I sat down with one of those WebMD diet calculation programs and ran what Jane and I eat, daily. It throws a snit fit if you don’t admit to a snack: wrong. We don’t. Period. So it made me say we have a fruit snack when we, in fact, have nada, zip, NOTHING. We have one boiled egg at breakfast, a cup of granola with low carb, lowfat, or synthetic milk at noon, I may or may not have one skinny no-sugar latte, depending on whether I’m skating or gardening, Jane has only water, and we have typically, half a head of cabbage, 3 carrots and a single 2″ potato for supper. Sometimes Jane has a cocktail. Sometimes I have wine, say 2-3x a week. Our caloric intake is, are you ready? About 800-1000 depending on the alcohol. The calorie-burning that the same program figures for our specific activities (skating and gardening) is 1900. We can hold our weight steady at our activity level with an 800 calorie intake. No snacks, no desserts. We go off our diet now and again (about once a week) and have (gasp) a hamburger and fries or we split an order of nachos, or we have a french dip with side salad. It makes no difference in our weight, but we will gain a pound if we eat out 2 days running, and in a week we can get it back off under the regimen given above. We split a pizza, oh, once every 3-4 months. We never have hotcakes, no syrup, no desserts, ever! no snacks, no chips, nothing but the damn boiled eggs. We don’t eat out any more. And it makes no difference. We DO not gain weight on this diet, but we do not lose appreciably. Name me reasonable people who can maintain on an 800 calorie diet while skating and working power equipment, shoveling, hand-excavating, and moving 14 yards of dirt. We can. Damn! it’s disheartening. It seems to defy the laws of physics. Or at least physiology. But the fact is—we’ll faint of exhaustion, drenched in sweat, before we start burning fat. Whatever ignites it, we haven’t got.
I’ll be interested to see if it makes ANY difference whatsoever that the endocrinologist has given me one more pill a week.
And if it should, Jane will be in to see him like a shot.
personally I think betyeager is absolutely right. little and often, and the very best whole, fresh, organic food you can find. organic plants and animals are fed on real food themselves, whereas non-organic mostly comes out of a baseline made from the petrochemical industry. real food!
I don’t like chicken much these days either … my sympathies there!
I’m also with betyeager. Ultimately your bodies have to get along with the nutrition they’re getting — so let wholesome, healthy, simple food (such as she describes) be your friend, and your bodies’ friend. Pay body-attention (not head-attention) to what your cells tell you after you eat this food, and after a week or two (once your body has gotten over the surprise, and starts to expect a few vitamins and a trace of healthy oils as a steady diet) you’ll notice that you just don’t want the other stuff any more. This allows you to start discovering *health*, and health means your body will cooperate in finding your own healthy weight.
Anecdote: about ten years ago, my husband discovered he had both gluten sensitivity, and high cholesterol. (Also, we were both noticeably overweight.) So we cut out all products with any gluten, and went on a diet that wound up being mostly salmon, fruits and veggies, and whole non-gluten grains. (Rice rather than corn, btw — brown rice has a much higher nutritional value; corn, while tasty, is mostly starch.) No dairy products (though I now eat cheese again); our needed traces of fat came from fish and olive oil. The result: I lost 40 pounds (all I needed to lose) **without even trying** — because my body recovered its sense of its own health, and I learned to be sensitive to eating what I *really wanted to eat*, and not eating what, and when, I didn’t. Bodies really want what’s healthy for them!
Re healthy energy-providing snacks, I’d add nuts — particularly almonds — to betyeager’s recipe (if you’re not sensitive to them, of course). Almond oil in particular is one of the healthy oils), and five or six almonds, as a snack when you need some energy to go on, can go a long way. Also, if you eat *any* red meat, take an extra fish oil capsule for the Omega-3 fatty acids (about 10 calories each). (Costco offers its own Kirkland brand, very very cheap.)
