THE DIET FROM OUTER SPACE

When you're in elementary school, you get picked on for anything - the color of your shoes, the frumpy bowl cut your aunt gave you, being too smart, falling behind, picking your nose, hanging out with the girls, not having a boyfriend, whatever. If I had to go through what I'm going through now, but as an elementary school student, the other kids would think I'm from the planet Zoltar or something. I thought that I would be spared from such criticism, since I'm part of the adult world now (at least nominally), but in reality I've felt just as alienated as a schoolkid.

So here's the story: I went through a long period of being really sickly. I was having a variety of digestive problems, and everything was just getting pinned to my old diagnoses (which are more or less untreatable by western medicine). Then I went to see an allergist for my severe allergies to three seasons of the year, mold, and houses. While they were at it, they assessed me for food allergies, and the results suggested I might be allergic to legumes. Thus began the Unreal Diet that I've been on, in some capacity or another, for the four years since.

My first assignment was to eliminate legumes for a few weeks. I was a vegetarian at the time and resisted, but ultimately gave in and tried it. I felt a good bit better, not eating legumes. Then I tried "The Food Challenge," which sounds like something on a game show, but isn't actually any fun in real life. Best case scenario, you can digest basic foods. Worst case scenario, you have to give up some food forever or risk anaphylaxis if you do choose to keep eating it. Awesome.

For my first Food Challenge, I bought a big bowl of Thai tofu at Whole Foods and went to town. I thought that nothing could hold me back from my devotion to keeping animals uneaten, and was sure that I'd be fine. But before I even finished eating, I noticed my hands started swelling. I got hives. I felt nauseated, and the stomach acid started churning its way into my esophagus. Later on... yeah, let's not get into what happened later on.

Next I went for the vegan plate at my favorite fresh-mexican restaurant. It's just a plate of black beans, pinto beans, salsa, guacamole, and rice. Maybe there is a little lettuce for good measure. I chowed down with my trusty friend Christa at my side. And the hands itched, and swelled, and I got hives. Though I didn't reveal it to her, I felt like I was going to hurl.

In the months that followed I started getting used to the fact that my life was going to be a science experiment for quite some time. While others my age were experimenting with drugs, I experimented with soy lecithin and oil (not allergenic, I learned), lentils, carob, and tamarind. Did you know they're all legumes? Do you have any idea how many foods soy protein is in? Many, many, many foods. Almost anything processed. So if you go to a restaurant and have a sandwich, it is probably in the bread. And quite likely in the meat, if that's what you eat. Yummy soy-sci-fi-meat products.

Allergies notwithstanding, I experimented with staying vegetarian. I tried all alternate sources of protein: whey, cheese, eggs, etc. Not that any of these are as vegetarian as I wanted them to be. It's kind of disheartening to be the vegetarian that has to eat lots of high-fat, animal-derived protein. The whey made me really sick, and the cheese wasn't cutting it. I tried weird alternatives like hemp protein, but never felt like it was working well enough. Eggs made me sick too, so with no reliable source of vegetarian protein I had to stop worrying and learn to love the meat.

I still didn't feel all that great, but I did feel better having removed a whole class of food allergens from my meals. I missed being vegetarian and used dairy to keep me from being a total meatavore. But over time I got sicker. And sicker. And then sicker than I had ever been. My sinus infections were practically constant, my asthma was totally holding me back, and my allergies were uncontrollable.

That's the point at which I got an acupuncturist. The receptionist told me that the person I was getting was really good with nutrition, and had a nutrition degree. I thought "Why would they assign me to such a person? I eat really well! I eat as low meat and low fat as possible, as organic as possible, and much better than most people I know!" I worried that by focusing on nutrition my acupuncturist might miss the real cause of my asthma and allergies. That's one of the many irrational fears I had before starting with Chinese medicine.

My acupuncturist went over my whole medical history, and every factor that might affect my health. She asked a lot of questions about what I ate, and said that my diet was imbalanced and this was probably making me sicker. She gave me a Chinese medicine guide to buying food, with general rules like "organic is better than not." Duh. Other rules seemed to make less sense. Like, "No added yeast. Fermented foods in moderation." In addition, she thought that I should try eliminating wheat and/or dairy from my diet, given my extreme digestive problems.

I was skeptical at first. I LIVED on wheat and milk. How could it be making me sick? Wouldn't I notice if it was making me sick? Still, I gave it a try. Another round of experiments began. Wheat was no thang; it didn't seem to matter whether I ate it or not. Dairy was another matter, though. I gave it up, and a miracle occurred. The miracle of solid poop.

In the year or so since then, I've continued to experiment. I tried eating dairy, despite the obvious health benefits of not eating it. I tried goat's milk and hyper-fermented yogurt. All of these things made me incredibly ill, and I've realized that this is my major allergy/intolerance. I tried adding legumes back in after cutting out dairy, but so far it hasn't worked. And now, I'm on the grandest experiment of all.

