Tag Archives: autoimmune diet

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Diet Day 7 later…fruit sucks.

Am I jinxed or what? Did I do something evil in a past life? Since the earwigs-in-the-peach fiasco, fruit-wise, I have only eaten bananas and frozen strawberries (the latter I grew, washed, cut and froze myself, so I knew they were safe). I haven’t taken even a tentative step towards any fruit that has a proper core with seeds or pits – until tonight.

My breakfast was delicious: banana, strawberry, walnut, vanilla smoothie and some granola on the side. I went to a restaurant for lunch and had an amazing salad of romaine, jicama, mandarin orange segments, red pepper, pumpkin seeds and grilled chicken breast. The salad was big enough to be my dinner, too, if I added a little something on the side and I decided to have apple slices with cashew butter. Yum, right?

The rest of the story is shown below. The center of the apple was a big fuzz pile of mold. Seriously? Life does not want me to eat fruit. So, in my disgust and frustration, the petulant child came out again and I reached for the granola. Screw you, life! I’m having bad, sweet, oats for dinner! Life is just lucky I didn’t have the chocolate peanut butter ice cream in my freezer for dinner — then she’d really be sorry she fucked with my good fruit intentions.

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Diet & Supplements Day 7… added info.

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!).

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Diet Day 6…Oats, glorious oats! Plus photos of supplement brands.

Mmmm… I had granola yesterday for breakfast and it was glorious. The rest of the day was uneventful because lunch and dinner are so much easier to stomach (basically, I had leftovers and snacked on nuts). Still having IBS issues from the diet change and supplements. Trying to be patient.

I’m still trying to find a good Vitamin A that my doctor recommends. But, as promised, here are the images of the other supplements I finally settled on:

Jarrow Formulas Acetyl L-Carnitine 500mg
Source Naturals Alpha Lipoic Acid 200mg
Thorne Research, B-Complex #6
Thorne Research, Biomins
NOW Foods Borage Oil 1000mg
NOW Foods Coq10 100mg
Sam’s Club Brand Member’s Mark Fish Oil, 1,000mg
Ortho Molecular Product Ortho Biotic (probiotics)
Sam’s Club Simply Right Vitamin D, 2,000iu

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Diet Day 5… I think I’m gonna cave.

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!

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Diet Day 4… Earwigs for breakfast.

I don’t like fruit. I’ve never really liked fruit. It doesn’t taste very good, it’s not filling, it gives you a stomach ache, it messes with your bowels. I have never understood people that buy fruit to eat it raw for the taste. I’ve only ever eaten it because it’s supposed to be good for me. Bananas gross me out. I eat them all the time because I’m trying to be good to my body, but they are the right taste and texture for about 3 minutes during their lifetime. Before that, they are grassy and tart, afterwards, they are muddy and diarrheal. My coworkers used to eat brown bananas by my desk just to see me wretch.

Well, now, with this diet, I am forced to eat a lot of fruit. I was trying to be positive: Mmm, fresh produce! Yum, berries! Apples taste great! This morning, I did that while eating my breakfast peach: Peaches are so good in season! So juicy and tasty and fresh! But, they’re not! It’s a lie. Their skin is freaky fuzzy and they always have brown soft spots that feel …contagious. But, by god, I wasn’t going to eat another Lara Bar for breakfast, so I persevered. When I was almost finished, the peach cracked open. The center had no pit ~ it was rotten and very moldy and, joy, two earwigs scurried out. I screamed, dropped the peach, my dog jumped up with his ears flattened and tail tucked, the earwigs disappeared (I honestly can’t find them anywhere) and then I promptly puked.

My husband happened to stop by the house while this was happening. He said, “Why does this stuff always happen to you?” And then he reminded me of the time a few years ago when I had bitten into a cashew and found a bug inside. Probably not the best thing to bring up when I’m doubled over the toilet and half of my current diet is nut-based.

So, I ask you, do I decide to have a liquid breakfast of chocolate almond milk every morning and just deal with the nausea that the pills will give me? Or, do I decide that I am allowed to eat oats, only in the morning in the form of granola, muesli, porridge or oat/nut/fruit bars? Do I perservere and eat a banana every morning during that 3-minute window of banana goodness and call that my breakfast? Or do I say, my quality of life is suffering and now, not only am I sick physically, but I’m sick to my stomach and depressed thinking about food every day, so fuck it…? What do you vote, readers?