Thursday, May 23, 2019
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Eating "Healthy" Almost Killed Me!
Dr. Michelle Jorgensen, Total Care Dental
Eating "Healthy" Destroyed Me
by-Ema Hegberg on Medium
It was a gloriously golden, warm
September afternoon and I was crumpled up in the fetal position on my bedroom
floor, ugly crying. I had nothing left in me. I was a twenty three years old,
newly married, employed, financially alright, plant-based vegetarian, and for
the six hundredth day in a row, I felt horrible.
I was supposed to be packing for a
leisurely weekend camping trip but I could not muster up a shred of mental,
physical or emotional energy to pack or prepare. The words I used to describe
where I was in frantic texts to my husband were “drained,” “zapped,” “dried
up.”
Somewhere in my exhausted tears
there was frustration. This should not be happening to me. I had been a
vegetarian for a decade; for the past five years, I had been eating a “clean,”
plant-based diet. I took a B complex, I didn’t have anemia, I drank vegan
protein shakes almost daily even though they made me cringe, I drank enough
water, I slept well. I should be ok. Yet here I was, crying at 2pm because I
felt like zombie.
And then a strange thing happened. I
had not had animal protein in ten years and I hadn’t craved it in nearly as
long, but suddenly my body instinctively called out for meat.
A few days later, I ate chicken. A
week or so later, I had sausage. I was a carnivore again. Slowly, I regained
strength.
When I gave myself permission to eat
meat again, I started to look at all the many other foods I had demonized and
just how sick I had become.
Meat had been the first thing I
nixed. After that, I whittled down the list of “safe” foods more and more.
I would allow no processed foods;
everything had to be in a form that my great-grandmother would recognize. I had
read that on a wellness blog somewhere; it was a way to identify if I was
eating food in its purest form. (Never mind that my great-grandmother also
wouldn’t recognize avocados or kombucha.) So no tortilla chips, no crackers, no
mayo, etc. Pretty much everything from the center aisles of the grocery store
was unacceptable. Whole foods only.
I wouldn’t eat granulated sugar,
because sugar “lights up” your brain the same way cocaine does. (As it turns
out, so does sex and laughter.) All sugar had to be “natural:” honey, maple,
coconut.
I severely limited my dairy. Cows
milk was offensive unless it was turned into yoghurt. We are the only animals
that drink another animal’s milk, I read over and over. How barbaric. How
absurd. (Yet somehow yoghurt was ok…) Goat’s milk was better but I was a poor
college student and goat’s milk is expensive. Thankfully, coconut milk was declared
sacred by the wellness community I followed religiously and it could be bought
more cheaply. In terms of alternative milks, soy milk was antiquated; coconut
was in vogue.
Gluten was of course suspect. It
seemed to be like the tobacco of our time; everyone was doing it but silently
it was killing us. So even when the finest sourdough was available to me, I
passed up the chance.
Eggs were questionable. They had so
much fat and cholesterol. Better safe than sorry. Maybe just an organic, free
range egg from time to time.
I’d never picked up a coffee habit,
which was good because coffee could shorten your life too. Green tea was
better. No sugar, no milk.
Vegetable oils were just downright
bad. I’m still not sure why. Too fatty? Too processed? Olive oil was better,
but then I found out it has a low smoke point which means that if you make it
too hot it gives off carcinogens, which equals cancer. So I only ate olive oil
uncooked. But that was ok because I had coconut oil, a gift from the gods.
What
did this leave? What was “safe?” Fruits and vegetables, beans, lentils, nuts,
coconut products, olive oil, oatmeal, buckwheat, lentils, quinoa, yoghurt,
honey, maple syrup.
I can come up with that list very
easily because that is pretty much all I ate for four years. Seldom did I
“cheat.” It wasn’t worth it and I knew it. Eat one of the forbidden foods and I
would kick myself for hours or days afterward. Psychosomatically, I would feel
uglier and fatter after slipping up and eating something made with canola oil,
or a small piece of dark chocolate.
This
is what I ate everyday for four years:
- Breakfast: Oatmeal or “overnight oats” with smidgen of coconut milk and smidgen of honey (maybe), topped with walnuts and a banana.
- Snack One: Apple or banana.
- Lunch: A very large salad of organic spring mix with beans or sprouts, dressed with olive oil only.
- Snack Two: Fruit, raw fruit and nut bar, a spoonful of nut butter, or a homemade smoothie.
- Dinner: Another salad the same as the first, or perhaps quinoa with lots of cooked vegetables.
- Dessert: Another large bowl of oatmeal, nearly identical to the first. Perhaps refined sugar-free banana bread slathered with coconut oil.
