My Food Philosophy Part II: An Anniversary Celebration

June 9, 2011

So where were we? Oh yes, newly restocked pantry, minus the meat, plus some weird ingredients like agave nectar and quinoa.

Two weeks after our diet change brought the time each month (always a Tuesday for some reason) when I normally, like clockwork, come down with a debilitating migraine. Let me cut in here to say, yes this coincided with that time of the month, but no, not all or even close to all of my migraines occurred or were connected to aunt flo. Tuesday came and went…and no migraine. I felt like I was walking on eggshells as day after day passed, thinking that if I got too excited a headache would come crashing down. A month went by. Then two months. Then six months. Then a year. In January 2011 I celebrated my first anniversary of being migraine free. I hadn’t taken an Imitrex or Relpax in 12 whole months. I hadn’t lost whole days buried in a room of darkness with my head surrounded in ice or heating packs. I hadn’t needed to take a single sick day from work. There wasn’t a single night spent sitting on the bathroom floor wishing I could go back to sleep but laying down made me nauseous and sitting up made the pain worse. And I had even had a glass or two of red wine without so much as a little dull reminder the next day. I couldn’t remember the last time my stomach had been irregularly upset and outside of the gaseous effects from an overload of veggies, my tummy was as happy as a clam.

This wonder food had literally given my life back. Blogging and discovering blogs had forever changed my life.

People often asked me during that year if I felt deprived of things. I rarely ate meat, and actively tried to cut all refined sugar from my diet. So when I passed on cake at work, or the ribs dripping in sweet tangy sauce at the family cookout, it was hard to explain to people that not only did I not feel deprived, now knowing what is in and behind those foods all but took their appeal away for me. I couldn’t look at a deli pastry without seeing the mile long list of totally unnecessary ingredients staring me in the face. The taste of chicken brought images of overweight chickens falling face first into their own feces because their natural bone structure couldn’t handle the excess flesh their feed forced upon them. Deprived? No. Thankful? Yes.

I made it my goal to seek out every one of these wonder foods I could find and try them. I blogged on Life Lite about my eating and cooking experiences. I took up running. And I felt on top of the world.