The Reluctant Raw Foodist
"I used to be a' foodie' and now I am a "foodist'"
Welcome to my health and wellbeing blog.
I’m not a raw foodist by choice. I was recently diagnosed as having a complicated autoimmune condition including severe Histamine Intolerance and a form of reactive arthritis. I have become hypersensitive to high histamine foods, pollen, dust and some everyday chemicals. My condition affects every area of my life.
I have Mast Cell Activation Disease (MCAD).
I was prescribed a low histamine diet and then a raw food diet to ease my symptoms and over the past 2 years I have overcome my reluctance to a new way of eating and living. I have been experimenting to combine the two diets and I have been learning how to eat a diet comprising mainly of low histamine raw fruit and vegetables and how to change the habits of a life time.
I am starting to feel healthier than I have ever been before. I have also lost 35 lbs in weight.
I will be sharing with you how I got here and I'll be exploring low histamine raw recipes, natural beauty products, how to cope with being "allergic to everything" and generally how to regain health and fitness and live life to the full despite my unusual condition!
Please feel free to message me with any suggestions, questions, or comments. I'd love to hear from you!
Everything I post is the property of its respective owner/creator unless stated otherwise. Everything will have a click-through link whenever possible. If you see something of yours that I have posted and would like me to take it down, please message me and I will remove it.
These are some ads for where I buy my coconut water and stuff like that :
(via lazygirlrunning)
The phone calls have stopped. The calls of concern have come to a halt. Your friends and coworkers eyes glaze over every time you speak of your “problems”. You can hear it in their voices. They’re just plain tired of you.
But when did it happen? Was it that last hospitalization that you had. Was…
No it isn’t just you. I call it “compassion fatigue” and it is very common. I was always the strong one helping others and then when I needed help it was different people, to those I was expecting, who stepped up.
Yes we are self absorbed to a greater or lesser extent- well at least I am or was. I think is understandable as we have to adapt to something huge in our lives which changes everything. We mourn the loss of our freedom, our mobility, our lifestyle,… whatever we have lost. We also have to adapt to changes imposed upon us. We also tend to forget that people forget us when they are taken up in their own worlds. It all takes time and if our illness is progressive we get worse and so we are always having to adapt. It is a vicious circle…
I have found dealing with my illness to be massive and exhausting. It took over my life as it was time consuming to say the least. Eventually I realised I could dominate the conversation and took to the strategy of emailing friends who did ask me out to tell them what had happened to me and what I could eat etc so I didn’t monopolise the discussion when I saw them.
I have lost a lot of my so called friends since I changed my diet and lifestyle. Always happy to still go out to eat with people but I suppose when your companion is eating salad and drinking water maybe you might feel uncomfortable about what you are eating. I don’t comment or criticise in any way as, after all, I used to eat and drink those things too, but I guess sadly for some people it is just not the same…
My friend Yasmina, aka The Low Histamine Chef has the same or a similar condition to me and she is always creating wonderful low histamine recipes. Take a look …..x
(via butbelieveme)
I prepare some fruit without thinking about it. Usually 3 or 4 fruits. Sometimes I add 3 or 4 nuts and a sprinkle of raw germinated oat groats or raw sprouted buckwheat, a dessert spoonful of seeds and a little coconut water to create a fruit salad. I love all the textures in the bowl. Other times I make a fruit smoothie. Sometimes I just eat a large piece of melon or I blend and drink it. Depending on the size and my appetite I might eat the whole thing.
I used to think that fruit could never fill me up. Now it does!
I have had several queries recently about how I gave up dairy:-
I knew this was going to be a biggy for me but I also knew instinctively that Dirk was right when he said he thought it was part of my problem.
It is somewhat ironic that all my early life I had point blank refused to eat any form of cheese apart from the odd bit of salty cheddar and to drink most milk products. Then in the last few years I had actually started to acquire a taste for cheese as an alternative dessert to sweet things and I had latterly become quite a connoisseur.
I was not a little resentful that I had to give up so many foods for the good of my health but I had started already to suspect that my favourite bread and cheese were causing me problems….