–And, at the risk of sounding eetee (yes, I recently reread Cyteen), I’ll add one major item to betyeager’s approach: **internal body image.** In my life (for various reasons) I’ve developed two polar-opposite body-images: 1) chubby and clunky (from about third grade on, and off and on in my adult life), and 2) (thanks to getting seriously into dance in my 20’s and early 30’s), body-aware, light, and physically competent. Over years of swinging back and forth, I learned that **what my body wants me to eat depends on the internal body-image I’m patterning.** Change that body-image — really really deeply — and hold to it, no matter what your current weight. That, plus betyeager’s approach to food in general, and being really sensitive to what your cells are actually craving at any given moment — is a recipe for being able to return to your ideal weight, and hover around it for the rest of your life. IMHO.
And first, as others have mentioned — you and your bodies’ cells need to start talking to each other again!
I’m rooting for you both.
To add to foods you can eat? cucumbers-radish-parsnips-kohlrabi-jerusalem artichokes-buckwheat noodles-turnips
jerusalem artichokes are a good potato substitute….. consistency, not flavor, roasted on the grill with yellow turnips, mashed with a touch of olive oil and a dusting of parmigiano-reggiano……radishes, daikon in particular, can add a zip that substitutes for onion. I personally am very fond of sliced radish on my hamburgs. When I still worked, my supervisor and I developed a bunch of recipes for a client who was sensitive to many of the things you mention AND was diabetic and gluten intolerant. I will try to get hold of some of the recipes and look them over. 😀
P.S. In addition to a scale and measuring equipment I use a book of food counts that counts calories,carbs, protein, cholesterol, sodium, fat and fiber. My current favorite is The Complete Book of Food Counts by Corinne T. Netzer. Most food packages have breakdowns, but she also does fast foods, such as mcdonald’s, starbucks, dunkin’ donuts……those are the eye openers! ;-D
That is a challenging set of limitations! A crock pot is a busy cook’s friend, so probably you know about these already: pork and apples, pot roast, corned beef and cabbage, chili (tomatoless, why not?). Do you like turkey? I think it tastes pretty much like chicken, but a friend who eats chicken and absolutely not turkey says they are completely different. How about soup? Beef vegetable, you could make some of the broth into something like onionless French onion soup and still melt the cheese on top, also borscht, pea soup, lentil soup, creamy style chowder. When you say beans, do you mean green ones, they go with just about anything hot or cold – or the navy-black-northern kind, which all make great soup and are a good kind of starch to include? (check salt of course if you buy broth for soup) Meat loaf, meat balls, add whatever spices you like. Make shishkebabs out of beef or pork and beets, zucchini if you like it. Sausages like bratwurst and Italian sausage? Hash with no potatoes, add a cooked egg and something spicy on top. Quiches and frittatas, put anything you want into them. Sauce needn’t be white cheese, I bet you could make a very nice brown sauce starting with what might be essentially a light gravy made from broth or maybe chopped mushrooms (if you like them of course) cooked in wine and adding spices. Hollandaise sauce goes on all kinds of things, leave the mix at the store and make your own, very easy and much tastier. For cold sides…cole slaw made with mayo and dillweed, can you eat sweet potatoes? They make very good potato salad with mayo. And an apple with a little peanut butter is a great snack.
One of my favorite recipe websites, allrecipes.com, has an Advanced Search that lets you specify ingredients you want or don’t want in your recipe. Best wishes!
I do a mean crock pot: my spiced pulled pork is quite good; and I do a mean tomatoless chili, well, sort of tomatoless, relying on pesto. And a middle-eastern beef with cinnamon and allspice that is good. I do a good corned beef and cabbage (with a nutmeg edge). Can’t stand turkey—far worse to me than chicken: it tastes really bad, which I am convinced is individual chemistry, which I will not describe, lest I put some undeserving person off turkey.
Thank you very much for that link, http://www.allrecipes.com —I’ll check that out!
