Food, glorious food, (not)

Day 148

I put out a call into the universe, a query, a request, a challenge to the Gods, and would you Adam and Eve it, I got a reply, pronto. I was led to a book that I got from the library two weeks ago but had forgotten about - suddenly, I felt a desperate urge to take myself off to bed early with this book, and study it.

Just to back-track, a few years ago I was working part-time in the photo processing at Safeway, but was sometimes on the checkout, which was a lot of fun. If you, like me, are always having a nosey at what other people have in their baskets whilst queueing, then you'll understand how much better it is to be able to deliberately look at it, c'os it's your job.

One chap, I remember, had 40 cans of lager and an apple. I told him to go and get a bag of carrots because that one, lone apple wasn't going to counteract all that booze. I used to comment on everybody's shopping and had some great conversations, it was a fun time.

That's how I met 'candida girl'. She had the healthiest shopping I had ever seen - organic veg, rice cakes, fresh salmon, herb teas, wholemeal tampons, the lot - and I told her so. She said she used to have CFS but had been put on this diet and it had completely turned her life around. I made the queue wait while she wrote out the website address I needed to visit and her contact number.

I've always been of the opinion that what you put into your body affects your health - it's how I was brought up. After my sister was born and the medical profession had given up trying to 'cure' my mum of what was most likely post-natal depression, she and my dad spent years investigating alternative medicines and healthy diets.

It was the sixties, and they were definitely not hippes (mores the pity), but I remember a large, brown case of tissue salts, Bach flower remedies, natural homemade yoghourt (out in the garden - but in a thermos flask?), goat's milk, wholemeal-stone-ground-rock-hard bread, and spending weekends collecting chickweed for poultices, dandelion roots for coffee, or rosehips for syrup.

My mum's 'Keble Martin', as it was always called - 'The concise British flora in colour' being it's real title - has pages and pages of diligently researched, hand written notes at the back. Clematis is good for headaches, stings, eyes and sore feet, apparently, Rosemary (with salt) is for wounds, Meadowsweet helps feverish colds, and Burdock is good for chilblains as long as you're not pregnant. At the time I honestly thought my mother was a witch.

When in my turn the medical profession washed it's hands of me, my natural instinct was to go down the holistic therapy/alternative medicine route. I tried as many things as the budget of a family with only one working parent could allow, all with some limited success, and was left knowing that the one thing I could do at home, was monitor what I put in my body.

So when I found out about the anti-Candida diet, I was quite excited - this was the first time that all the symptoms I had were attributed to one cause, including many that I hadn't even considered as symptoms, but had been living with all the same.

The diet was hard - I had to cut out all sugars including those from fruit, all caffeine drinks and alcohol, anything fungal or fermented - vinegar, marmite, cheese, mushrooms, yeast and bread etc. - and lots more besides. At first I went through a horrible detox, then slowly I started to improve. I never broke the diet once. I cooked for the family without tasting their food, ever, so I'm not sure how great their diet was either. I had birthdays, weddings and Christmas - all on this diet.

Then a horrible thing happened - I started to get worse again. I worked really hard at it, but I continued to deteriorate. Going back to the Nutritionist who had outlined the diet for me, I was given tests from urine, spit, etc., and it was found that my liver was getting backed up like a clogged drain.

It was suggested that the illness had caused 'leaky gut syndrome' where particles of food sneak back into ones bloodstream and are treated as aliens by the immune system, the resulting detritus being more than the liver can handle. This in turn causes a sensitivity to those foods, the most common suspects being dairy, gluten products and all of the nightshade family, so I cut those out as well.

I was now on the most restricted diet imaginable, and another Christmas was coming up. I felt no better, but I had stopped getting worse. I decided to take Christmas off and start again after, as it had been eighteen months and I just couldn't bear it anymore. Trouble was, after Christmas, I couldn't seem to get back on it again - I didn't have the will-power and I felt too shitty.

I've tried many, many times since, all with no lasting success - my body just doesn't want that level of deprivation and hard work any more, with no actual results guaranteed. Had I felt great on it, it would have felt worth all the effort, but I didn't, I felt rotten, and I couldn't even have a glass of wine or some lemon sorbet to take my mind off it.

Roll forward a few years. Here I am again, stuck needing to change what I do to improve my health, feeling fitter and more emotionally able after the joy of college for the last two years, but knowing my body isn't happy with what I put in it - I am having too many headaches for that to be true.

So I send out a call and am drawn to a book - about a diet - that is even more restricted than the first! This one is about the natural chemicals that are present in all foods, but which can cause problems in 'sensitive' people, CFS being a common complaint.

It would be churlish in the extreme to ask God for an answer and then whine because it isn't what one wants, and consequently ignore it. So I will give it a go. It may have much less variety than the other diet but I can have more treats on it, mangoes, for instance. The sweetest thing I was allowed on the other diet was a sunflower seed and, call me picky, but I just can't overdose on them.

I need to wait until the next lot of housekeeping money comes in from the dole office, and then do some careful shopping, and a lot of planning and pre-cooking, but my intention is to give myself a few weeks on this in order to detox and have a good old clear out. (Hoping the pre-menstrual food-cravings don't sabotage it too much.)

If I feel a little better - great! If I don't, then I haven't lost anything by doing it and it's back to the drawing board. If I feel really bad when I revert to my normal, fairly healthy eating, then It looks like I'm stuck on another long term diet - Oh whoopee (not). Either way, wish me luck, and don't expect 'happy Bev' while I'm detoxing!