Ordered Eating, Whole 30 and Inflammatory Bowel Disease

When I returned from Camp Nerd Fitness in late September, I decided to “level up my life” and try the Whole 30 program, which has special rules, and may be especially beneficial, for people with Inflammatory Bowel Disease, like me.

For those of you in the don’t know, the Whole 30 is a program in which you eliminate potentially inflammatory foods for at least 30 days and then slowly reintroduce them to learn which ones affect your individual body.

The general guidelines for the elimination stage are:

No natural or artificial sugar
No alcohol
No grains, included gluten-free grains such as quinoa
No legumes
No soy
No carrageen, MSG, or sulfites
No “fake” muffins, cakes, breads, etc.

When I began the Whole 30 on October 1st, I had requested the Whole 30 bible, It Starts with Food (2012) from our state library system but hadn’t gotten it yet. Once I had book in hand, I learned that the authors, Melissa and Dallas Hartwig, suggest extra restrictions for those of us with Inflammatory Bowel Disease, which I’ve had in the form of ulcerative colitis since the age of 10. Because UC is an autoimmune illness, the Hartwigs also suggest that we UCers also adopt the autoimmune protocol (AIP). Here’s the added list of “no” foods:

No eggs for at least 90 days
No nuts or seeds (including oils and butters)
No nightshades (tomatoes, white potatoes, sweet and hot peppers, and various spices including cayenne and chili pepper, curry power, and paprika) for, again, at least 90 days
No coffee

My first reaction to this extra set of inflammatory foods to avoid was:

HELL. NO.

The first week had been overwhelming enough, and I had finally made a meal I enjoyed, baked salmon cakes and salad with “ranch dressing,” using three recipes from It Starts with Food. Now, that whole meal was off limits: the salmon cakes had almond flour and an egg, and the “ranch” dressing used homemade olive oil mayo (with egg) as a base. The hardboiled eggs I had made with my new Instant Pot had become a lunchtime staple, and eggs and veg for breakfast were making one meal a blessed no-brainer. It felt like summiting a mountain, only to be told to climb an extra peak in order for it to count.

I sped through the five stages of grief, however, and realized that, like it or not, I had no choice. If I wanted the full benefit of the Whole 30, I couldn’t self-sabotage the plan by eating potentially inflammatory foods during the 30 to 90-day “detox.” Plus, I’ve never really loved eggs for breakfast.

So, since Sunday the 10th of October, I’ve been on the Whole 30 AIP. I’m roasting a lot of vegetables to make [insert chosen vegetable here] chips, and I’m spending a lot on organic meat.

I’m also thinking a lot about the thinking I do about food. My life has been a history of disordered eating only recently relegated to the past. I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis in 1990, when doctors knew a lot less about digestive diseases than they do now. As a result, my mother and I were handed a pamphlet of “NO” and “YES” foods by my pediatric gastroenterologists that read like a torture diet. Bullet-point list time again:

No raw vegetables
No pulpy fruits or berries
Nothing with “whey” (check your labels)
No dairy
No beans
No spicy foods

I still remember showing up for the birthday party of Lesley, one of my two elementary school best friends, shortly after my diagnosis. Lesley’s parents had ordered cheese and pepperoni pizza for the gaggle of girls. My mom dropped me off with a tupperware container ready for the microwave, filled with plain baked chicken breast (not even any salt, because the prednisone I was on made me retain about 10% of my body weight in water) and carrots cooked to limp parabolas instead of sticks. If you looked up the sad face in the emoji dictionary, that meal would be there as an example.

I desperately wanted that pizza. It smelled amazing, as most junk food is wont to do, but even stronger than the desire to taste it was the desire to be just like the other girls. I was painfully different, not only in the bathroom I visited up to ten times a day for up to 45 minutes at a time but also at the table with friends. I didn’t eat pizza for another 10 years.

In my early 20’s, my disease stabilized a bit, and I could expand my diet to include most dairy (pizza!) and fruits and a few raw vegetables and beans. In adolescence, I had the still chic thin frame of the malnourished. As I ate more things, I gained pounds. I came home from Philadelphia the summer after graduation determined to lose weight; I still remember sobbing to my mother as I uncontrollably stuffed a pint of Turkey Hill Neapolitan frozen yogurt down my throat, deeply unhappy about my extra weight and baffled at my mindless eating.

So began the plunge into socially motivated, rather than medically sanctioned, disordered eating phase of my life. In my mid-20’s to early 30’s, I starved (800 no-fat calories/day, getting down to as low as 87 pounds), binged the weight back (eating boxes of cereal at a time until I was sick to my stomach), obsessively counted calories (especially when apps like My Fitness Pal came along), and wasted SO MUCH psychic energy that I could have used improving my relationships, becoming a better writer, and being happier. My only longterm romantic relationships came in the brief period when I didn’t measure my self-worth by how righteously I had eaten that day.

I no longer practice disordered eating: a massive victory that I don’t acknowledge often enough. And I know I’m doing the Whole 30 AIP for the right reason: a hope that I may be able to use diet to reduce or even eliminate the immune-suppressing medication I’ve taken for decades, medication that has landed me in the hospital twice and carries a rare but serious risk of an untreatable lymphoma.

Nevertheless, I’m feeling the magnitude of being back on a restrictive diet. It’s not sadness, anger, or irony; rather, it’s closer to a slight strain with touches of bewilderment and insight.

T. S. Eliot expresses it best in “Little Gidding”:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

I’m back where I started as a child, but with a quarter-century of experience behind me and far more compassion for my body and its limitations. Ordered eating: I like the sound of that.

Originally posted on October 11th, 2016.

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Hello, I’m Sara!

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