Category Archives: My experience with an elimination diet

Post-flu: food is confusing

tearing-hairMy body is a bit of a mess lately. Ever since that flu hit a week ago, I’ve been feeling awful. I’m exhausted all the time. I keep trying to do a few minutes of exercise, to get that effect where doing a little exercise gives you energy, but I can barely keep going longer than five minutes. Honestly, five. I set my watch and everything. If I make it past the 5-minute mark I’m pleased.

My innards are all confused and messed up, and food is also doing weird things. For example, whole wheat 7-grain toast seems to be pleasing and even soothing, but the Kashi 7-grain cereal I bought gives me headaches, stomach pains, “brain fog”, fatigue, tightness in my chest, anxiety, and bloating. What the heck? It’s happened three different times, consistently. Just to add to the confusion: the gluten-free, wheat-free coffee cake I made from a mix by The Cravings Place, does the same thing the Kashi cereal does (again, I tested a few times – leave it to me to make ABSOLUTELY SURE the coffee cake won’t work, heh).

At this point, I don’t know what to think. The plan of action I like the best is to start working on collecting veggie recipes, so that I can go back to eliminating a few things while not starving.

Tomorrow, on my 35th birthday (hurrah!), I’m off on a visit to Portland to see my bonus sister get married. I admit I’m a little nervous about coping with food, and a lot nervous about coping with anxiety, but I’m trying to keep an optimistic outlook on everything. I’m taking a lot of good snacks with me, and honestly I’m even tempted to take my Vita-Mix down too. I’ve heard a lot of people travel with theirs.

Let’s get physical! PHYSICAL! I wanna get physical!

I just amused myself and Meg, made some of you want to hurl, and probably confused the younger generations.

YOUR WELCOME.

I went to the doctor this morning, for my yearly physical. I told him about the elimination diet, and how I’m still having problems with being stiff and sore at night and in the mornings, and all the other symptoms. He spent most of this time looking at his computer, so as usual, I’m not sure what got heard and what got missed. He did palpate my back for the tender spots associated with fibromyalgia, but ruled that out (I wasn’t wincing enough?).

He was intrigued by the celiac idea, however, so several of you will be pleased to know he did draw some blood, for both lipids and a celiac screening. He said it woudn’t show anything if I’d not been eating any wheat, but I told him about how I’d added it back in. Then I told him about the three slices of cinnamon french toast on Sunday, and the two pieces of toast yesterday, and that seemed like enough wheat.

Otherwise, I’m healthy. GO ME.

The perks of being married to a programmer

One of the annoying things about doing an elimination diet, or trying to find out any useful information from your day to day routines, is that to do so you have to be fairly religious about writing everything down. EVERYTHING. This can get really old after awhile, yet it’s so important, especially when you’re trying to track down things like anxiety triggers – stuff that impacts my life in a major way.

Enter my programming god of a husband: Greg.

About a week ago, I said something like, “Man, it would be so useful if I could just record what I eat on my iPhone, or when I take a pill, or when I have a panic attack. I’m tired of lugging around this notebook.”

He got that look in his eye, the one that means he’s thinking he can make me really happy (I love this look, it always ends with him inventing something crazy and wonderful), and said, “Like maybe something where you could put in an event and then it would stick it on a calendar? You know, I could do that. I could make something would enter an event on, say, a Google calendar.”

And so he did.

Right now it doesn’t have a name or an icon: we just call it “Event Tracker” – it’s the white icon down at the bottom:

event_tracker

What it does is going to, for lack of a more mature phrase: rock my world.

  • I can set up events with any text I want. Right now I’m using an initial system. For example, “A: FB PA”, means, “Anxiety: Full Blown Panic Attack”. I’ve created events for exercise, for example, “E: Stat. Bike (10m)”, means, Exercise: rode stationary bike for 10 minutes.
  • Every time an event occurs, I just tap the button, and the information is put on a private Google calendar he set up, called “Hollie’s Events”.
  • Greg is also planning on creating an Apple Script that will pull the data off the calendar into a list. By comparing lists, I’ll be able to answer questions like, “Is it true I’m more anxious at different times in my cycle? Is exercise triggering anxiety or is it something I’m eating on the days I’m exercising?”

