...which just happens to be amazingly good :)
I believe that maybe this door closed so that another door could open. Of course, you can never see the door that has opened right away...that's why the saying works. You're so busy looking at the door that's closed that you fail to look down the hall at the open door. Well, I spent a good 1-2 months looking at the closed door. That is, until I went in and got allergy testing and figured out what was making me sick. I'm SO glad I got tested. I will say that having to avoid all those foods has forced me to totally redo my diet. I'm talking TOTALLY. Most of the things I am allergic to were things I ate my whole life, nearly every day, and I loved them dearly...and they never made me sick. Here are the cornerstones of my new diet that I've had to adopt over the past month -- I eat most of those every day, as there is not much else out there besides this list:
- Coconut (shredded, milk, oil, ice cream)
- Juice (cranberry, papaya, cherry)
- Yogurt (whole/plain, chia seeds, banana, and this hemp/buckwheat/chia granola)
- Eggs
- Rice (rice bran, rice, rice pasta, rice pudding, rice crackers, rice bread)
- Millet (I think this is what I used to feed my parakeet...)
- Salad (spinach, avocado, pecans, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, pear, tomato, cherry tomatoes, strawberries, cranberries, raisins, parmesan)
- Plantains
- Potatoes, sweet potatoes
- Beans (black, pinto)
- Potato chips
- Guacamole
- Apples
- Cheese
- Chocolate
- Dried fruit (apricots, mangoes, pineapple)
- Kiwi
- Vegetable chips (sweet potato, beet, etc.)
- Broccoli
- Tapioca
That's pretty much it. There are other little things like ginger, gingerbread cookies, buckwheat crackers, a few other treats I've found. I'm mostly concerned that if I just stick to this list, I'm going to become allergic to those foods too, and then I'll really be screwed!! Soon I'll be left with just water and fish...hey, isn't that Gollum's diet? Hmmm...lol
I met with a nutritionist last week. It wasn't very helpful, but it did encourage me to think about trying to restore my immune system and treat my allergies. I need to try to fix my body and she got me thinking about a diet that claims it can help with that. I'm definitely going to look into it, but I'm not convinced. However, I believe that I can get better because in grad school I developed an allergy to almonds and I stopped eating them for 2-3 years...then I gradually reintroduced almonds to my diet, and voila -- I was eating handfuls of nuts every day for years. Until November 2013.
I'm eating pretty well, considering. My fat and sugar intake are too high (because many of the treats I can have are sugary and coconut stuff has lots of fat), so I'm working on shifting things around. I worked out 2 days this weekend :).
Quick rant on food stuff... :)
I have decided to eat eggs again regularly, which has never been a huge deal to me because I believe life begins at birth (but that's just my view), so to me I'm not eating "meat" when I'm eating eggs. :) I've decided to loosen up on salmon too, so hopefully I can start eating that more often. I have difficulty with fish, but I refuse to eat animals unless things get dire. FYI I think people make a lot of assumptions about vegetarians and vegans. My refusal to eat animals is only partially based on not liking the idea of eating animals. It is primarily based on the gross negligence, money, waste, resources, and horrible effects that have come from growing animals for food (watch any of the documentaries on this topic).
The carbon footprint is huge, let alone the fact that people who support those types of mass-producers are allowing them to alter our bacteria structure. So now I am vulnerable to resistant bacteria because some farmers feed their cows shitty stuff and it changes the bacteria. The point is, THAT is what bothers me, not so much the gross-ness of eating an animal (which is partly there). I take similar issue with mass producing other types of food and altering our food structure (GMOs), so it's not like animals are my one and only thing. I am anti-engineering our environment just for our ease and benefit. But that's a story for another day :). I buy local, organic, and non-GMO as much as I can. Once I get a garden, I'm going to do a lot more growing. I think I grew and ate about 5% of my food in 2012 (I had a garden with someone). I hope to increase that to 10-20% this year or next. Fewer trucks to transport food, less crappy unripe food in the market. "Less crappy unripe food" -- that's a good motto for a store eh.
