Diet portion of my program

Happy Thanksgiving, you turkeys! :D 

**Be sure to read my gratitude to you turkeys at the end**

Since this homeopathic program will take forever and a day to talk about and share what information my test showed, I will begin with describing what restrictions I have to my diet. I whine all the time that I can't have all this deliciousness I see all around me.. it's so hard, but I haven't cheated at all yet and it's mid week 13.. so that's power! And I refuse to cheat. Almost 8 weeks left. I've made it past Halloween (no candy candy candy), today is Thanksgiving and my lover, PUMPKIN PIE, is off limits to me. I don't know what I'm going to do..... no apple pie ala mode either..... my gosh, this torture! And yes, I've looked everywhere for a recipe that would work but they all contain something I can't have in it.

Gonna be me today. Lmao, but seriously.

I've actually been living upstairs in my room for quite a while.

1) Because rock climbing while stiff-legged up the stairs got to be too awful for me at night.

2) It's quiet up here. No stab-me-in-the-eyes-and-ears daily Russian Television or political news! Just me. And Nia when she decides to randomly come and go.

3) I don't need to walker all the way from the couch to the bathroom downstairs. I just walker the much shorter distance from my room to my bathroom now. My condition gets worse the more I move around and with the RIDICULOUS amount of times I have to get up to pee each day, it exhausts me, twists me up, stiffens me up, and the destination was too far for me when i'd just be in there for two minutes and then have to come all the very tedious way back just to get back up and repeat each hour. Plus, the bathroom downstairs doesn't have enough room for my leg to be the boner it is, so I had to open the cabinet underneath the sink to fit, nearly peeing myself every time. It's still a chore now and my bathroom is so close. And I fit in there. My walker doesn't fit in either bathroom, but my house isn't handicap accessible so what do you expect? This peeing issue will always be one of my largest program nuisances as long as I'm having to down all these liquids every day. The Pau d' Arco tea to drink 3x a day, in my belief, makes you have to pee twice per bottle. That's not even including all the water I have to drink daily + the 2 small optiflora glasses + the 2 small protein drinks. 

4) My bed is the comfiest place for me, so it's convenient that it's in my room.. obviously.

5) It's just plain easier even though I'm even more isolated now. Spend all day and night up here except for when I hop down the stairs to make and eat breakfast, and then stiff-legged rock climb back upstairs. Used to go down & up them twice a day, but now it's only once and it's still dreaded. I'm just so tired of stairs and walkering. They need to go away. 

6) When my parents eat/get normal things to eat, now I don't know and won't want to rip my hair out in jealousy while drooling over what they have ..until I open the refrigerator the next morning. Before I moved up to my room permanently again, I stared them down while eating, like Nia does for us.

Back to my extremely restrictive diet that is tailored for me:

- No yeast

- No soy

- No dairy (milk, cheese, butter, yogurt, ice cream, etc.)

- No gluten (wheat, oats, rye, barley, spelt, kamut)

- No peanuts or peanut butter

- No refined sugar (soda, cake, cookie, boxed cereals, basically everything)

- No natural or artificial sweeteners (honey, maple syrup, molasses, corn syrup, fruit juice, cane juice, rice syrup, malted sweeteners, stevia, vegetable glycerin, etc. If any sweetener is in the 1st -- 4th ingredient on the label.. can't have it. We go full in & if it's anywhere on the label, we don't get it.)

- No chocolate

- No citrus fruits

- No dried fruit

- No caffeine

- No coffee

- No MSG (monosodium glutamate, found in packaged foods and Chinese foods.. I have to be careful when dining out.. which I have done once.. at Bravo for lunch with my neighbor who is also on this program.. they have a gluten free menu [both have to avoid gluten for the program] and I got pasta with spinach, onion and grilled chicken and it was deeeeelicious! First gluten free pasta i've had.)

