Thank god.

If I thought for a second that the cupcake thing was really over I’d jump for joy but here in NYC I don’t think cupcake shops and parties are going anywhere. My friend Grace has the best quote ever about cupcakes: “what happened to eating a slice of cake on a plate with a fork like a civilized adult.” I say what happened to eating breakfast foods throughout the day, pretending we’re all weekend warriors on eternal sabbaticals, living out the everlasting brunch?

Um…I know all the blogs are all afire with the news of PETA’s new ad campaign, but having given up my vegetarianism while keeping this blog, albeit with little fanfare, I think I deserve in on this one.  Never mind that no one takes PETA seriously anymore, and they’ve long become pretty antithetical to the substantive animal rights movement.

I’m only going to give myself a few moments to bang out my complaint; as the whole thing just isn’t worth any more than that. Its just that with an eating-disordered population out there the size of my beloved city (that’s 8 million people,) and 7/8 of them being female, i think that PETA is incomprehensibly cruel to not just target overweight women, but then offer them empty, false promises of easy weight loss with vegetarianism.  Hey, fatty! Order our veg starter kit which literally promises that you can eat all the high carb crap you want and lose weight! Last I checked, floor-crashing HDL and deadly gas-passing did not make one beach-ready. Not that all veggies have insanely low HDL or pass horrid gas (OK they all do – I know because I used to hang out with them exclusively) but hey, obviously all women who eat meat are fatties too so whatever…Never mind the scientific evidence about dairy and weight loss, for starters.

Anyway, my 5-6 minutes are up. I haven’t bothered asking any of my vegan/veg friends what they think of the ad because last I checked none of them are 15 and I’m fairly sure that’s the only demographic left over which PETA has any “cool” sway…I’ll get back to SIBO in the next post, I promise.

“I confess that I have been as blind as a mole, but it is better to learn wisdom late than never to learn it at all.” – Sherlock Holmes, ‘The Adventure of the Man with the Twisted Lip’

I worked in grocery for around five years before I discovered the accommodating and relatively high-paying (until I moved to New York) world of clerical work-study. Three of those five years were in natural and organic grocery, and two of those were spent stocking, ordering, cleaning, and selling produce. I never heard of gluten sensitivity or candida or even food allergies before the organic market. I listened to countless stories, almost always told by women, about their symptoms: weakness and fatigue, the aches and pains and the often drunken not-of-this world brain fog that shrouded their lives. These things led them on arduous journeys to root out a wheat allergy or a yeast overgrowth. Often it took them months or years and often no one helped them along the way; maybe one or two of them had a naturopath’s assistance. I wonder now how helpful in truth that assistance was. So many people abruptly swinging from one end of the spectrum to the other; omnivores suddenly eating raw diets, vegetarians adding red meat to their menus. I always listened intently to these women while they told their stories. I often asked questions. “Well, what do you eat while you’re trying to find out your allergies?” “How did you know that was ultimately what was making you sick?” These women were always thin and almost always middle-aged. They were sometimes hippies, and other times they could have passed for suburban soccer moms, and they probably were just that, willing to drive east or over the river to the urban fringe to pick up their organic food. Some of them practiced healing arts, as I suppose their experiences empowered them to be more than just well for themselves. Sometimes they espoused all kinds of New Age crap that I couldn’t care less for. Sometimes they didn’t.   I confess now that I didn’t always believe them. It is difficult to explain. I respected their stories, especially the parts where they were symptomatic. Who wants to feel that way? I had lived my whole life feeling like something wasn’t quite right – depression and lethargy despite a natural optimism. I had aches and pains too, and it was always difficult for me to lose weight – my body always seemed like it wanted to hold on to things, especially hurtful things. During the parts of their story where they figured out what was making them sick, I even cheered them on inside, but I don’t know if I ever fully believed them. How could something as innocuous as food make you that sick? Surely the relationship was not causal. Something else was going on. Hormones? Stress? A latent medical condition? I took these stories with a grain of salt, the way I took the stories of women who went on olive oil diets and lost tons of weight.

For the past two years I have felt sick and no doctor has been able to find a cause. In order to cure, a cause must be found. The one causal factor identified, my gallbladder, was removed one year ago, and the procedure only minimally lessened my symptoms. And gradually, all the symptoms returned. I have been back and forth in these two years with food. I have at times felt empowered when investigating my food, happy that I could actually be the one controlling not only the disease but the cure. I have at other times felt helpless and burdened. Food = my fault, again. I can’t just take a pill, get some rest, eat smaller meals. All this time, however, I have secretly and silently taken my strength from the women in the organic grocery store. I am only 32. Probably the age of many of the women I spoke to when they first began to hunt down their intolerances and allergies. Now I realize that the women who lost weight on olive oil probably did so because they put down the sugar and the bread. Now I realize that food can make us all incredibly ill; the same food can make us all ill for different reasons. I feel that I have a lifetime of diet detection ahead of me. But I feel that one day it may be old hat, it may be comfortable, and I may see lasting benefits that will allow me to tell stories that begin with “I went through a couple of very rough years until I figured out that I….”

This is what I get when I play with my food. Salty and five-spicey. Salt is fine. Five spice is probably cheating.

A lot has happened in the past two and a half days.

The meat-eating was getting to me. Sunday night in bed, nearly every progression towards sleep’s doorstop was met with a vision of a turkey, fearful; a strong arm holding it still while a deadly gash to the throat closed its eyes. Monday at Topp’s by the Waterfront, I accompanied the husband to pick out a tilapia filet. The seafood and meats section was flounced on all sides by crèmes and cheeses of every variety. My eyes watered at the sight of several wheels of brie (brie always makes my stomach lurch within minutes of eating it) and creamy havarti, sitting next to Laughing Cow, the light Swiss wedge. Over the seafood counter, four cartoon posters depicted happy seafood working out, running through the park, and surfing the internet. It was over. Tears of selfish longing turned into tears of guilt, and I did a bang-up job of embarrassing my dutiful husband. He bought the tilapia anyway, at my behest, and walked me to the train with comforting words.

I think I got through dinner somehow that night, but I boycotted my fish and fowl breakfast the next day. Of course, by lunch, I was really hungry, and I ate most of the turkey. I even poorly food-combined and ate some rice with the turkey. My husband convinced me to call my nutritionist (even though my first real post-starting-the-diet consultation is today) and ask her if I could have Fage again because I couldn’t take eating meat anymore. Fortunately she is a vegetarian herself, and she agreed that the diet could hardly be beneficial if I choked down most of my meals between tears. It seems so wrong to incorporate any dairy in an elimination diet, but the argument for Fage is so strong given my history and nutritional needs. The nutritionist suggested that instead of meat I stir some unflavored rice protein powder into some unsweetened soymilk. I don’t have a problem with soy, other than the fact that like most vegans, I lived on it for several years, and was doing so (with the exception of the MacDougall diet) when I got sick. If this was a candida diet, I would be allowed Fage for its beneficial bacterial ingredients. However, now that I have it, I feel like I’m cheating. I’m so glad I don’t have to eat meat. Fage is the only really good tasting thing in this diet, and I am constantly afraid I’ll go overboard. And its possible that I’m a little more bloated today than the other days on the diet?

Overall, the cravings have become far less powerful. I can’t believe I haven’t eaten any sugars other than very few naturally occurring ones in five days. Fage now brings my sugar grams up as well, but its still around 10 daily rather than 30 – 100. I think quitting aspartame was worse than this. I had delayed withdrawal; horrible headaches that didn’t begin until nearly a week after the last sip. I quit aspartame on the first of the year and the headaches didn’t vanish until this week.