On Food: The Diagnosis That Started it All

While I’m on the subject of cooking, I am interested in talking about food.  My diet has become stricter and stricter in recent months, and I’m noticing some changes in my body as a result of the healthy eating.

But let me begin from when the journey started.  In April, I was diagnosed with something called PCOS, Polycystic Ovary Syndrome.  I was diagnosed in Thailand, by a doctor who looked with an ultrasound and found some black spots on my ovaries.  In retrospect, he made the diagnosis quite quickly and didn’t really explain to me what it all meant, but I believed that I had it.  It is a disorder characterized by some hormonal changes, the inability to bear children or ovulate correctly, and comes with an extreme increase in the possibility of diabetes.  Because of my diagnosis, and the risk of diabetes, I decided to make some changes in my diet. 

I started by cutting out added sugar from my diet.  Cookies, and cakes, and sweets of any kind, plus soda and anything that has extreme sugars went away.  I treated myself from time to time with something sweet, but, on the whole, I was pretty good about getting rid of added sugar foods for the benefit of my health.  Getting off of added sugar was a bit rough, and continues to be rough during certain times, and sometimes it takes me every amount of my energy to deny myself something delicious and sweet.  But, I knew that I needed to do it for my health, and so I did.

I kept moving farther on the non-sugar train, particularly as my taste buds began to shift.  I cut out more things from my diet, slowly taking the sugar and the things that make sugar out of my diet.  I took out most alcohol.  I took out most bread and grains.  I took out almost everything that is processed or packaged in any way.  All these things make sugar, and I was so afraid of the risk of diabetes that I kept moving farther and farther from anything that resembled sugar in my body.

It hasn’t been an easy road, and it was one of the things that encouraged me to take up cooking when I moved to Moscow.  Now, for some recent memory, my diet is mostly vegetables, particularly spinach, lettuce, and carrots, with oatmeal and yogurt in the morning and salad and meat at lunch.  And, in fact, when this is disrupted, it brings my body to a very unpleasant sort of place.  This is, in fact, the catalyst for this blog post.  I went off my diet this weekend because of travel with a group of young people on a robotics trip, and my body is feeling worse than it has in weeks because of it.

I noticed this as well earlier in the week.  In fact, I decided to celebrate a recent trip to the doctor with a special bit of food.  I went to the doctor here in Russia and found out that I do not actually have PCOS, that my lady parts all look healthy and normal.  Part of me wonders if I had it at all, and the other part thinks the food might have been able to change things for me.  I wanted to celebrate this occasion and decided to do so with a special treat: bread.

So, I went to my favorite grocery store, bought a loaf of the most delicious looking bread that I could find, and made a bread and cheese plate with balsamic and olive oil to enjoy.  After this food, I passed out in a food coma of sorts.  And when I woke up, there was a hangover left in my body that I hadn’t felt in recent history.  My knees and joints felt a bit sore and inflamed, my head had cotton in it, and I just didn’t feel great.  I felt bloated and sick with the food.  And now, in coming back from the trip, I feel much the same.  I ate processed food and bread at the weekend, and far too many of them, and I’m very much regretting that at this moment.   I feel sore again, with my knees acting up and my eyes all puffy. 

I wonder about the food, because I used to have such problems with my knees when I started to run and exercise, and now I don’t notice them.  It’s hard to tell how much of this is from the food and how much from the exercise, but I’ve seen a difference in my body and the way it reacts.  Perhaps bread and processed foods make my joints ache.  Either way, food is a current obsession of mine, and I’m starting to subscribe to ideas about how food can greatly improve life.  I’m watching the documentaries, reading the books, seeing news, and it is making a change on the types of things I will ingest.

I don’t have PCOS, either because I never had it, or because my diet helped my body heal it.  Either way, I’ve found the foods that make my body healthy and happy.  Sadly, I don’t think bread is in that category, or sugars, or packaged foods.  But even without the disease, I can’t quit the path that I’ve found to make my body feel good and have the energy I need at school and at home. 

And given the recent experiences I had with asking for the food, I think I need a word like “vegetarian” that fully encompasses that idea.  I’m not a vegetarian because I eat meat.  I’m not a vegan because I have the occasional cheese and milk.  But we don’t really have a word for people who don’t eat the bread or grain or processed food or packaged food or starch and would really just like something green and delicious to eat.  It would be handy to say that instead of trying to explain all the things that end up making me sick.