Well, I can reassure you that, while starving ourselves, we are ALWAYS back-to-nature in WHAT we eat. Sure, we’ll do the restaurant thing now and again, but when I cook, I go to the counter with the actual vegetables, and bring home things that have or had leaves, roots, and stems; not always the organic stuff with the veggies: I’m more likely to go that route with meat and eggs, on ethical grounds, when I can afford it. I don’t do packaged foods as a rule. We eat only whole grains, bread that fights back, if we have bread; and our one exception is pre-processed muffin mix, because it uses some low-carb flours I don’t have access to. I’ve been thinking about baking bread again—and one of my loaves, while good, can be used as a siege weapon.
Sweets: once every couple of months we split a 4×4″ raspberry bar made by a local bakery; and we have a muffin-top tin that lets us bake the occasional batch of low-carb muffins, that is 90 calories per muffin top: there are 3 apiece.
Other than that we never sweeten anything, don’t add much salt at all, use only virgin olive oil for cooking, and butter for bread occasionally; generally if we have cheese, it comes from a local (WA) source, nonprocessed, ditto eggs. Milk is usually low-carb.
I’ve subbed turnips for potatoes. I can drink vinegar straight; Jane can’t tolerate the acidity, but she uses this Salad Spritzer thing that’s like Pam for salads that I can’t stand, so we’re even.
As for exercise, figure skating will do that for you: pick up speed and you’ll sweat, no question; practice a string of 3-turns and you’ll sweat. It’s why most skaters start shedding clothes on the side of the rink as the session progresses. You can also get a good sweat going hauling dirt and excavating: I know it’s not gym-exercise, which is special and targeted, but we are far from sedentary, and this front yard has to be attended before summer. Plus hanging onto a Mantis when it goes into startled-skunk mode (starts bouncing a foot off the ground) takes a little bit!
Plus when we get the pieces, we’ll be building a 12 foot bridge and a 6 footer, sanding, painting, and positioning. That’s going to be a job—screwed, not nailed, primed, and painted.
Oh, there’s no end of exercise out there. Remember that dumptruck load of dirt I moved? I’m going to have to turn it, for composting action.
On the other hand, the good news: I feel LOTS better today. Yesterday, pre-chicken dinner, I was really wheezing and on the edge of an emotional tizzy, not to mention hurting in every joint I own. Today I’m only up half a pound and feeling whole lots better. So I think you guys are right. Jane is now talking about going to the endocrinologist for HER appointment, and that will be a good thing. If we can both get out metabolisms in line, it will be a good thing.
A nutritional imbalance may be aggravating the muscle cramps that Jane is getting.
Also Have you tried celleriac or parsly root in your stews and soups?
Chinese done at home gets away from the heavy sugar and salt that is so prevalent in most American Chinese restaurants. I adore my wok. When I was in grad school I quickly learned that it didn’t take much longer to chop the meat for several chinese-style meals as to do it for one. Meat was frozen on a tray, and bagged. When I got home the handful of meat thawed in the time that it took me to prep the veges. I now have an electric rice cooker which makes life much easier – and can be used for steaming stuff as well as cooking rice. I have used it for keeping soup on a low simmer too.
I’ve lusted after one of those rice cookers, but our kitchen is so tiny I think Jane (who cleans it) would shoot me if I put one more item into our little storage or onto our counters.
Poking my head out of lurkerdom (I promise I’m not a spammer, I just was shy about registering)–I think that the others are right; it sounds like your body is unhappy with the amount of calories it’s getting, and is shutting down your exercise efforts. You’re getting protein from your eggs and the cheese that you eat, but I still think you could probably use a little more, and another side of good fats, as well.
How about a shepherd’s pie, with lean ground beef? I saw that you like peas, and cooked carrots; you can modify any recipe to leave out tomatoes, and just spice the beef as you like it. If you like mushrooms, those can certainly go in as well. And you like cooked cauliflower, which can be mashed excellently in place of potatoes for the topping. If you’d like a little cheese and Jane would rather not, you can always add that in on your plate, and broil it for a minute or so.