Over time, I’ll be able to see trends a lot faster, and I’ll have a lot more data, since this is so easy to use and I won’t skip days because I’m tired and forgot to log what I did or what I ate. The data will also be more accurate, since it will have the date and time, and not lame notes by me, like, “I think this is what I ate, I can’t quite remember”. Basically, I’ll get better information while being able to obsess a lot less about tracking. Win-win!

Staying Heart-Healthy Part 1 – The Diet Wars

As long-time readers of this blog know, I’m fascinated by different diets. For a long time I believed that a totally plant-based vegan diet was the way to be truly healthy and long-lived, but I struggled desperately with getting enough vegetables. Recently I’d decided to add meat back in for awhile to replace what seemed to be problematic beans, as I went to an elimination diet to figure out why I seemed to have a lot of symptoms of food intolerances. While I don’t feel like I’m truly done with that, the effort has brought me some great insights.

One of the things I haven’t uncovered yet is why I’m still so sore, why I wake up with my joints hurting, and why I hurt when I’ve been sitting longer than a few minutes. The only time this ever went away was when I tried Eat to Live, by Joel Furhman. I only lasted a week, thanks to a total inability to fill up on vegetables, but I did feel great at the end, and I remember springing out of bed without pain. The only real difference between that diet and my elimination diet has been meat. Could meat be causing the muscle soreness? I don’t know, but it’s something I’ve wondered about.

The low-fat vegan way to health and longevity….

engine2Enter a friend of a friend, who wrote me a few days ago thanking me for this blog, that it was inspiring them to do some more thinking about their own diet strategies to get healthy. They said they were going to use a new book that just came out entitled, The Engine 2 Diet: The Texas Firefighter’s 28-Day Save-Your-Life Plan that Lowers Cholesterol and Burns Away the Pounds, by a firefighter and world-class triathlete named, and I love this: Rip Esselstyn. If I’m gonna be saved from a burning building, I really want it to be by a guy named Rip.

The book follows the low-fat vegan crowd, which I’ve been a fan of for years, whose proponents include T. Colin Campbell, Dean Ornish, Joel Furhman, and John McDougall. Yes, I’ve been a fan of something I find difficult to follow. Why? If eating a lot of veggies seems this hard for me, why did I keep at it for so long? Because, these guys have serious credibility. Each one of them has personal experience reversing heart disease in their patients. EACH ONE. Dean Ornish’s articles on his hundreds (if not thousands?) of these diet-based reversal proliferate in peer-reviewed medical journals. T. Colin Campbell’s book, The China Study, is a fascinating and evidence-filled tome indicting meat-eating, and has been called the “grand prix of epidemiological studies”.

That said, I’m not a scientist. While I do read the studies, and I do follow the science, I also tend to just look someone up and down and make some gut assumptions, and what you’ll notice about all these guys is that they’re all healthy, they don’t have any chronic health problems, they’re not overweight, and they’re aging very well. You may have heard about Atkins, who “slipped and fell” outside his clinic, and ended up dying while apparently hugely overweight.

Atkins’ medical records were released by accident to a doctor in Nebraska, who discovered in these records “a hand-written note that Atkins had a history of myocardial infarction (heart attack), congestive heart failure, and hypertension (written “h/o MI, CHF, HTN”). While fans of Atkins rush to point out how the injustice of these records being given out by mistake, they don’t have any response to the facts: the guy was dying of heart disease. Atkins’ family vehemently denied any autopsy, which I find ridiculously irresponsible. If you’re going to build an entire empire by advising people that slurping down cheese, cream, bacon, and hamburgers is good for you, then I think letting the public have a look at your arteries after your SUSPICIOUS UNTIMELY DEATH is the least you could do.

So what about the Paleo diets?

That’s next up! I’m fascinated by the paleo diets and their very healthy-looking advocates, and I’m especially fascinated by the claims that both sides make about the other. I’ll write more about that tonight or tomorrow, depending on how busy it gets around here. Right now, the kids just got home from their overnight visit to Grammy and Papa’s house, and it’s time to go have some fun with them.

Elimination Diet Update!

It’s been barely two weeks (15 days!), and while I’ve screwed up and added things back in too early and accidentally eaten things I didn’t mean to, I feel like I’ve already learned so much!

