Whole30 Chicken and Zucchini with Green Chile Sauce

For foods that are, likely, whole30 compliant, I'm pretty much just throwing things together, for the most part. Every once in a while I might have a 365 days of pinterest recipe, though.

For right now, though, so I can remember what works, here is the first one.

Whole30 diet

If you haven't heard of this diet, it's kind of like a modified Paleo, with the theory - as I understand it - to take 30 days to get into a different headspace about food, while eating a bit healthier.

Basically, no grains, no dairy, no sweeteners, no sulfites/msg stuff, and almost no legumes. Meals are based around a meat or egg protein with the rest made up of lots of veggies, a little fruit/nuts/seeds/coconut/avocado.

But without the subs like paleo pancakes and breads, because again, this is supposed to be a mindset thing.

I don't really know how this works for other people, but this is pretty much what I have to eat all the time anyway, when I don't want to react, so I'm trying it for this month to get back to my good diet, and also have some folks who are, for once, eating kind of like I do. :-) Although I suspect I'll have more fats than some. :-)

It's actually helped already, because when I'm tempted to eat things I know I react to, I've been able to tell myself, 'just for the next 30 days, at least.'

I'm looking forward to the company, for now.

Thanksgiving food Ideas when you can't eat anything

The very first Thanksgiving I had after my allergies decided to go insane was pretty awful. I was down to less than ten foods, trying to figure out what to eat, and really came up with nothing all that palatable.

Although admittedly, the next Thanksgiving was more emotionally upsetting, what with being exposed to one of my allergens by my ex (just a whiff), to help prove to me that it was all psychosomatic. Yeah, that one didn't work too well, just made me sick the entire holiday, sigh.

But, anyway, back to foods. There are some AMAZING recipes for Thanksgiving foods you can make with substitutions. Awesome ones. If they help you, awesome. And I mean that - I'm all about the food porn here. I love seeing other people enjoy food, even if it's not something I'm likely to try myself (see the similarity here? Food porn - it truly is).

But if you are like I was, you may have so few foods that you just don't even know where to start. It's overwhelming. So, for those like me, here's some things that might help a little bit for Thanksgiving foods when you have very little you can have. I don't know if these will help anyone, but I hope that they may be of use for some.

What I eat

I am trying to put this up periodically, in large part as a reminder to myself, for when I'm feeling down about my diet, or to remind me how far I've come. Because folks with MCAD so often have very, very limited diets that I am doing REALLY well, and I want to hold on to that for the days when I'm feeling down...like right now when I need to lose a bit of weight and have to diet, ouch.

So, reminder to self!
Two weeks after going gluten free, I was reacting to so much that my diet of 'what I can eat without reacting' dropped down to:
Bison meat, carrots, sweet potatoes, quinoa, avocado, and salt.

Within a few months, I tried and discarded a few more items and was able to add amaranth, too. I don't think it was really any improvement, considering how little I liked the texture of amaranth.

And what I can eat now (without an unpleasant reaction):

Gluten free is definitely not always gluten free

New study just came out, and it's saying what a lot of celiacs have been saying for years: gluten free products are not always as gluten free as they claim.

In the study, out of 158 products labeled gluten free, 5% of those with the gluten free label with not gluten free. 4% of the products labeled as certified gluten free were not gluten free, and these are the ones that are supposed to certify as having half the allowed gluten contamination as the regular gluten free label.

https://www.glutenfreewatchdog.org/blog/Five-Percent-of-Tested-Foods-Making-Gluten-Free-Claims-are-not-Gluten-Free-Study-Finds/41

Personally, I think this is the canary in the coal mine of contamination.  Gluten currently is one of the only allergens to have actual ppm contamination standards on the books. The other allergens do not.  You would expect that having to meet actual standards would increase compliance, to avoid prosecution if nothing else.

So if gluten free foods are only gluten free about 95% of the time, what's the level of 'free' for other allergens that list themselves as soy free, egg free, and so on?

Obviously, it's something we have to figure out for ourselves. But for those of us with serious allergies, or who have very serious reactions to allergens, I think this may be a factor to consider for our food. Yet another potential reason to start looking at whole foods rather than processed foods when making dietary choices.

What we can eat

I was reminded recently that there are lots of lists of what allergic folks can't eat, but much fewer lists of what we CAN eat. Our own list of 'can't eat' is pretty extensive, for example.

My son is gluten free and dairy free and can only seem to tolerate limited quantities of eggs, GF grains, dyes and preservatives, non-organic fruits and veggies, and palm oil.

My daughter is gluten free, dairy free, soy free, egg free, onion and garlic free, and grain fee. She can only seem to tolerate fruit, dyes, and preservatives in limited amounts, and some fruits are no good at all.

Myself, I'm gluten free, dairy free, soy free, egg free, grain free, sugarcane free, coffee free, chicken free, and sulfite and high-in-sulfur-foods free. I have to limit my consumption of legumes, potatoes, and sweeteners, as well.

But what CAN we eat? Well, in the spirit of looking at the positive, here's a few foods on a 'can eat' list.

I can eat this, for example. Probably.

Things to consider on an elimination diet

There's a lot of sites out there which discuss how to do an elimination diet, from medical sites to forums to personal blogs. There's lots of different ideas on what to avoid, how to avoid it, and in what order you should try to eliminate foods.

I'm not going to talk about any of that. In my family, we dropped the 8 most common allergens and cooked from scratch for a while, and changed that on subsequent elimination diets, based on what we learned.

And that's what I'm going to talk about right now: what we learned. Because even if you can find a doctor who is willing to help you with an elimination diet, many times they seem to be, to put it bluntly, pretty ignorant about the REALITY of an elimination diet. Most doctors I've met don't seem to have the barest clue about what your every day experience is going to be like, or what the food industry has been adding to your food.

I hope that knowing a bit more about the process, from someone who has been in the trenches, so to speak, might be of use for anyone who is going through the process.

Cupcake Grief

I came across this today, an old post that never went up, but which really brought the moment back. This was the day before my daughter's 14th birthday last year.

Cupcake Grief

Optimism

I'm a fan of optimism, although I often think it's not a trait I possess in abundance. I'm more of a natural pessimist. Or maybe it's simply that I have a different flavor of optimism. I'm only optimistic if it can kick me in the pants. So, I'm pessimistic about my optimism.

Case in point: eating soup today.

Allergen Free Hygiene

Finding a way to stay clean, fresh, and not-too-stinky is somewhat difficult when you react to common ingredients in our hygiene supplies.  So, this is what I do:

How to succeed in your diet

When our reactions are life-threatening, it's very motivating to stay on the diet. But what about reactions that aren't life threatening? The ones where you feel like crap, but only for a day or two. Or those reactions that build up over a week or two, where your RA gets worse, your FM gets worse, you get more tired and feel terrible until you finally go back to eating like your should.

In the beginning, those can be much harder to stick to, especially when we're tossed in the deep end of allergen-free cooking and it's drowning us. We have to rely on our support and our own will, and sometimes that's just barely enough. 

Or it isn't enough. I still drown periodically, eating something I shouldn't, getting sick, and smacking myself in the head that I let myself be such an idiot. But, when I'm completely on track, here's some of the things that have helped me stay on track.