Allrecipes.com is a great resource, as other people pointed out. I like cookinglight.com, although you have to be careful with their recipe search–I think it defaults to showing you recipes from *all* of their affiliates, so you have to go in there and make sure that you check the box for just Cooking Light recipes, or you’ll get some delicious-looking (but totally unhealthy) stuff from, say, Southern Living clogging up the results. Cooking Light also has quick fix/few ingredient meals, which can be handy, and I think you can search for specific ingredients and exclude others.
Good luck! 🙂
Shepherd’s pie sounds good. Oddly enough the one spicing I’ve never mastered is British. I think it’s probably something simple, like getting a can of Bisto—but salt and pepper doesn’t do it. If one of our British (or other!) readers has a good recipe for the spicing of shepherd’s pie the way the do it in the pubs, I’m all ears!
worcester sauce is the traditional thing for shepherds pie, but it is one of those personal recipes like italians and theor pasta sauces – everybody has their own recipe. it can be made with lamb, nit beef for instace. my mother couldn’t tolerate onions, so her version was onionless, but perfectly tasty. but no bisto, please, that’s disgusting!
oops, sorry about all the awful typos! too much hurry ….
Shepherd’s pie is also traditionally lamb, at least it is when you come from the Down Under. Have you considered buffalo? Very lean and supposed to be a lot better for you.
😆 Worcestershire sauce! Bingo! That’s the taste I hadn’t identified. I was trying to pick it out in pieces, the tamarind paste, the whole bit. Experimentation might have gotten there, but meanwhile I’d have invented Worcestershire sauce—a century or so too late!
Thank you, purplejulian. I am going to have to try that, now!
I’ve got to agree with everyone here. Other vegetables I love are parsnips and beets (not just red ones, yellow ones as well). I cook chopped carrots and parsnips together and then mash with butter. Brussell sprouts are a favourite; always buy fresh, cook in a little water until the desired tenderness, and then salt and pepper. Cook enough for 2 meals, halve the leftovers, and marinate. They make a nice salad. I absolutely love taboulli, made from scratch, but the tomatoes and onions may do you in. I make it with lots of lemon and EVOO (Extra Virgin Olive Oil). Some people on weight watchers use mashed cauliflower instead of potatoes but as much as I like cauliflower it doesn’t fool me into thinking it’s mashed potato. I love broccolini, a natural cross between broccoli and kai-lan, Chinese broccoli. It’s very tender and could double for asparagus. Sugar snap peas, just nibble on them.
Roasted veggies, really yummy. Carrots, parsnips, sweet potato rounds, all spritzed with oil. Onions as well but not for you. Poor you.
I find rice really easy, even without a rice cooker. I buy RiceSelect Texmati, American basmati, and I find it very good. They also have what they call a “Royal Blend” which consists of Texmati brown rice, red rice, barley and rye berries. There’s another mix with red beans in it. These take as long to cook as brown rice but are really yummy.
The farmer’s markets must be starting up your way. Visit them and get recipes and ideas from the vendors.
As an afterthought, try barley or quinoa or couscous instead of rice.
maybe no quinoa if problems with south american plants????
None with quinoa: it’s the lily family that bothers us most; and the nightshades. That’s onion, garlic (to a lesser extent or we’d be hosed) leeks, shallots, chives, scallions, you name it. I used to be so bad I couldn’t even have catsup because of the onion content. Nightshades is potatoes and tomatoes, well, and of course the deadly nightshade. 😉 Those we can tolerate in moderation.
I’m doing the same things you are doing, and getting the same frustrating results. I have discovered that exercise is pretty much the key, for me, and I have to do something every day. I joined weight watchers and health club, but it seems my barn chores and riding give me a healthy amount of exercise – it’s summer and I sweat a lot. Also, when watching movies at home I have a recumbant bike that has a timer so I work the back and enjoy a movie. I refuse to give up my wine:>
Oops, that is, I work the BIKE, not the back. throws up an “i”….
Wishing you the best of luck. Thyroid issues are such a pain to deal with, especially the medication balancing ordeal.
Humans are (nearly?) the only mammals that are lactose (dairy) tolerant as adults, a few individuals and populations excepted. (Think about why lactose tolerance would be a problem.) This means we’ve been eating dairy for an evolutionary time period.