And every day, after eating like
this, I felt so righteous. I did yoga almost every night. Each day, I walked
all over my college campus with a twenty pound backpack. I got eight hours of
sleep. Frequently, people commented on my weight and how delightfully “skinny”
I was (five foot seven, 125 pounds). I was doing everything right; I was being
so very good.
About three years into being
stringently a “clean” plant-based eater, I started to have severe chest and
stomach pain. It felt like the food I was eating would get stuck in my
esophagus. I went from doctor to doctor, for medical test after medical test.
No issue could be found. (Thankfully, my dad is a school teacher and I was on
his insurance, which is the only thing that made this possible.) I stumbled
onto some research about b12 deficiency in vegetarians — something no doctor
had warned me about — so I started taking b12. The pains abated.
Then my energy levels plummeted.
I begged my doctors to find an
answer. I asked for more tests and I gave them detailed food diaries. One
doctor asked if I ate peanuts and beans. I told him yes. He said that I was
then, certainly, getting enough protein so the answer must be that I was
depressed. I ignored him and got a new doctor.
I tried a naturopath, who if nothing
else recommend an elimination diet to figure out what food sensitivities I had
(because I must have at least one). After six weeks of an even more limited
menu than I’d previously had — I cut out all dairy, soy, nuts, eggs, gluten and
coconut — I reintroduced coconut first and discovered I had a very bad reaction. Everything else seemed to be fine.
That was the problem: everything was
“fine.”
What I now know: daily, for four
years, I had a deficit of several hundred of calories. This did not cause me to
lose any weight because my body had gone into starvation mode. Functionally, I
had no muscle. The only micro-nutrient I got all of my daily value of was
fiber; everything else I lacked, but specifically I wasn’t getting enough protein.
I got maybe a tenth of the protein I needed, and it was never a complete amino
acid profile. My total cholesterol was, at its lowest, 113mg/dL. There is
research to show that cholesterol as low as mine increases risk for depression,
anxiety, suicide, cancer and heart problems.
Other curious things from this time:
I didn’t sweat anyplace except my armpits, and that I did profusely. I knew
nothing of brow-sweat or boob-sweat, despite working on a farm in the summer. I
also couldn’t tan; I only fried red. My hair grew very slowly and my skin was
breaking out often. Also, my immune system was decimated and I had to pee
constantly. All of these things have resolved since my eating got broader.
I’d found myself in this place,
namely, because of wellness bloggers. I was devoted to several. Their promises
of health equated to enlightenment in my eyes, because I’d never felt fully
well. (In retrospect, I’d been
severely anxious since age five.)
The bloggers — almost entirely white
females — were beautiful, glowing, thin,
confident and they accomplished great things. They published books, the jetted
off to Bali and Spain, the wore amazing clothes and did yoga in the sunshine. I
was a sad, quivering American female teenager who was homeschooled and
friendless. Wellness blogs played upon every insecurity I had.
Recently, several of the wellness
bloggers I followed have started to flirt with intuitive eating. This might
seem like a fine solution to the limited diet I restricted myself to. But at
the time what I ate was truly all I craved. Everything else had been so
demonized that it was no longer appealing to me.
I believe I had an eating disorder,
just not the kind everyone talks about. Mine was called orthorexia, meaning I
was eating “too well.” Food was all I thought about, regardless of whether I
was hungry (but I was usually hungry). I was constantly planning my next meal
so that I could be sure it would be completely safe. When I ate I’d stop just
short of feeling “full” because anything close to that feel scared me. Food was
an obsession that swallowed up my day, and nearly my whole life.
Although I’ve nearly always had
anxiety, my depression, I believe, was largely sparked by my “healthy” diet.
While people praised how saintly an eater I was, my body was begging for more nutrients.
Since I wasn’t giving it enough to work with, it had to shut things down, and I
can’t blame it for thinking positive emotions were a reasonable thing to put on
hold. When my diet was the most stringent, I experienced the worst of my
depressive episodes and suicidal ideation. When I started to eat meat again, my
depression began to fade.
I remember every detail of the first
time I ate a processed food again; I had Late July brand tortilla chips. A very
kind new boyfriend (now husband) accepted my issues with food and patiently
walked me through the stages of my guilt. The same day we had dried organic
pineapple rings that were lightly sweetened with granulated sugar. It was a big
day for me.
Reconditioning myself to be ok with
the foods I’d categorized as “bad” has taken time and there are moments when my
twisted perceptions of eating creep back in. Now I eat just about whatever I
please. My diet is still composed of mostly fruit and vegetables, and I am the
most clear headed I can recall being. For the first time, I have muscle.
What the wellness bloggers portray
is no longer what I’m after. Yes, they look lovely but I’ve no way of telling
if they actually feel present and strong. That’s what I want now, and the only
way I can get there is if I care for my body in a way that it understands.
Deprivation is not its love language. It needs bounty; it needs grace.
Wednesday, May 1, 2019
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