The biggest thing I’ve learned so far is that I’m not anxious all the time. I was beginning to think that I was. I had so many ailments and sensations every day that didn’t seem to make sense, and I was grouping them all under “ANXIETY”. There were days when I’d feel so awful, I was sure I was just going to end up going completely nuts.

After tracking my food and my feelings and symptoms for the last two weeks, despite the fact that I haven’t stuck to the diet properly all the time, there are three very clear groupings of symptoms that are arising:

1) Specific symptoms that happen after I eat certain foods, which I’m beginning to assume means that I have some sort of mild allergy or intolerance to that food:

- nausea
- gas, cramps, bloating
- heartburn
- headaches
- irritability
- fatigue, an extreme version of “brain fog”
- joint pain and muscle soreness (often the next day)
- eyes feel “hot” (weird one, I know, but it happens)
- lights begin to feel too bright (often occurs with headache, though not painful enough I’d consider it a migraine).

2) Symptoms of panic and anxiety (I have an anxiety disorder, there’s no denying that):

- sense of doom, fear, extreme anxiety
- rapid heart rate, pounding heart, palpitations
- shaking, tremors
- dizziness
- chest feels tight, like the muscles are a band around my body pulling way too tight
- palms begin to sweat, the rest of me gets clammy
- blood pressure shoots up

3) Symptoms of low blood sugar:

- a sort of “shakiness”, a feeling that I could fall into a panic attack at any moment, lacking in physical stability.
- a light and “deep” sort of headache
- hyperfocus on something I’m working on, so that I’m ignoring a lot of physical signals (like right now I’m working on this post without having eaten breakfast yet – I’m resisting stopping to go eat, but I know if I don’t, I’ll end up in trouble soon….)
- strangely: repelled by the idea of eating, nothing sounds good, I don’t know what I want, and I’m too busy to think about it, and get annoyed by anyone asking me to eat (see last item!).
- irritability (heh!)

Part of the problem with having an anxiety disorder is that you become hyper-attuned to your physical state. A person without an anxiety disorder will often ignore strange or unaccounted for physical symptoms, or feel unafraid of them, finding them annoying at worst. They only “panic” and feel fear or real worry when something serious happens, like that abdominal pain doesn’t go away in a few days and the doctor says they have appendicitis. In other words, they have (generally) reasonable responses to bodily sensations. 

Someone with an anxiety disorder, however intelligent and rational they may be most of the time, can be plagued with an irrational hyperfocus on their body’s sensations. This is especially true with panic disorder, because panic attacks are terrifying, and someone who experiences them on a regular basis will basically go to any length not to experience another one. This is why people with panic attacks often become agoraphobic; they avoid places where they had attacks before. It’s also why they’re especially prone to hypochondria. I have issues with both; my agoraphobia manifests as difficulty driving long distances and difficulty being away from home for long periods, and my hypochondria manifests as a fear that there’s something wrong with my heart. 

What I’m realizing through doing this diet, is how the food that I’ve been eating and the way I’ve been eating it have been impacting and triggering my anxiety. Eating things I’m intolerant to cause symptoms that, while not producing a panic attack on their own, contribute to my hyper-focus on my body – asking myself, “What’s wrong? Why do I feel this way? What’s happening?” – and do nothing but increase my own sensitivity to physical sensations, which increases the likelihood of an attack being triggered. 

I used to think that I was just anxious 24 hours a day, but when I went on the diet, all the food intolerance symptoms went away. I began to actually feel good most of the time. I realized I wasn’t anxious all the time; I was anxious some of the time, and I was very likely reacting to my food the rest of the time. 

So what foods are problematic? Here’s a breakdown of what I know or strongly suspect so far: 

DAIRY: evil, evil, evil. 
On June 30th, Greg and I went out for a date night, and I wanted to just enjoy myself so badly, and I’d been so good, and I thought I’d just experiment and eat one meal with dairy and see what happened. Well, within about 40 minutes of eating two kinds of cheese, I began feeling almost all the symptoms of intolerance, as well as the symptoms of lactose intolerance. The next day, I had the worst panic attack I’ve had in six months. This is consistent with my notes from eliminating dairy a few years ago, when I noticed that it took about 12-48 hours for the panic attacks to hit after having it. I don’t know why, but it has happened that way repeatedly, for years, even during times when I didn’t know I’d eaten dairy. Many times during that trial I’d have attacks that hit out of the blue, I’d look back on what we ate, we’d see no evidence of dairy at all, and then we’d dig deeper and find that, oh yeah, that margarine has “milk solids”, or that soy cheese has “milk proteins”. 

