Tuesday 8th January 2013
by ChelseaI’m the first to declare that other people’s diets are boring. Hell, my own diet is boring, so I’ll get this over with quick.
Don’t worry, I haven’t fallen off of the Body Acceptance wagon. No, our doctor has us both doing a three-week elimination diet (blood tests, inflammation markers, blah medical blah). No caffeine, sugar, dairy, soy, wheat, corn, oats, nuts, eggs, citrus, nor any oils but olive and coconut. So we used up or gave away all of the unqualified perishables, made a $200 trip to the co-op, and here we are.
We’re about seventy-two hours in, and it is so hard to find anything to eat! All we have are unfamiliar ingredients and rice-based confusion. I really want to just buy a few gallons of Naked juice and a bushel of avocados to live on until the twentieth. Don’t even get me started on how hard it is to find something to order at any of the various knit nights…
Also, I am being reminded, intimately, of the feminist-rage facet of my general anti-diet stance. Before this week, I would not have listed pizza as my favorite food, but it seems like a good third of my brain capacity is now taken up with daydreams of the Neapolitan pizza from Punch. That’s a lot of brain power that could be turned toward, you know, fighting the patriarchy or something. I can’t come up with anything better right now, because the Flavor-Up alert from Izzy’s Ice Cream just popped up in my Twitter feed.
[...] I last greeted ye, my sistren and brethren. First we had the three horribly boring weeks of the elimination diet, wherein I could think about very little save what I could eat, what I had to eat, and what I would [...]
Doctors are evil.
Punch is wonderful.
We are in agreement.
I know I need to cut nightshades, just to find out if they do affect me. Sad about this. Working up to breaking up with them.
Kim, you might look into cutting nightshades, apparently if you do the elimination diet and you have arthritis or have a history in your family, they recommend cutting nightshades as well.
–connect–
Oh dear. No dairy? No nuts? And you aren’t one to self-medicate with grassfed steak, either, are you? When facing a diet (and I regularly, though perhaps not regularly enough) break up with sugar, bread, etc. I find my best strategy with going out is to make sure I’m full before I go out. I also take a “feed, not food” approach, just put anything that’s allowed into my stomach to at least take care of the biological urge. The mind, however, that’s the big obstacle.
As a migraine sufferer and arthritic person, I’m fascinated with elimination diets, though I’m challenged to pull one off. Hope you keep writing about this process and how it works for you.
I would live on avocados and Naked Juices too, though.
The majority of what I’ve put in my face for the last week and a half could be most accurately described as Human Chow.
Oh my Chelsea! That sounds horrendous. I’m glad it’s only temporary, and maybe you will find that eliminating just one of those things fixes the problem. *Big hug* I had a bad day today, so I’m drinking red wine and eating chocolate. Oh wait, I do that every day. Take that patriarchy! er… yeah.
On day 10 of 21 before we can start adding things back in one at a time. Each day I become more indignant at the fact that this version of the future lacks our promised food-in-a-pill.
Well, however undesirable the circumstances, thank you for introducing me to the Trader Joe’s granola. I may have to track some down on my own.
Based on your list of no-nos, you may still be able to drink the vanilla rooibos tea at Starbucks. Although I’m not sure how much fun it is if it isn’t in latte form.
There are SO MANY delicious things to be had at TJ’s! I feel so forlorn wandering up and down the aisles, reading all of the labels on things I can’t have…
I found that the nut- and rice-based crackers from Blue Diamond were so good I had to stop buying them. Gluten free, but check the ingredients list for any other forbidden stuff. You can find them in either the cracker section or the GF section of the grocery store (or co-op). Good luck!
No nuts, unfortunately. After investigation, we were able to find one rice cracker that had no forbidden oils, sweeteners or seeds. It tasted so much like nothing, we still have half of the package left.