The term “organic” is just crazy-making to me. “No, I’ll have the inorganic silver-platinum stuff.” I think the base point is the evolutionary one: has you body evolved with the stuff so it can deal with it well? Corn syrup, no–your body may under-“judge” the actual number of calories consumed. OTOH, a few foods, it may over-“judge,” Splenda, for example, which is wrong-handed sugar you body can sense but not metabolize.
So, I don’t think the issue is organic or natural, but is it something you body is going to correctly judge the calories of. Or even better for dieting, it is something your body will over estimate the calories of? To be sure, processed food uses a lot of stuff we didn’t evolve with, thus the problems. But unprocessed foods your ancestors didn’t evolve with can also be a problem. For example, pellagra. Processing corn cures pellagra; unprocessed corn causes pellagra.
The main thing I worry about in organic v (in)organic?—is humane treatment of food-source animals. Chicken/egg factories where the poor bird never sees anything but a food tray and is done in after 93 precise days of service is more than a bit of a turnoff, ditto feed lot beef. [I think we’d all be better off if food animals like deer and bison just ranged free without fences and we ate less of them, but that ain’t gonna happen. But it is why, though I don’t hunt or fish, I cheer on those who do, and I’m in favor of bison ranches: fewer feedlots in the world, by that number of people.]
Use of pesticides that may be residual or hormone treatments I don’t want to ingest are another reason that I’ll occasionally go for organic if it looks fresh.
But I’m not totally fussy. I just grew up spending my weekends on a working farm and have an appreciation what actual allowed-to-finish growing veggies can taste like!
{Buy some carrots that still have their tops, from the organic section, and taste those versus the poor battered things they sell in plastic wrap, or worse, the poor skinned ‘baby carrots’ that they sell as a luxury item.} 😉
carrots bought with the earth still on them taste so much better! ditto spuds, but you don’t eat those ..
tests done here show that organic foodstuffs have all the vitamins and minerals they should do, but plants grown using artificial fertiliser etc tend not to as all the natural values of the land they are grown on have been used up. crops are grown again and again on land that has had no resting time to rebuild it’s reserves, and nothing organic put back into it. so it’s not all about pesticides, although I am not keen on those – especially as I often get a noseful when I am walking when the tractors are spraying at this time of year. but then I am lucky enough to have an organic farm shop 2 miles down the road. wonderful produce i season, not expensive, and they have their own home raised beef, pork and lamb, plus game in the winter.
You can get a nasty shock working out a balanced diet based on the average organic ingredient if all you’re eating is factory farmed stuff.
Industrial agriculture is unhealthy full stop. It’s not good for the environment, it’s not good for the soil, it’s not good for the people who eat the stuff, it’s not good for local economies as family farms need to step up or go under which gives them less maneuvering room.
Humans are the only animals that intentionally consume dairy – we know cats will drink milk, mine loves cream and it doesn’t hurt him. So. Do we KNOW that humans are the only animals that process lactose as adults. I think we don’t really – my parrots also love dairy products like cheese and homemade ice cream.
So you can say that humans and their associated species are the only ones who consume these things, I suspect that lactose is no different than any other sugar molecule in being tolerated here and there.
Also, people who cannot tolerate pasteurized dairy foods can often tolerate raw milk or cheese without any trouble at all. All we’ve looked at has been populations in developed nations where the milk has had something unnatural done to it before being consumed – if anyone has figures on raw dairy tolerance I’d be interested…
Dunno on the raw dairy; I drank it when I was a kid *and* carried the pail up from gran’s barn—but we knew those cows as family, and we didn’t worry about TB or brucellosis or other such things. There are things you can catch from a sick cow that I really wouldn’t want. So I stick to pasturized, which is just basically brief exposure to high heat—cooking, in other words.
Of course acidophilus helps with lactose-generated upset; Lactaid (I think it’s probably acidophilus) helps.