Dairy just needs to go OUT. Completely. Permanently. 

SOY: seems okay.
Doesn’t seem to be an issue in the “light” forms I’m eating it in. Right now I have some small amount of soy in a protein powder I use, and I use soy sauce in cooking. I don’t notice any problems or symptoms of intolerance. I’m still not eating soy meats or other highly processed soy foods, and I likely won’t start for some time. They’ve always made me feel lethargic and nauseous, and I don’t feel like I need to “test” that right now. 

WHEAT: okay in small doses, so far.  
I need to do more testing with wheat. In small doses, like when wheat is an additive in something (a breading, or croutons on a salad), I don’t notice any food intolerance symptoms. When I eat a lot of wheat, I begin to notice symptoms from group #1. I’m still not sure how much of a problem wheat is, I’ll keep working on that. For now I seem to find myself gravitating toward gluten-free items. 

SUGAR: okay in small doses, but hard to only have small doses. 
Sugar in general doesn’t seem to give me any symptoms of intolerance, but it HUGELY contributes to low blood sugar issues, which are very triggering for anxiety. I also notice that if I don’t eat a lot of sugar for a few days and then eat, say, a small pastry or cookie (there are some great gluten-free cookies I was trying), that the cravings for MORE sugar become incredibly intense. I think my body really has the habit of using sugar as a mood stabilizer, so it tends to want a little, and then want a lot more to balance out what the little bit did, and then pretty soon I’m just wanting nothing but sugar. Interrupting the cycle with protein, and then sort of dodging the cravings with fruit, seems to help this a lot. 

LEGUMES: avoiding for now. 
Been working on the other foods, haven’t reintroduced legumes in any way yet. 

CHOCOLATE/CAFFEINE: okay in small doses, but like sugar, hard to only have a small dose.
Those gluten-free brownies were wonderful, and after one small piece, I felt FINE. A few hours later, I had several more small pieces, and I felt anxious and sugar-crashy. Chocolate and sugar seem to be things that I could have in small doses if I could just only have them in small doses. 

CORN: perhaps the surprise problem food!
I wrote about how I wasn’t going to include corn in the elimination trial, because I just never thought I had a problem with it, but I was beginning to suspect I was wrong. Well, now it’s at the top of my list of suspects, after dairy. Last night we went to Greg’s parents’ house for dinner, and without even thinking about it, I devoured two cobs of fresh corn. I was distracted, I was so focused on not eating dairy that I completely forgot about my intention to continue avoiding corn.

I felt okay for awhile, and forgot about my mistake. Later that night, around bedtime, I noticed my joints were killing me again. I got out of bed to use the bathroom, and just walking from my bed to the bathroom door felt like torture. I was amazed, I hadn’t felt this sore in two weeks. It was awful. My first question was, could corn have cause this? I don’t know for sure, but it’s the only new thing I’d eaten. 

 

So what now? 

  • I’m still avoiding beans. I’ll put those back after I have some stability, and a better idea of whether corn is a problem. 
  • I’m avoiding corn as much as possible for awhile, to clear that out again and reintroduce it later. 
  • I’m comfortable with small amounts of soy. 
  • Sometimes I eat a gluten-free sweet treat (without corn syrup), but I’m working on only eating one or two and then stopping for the rest of the day. Sometimes this treat contains chocolate, but again, only in very small amounts. 
  • I’m trying to eat lots of: VEGGIES! FRUITS! 
  • I’m eating small amounts of meat and fish. 
  • I tossed out the scale, and am now working on getting 30 minutes of exercise every day, and am committed to the idea of using exercise to heal or at least mitigate my underlying anxiety disorder. 

I do feel a lot better now than I did when I started. I’m becoming less sensitive to sensations now that I know their probable cause, which has helped me feel more in control of my body. I look at myself more from a data-collection perspective, rather than constantly throwing up my hands and feeling like my body is just melting down all the time. 

I’ll continue with the updates, as more connections are made and more news comes in! Thanks to everyone for their support, both here and in email (and in person!), and all the encouragement I’ve gotten to keep going.