New Religion (Part 1)

Okay, so here it is. I have been putting off writing about this for some time now because I was not sure how things were going to go. It's like anything new, at first you're unsure, but eventually you reach that point where you know this is simply how it's going to be from now on. There have been many points like that in my life; when I decided to marry my husband, when I realized I was six weeks pregnant for the first time, when I knew I wasn't a baptist anymore, even when I finally accepted my diagnosis of Lyme. Now the newest point of no return I've reached has been one that's definitely been a long time coming. And even though it is "just a diet" I feel like it's the culmination of a million tiny things that have been telling me for my entire life this is the right thing to do.

When I was a kid, my grandparents had a farm out in the middle of nowhere in Missouri. Living with them, I ate eggs straight from the chicken house, drank (and swiftly discovered I was allergic to) milk directly from the cow, helped harvest fruits and vegetables from their large garden and tiny orchard, and watched the heads get cut off the turkeys in preparation for Thanksgiving. I took a bath in a bucket outside in the summer, hid in the flooded cellar during storms, had cats, dogs, and hens as pets, got flogged by guineas for chasing their babies, and of course was constantly covered in ticks. So it's really no surprise I've seemed to come almost full circle back to that life, being a vegan raw foodist now with Lyme disease. It almost seems like kismet. It almost seems like I was led by the hand.

All my life I have struggled with improper food choices. My mother took care of my brother and I alone; we were poor and could barely afford peanut butter and jelly, forget about anything nutritious. After moving from my grandparents' I became the average processed-food fed kid, and it played hell with my body even when I was young. A good portion of my childhood was spent vomiting, and that is no exaggeration. I always had "the stomach flu". I was skinny as a rail and my grandmother constantly poked yogurt and vitamins down my throat when I'd visit her because she thought I was malnourished. I had problems with hypoglycemia as early as seven years old. Grandma was diabetic and I can remember her coaxing me to let her check my blood sugar and how much those old-school lancet pens hurt my fingers. But being the kid I was, I paid no attention to my health, constantly in my own make-believe little world. However, I did start policing my sugar intake after one particularly harrowing day of eating nothing but oatmeal creme cakes and marshmallows followed by a night of violent illness. It wasn't the first time I'd made myself sick with food, and it wouldn't be the last.

Even as terrible as my diet was, I was never an overweight child. Perhaps it was genetics, perhaps it was my unintentional almost-bullimia. You can name any food; I've barfed it up. There were so many things that did not agree with my stomach as a child and thank God I'm smart enough to stay away from some of those things now. Food allergies run heavily in my family, but I was never officially tested; I just learned the virtue of avoidance. Even so, just a few months ago I was voraciously addicted to dairy products and chocolate, and their immediate effects went not unnoticed, but unheeded. How many times did my husband say to me as I grabbed a pint of chocolate milk to drink while we shopped: "Are you really sure you want to do that? You know what's gonna happen." How many times did I say on the ride home, "I'm gonna puke."? Too many to count. But old addictions die hard, and it took (and will continue to take) the same cognitive decision-making it takes every time I see a cigarette; a conscious decision that I DON'T WANT THAT. Indifference is definitely a work in progress.

It was really in 2003 that I thought about changing my diet for the first time. I'd just started to really feel sick and was following a diet recommended by a nutritionist to minimize my hypoglycemia. I kept detailed records of everything I ate and what my reactions were. I lost the baby weight when I took a bad antidepressant and started walking home from work every day. A doctor I saw told me I was anorexic, which was ridiculous. When I asked him about heart palpitations he said there was no such thing. From out of all that began my obsession with nutrition, and I experimented with different diets, none of which helped my blood sugar levels. After moving to Kansas and "starting over" so-to-speak, I became concerned with the amount of processed food my kids were eating and wondered aloud if what I had suffered through as a kid had something to do with how I ate. My husband and I talked about cutting out processed food, which back then with my limited knowledge meant no more pre-boxed dinners. I started to actually learn what the words on the nutrition facts box meant and which ones were bad and good. After having my third child and failing to lose the baby weight that time, I sort of resigned myself to the fate all the other women in my family had fallen victim to: Rising weight, thyroid failure, and diabetes. While pregnant I had been good at following a strict diabetic diet, but all this seemed to make no difference to my weight. I decided I was destined to be fat and gave up after two years of that diet. The pounds had continued to pile on until I didn't even recognize myself anymore. And I was definitely sicker than ever, with undiagnosed Lyme and all the problems it was beginning to cause, which overlapped the problems the extra weight was causing as well. I was a regular hefer. And I was sick as a dog.

The more ill I became, the more distrustful of medicines, doctors, and food I found myself. My daughter's severe food allergies and the horrors of reading misleading and often outright blasphemous labels allowed me to see the disgusting underbelly of the food corporations. I became interested in cancer prevention and macrobiotics. I avoided pills or anything that would cause me to lose weight too quickly because I was already having heart and blood sugar problems. I wanted to find one answer that explained everything. One way to eat that was a multi-faceted solution. Something that assauged my distrust of Big Food and Big Pharma and protected my failing immunity. Something that gave me confidence in my own body's ability to protect me from illness - a confidence I'd never had. I slowly realized that I HAVE BEEN SICK MY ENTIRE LIFE. And if I looked around at the world, my story was the same as everyone else's. But the difference was I was going to do something about it.

Before I sound any more like an ad for TinyWaistPills, Inc., I'll sign off and continue more later. Stay tuned for Part 2, The Vegan Vampire...