My poor cat is lactose-intolerant, and can drink a spoonful of Almond Breeze milk substitute with no issues, but one spoonful of the real thing will come right back up. She has allergies too, including corn, and loves my cooking, which doesn’t tend to make her sick—I just have to be very sure about corn content.
My former cat was also allergic to corn. Once I figured that out I removed any and all grain products from his diet with great result. Frankly, I have never seen a cat go out and eat a corn cob or a wheat ear, what little carb they would get would be rodenty stomach contents…
Yes, sanitary considerations are paramount with milk, but with modern understanding of hygiene and technology it’s certainly possible to bottle and distribute at least in a reasonable radius. In my state though, in order to legally consume raw milk it must be “your cow” so we have Cow Shares! I may even get one, I want to know if all the things these folks say about raw milk are true.
I get digestive upset from lactose myself, which is why I use heavy cream instead 😉 My spouse makes ice cream that is all… oh wait, I’ve said that.
Almond flour is a great base for an absolutely awesome gluten free cookie that makes regular cookie eatin’ folks sit up and beg… I am positively disposed to the notion of almond milk, whereas soy milk will be flung away as violently as possible.
Oh, we do eat potatoes. We limp around the day after, but we do eat them now and again full well knowing what we’re going to get. We love them too much! Unfortunately onions and their ilk have a major effect: not only sore, but unable to bend fingers, swelling of hands and feet, and 5-10 pounds worth of water-weight.
I get the sore and unable to bend fingers thingy, and I don’t eat onions; I should really try to sort out which foods might be causing it.
pleased to be able to help on the worcestershire! 🙂
I hate to tell you, but suspect the nightshades.
Sorry, coming late to a long conversation, but I thought I’d chip in a thought… I don’t know if part of your problem with chicken may be that most supermarket chicken just isn’t that fresh. It seems even worse here in the US than in the UK. I have bought chicken from a reasonably good supermarket (Trader Joe’s), taken it straight home and cooked it, and it has been stale. How bad the situation is was really brought home to me when I bought some really good fresh chicken from the local farmers market. I know farmers markets can be expensive, but I’d rather have less of something delicious than a whole lot of something disgusting… You also have the benefit of knowing you are buying a humanely raised piece of meat direct from the producer with the minimum number of food miles and dubious links in the supply chain involved (dismount hobbyhorse 🙂 ). Personally, I have found that the potential expensive of the farmers market is outweighed by the fact that when food (e.g. meat ) tastes really good a little goes a long way, the produce is so fresh it keeps really well so is less likely to be wasted and, if you are prepared to eat mainly what is in peak season, the prices aren’t always too bad. If you are lucky you also get exposed to a great selection of weird and wonderful fruits and veggies (and their equally weird and wonderful growers)…
I know what you mean: chicken kept too long, while not spoiled, is not Nice. But alas, I have had chicken straight from the chicken yard to the table, and the taste is still there for me…
Even now that you have already been swamped with lots of advice, I’ll add my voice: Please do not go on starving yourselves! That cannot be good for you – and I wonder if your problems with tolerating so many foodstuffs doesn’t at least partly come from lopsided diets for so long?
Regarding the allergies, I have had an immense bettering of symptoms with bioresonance therapy. I know that it tends to sound very bogus for scientific-minded people, but if food restrictions due to allergic reactions are that many and hard on you, if you can afford trying the bioresonance… why not?
And another tidbit of info that I haven’t found yet in here: The body tends to settle down and get used to a new weight after a while – about three months is what I have in memory. So if you are dieting and are not in starvation mode, you’ll typically lose weight quickly for a while, and then it sort of levels out (body trying to stop the dangerous weight loss). That is when you should be carefully and slowly getting back to normal calorie intake for weight-sustain. Keep your weight level for about three months with a normal, healthy calorie intake before you try for another weight reduction. And once you are in starvation, that will not work – that’s why it is important to get back to normal slowly once your body starts to get into the energy-saving mode.