- No fried foods (tortilla chips count, boo)

- No hydrogenated oils

- No chlorinated or well water (can only have distilled water)

- No Alcohol

- No white potatoes

- No tomatoes

- No eggplant

- No bell pepper

Sensitivities:

- All food dyes

- Artificial flavorings

- Nitrates, nitrites, sulfates

- Chlorine

- Phenols 

(And a ton of others that aren't food related that I will address on a different update and that add more annoyances to the program) 

Limitations:

No more than 2 pieces of fruit a day

Vinegar (food products with vinegar in it, vinaigrette) ..No more than 2 tablespoons

Recommendations:

Try to eat all organic (And that, I certainly do. Everything I eat is organic)

When we tell people my limitations they ask, "So what can you eat?" At the beginning of this program, I felt like I had 2 things to choose from but now we have several options and our supply of options has increased 4x since the beginning. Pretty dang sure we've found everything out there that I'm allowed to have. It's food, so it's food, but it's still so limited and it's not like I can get this diet food whenever I want because I'm so disabled and I'm upstairs now. Plus, the preparation is a huge factor added on. Eating healthy isn't simple with prep. I wouldn't even get up when I was starving while I was downstairs--that's how much it sucks to 'walk' a few steps. On this diet, I could eat all day and it still wouldn't please me like food I would eat before this diet--and I still ate pretty healthy before this.

For breakfast, on the side, I make scrambled eggs by mixing in rice milk instead. I want to make omelettes soon with onion, kale/spinach and non-nitrate bacon mama found. My dad is a big fan of cream of wheat and oatmeal, so I grew up eating those when he would make them and when I grew up, I made them all the time. Oatmeal mostly. Old fashioned oats and on the stovetop! It kills me that I can't have oatmeal! But that's why I love warm cereal so much but cold cereal is just as yuma! Last week we found cream of buckwheat at Cincinnati Natural Foods (where we get Millet bread)! Can't wait to try that out. Of course, sugar was added to the cream of wheat all my life.. so I don't really know what it tastes like plain, but it will make do! I am IN LOVE with bananas and a medium banana (for sugar control and as instructed) each morning goes in the cereal (hot or cold) and in addition to the nana, a bunch of cinnamon goes in rice grits, quinoa and will go in the cream of buckwheat. My cold cereal is rice puffs and non-GMO corn flakes.. but the corn flakes are sweetened with pear juice concentrate, so I don't have them much. They're still the best for me than all the other ones I have looked at. Mornings where I have therapy, twice a week, my mom fries an egg and has the millet bread toasted with cashew or almond butter on the slices and has my naner for me! I like to put banana on the toast now. Veryy good stuff! Eaten very rarely are gluten free pancakes because one of the sugars is listed as the 4th ingredient. We thought it was the fifth, but we realized the mistake and I haven't had them since. Potato starch is also in many, many things including the pancakes and I have to steer away from that as well ..assumingly because I can't have potatoes. We found cinnamon raisin millet bagels at the Cincinnati Natural Foods store and since "no dried fruits" isn't in a prominent spot, I just found this out this restriction recently but they are so sparse in the bagels and it's just because dried fruits have a lot of sugar in them. Like 9 raisins won't hurt me, but I don't eat the bagels regularly whatsoever. Also very rare. I prefer to warm my belly with the warm cereal and scrambled eggs :) 

Lunch is the same 'ol, same 'ol each late afternoon but I love it! Celery boats with tons of almond butter and an apple the size of my fist (once again, for sugar control). I am literally obsessed with nut butters. Sometimes I have tuna on rice crackers with the lunch/in lieu of the apple, but I like my fruits!!! I have started making green smoothies with the Vitamix.. which requires me to go down and up the stairs twice a day again when I decide it's a smoothie day.

Dinner is mixed vegetables (corn, peas, carrots, green beans), spinach, or steamed broccoli that tastes and has the consistency of butter with the salt on it :) I'm allowed to have red meat so mama has steak bits frozen in snack baggies just ready to cook in the skillet. Sometimes I have hamburger patties on bread and we recently got organic mayo and mustard (oh yea, forgot I said literally everything I eat is organic) but it had me so beyond excited because two CONDIMENTS! Hello, condiments! I've missed you. Just can't have more than the 2 tablespoons because they have vinegar in it. So mayo and mustard on millet bread topped with a hamburger patty. Delish! Mama always got local, grass-fed, no hormones, no antibiotics beef before I was sick, so that still applies. Same with the chicken. Back when I ate quinoa more when I didn't have too many options (I don't prefer it now because it tastes blah), mama would put spinach and chicken broth in some already cooked quinoa and it was like a stir fry. She would add mixed veggies to it other times. Good chicken booby is always yum yum. A meal I have been absolutely in loveee with for weeks is crisped up corn tortillas from the toaster oven with refried beans and romaine lettuce. It has switched to baby spinach with refined beans on top of it with seasoned broken sweet potato tortilla chips.. the chips being a rare exception because technically they're fried but OH MY GOSH, I thought they were a healthy Doritos copy at first because the piece of chip I ate tasted exactly like cool ranch Doritos! They're at Costco. Go get them and boycott the GMO corn Frito Lay company.