I've gone on a complete natural foods/Chinese medicine/probiotic diet. I don't eat anything that people weren't meant to eat and digest. I try to make my meals and days as perfectly balanced as possible. My vegetable intake has probably quadrupled. I don't eat any processed foods, as almost all of them have something I'm not supposed to eat in it (often an allergen, sometimes just nasty food chemicals). I don't eat any refined sugar (except for occasional slip-ups), and generally don't even eat fruit (it has a ton of sugar, btw). I've accepted that lean, meat-derived protein is a really good force in my diet, and for my health. Hell, I eat bacon (all-natural bacon), and I have still managed to lose a lot of weight. My digestive system works, despite eating things that I equated with devil worship* when I was vegetarian.

Everyone had been very encouraging of my hypo-allergenic diets. I was surprised at how often my friends would make things dairy and legume free so that I could eat them. The full natural foods diet, however, has not been so easily accepted. A lot of people think it is "pretty crazy." I am often asked "How long are you going to have to do it?" and sometimes it seems like people doubt my ability to do it at all. The answer is that I'm going to do it as long as it takes. I'm going to give my body as much a a rest as possible, after years of feeding it nasty allergens. I feel pretty great on the diet, and so I'm OK with the diet so long as my lungs, sinuses, and digestion continue to improve.

I realize the diet is pretty extreme. It took me about a year to come to terms with doing it, and lots of preparation and planning so that I actually could stick to it. This is actually about my fourth major attempt, and the first time I've made it a full month without totally crashing and burning. But isn't it crazy to think that this is the "extreme" diet, and all of the unhealthy stuff is the "normal" diet? That we are totally socialized to believe that whatever is at the grocery store is what's best for us, or at least "fine?" That WonderBread is, in fact, bread?

One of the most common questions I get is "What if you can't go back on the normal diet?" and relatedly "What if this makes you hyper-reactive to 'regular' foods?" In response, I'd have to ask, "Do you really think it's a health *liability* to eat too well? Should I not eat the foods that are best for me, and allow my body to heal, just because I might not be able to digest a bunch of additives again someday?"

Yeah, it is NEVER, ever, a liability to eat the foods that are best for you. Eating more vegetables will never make you sicker (unless you're allergic to the particular vegetables). Cutting out additives, excess fat, refined foods, and crappy carbs cannot be bad for you. It may take some readjustment for your body to learn how to run on crappy fuel again, but that's no reason not to try eating real food for awhile. Most people who go on my kind of diet find that they can eat everything in moderation again. Some don't go all the way back to a "normal" diet because after going on the all-natural-foods diet the effects of unnatural food on the body become really clear. For example, this weekend I slipped up and ate some super-processed cookies with tons of sugar in them. I meant to eat just one but in reality I ate... eight. Yeah, you can't just do that after totally detoxing from refined sugar. It actually made me feel sick to my stomach, and I felt crappier the day after too. These foods have similar effects on people who are used to eating them, it's just hard to discern the effects when the body has already adapted to eating loads of crap.

I'm not intending to live on such a restricted diet forever. The goal of the diet is actually be able to eat MORE things. I'm hoping that once I get over the damage I did to my body by eating dairy for 26 years (despite the severe allergy), that i can eat legumes again. Isn't that worth a shot? It seems that I'm already regaining tolerance to some random foods I am allergic to, and my tolerance to ye olde moldy houses is increasing too. While my diet is currently pretty inflexible, I look forward to a more flexible future, one where I'm not held back so much by my asthma and allergies.

It has been hard at times, socially, with the diet. I feel bad about having to direct my friends to one of the few restaurants on my "list" and having to send around an excel spreadsheet with all of my food allergies listed. It is incredibly hard to explain to new people, who think you're either crazy or must be really, really sickly to even consider such a diet. Though the latter is true, I don't always like to admit that the first time I meet someone.

Going on the all-natural diet makes visible a lot of our underlying assumptions about food and culture, and that's not always an easy process. You definitely do feel like the 2nd grader who doesn't know how to tie her shoes, and is thus thought to be from the planet Zoltar, but there's a lot to be learned from this position. The more I think about it, the more I see us as a culture of the feast, where food and alcohol factor prominently into social interactions, and the littlest nonconformity is suspect. Refraining from alcohol at one particular meal, or not being able to go to one restaurant or skipping the birthday cake can all be shocking deviations from normal social behavior. Perhaps most importantly, I've learned that we consider a real food diet to be the Diet from Outer Space, and think that the space-age, corporate-sponsored high-tech food science diet is real, and even healthy.


*Actually, I think eating meat is worse than devil worshiping. And from an environmental perspective, I'll never be happy with the fact that I have to eat meat, which requires more energy to produce than any other food and is worse for the planet than driving.