Most dieting attempts misfire because of the level-out of weight after a while and frustration that springs from trying harder and harder to get more weight loss with less calorie intake. And the safeguards that evolution put in will not allow that to work… ultimately resulting in a “diet-break” high-calorie something which will add weight at once – the refill procedure of depleted stores that was mentioned already – and that will typically lead to more frustration and an even stricter diet, until it is all called off due to frustration overload. So… whatever you do and eat (as long as it gives you all nutritients you need), never going into starvation mode is crucial.
You all are very helpful.
For those of you with similar problems, I can tell you what I learned, after 7 years on allergy shots and a whole lot of serious food allergies, and it’s not too do-able for a lot of people. But IF you are living in a region that is beset with low air quality, pollen overload, mold overload, or just the item you are allergic to, for a significant part of the year, you have to ask yourself no matter the hit it would take financially to move elsewhere, would it be worth, say, a third of your year, every year, for the rest of your life?
Ie, the answer I found is to lower the allergic hit on your body. I was living next to wheat fields (wheat smut fungus) near native oak (blackjack) and wild cedar (cedar fever) and in summer we had ragweed to succeed the cedar, oak, and wheat smut, add the fungus that grows on cut pine in winter (Christmas trees), and various others, not to mention the smog from Denver from one direction and from Mexico City in the other…and it was slowly killing me. I was being hit year round. Not to mention the food allergies.
Now I live near wheat fields, yes, but the wind flow is different; I am not allergic to pine or hemlock, spruce, or those sorts of trees: there is little oak up here, and the cedar is red cedar, not that plains-bred sort that is a pioneer species on disturbed prairie.
Just to give you heart, our first diet success, back in 2003, busted off 40 lbs apiece, and we have kept it off, because we have never let up again, never thrown up our hands, and never allowed ourselves to go over a certain mark. The fact was, we were woeful couch potatoes who converted to high exercise and a low food intake. That kind of weight loss is hard, but not so brutal as that LAST 40 pounds. And note, it was impossible while I was popping sudafed and benedryl like crazy trying to keep going down south. Getting off the anti-allergy meds was huge in terms of recovering my health.
So if you are really, really losing a major part of your life to allergies, moving may be the option you have to face.
Second is to reduce your diet to oatmeal, milk, and water, and start adding items one at a time and noting when you react (sigh). That’s one of the oldest methods. There’s no effective treatment for a food ‘sensitivity’… and the best treatment for other allergies is to simply get out of the region where you are exposed…for this reason:
If your system is in an uproar over one allergy trigger, it is more likely you will over-react to others. And if you are being bombarded from all sides at once, all the reactions may be over the top. Something you might tolerate in a neutral environment will set you off. So you get no rest from it. That’s the state I was in, and that’s why I moved north. Up here—blissfully, the days I have to take any allergy meds are very, very rare: ragweed season is about it.
Systemic inflammation underlies a staggering number of health complaints – much of it comes from highly inflammatory foods in the diet – your nightshades for example, also grains and beans.
Interesting and scary correlations exist between gum disease and heart disease. The reason they measure CRP (C Reactive Protein) is because it is a way to look at inflammation, not because it tells you anything specific about your heart health and inflammation. Some docs don’t bother with CRP because of that, but it’s useful to know if your immune system is overactive.
As CJ has done, staying away from stuff that makes you hurt is an excellent strategy. Many people, though, are not aware of how much they react to substances because there’s never been a time it wasn’t part of their food environment and they never felt any better than they do now – also, it is possible to have immune responses (antibodies which can be detected in blood tests, for instance) that aren’t overtly noticeable.
In short, between what’s in the air, the water and the food supply, let alone the fibers in your clothing and the sheets on your bed… it’s a bleekin’ mine field out there.
My body is now more interested in sitting at a desk (love those computers) than anything else. I’m just not as active as once I was. That’s got to change if I want to get fit. But, honestly, age seems to have a lot to do with it. I can’t (thanks to I Love Lucy) starve my body anymore and shed pounds in a few days. Oh well, it took about ten years to get to this point, so I guess it will take a while to change. I hate exercise and dieting. I have no motivation for it.