How It All Started

I used to pride myself on being the super low-maintenance person in almost all respects and particularly at restaurants.  I'd make faces when one of my companions became "that person" who asked the waiter a dozen questions and asked for this on the side and that on the side and "make sure they don't use oil" and "I want romaine not ice berg" and then they'd still take 30 minutes to decide what to order.  Ugh!

But life has a funny way of throwing things back in our faces.  I am now "that person".  Not that I go to restaurants anymore, really, but let's start at the beginning...

Last April (so it's been a year now, wow!), I decided on a whim to do an elimination diet.  If you're not familiar with that, google it, there's tons of info.

What's the point or goal of an elimination diet?  To find out if there are any foods that maybe you shouldn't be having.  A certain food or food group could be an allergy for you, but I think "intolerances" is the more likely culprit.  To me a food intolerance is a food your body (for some reason and at this particular time) doesn't tolerate well and then your body "acts out" or behaves in a particular way.

There are basically two types of elimination diets.  There are the easier but (I feel) less productive ones where you eliminate one food at a time for x-number of days and see if your symptoms go away.  And there is the other kind where you kind of start at ground zero, eating only a few foods that rarely cause intolerance in anyone.  Then you gradually add in one food or food group at a time and see if you react.

That second kind, the hardcore elimination diet, makes so much more sense to me, particularly if you consider things like "what if I am sensitive to two things that cause a similar reaction?"  'Cause then just cutting out one food at a time, you'll never find the culprits.

So I did the hardcore elimination diet.  I guess I can say that I probably went into it with preconceived notions of what I'd discover.  For example, I was dead sure I'd find out that gluten was giving me my migraines.

I have to admit the results surprised me.  But that surprise helps me believe that the results were not prejudiced or tainted by my aforementioned preconceived notions.  I discovered that I am currently intolerant of the following foods:

• cow dairy 
• yeast
• corn

Also sort of:

• gluten
• sugar

So the cow dairy gives me migraines.  Kinda pisses me off to think I didn't need to suffer 35 years of migraines, but no crying over spilled milk, eh?  It's wonderful to be virtually migraine free for a year now.  I say "virtually" because I'm an idiot and do "test" it out once in while.  Y'know, sometimes when you're out and everyone else is eating food that you used to love (were practically addicted to), hey, I'm human... I cave.  The stupid part of my brain tries to reason that I've not had cow's milk in so long that I can probably handle a little.  And maybe I could... but it tastes so good that I try some more the next day, or maybe the next two days.  And before you know it... hmph!

It appears I'm not sensitive (or as sensitive) to goat or sheep's milk.  When I tried to look into the reason for this, what I came up with is that cow dairy has A1 β-casein and goat and sheep dairy have A2 β-casein (with little to no A1 β-casein).  That's the only difference I could find.

My intuition tells me that while I may be okay to have goat/sheep dairy once in a while, it is not something I want to be a staple in my diet.  I think we have to listen to our intuition on a lot of this stuff.

So that was dairy.

Yeast was also a surprise to me.  I was sure that my horrible, painful eczema (on my hands) was due to wheat (why was I trying to blame everything on wheat?).  I did discover that when I re-introduced bread into my diet, my eczema flared up.  But duh... bread is not *A* thing... bread is MANY things.

I even tested beer.  Okay, again, this is rather stupid since beer also has multiple ingredients.  But during these months (like April through Sept) I was still trying to be a normal(ish) person and throw dinner parties and go out to restaurants and eat at other people's houses, etc.  So yeah, not a perfect elimination trial.

I reacted to the beer and again assumed it was the gluten or wheat the beer was made from.  It wasn't until I tried a cheese substitute made with a crap-ton of yeast that I found the offender.  

Yeast.  It was the yeast in the bread and the beer that I was reacting to.  No yeast, no eczema.  You have no idea how happy my painfree hands have been for the past nine months.  (If I can find a photo I'll show you... cracked and bleeding and bright red with pain... ouch.)

The corn I'm still testing a bit but so far it seems that corn is the reason for my stuffed up ears.  I don't want it to be corn.  Corn is in  EVERYTHING!!!  It's so so so so so hard to avoid corn.  Well, I'll keep you updated if I learn any new insights but for now I'm trying to avoid overt corn.  

By "overt" I mean like corn-corn.  But corn derivatives are in so many other things that I'm sure sometimes I ingest corn without intention or knowledge (vegetable oil, vinegar, brown sugar (caramel coloring), citric acid, etc).  Just one more reason to steer clear of processed/packaged foods and stick with single ingredient recipes.

As to the other two things (gluten and sugar), I can't say I see a specific body/item correlation but I have a sense of not feeling well when I eat them.  So they are currently excluded.

Okay, those are the intolerances, which is huge enough, but then we get into my personal likes/dislikes.

Here is a list of the foods I'm not fond of for one reason or another:

• Processed foods: I try to steer clear of processed foods whenever possible; I think they're terribly unhealthy for us AND they are so "multiple ingredient" that I'm never really sure what I'm eating. I loathe ingredients like "flavors", "spices", etc.  Way too ambiguous for me.
• Red meat: I'm just not a fan; I can eat it if it's somewhat disguised like taco meat or spaghetti meat, but I will never sit down to a steak.  For meat (of all kinds as well as dairy and eggs), I want ethically raised and slaughtered, also red meat has to be grass fed.  I've recently been experimenting with buffalo meat.  Basically I have red meat about twice a month.
• Poultry: Sometimes it grosses me out, but again if I doctor it I can take it in small doses.  By doctoring it I mean like make a big batch of curried rice and throw some chicken in... stuff like that.
• Eggs: Another one of those things that grosses me out.  I can eat deviled eggs I make myself (although the white parts are icky) and I can eat an omelette if pushed, but eggs are not my go-to.  Still... nice to know I can tolerate them.
• Mushrooms and Beets: Two things that just make me shudder.  
• Fish: Occasionally grosses me out but I'm trying to work on that since it's one of the few meat proteins that actually might be good for me.

So... now you see my problem.  No meat, sugar, dairy, yeast, corn, gluten.  Eek!  And it gets worse if you try to think about oh say the Paleo diet for example.  No grains allowed... and I don't like meat much.  I can NOT live on just veggies and nuts.  Maybe others can but not me.

I am a proponent of "whole foods" eating, which to me means your recipes have solitary food ingredients (as opposed to "dressing" or "spice mix" types of things).

Alright so that's the basics of the thing.  Sometimes I walk in the grocery store or look at a restaurant menu or even just stand in my own kitchen and freak out inside yelling (internally): There's nothing I can eat!!!

That is entirely NOT true, mind you.  There's plenty I can eat.  It's just that there's nothing super fast and easy, safe and appealing.  Not only am I used to "comfort" food, I'm used to being able to make a meal quickly.

But I'll get over myself.  This blog will help me organize my food thoughts and catalog my recipes so that I can make healthy choices that work within my totally crazy hectic lifestyle.

Bon appetit! 

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Have a recipe you’d like me to try out?  Let me know in comments.  So long as it’s gluten free, sugar free, yeast free, and corn free… I’ll have a look.  When leaving a comment, you may need to use the pull-down to change the selection from "Google Account" to "Name/URL" or "Anonymous"  Thanks!