CW: food & size & related topics.
Many things are coming together and my soul is taking warmth and strength from the concatenation of care. I’m incredibly lucky — even blessed — and I feel my good fortune with all my heart. It’s a great, and unforeseen (by me), turn of events, after decades of raw struggle.
One of these blessings takes the form of a gifted young man who takes my complex & often conflicting dietary needs as a delightful challenge, rather than a terrible curse. His work with me is a hugely encouraging capstone to,
- A lifetime of food-nerdery,
- A career of nutrition-nerdery (not the same thing),
- Decades of increasing dietary stringency,
- Years of gastrointestinal fuss.
It turns out that addressing underlying nutritional needs can re-shuffle metabolic activity so that former limits are a lot less limiting.
I know, right? Who knew???
I’ve been dealing firmly with mast cell activation & histamine reactivity, by keeping everything I eat super fresh, freezing it in portions immediately, reheating in the microwave (which tastes a lot better than cooking it in the microwave in the first place), and keeping the dishes & utensils squeaky clean.
After doing this for awhile, it turns out I can eat brassicas again (cauliflower and broccoli, 2 of my favorite veg) without my thyroid flipping me the bird as it passes out.
I feel profoundly rewarded.
Competing needs: no brassicas; lots of winter veg.
Layered needs: calm down the mast cell activity & histamine responses, and my immune system is perfectly happy to take brassicas on board without trashing my thyroid in response!
Also, I was gaining weight rapidly around the time this kitchen-magician showed up; since my diet was so limited at the time (homemade parsley buns, homemade blueberry buns, farm-frozen chicken, and sprouted lentils, with only olive oil & salt for flavoring) it was very easy to do a calorie accounting.
It turned out I was in hardcore starvation mode, getting only 700-1000 kcals/day. That’s not enough. It kicked my cortisol into high gear, which is overdriven anyway due to pain & dysautonomia, and manufactured excess adipose tissue from (apparently) thin air & bad grace.
I’ve roughly doubled that calorie intake; with my kitchen-wizard’s help, I’m getting loads more veg, too, which for me are a sort of cure-all — whatever is wrong with me, it eases up if I get more veg.
Keep in mind that *any* consequence of starvation is unhealthy. Losing 80 pounds to starvation is even more horrifying than gaining them. It hurts less, but it’s more dangerous to kidneys and system function.
It’s a peculiarity of our modern sensibilities that gaining weight due to starvation is absolutely invisible, because being fat is considered so repellent (the word “gross” translates as “fat” — that’s a strong linguistic clue), that shaming & blaming is the default response, even — especially — by physicians who should know better than to disbelieve, shut down, and further humiliate their starving patients.
This obviously needs to change.
My clothes fit more naturally and my feet & legs hurt noticeably less 3 weeks on. So, that’s much better!
Competing needs: more nourishment; fewer calories & more activity, I’m told.
Layered needs: adequate calories, so my cortisol can stop screaming about starvation and let my body work better!
There will probably be a lot more about the details — why are all my veg heavily processed or overcooked? What’s the recipe for those buns? How many diagnoses am I working around, anyway? How do you get onions in when you can’t go near them raw? — but that is, as it were, food for future posts. There’s a lot more info in this topic. It’s possible there are a few books in it.