Our traveling pantry.
This week marks 9 years since I first assessed my eating habits in hopes of solving some long-time symptoms. I eliminated sugar and dairy and was completely confirmed in my suspicions of them when I unexpectedly dropped 50 pounds in the following weeks and stopped feeling the routine dizziness, nausea, and stomach pain to which I was accustomed. It was powerful confirmation that I was on the right track. In the coming years, and later with the help of a nutritionist, I was able to single out a few other sensitivities to take out of my rotation and kept finding more health and balance in my life.
More often than not the refrain that I hear from others who observe how I eat (whether in homes, eating out, or at work) is some variation of ‘oh I could never do that.’ Patiently, I reply that if they’d felt as bad as I did before sorting all this stuff out, they most certainly could. Desperate times can drive us to desperate measures.
Of course I want to eat all the delicious things that others eat! (It’s especially rough being a baker who doesn’t get along with gluten, dairy, and sugar!) It’s just that I know what the trade off is, and while I’ll cheat with some things some of the time, there are other things I won’t yield on. In some seasons I’ll be fully back on with sugar (because it’s the hardest one of those three to sub for in baking and also it’s delicious). I start by assessing it as I go to see how I feel, but all too often one successful experiment after another encourages me to turn a blind eye which eventually lands me in trouble and puts me back into a cycle of unwellness that requires me to go cold turkey again for a while.
Anyone who meets me during a particularly restrictive cycle might find think me a dietary puritan. What they fail to see, however, is that I don’t do this because I’m pious or have discipline as a superpower. I do it for baseline survival so that I can feel normal instead of terrible. I’m not even aiming to feel great. I’m literally aiming to just not feel awful. This is what makes the commentary on my dietary discipline so tiring.
My weary feelings about this rote dialogue is more acutely felt in the present moment because I am feeling extra poorly and am having to watch what I eat very carefully. I also find myself in a region of the country where the local dietary preferences differ from those in the PNW. My foreign and limited diet draws attention and so I’ve been receiving more comments of late. But, as with any situation with some measure of intensity, it’s a time full of growth, so I’m writing my experiences here to share with you. Stay tuned. ♥︎