Wednesday, March 20, 2013

The definition of "Beetle Friendly"

The first question I get asked when it comes to food is "Aren't you gluten-free?" The answer, every time, resoundingly so, is "Hell. No." If I could ever find a tee shirt that said "Team Gluten" I would wear. I love gluten. Gluten is my secret boyfriend.

The second question is "Aren't you vegan?" For the answer, see above. Although I don't eat meat, I eat fish like a seal who's been swimming for three years without break and just arfed her way into a fishmonger's shop. I LOVE fish. Love it.

Tangent: Wanna know how much I love fish? I'll tell you. You know how when you were little and you would go to the grocery store and your parents would buy you a snack as a treat for the ride home? A candy bar (back in the days when your parents could just HAND YOU A BAR OF CHOCOLATE without worrying about getting arrested for crimes against society), or something similar? Yeah, my snack was never a candy bar. MY snack was a strip of salt cured herring. A solidified piece of salt and fish that was so dry you had to rip pieces off with your teeth, and was so salty it made the insides of your lips all puckery. So. Good. My dad used to look back in the rearview mirror at Little Beetle, buckled in, mountain of curly hair atop her three year old head, gnawing for dear life on salted herring. And he'd say "Jesus Christ we're raising a Viking."

ANYWAY. Point being. Not a vegan.

What I am is a strange hybrid of all the "free" diets rolled into one. And the reason for this is, there's no delicate way to put this, IBS. Yep. Sorry, everyone. I know it's not polite to discuss your digestive system in public, but it's got to be done.

If you're really bored at work, here's the Wikipedia entry on IBS. It's kind of a bitch. And everyone's IBS manifests itself in different ways. What will send me to the emergency room will make up the bulk of someone else's diet, and vice versa. And the only way to know what you can eat and what you can't, is, you guessed it, trial and error. SO FUN RIGHT? My trial and error period was the three months after getting diagnosed. It was basically me eating dry cereal and sometimes crying in a fetal ball and sometimes not.

It started when I was 22. I had been sick on and off for a few months and then one morning woke up (GROSSNESS ALERT) to find the entire contents of my digestive system in my bed with me. Needless to say, I called my doctor. Tests, etc. ensued. I got to take Demerol for one of them which was AMAZING. At the end of all of them she told me I had stress-induced IBS and that I could either make a comprehensive eating list and calm the f**k down or go on Zoloft. I chose the former. (Note: I've been a lovely little stress ball since I had my first full blown panic attack at 11. I bet there are legions of parenting blogs out there who would be happy to blame the fish. And the salt. And, you know, air.)

So. Long story short. I am not gluten-intolerant. I am not lactose-intolerant. What I am, dear reader, is fat-intolerant. Yep. My body, for whatever reason, has an inability to digest fat in large quantities, and in almost all it's forms. As one co-worker once said to me, perhaps not totally nicely, "you're destined to be skinny and healthy for every day of your ridiculously long life."

It's boring to list the foods I can't or can eat. Suffice it to say that cheese is out (insert large sob), as are nuts, cream and butter, seeds, and all oils except olive in small quantities. I had to stop eating meat whilst I got better and sort of fell out of the habit of it, hence the pescetarianism. It IS possible to retrain your body to digest certain foods again. It took me five months of agony before I could eat potatoes but to be honest I would rather die a horrible death than face life without potatoes ever again. Potatoes = God. I got back most kinds of beans, and recently, and to my delight, almonds.

Again, long story short. As long as I eat low fat, high fiber, the simpler the better, I'm good to go. Lots of steamed vegetables. Lots of tofu. Lots of bran crackers and wheat/spelt bread. I'm a runner. Carbs are my life. Bread is the single greatest culinary creation of all time. BRING ON THE BREAD.

So when I say "Beetle friendly" as I will over the course of this, I mean butter free, cream free, seed free, and 99% of the time oil free. I cook with a lot of vegetable purees, a lot of applesauce, and I will be the first to admit that it's more than an acquired taste. You gotta get used to dinners that taste "really" healthy. But once you do, it's not so bad. At this point my internal checklist is so innate that I don't think about it anymore. And my taste buds have gotten used to it. Once in a while something will sneak in, a restaurant will fail to tell me something or I'll misread an ingredient label. And then . . . well . . . have you ever seen a tv show or a movie where the character turns into a werewolf? It's kind of like that.

But for the record. Not a vegan. Team Gluten. Yay Carbs.

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