I promised on my new twist to the blog I wanted to not only talk about some of the things that I've been getting involved with to help use my skills to work on projects and with companies I believe in but I also made a commitment to myself to write more about life as a young adult living with chronic illness.Well today I wanted to write about my major transitions with food in the last few years and why it's not only helping me get healthier little by little, but also helping support sustainable agriculture and the environment.
When I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia at 16 never once did anyone ask me about the foods I was eating, this continued to be the case over the last few years until last year, a month before my 22nd birthday. You would think that doctors would ask what you eat and see how it relates to your health.
I never really realized my stubborn eating habits, were not just for silly reasons, although trust me I will admit as my lovely boyfriend Rob likes to point out, sometimes I have the worse excuses for why I don't want to eat certain foods. Just ask about seafood and Mexican food, and you'll understand.
After spending 5 amazing months in Costa Rica in fall of 2008, I was SOOO healthy and happy. Before that my final semester at Elon I had gotten very sick even though I was probably the least stressed I'd ever been in my college career. Spring of 2008 I had been determined to eat very healthy, which to me at the time meant switching to all whole grains, lean meats, etc. Low and behold, it didn't take me 5 months to gain over 30 pounds. When you're a former competition gymnast, gaining 5 pounds is rare, gaining 30 is unheard of.
Of course this freaked me out, and as I was soo busy writing my thesis my final semester,I had been doing Tibetan yoga as a class to help keep my stress down in a semester that was truly either going to break me or make me stronger ( think spending 20 hours a weekend working on your thesis). I thought my eating healthy plan and scheduling my relaxation time would work wonders. And it did mentally, but physically it took a huge tole, which didn't make a lot of sense.
Well it wasn't until Spring 2009, when I returned from Costa Rica and moved to Arizona to start working that puzzle pieces started to come together. In March 2009, I started getting super sick again, fainting and black out spells were extraordinarily uncommon. It wasn't till I went to an MD who was also a licensed naturopath that someone actually asked me for a full medical history and that included my diet!
To my lovely surprise, I knew I have never really liked food, yes yes I know that's weird but it's absolutely true, but there was a reason!!! I knew people had food allergies, but I had never known that people could get food sensitivities. Who would have thought that half the odd feeling you get from certain foods are because your body is sensitive to them and doesn't digest them right. I truly had no idea that this could account for a some of my fibromyalgia symptoms.
Well the doctor prescribed a yeast-free diet, which at that time when he handed me a list of what I could eat, which was not a whole lot in my opinion then, I seriously felt like I was being handed a death sentence. I had never eating and especially didn't know how to cook what was essentially a vegan and gluten-free diet.
At the time I was working at a boarding school, and as part of that all of your food is paid for, so to have to use the little money they actually give you since housing is part of your salary as well, so I didn't have a whole lot of money to start experimenting with food. But I started to try.
For a while I didn't even know where to begin, I really had a very low level of cooking skills so I went straight to cookbooks. I really like Gluten-free girl, a memoir of a true foodie who didn't know till she was in her 30s that she had Celiac disease, and while I don't have celiacs our diet requirements are very similar. Yeast-free is essentially gluten-free/dairy-free , and while you can have meats so it's not vegetarian or vegan, you are supposed to really minimize your intake.
The shock of this type of diet to someone who basically lived off of starches and dairy is a small trauma in itself. Yes I was really that ignorant growing up to think my picky diet would never catch up to me.
So needless to say I've been going through the roller coaster of trying to live out this diet for a long time. I wanted to make this a series of posts that reflects my changing attitude towards food, and how it's helped me be even more aware of the environmental impact of food and why that's now a very important place in my life.
Next time around I wanted to send some shout-outs to some amazing people who don't even realize that conversations I've had with people over the years have truly helped me to get where I am today with my relationship with food and how it is so very much intertwined with my interest in environmental sustainability and now sustainable food. I'll also love to tell everyone about this fantastic blog that I frequent often and how it's really helped me change my opinion about food.
I hope these posts really help someone else or others who might be living with some of the same issues and facing all the struggles that come with chronic illness and that hopefully this information that it has taken me years to understand and really start applying will be helpful to others that are in the constant struggle as well. I also hope that starting the dialog with others about sustainable food and environmental responsibility will encourage others to really start learning and exploring and realizing what a difference it makes in our lives and that of the world around us just when we start making little changes.
I want to end this series of posts with an explanation of why I'm always talking about how little changes make a difference and why that's so important to me, especially now when as Suze Orman likes to call us: young, fabulous, and broke :). But I really want to show how that doesn't stop me and many others I know in their 20s and early 30s from wanting to make a difference in the world with what we have to offer both skill wise but also with the little money most of us have.
I hope you continue to enjoy these posts as much as I am enjoying really taking a different direction with my blog.
Enjoy, and I hope everyone is having a fantastic end of summer!
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