food

Having read a couple articles about food and fasting and longevity, I've decided to adjust my diet. Again. Since I've been keeping track of everything I eat, when I sleep, how and how much I spend, and what odd things happen to me, I've been able to see the effects of food and sleep have on my short-term health. While I won't really be able to track for longevity other than by delaying as long as I can my arrival to the other side, I can track how I feel after adjusting my diet.

Tracking everything has been fascinating, like realizing I have headaches after eating sugar, even with chocolate but especially with cupcakes. Or that the suggested four Omega 3 supplements a day wreaks havoc on my bowel movements.

Yeah.

Two is just fine.

So, my current plan for food is, "If I can grow it, make it, catch it or harvest it, I'll eat it." It'll mean a lot more whole foods, a lot fewer processed foods. Technically yes, I could make the potato chips or the corn chips or the exquisitely light, white cake with butter frosting... but I'm not going to make them. I'm not going to grow the wheat and mill it and churn the butter and the like. There's a limit to how far I'll go, so pffffffft, most sweets are out.

Of course I'll make an exception for chocolate in this new grow-make-catch-harvest rule, but I hope to eventually make that the only exception. We'll see.

Well, I called Bob, Kris' dad, today. There's only so many days in a row I can spend in darkness, not moving, wishing for quiet, before every fiber in my body is going to scream for a solution to this ongoing problem. Three times in five months, I've had four in a row, and it's getting out of hand. If it's the wine, or even alchohol in general, fine, I'll stop drinking it.

When Bob called me back, he had some good dietary suggestions for me, which was what I was asking for. I was looking for an elimination diet, maybe to help me figure out what was my trigger. I thought I'd have to cut everything out of my diet and subsist on rice and beans for a while.

I was, thankfully, wrong.

Out of my diet is now: nitrates, nitrites, tyramine, chocolate, sulfites. When I asked how to determine if food has any of these in it, because, let's face it, except for "chocolate," the rest of them are sorta hard to figure out, Bob told me, "Avoid processes foods."

Okay, I can do that.

I've recently switched to a vegetarian diet, though didn't tell very many people about the change. I'm the easiest vegetarian you'll probably ever meet: if you serve me meat, I'll eat it. I like Andy's philosophy that (I'm poorly paraphasing here) wasting the animal is worse than killing the animal in the first place, so if it's there, better to eat it than refuse and have it thrown away. Or something like that.

However, my food choices have been remarkably fruits and vegetable based, even for me. I suspect Lisa would be somewhat pleased.

Update: Okay, after going to the store and buying a bunch of unprocessed snacks, I did the research for high level tyramine foods. I really should have done the check before I left. Now, I don't know if the auras and migraines are dietary triggered, but, if I had to guess, this could very well be my trigger. Check out the foods with tyramine: hard/aged cheeses (check), avocados (check), eggplant (check), oranges (check), grapes (check), nuts (check), soy (check), leftovers older than a day (check).

This is going to take some work. Though, honestly, anything has to be easier than that no meat, no wheat, no dairy, no soy diet I had five years ago. That one was hard.

I don't eat much meat. If I know I need protein, I'll actively seek some meat in my meal, but for the most part, I'll eat vegetables, dairy and some breads. I'm not vegetarian, I'll eat meat, I just won't crave it, or eat it by default.

Friday for lunch, however, was a little different. I was cold, the day blustery and overcast, so I ordered soup at the local Vietamese restaurant. Changing from my usual order twice, I ordered the egg noodles with beef balls pho. Doyle looked at me when I ordered. "I wouldn't order beef balls. You don't know what's in them."

No, I don't. And in retrospect, shouldn't have ordered them.

In the evening, Kris was heading out of town to spend Saturday with his parents in Southern California. Since he was in a hurry, we defaulted to grabbing a meal at McDonalds. I don't know why we ever go there. Except for the ice cream cones, the food is always suspect. And stinks.

Yet, I ate a cheeseburger, just waiting for that moment where the sweet ketchup, bun and pickle overwhelm the "meat" pattie for that one tasty bite that almost makes the rest of the cheeseburger worth it.

An hour later, I was on my way to pick up half the players from the women's team I'm coaching, to drive them to this weekend's tournament. The fields were changed at the last minute, from Stanford to Stevinson, California, 100 miles by road east-ish. One mountain range kept the distances from being only sixty miles as a straight shot.

In the morning, I found myself back at McDonalds, wondering what to order. The $3.50 charge on my credit card, all of my cash in my bookbag at home, paid for the sausage egg McMuffin™ on my plate. I managed to eat half of it before I was overcome with disgust at all the fake meat I had eaten in the last twenty-four hours.

I stopped eating, and threw the rest away.

It'll be interesting to see how my crap smells in the next couple days.

Yeah, yeah, don't talk about poop.

Whatever.

A well know fact is that vegetarians' body odor smells better than meat-eaters', so the smell of the bathroom when I done with it will be different than normal in a day. I haven't eaten such a large amount of crappy meat in a long, long time, so I do have to wonder how much the room will really stink.