Possibly Cured

As some of you may know, I became very sick my freshman year of college. I missed a lot of class and I was forced to take some time off at one point. To try to figure out what this stomach ailment was, I went through an endoscopy, a barium X-ray, a colonoscopy (to this day probably the most unpleasant thing I’ve ever done), and various other terribly uncomfortable tests. I saw a half dozen doctors and specialists who had no idea what was wrong with me. 

I finally settled on a Naturopathic doctor who finally gave me some answers. I got my blood tested at a lab across the country. A month later I found out I had suddenly become allergic to nine foods, including a severe allergy to yeast. I had never been allergic to any food my entire life. I overhauled my diet and restricted myself to the basics that I knew wouldn’t make me sick. I cut out bread, dairy, anything that had vinegar or yeast (which is almost everything), peanut, almond, soy, banana, cranberry, and a few other things I can’t remember. I lost 20 pounds.

My diet was the same every day for almost my entire time at college: oatmeal for breakfast, rice cakes for snacking, plain turkey on a tortilla + tortilla chips for lunch, plain chicken with rice and apple sauce or vegetables for dinner. That was it. Every single day. People would always ask me, “aren’t you sick of eating the same thing every day?” Well, in my mind, I had no other choice. So I wasn’t able to “get sick” of food.

My doctor and therapist(s) told me it was stress/anxiety-related, and I slowly started finding the connections. But sometimes it would be worse for no reason. Then it would be better out of the blue. But it was almost always gone on vacations. Since I started dating Haley, especially the last 6 months or so, we began to experiment and started eating out a lot, which pretty much forced me to eat something I normally wouldn’t have. Suddenly I realized that I was eating decent proportions of foods I thought I couldn’t have under any circumstances, and I was feeling fine.

I set up experiments on weekends when I don’t have to go to work or school the next day or two, and don’t have to fly. I figured this long weekend was as good as any for my biggest experiment yet.  

Last night, I ordered a pepperoni and sausage pizza. My first pizza in over five years. My first bread of any kind in so long. It was incredible. The crust was so much better than I remembered. Not as much cheese as I thought. I ate 5 pieces, and the left overs for lunch today.

I’ve never felt better.

vegbear:

“High-fructose corn syrup “may be cheap in the supermarket, but in the environment it could not be more expensive,” Michael Pollan, author of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” (Penguin Press, 2008), writes in an e-mail. Most corn is grown as a monoculture, meaning that the land is used solely for corn, not rotated among crops. This maximizes yields, but at a price: It depletes soil nutrients, requiring more pesticides and fertilizer while weakening topsoil. “The environmental footprint of HFCS is deep and wide,” writes Pollan, a prominent critic of industrial agriculture. “Look no farther than the dead zone in the Gulf [of Mexico], an area the size of New Jersey where virtually nothing will live because it has been starved of oxygen by the fertilizer runoff coming down the Mississippi from the Corn Belt. Then there is the atrazine in the water in farm country — a nasty herbicide that, at concentrations as little as 0.1 part per billion, has been shown to turn male frogs into hermaphrodites.” Milling and chemically altering corn to form high-fructose corn syrup also is energy-intensive. That’s not to say that corn is evil and other foods aren’t; all crops require energy to grow and transport. What makes corn a target is that federal subsidies — and tariffs on imported sugar — keep prices low, paving the way for widespread use of high-fructose corn syrup and, in the process, keeping the American palate accustomed to the sweetness it provides.”

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High-Fructose Corn Syrup: Not So Sweet for the Planet - washingtonpost.com (via robot-heart)

“In some studies it has been shown that HFCS contributes to high cholesterol because it actually scars the internal walls of the arteries. This causes the body to then produce cholesterol to heal the walls of the arteries which is one reason that the plaque builds up on the arterial walls. As the walls are continually scarred this slowly shrinks the opening for blood to flow through making the heart work much harder and eventually wearing the heart out.” -Natural News

I avoid this stuff like the plague.

I try to avoid it as well; interesting stuff.