10/20/2024
I'm still finding it ironic that after a lifetime of trying to "eat healthy", it turns out that what irritates my GI is mostly fruits and vegetables - especially raw, but often cooked, as well. I've always had an irritable GI but it wasn't until earlier this year that I figured out that the culprits are fruits and vegetables. I mean, I knew for sure that some of them seemed to irritate me sometimes. But, you know, they are fruits and vegetables. So I figured that they couldn't be the real culprits and it must be something else related to eating them. But, nope, it's them. My GI is very calm if I stick with the (theoretically) inflammatory foods like wheat and dairy and meat. Although, to be fair to my GI tract, I usually eat very clean versions of those - grass fed and cooked and sprouted and organic, for instance. But that's not 100% true. I can also eat Domino's pizza, Whole Food brown butter chocolate chip cookies, and Cheez-Its with no GI distress. However, if I want to feel terrible, all I have to do is eat raw greens, fresh berries, olive oil, vinegar, tomatoes, cucumber, avocado, coconut, almonds, onions, or peanuts.
Pretty much anything that originated on a tropical island is off-limits to me. In keeping with my latex (natural rubber) allergy, my body also finds plants that cohabited with latex plants during evolution unacceptable. So that's all the tropical fruits and nuts, basically, including citrus. And really, it finds a LOT of plants unacceptable as food. Yogurt made with the milk of any animal that I've tried so far is fine, for instance. But yogurt made with coconut or a nut milk will make me very miserable. Sugar, coffee, tea, and chocolate also live in the "irritating" category although, like with the others, I can eat them - mostly cooked - sometimes, in small quantities, as long as I don't try that too often.
That's a really bizarre discovery after spending most of my life as a vegetarian who rarely even ate dairy. And it's even more bizarre in today's increasingly vegan-oriented food supply where things like avocado and almond milk are considered super healthy and anti-inflammatory. I can't eat at most vegan restaurants, in fact, because the menu items almost always have something in them that will make me ill. I can go to Waffle House and eat bacon and toast or to Sonic and eat corndogs just fine. But I can't go to the super-healthy Chocolatree in Sedona and eat anything on the menu without feeling terrible later. I love Thai food but it always gives me a stomach ache.
So I'm struck by how profoundly this has opened my eyes to my failure to listen to my own body for most of my life so far. I mean, my body always knew what was safe for me to eat. My cravings have always been for what I know now are 'safe' foods. But I made myself eat salads and fruits because those are supposed to be healthy. I should have figured it out sooner when I went on the all-meat diet 6 years ago to address iron-deficiency anemia and had amazingly calm digestion the whole time, or even much earlier in life when my GI was miraculously calm during Army Basic Training, where there were no raw fruits or vegetables. But I didn't. Because I believed training from outside experts over my own body.
This has been a great learning for me, especially as a naturopathic physician trained to teach people to "eat healthy". I already knew that didn't look the same for everybody. But over this past decade, I've become increasingly aware of just how profoundly we vary that way. I can't even take Vitamin C safely because it is usually a fruit derivative, for instance. And I had no conscious awareness of being allergic or sensitive to fruits because my reactions don't hit until foods reach my lower GI at some point maybe 15 to 30 hours later.
So the moral of the story is - trust your own body about what's going on with it, regardless of what anyone else tells you, including doctors. We for sure don't know everything - even about ourselves. And if we seem to know that, it's probably just a fortunate accident of birth where our families naturally did what worked for us or we have bodies that don't react to anything much. If something isn't working for you then it isn't working for you, no matter how many people think that it "should" work for you.
In the final analysis, at the end of the day, YOU are the only one who lives inside your body and has first-hand access to what it is telling you. And if you think that your body is "broken" or is your "enemy", then you probably can't hear it very well. Bodies are marvelously complex and brilliantly designed to adapt to a wide variety of things. If yours seems to be malfunctioning, it's for sure responding to something in a way that makes logical sense at the origin point of the problem. Your body isn't broken. You just haven't figured out what it is doing yet so that you can figure out how to help it respond in a more comfortable way or remove the source of its discomfort.
Modern medicine thinks that many things are "incurable" but I'm certain that they are wrong about many of them. We just haven't found the cure yet. Our bodies have. Our bodies have "cures" -solutions to threatening situations. Otherwise, everything would kill us without treatment and that that's not what happens. But some of our bodies' solutions to situations are just unpleasant for us. That's what "disease" actually is. It is a body response that we find unpleasant, uncomfortable, or incapacitating. The body is always responding intelligently, in the ways that it can, using the resources that it has, to maintain equilibrium to the best of its ability. But we don't always like how it does that. The "secret" to curing any disease is to figure out what the body is trying to do, and why, and then help it do that more efficiently or remove the cause of the "disease" response altogether.
You might say that sometimes the disease is actually an OVER response by the body and so it is actually necessary to help the body do that LESS efficiently. And that might be true in the short-term, to keep you more comfortable or alive. Sometimes the body's response to something is SO extreme that it can kill us. That's what happens with an anaphylactic allergic reaction, for instance. But there is still a secret in there, a message to be discovered. There is a reason that the immune system is willing to risk killing you to launch an extreme reaction to the trigger. Or there is a reason that your body can't produce enough of the chemicals that clear histamines fast enough to keep you safe. We might not be able to figure out why it is doing that, other than "genetics", but we know that something else is involved. Asthma and peanut allergies used to be a lot more rare than they are now, for instance. The genes were always there but the expression was different. So there is a root cause behind why the body is failing to modulate the response appropriately and safely.
And until such root causes are located, and resolved if possible, the only useful strategy is to avoid triggers and keep emergency medications readily available to fight the body's over-response. But it stands to reason that fighting your own body can't really be an optimum strategy for the long-term. So when over-reactions become chronic and frequent, then it is more important than ever to locate the root cause and address it.
Our modern medicine does NOT excel in this. Some ancient medical systems do it better. They have more robust methods of locating useful underlying patterns. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is an example of this, with its diagnostic methods that use multiple pulses and the tongue and other things. It isn't even necessary to know the modern Western medicine diagnosis to benefit from the TCM treatment for an underlying pattern.
TCM is how I came to understand that my hypertension was due to anemia, for instance. My TCM practitioner said that my pulses and tongue indicated a "blood deficiency" going on. So, as a modern Western medical practitioner I translated that into getting blood tests and looking for anemias and, sure enough, an anemia was happening. Once I resolved the iron-deficiency anemia, then my hypertension also resolved. I added in the suggested TCM herbs and acupuncture to speed that process.
But I would not have done that if I had bought the standard modern Western medical assertion that my body was just broken and that people get hypertension when they get older. I was supposed to believe that but I did not. To the core of my being, I believed that my body had a good and logical reason for elevating my blood pressure. And whether that was simply because my blood vessels had gotten stiffer or my stress was too high, I was certain that there was a reason. And I was equally certain that there had to be a better solution than fighting what my body was trying to accomplish with the higher blood pressure.
So, I guess that I'm saying that our bodies are our friends. And they are super intelligent and complicated friends who work VERY hard to keep us alive every day and from moment to moment. So I think that we should give them the benefit of the doubt. I think that we should trust them that they have good reasons for making the choices that they make. We might not find those choices comfortable or convenient all the time, but I think that we need to respect them. We need to respect that our bodies are doing the best that they can to help us with what they have to work with at the moment. We will find no greater friends, protectors, or defenders on this Earth than our own bodies. And so I am certain that the path to healing always lies in learning to listen to them