Tastes just like cool ranch Doritos, i'm tellin' ya. Costco. Better for you.

That's another thing we make sure of. Non-GMO everythang. But yes, I can have sweet potatoes just not regular potatoes. This late summer, when my dad was grilling out, he grilled me chicken and mama sliced up sweet potatoes and sprinkled a bunch of cinnamon coating them, and then my dad grilled them. I don't like sweet potatoes but they were so good!!!! This way at least. OMG! Before I forget, mama found these gluten free chicken tenders from Perdue that are breaded with corn meal and I can have them! Just pop them into our toaster oven! And they taste like the real deal! When mama found the no-nitrate bacon, she also found no-nitrate small hotdogs for me, but they have sugar low on the list. I have a hotdog sometimes with mustard and on a piece of bread that i curl around it to make a bun to eat for dinner with veggies. I never have bacon and hotdog on the same day due to the fact they're still processed and have some sugar in them. I've already had my daily sugar with the fruit. No mo', no mo'! I have a hotdog about once a week and I rarely eat the bacon because I forget it's there, I want to say no to the pig, or simply because we've been out of it for awhile :)

Snacks are almonds. That's what I eat when I do snack because I have a little can of them in my little bedside organizer. I eat a few and then I'm good. My life's too busy to snack. Too busy with this stupid program! And therapy. And being pooped from it. And being tired all the time. And being depressed. And schoolwork. And distractions. And taking my meds. And preparing and eating meals. And other stupidness that a bed-bound girl should not be this busy.. wth? But really, Snap Pea Crisps and Pop Corners sea salt flavor are also both okay for me to eat and I could plow through a whole bag of those, especially Snap Peas, and I normally do with the Snap Peas. I never eat from them though because they are downstairs and I always forget to ask for them to be brought upstairs. No fear, mama bought me a 36 count box of little 100 calorie bags of Snap Peas for me at Costco and they're in my closet. But that requires me to get up from my bed, move my walker out of the way from my closet door, yadda yadda and get back onto my bed which isn't fun or comfortable to do with a stiff leg, NOPE! But that's the reason I can never stop eating these pea crisps. Well, yea they are freaking delicious, but what's stopping me from closing the bag? Nothing. But if it's an individual sized bag, we are GOOD folks! Oh yea, we also got an air popper for organic non-GMO kernels, and we spritz olive oil on the popcorn and sprinkle it with salt and.. yea. We haven't done that since a few times in the beginning weeks. Once again, too busy.

Q: "Is it helping you??"

A: No. I'm always about to turn into The Incredible Hulk from anger and frustration or I just want to curl up, cry forever and die. If only I could curl up into a fetal position. That would be nice, leg. Oh, right, you don't listen. But really. Who knew a person who eats as healthy as I do and gets so depressed? We think maybe my blood sugar is too low and is causing it. Normally the people with poor diets get depressed. I mean, I've been depressed this whole time. I started out depressed and now that my life is topsy turvy and disabled for two years and I can't dance anymore, I'm really depressed. But now, I'm really REALLY depressed. I need my comfort food, yo! And my condition isn't benefitting from it either so this whole torture treatment is well, that. And costly. And the fact that I can eat crap for two years and lose 33 pounds and eat a medium sized cone literally everyday trying to gain my weight back/stop losing it, when I eat healthy food is when I start packing on the pounds? I'm adverse to everything.

Things I've learned:

1) The food we eat is literally trash, and it's to blame for so many health conditions and cancers.

2) The food restriction pages came with alternatives to eat what you want, without it really being what you can't have. Too bad my diet is too strict and the replacements don't work because they contain ingredients I can't have. Take the substitute for chocolate--carob. Well carob has soy in it. Take the substitute for ice cream--Rice Dream--tastes just like ice cream. Well Rice Dream has soy in it. Soy is in everything! Sweeteners are in everything! Potato starch is in everything! 

3) Things take a lot longer to cook without a microwave. (We removed ours out of choice)

4) The holidays and January are going to suck without pumpkin pie, HOT COCOA, and candy canes.

5) I rarely drank coffee.. I drank more like drinks with coffee in them, but not being able to have the choice, I feel like I'm going to become a coffee addict when I get off this program.

6) Thought I was COMPLETELY going to go back to my old diet and eat nothing from this diet afterwards. But I'm keeping many things with me. Still going to go splurge whenever I want.

