Ok, my grief over the loss of most of diet staples is significantly reduced now that I have allowed myself oats in the morning. It changes everything. My mood, how full I feel, my constipation… Ok, I lied, that problem still has not been solved. After days of Miralax! No change.

I finally got some more clarification from the Good Doctor about what kind of Vitamin A to buy. She had said to look for “preformed” or “mixed carotenoids”. I told her I had looked at hundreds of labels and only found “beta-carotene”, “retinyl palmitate”, “retinyl acetate”, just “palmitate”, and “fish liver oil”. She said I want most of the vitamin A in the product to be in the retinol or retinyl palmitate form ~ not beta carotene. So many Vitamin A supplements are coupled with Vitamin D, but since I already bought the latter, I’m looking for straight Vitamin A. I had blood tests done that showed I am allergic to cod, egg and tomato. I’m ignoring tomato, I’m kind of ignoring egg, but I’d like to avoid cod (the doc said not to place a lot of faith in the blood tests, but, out of all of them, he’d probably avoid cod). So, I don’t want to get Vitamin A from cod liver oil. I’m going to buy this one: Solgar Dry Vitamin A, 5,000iu. It’s also free of Gluten, Wheat, Dairy, Soy, Yeast, Sugar, Sodium, Artificial Flavor, Sweetener, Preservatives and Color. God love them.

As far as my diet goes, yesterday I had granola with almond milk and a banana for breakfast. Salmon, carrots, cauliflower, avocado and olives for lunch. Spinach, coleslaw, and pork chop with apple sauce for dinner. Snacks were mixed nuts and a Lara Bar.

I forgot to mention that the Good Doctor wants me drinking green tea and ginger tea and using olive oil and turmeric in my cooking (keep forgetting to buy turmeric!).

So, yesterday, I stuck with the diet after my earwig fiasco and, as usual, lunch and dinner were better: leftover soup and, for dinner, my husband made a lean hamburger with a portobello mushroom “bun”, tomato, sauteed onions and asparagus. Yum! He came through in my time of need!

However, I did email the Good Doctor and told her that I felt like my quality of life (what little there is) was suffering with this diet and could I please just eat oats in the morning? I make my own granola, which I adore, with gluten-free oats, nuts, coconut, cranberries… If I could still have that and oatmeal once in a while, I could really try to get excited about the rest of the diet. Still cut out all dairy, all other grains, all fatty meats, all legumes. It would still be a strict elimination of a lot of the foods I normally eat. And I will cut down on oats. I won’t eat as much as I was… I will still have a smoothie, but I will add some granola on the side to feel full. I will add fruit to my porridge, I can make homemade oat/fruit/nut/seed bars to carry as snacks for low blood sugar (instead of a tin of tuna!). That’s the thing about hypoglycemia ~ I’ve always been told to LIMIT my consumption of fruit and fruit juices because of the high sugar content, but this diet was doing the opposite. I think, if I could eat eggs, it would be a different story. The thing I really need to do ~ and have always needed to do ~ is cut back on sugar and I hope this diet will help.

So, the Good Doctor thought that was a reasonable request and now I’m feeling like a bit of a failure for caving, but this has lightened my mood considerably and maybe, once I’ve eliminated all the other stuff for a while, I will then feel strong enough to stop eating oats, too.

I should have bargained corn back into the diet instead of oats, that way I could have Chex cereal and popcorn and corn tortillas! Doh!