I posted a pretty emotional piece about my feelings around eliminating my comfort foods due to food sensitivities diagnosed by a blood spot test through my naturopathic doctor.

Now that I’ve been home from our trip at the beginning of the month, I wanted to come in with a little update in this evolving situation.

When I think about chocolate chip cookies, I still feel a little sad. We found a gluten free, dairy free (GF/DF) mix, but it just isn’t the same.

I discovered there are some very tasty coconut chocolate treats that are GF/DF, and that is making me happy. These are my favorite. I found them by accident at the big box store, and haven’t been able to get my hands on them since. Like every specialty food, they are pricey, so I haven’t yet sprung for buying them online.

But to the larger point – are these big changes helping?

This past week, I realized something. It was 6 weeks since I had gotten the news about the sensitivities, which is when I started to eliminate most of the foods I wasn’t supposed to have. At that point I was still allowing myself to eat some foods on the No List, because I hadn’t officially started the diet yet. It was three weeks since I had been 97% compliant (that 3% is the milk chocolate candies in my trail mix. Don’t judge).

I was starting to find some ways to make the diet work, like cooking an entire bag of rice pasta, then eating a little each day, and working as a team at dinner – one person would make the main dish – pasta, or quesadillas, and I would make the veggies – fresh salsa, stir fried vegetables, eggplant “steaks.” That eliminated some of the decision fatigue around dinner, and also reduced the prep and labor.

I tried goat cheese, and discovered I liked some of it (although other types – like gorganzola, were terrible). I bought some fermented foods, like kimchi and beet kvaas, which are supposed to be good for gut health and healing.

I tried smoothies with almond milk… which are just OK, because almond milk is watery, but next time we’re trying goat yogurt so I have hope that eventually we’ll have a winner.

I also started eating some meat. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was in high school. I didn’t have any political or philosophical reasons for being a veg (until I read The Omnivore’s Dilemna, by Michael Pollan, recently, and now I DO have a problem with beef AND chicken, unless it’s responsibly farmed, AKA expensive).

The thought of eating meat now is kind of gross for the most part. But I have always liked bacon and sausage, and it’s an open secret in my family that I will “cheat” and have some of those delicious morsels a couple of times a year. They are so processed, fatty, and salty that they feel really far from the animals where they originated. Those meats, while I know they aren’t healthy, are OK for me to eat. (I even found sausage bacon at the grocery store, which I hope tastes as amazing as it sounds. Update: I’ve tried the bacon sausage, and it’s a bit much. I decided I like my bacon and sausage to be two different things.)

I’ve also been eating mushrooms again, which I had mostly stopped buying with because several family members don’t like them.

What sent me to the calendar to count weeks since I’d started the diet was that I’d come to the gradual realization that my belly issues were basically gone.

I don’t talk about those issues here, and I won’t start now. Suffice to say there has been some GI distress in my life for some time, growing worse over the last decade. The change had been so gradual that I didn’t realize how bad it was until all the symptoms disappeared.

So, that’s the good news. The bad news is I have been in a mood and fatigue crater for weeks. Part of this is probably coming back from a mountaintop experience like Rwanda. We were well taken care of while we were there, got to see amazing sights, and had good time with friends. Going from being taken care of to taking care of many others and all its responsibilities, was HARD, like I knew it would be.

I would have liked to get some energy back with all these changes, and so far, that hasn’t been the case. In fact, what I got besides needing to lie down for hours every day and feeling sad all the time, was a rash that keeps migrating around my trunk and arms. Nearly every day, there is a new patch, while the older sections fade. I haven’t changed the skin products I’m using, so I’m blaming the diet changes.

I’m still hopeful that things will get better, but solving my problems, which seem somehow related but also difficult to pin down – Is this depression? Chronic fatigue from autoimmune issues? Am I just unaware of what I’m capable of if I could just push a little harder? That last question is my perfectionism talking. I DO know what happens when I push harder: I’m a mess. So I rest.

This complete lack of energy makes me apprehensive about the coming school year. Instead of overseeing all seven kids like last year, I’ll have a kid in commuter college, a kid at the local high school, and my next oldest is taking two core classes online, which takes a lot of the pressure off.

My other four kids, though, are in the high needs/accountability/oversight part of their education, which means they’ll require a fair amount of hands-on help. And one of them is as stubborn as bedrock.

The level of fatigue I’m at now is not compatible with keeping our house livable, making meals, AND doing school. I’m already having trouble with the first two, and creative pursuits have taken a huge hit already due to pandemic fatigue. Adding school will probably be good routine-wise, but it’s hard to imagine where the physical and mental energy I’ll need are going to come from.

I would like more time in between the mountaintops and the troughs. I would like to have enough energy to make a dinner at the end of the day that contains food I can eat. I manage some nights, and others, it’s almond milk and rice cereal. Or rice pasta, for the fifth night in a row.

We’ll see where this goes.