7) I never realized how DESPERATELY I alwaysssssss want PIZZA and cake until this. (Back to number 6, they have gluten free pizza and cake.. and I will order those/make them. Thought I was just going to eat regular pizza and cake all the time, but I had a change of heart. When there's normal pizza and cake.. still going at it!! Of course!)

8) Food/snack/candy/chocolate/drink advertisement commercials are TORTURE.

8) Idk. I'm sure there's more, I know I'm forgetting some but I'm tired of typing and thinking.

My lunch from Bravo. Gluten free. But then when I got home I realized it probably had soy all in so much of it, who knows where the chicken came from, and the food wasn't organic. Oh well. It was good while it was lasted. And my neighbor said that the doctor who is in charge of our programs says when you eat out, you don't have to be as cautious about little things. "You have to live," in her words. Right. "Live" on this program? No way, no how. Too restrictive. I may eat out one other time. I'm just staying as tight to this diet, plus more, to ensure I'm eating the healthiest possible and to get the best results out of it, just in case it decides to do something--unlikely.

Another thing. Thought that Chipotle would be fine to eat. A manager gave my mom an ingredient card after she ordered and purchased a bowl for me, hearing that she was ordering for her daughter with a restricted diet/restrictive ingredients. She passed it back to the backseat where I can only fit in the car, the only column that had checks was soy. And guess which of their ingredients has soy in it? Everything but the lettuce. .............. Still ate it anyway and it was so good that I wanted to cry. No more since that one occasion. And I was so depressed that night after going to the mall to get a new phone case and I saw so many things that slapped me in the face that I can't do/can't have and never thought I'd find myself in this situation. So, I deserved it that night and it brought me some happiness back.

But, it's thanksgiving today and it's actually a good holiday for my dieting. I can eat turkey, corn, green beans, spinach, and other vegetables that may be there, sweet potatoes (even though my grandma probably has cooked them with sugar and cinnamon..meaning we should bring our own yams and cinnamon maybe if I decide I want them..), I'll bring pieces of my millet bread.. maybe almond butter. But I can't have mashed potatoes or stuffing or pumpkin pie or apple pie or cranberry jello salad and all other things. So it will be good and bad at the same time.

Everybody knows Thanksgiving for food, but the real meaning is what you are thankful for and being there with your family. I'm excited that my sister is here from North Carolina and that I can be with my grandparents again as well as my parents. And we will watch the Steelers get stomped by the Ravens because we don't like either, but we ESPECIALLY don't like the Steelers. And they are 2nd in the AFC North, behind the Bengals, so they better back off. No Black Friday shopping for me or us. Just going back to comfy home and being thankful for my amazing family, best friends, fellow disabled/sick loves and my supporters. Your kind words always are appreciated and I appreciate the prayers. They both honestly mean mean tons to me. I wish they would make me feel better when I am in my moods, but only having a bendable leg and functioning without so much struggle doing everything is what would make me feel better. Not saying your comments are meaningless. I definitely hold them inside and I have an army of people who want the very same to make me happy. Just having the kindest, sweetest, most genuine supporters makes me feel so blessed and I know that I am really not alone, like how I always  feel. I may actually be, but in many of your hearts.. not in the least bit. I'm thankful most of you don't have to deal with horrible debilitating or sickening diseases/conditions and I always pray it stays that way. I hope you all have a great grubbing dinner and a fantastic time with your family. It's great to have family that is so supportive. I love my parents so much. I can't even begin to thank them. Mama helps me with everything and I have to place to live while I can't do anything or help pay for anything. The love they have for me drives their desire to help me/work overtime to keep up with the costs of having a disabled daughter plus still trying to find relief for me. The love I have for you two drives me to be speechless this Thanksgiving towards you both. I seriously can't thank you enough or find any other words than THANK YOU and I LOVE YOU. <3

Also thankful that I'm not in as much pain this Thanksgiving, since Dr. Godby came into my life in May. To Dr. Espay as well, Dr. Heuser and Logan, the people who came and donated to the Dystonia walk, my therapists at many places and the staff, thank you for working with me and trying to help my stank leg :)

One day it will be fixed/helped so I'm not stuck, miserable, and non-contributing. 

Someway or another, it will happen.       

I will be functional.

AND I CAN'T WAIT TO SPLURGE LIKE CRAZY AND EAT EVERYTHING ONCE I GET OFF THIS DIET! IT'S HAPPENING FOLKS!

Much love.