It was a great incentive (or not depending on how you look at it! ) that my body reacts so strongly to milk and cheese with rashes, diarrhoea, immense joint pain and other issues. I have to say that as I returned time and time again to eating a bit of cheese I found that these symptoms returned. You would think therefore it would be easy for me to give it up but, on that basis, we would all give up everything that is bad for us and we don’t, of course…
This is how I did it …
Yeah!
(via jayneysgotagun)
The performance yesterday was very good and I did not have any big mast cell problems although I could smell perfume all around me. I even managed to keep awake throughout the performance and on the very crowded train going home. Sudden overwhelming sleep is another of my symptoms and, in the past, I have been mugged on the train owing to being out for the count.
We ate at the Wild Food Cafe In Neal’s Yard London. I ate all raw food and managed to keep my histamine levels within a reasonable limit. Some joint pain this morning but nothing like the old days.
Today is my birthday but histamine levels will be kept down. I know from experience that if I eat over my histamine limit 2 days in a row I will be in agony over night.
True!
(via dependenceruinsyou)
Says it all! Unfortunately all medication has side effects and as we get sicker the drug companies get richer.
My mum was on a cocktail of some 18 different tablets. She has dementia. When I insisted she came off the tablets as she had diarrhoea constantly and was chewing her medication, she got better. She actually became my mum again for a while. The medication was making her worse.
The drug companies have no idea what happens in the body if one drug is mixed with another and yet that is how they are prescribed by doctors.
But not all meds are bad. Yes, it would be a great world if we didn’t have to take them, but that’s not the way it works. Good diet and exercise are healthy, but they can’t cure or prevent everything. A lot of people I know would either be dead or barely functional without those medications, including meds like Paxil for depression and things like methotrexate for autoimmune diseases (which is what I take).
Those pills saved me from getting much, much worse and actually let me live my life instead of laying in bed, in too much pain to get up at age 23. They can cause terrible side effects, but just eating well and taking care of myself is not going to stop my immune system from eating my body or my clinical depression from rearing its ugly head. It certainly can help, but it’s not a cure or treatment for serious diseases.
I can sympathize, to some extent, with both of these arguments. I think there are a lot of cases perhaps supporting the OP & this image, but it is *really* difficult to be someone with an incurable genetic disease & deal with a growing trend of people indicating that if I did XYZ, I’d be a lot healthier. Because honestly, I don’t have health insurance right now & don’t have access to palliative medicine. I was in my twenties when I took morphine daily, and that was the only way I could actually feel like a human being. Yes, it’s hardcore.
But you know what? I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, and apart from some ED relapse this last year, I eat the kind of carefully planned plant-based diet that could all but be used in brochures at dietitians’ offices. When my pain and injuries haven’t been as bad, I’ve done cardiovascular & body-weight exercises since middle school. I’ve never touched recreational drugs.
And I still have Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. I still developed osteoporosis in my early-mid twenties. I still have arthritis. I still have the vascular problems from EDS & the unrelated cardiovascular problems derived from a separate genetic disorder, Type II Familial Hyperlipidemia.
Being vegan helps. Some exercise, particularly PT/strength training, can help—when I dislocated a hip & impinged a nerve this last week, I was able to get myself on & off of the toilet by myself because I’d strengthened my arm muscles enough (the last hip injury this bad, in 2008, meant that I would have to get on my stomach and then sort of hug the toilet like I was going to puke and pull myself up from the front, but now my triceps are strong enough to do something sort of like a tricep dip on and off).
This is the reality of incurable illness, and if I ever got access to a doctor again, I would go back on the morphine and be able to read books & sometimes take walks & live my life without the constant anxiety & depression that come from unceasing pain & my inability to change that.
Yeah, morphine’s heavy stuff, and so is the rest of what I take.
And honestly, even if I wasn’t a strict vegetarian, even if I did drink or smoke or fail to exercise because I just plain didn’t want to and not because I was in too much pain, I would be equally deserving of pain management in the form of medication. Even drugs that have shitty side effects that cause meaningful improvement in quality of life are justifiable and worth it.
I know this isn’t the OP’s point, but this tangent is something really important to me, and as someone who, separate from my chronic illnesses, is often placed in social settings with other anti-drug/pro-lifestyle culture, I feel the need to clearly articulate that everything has its time and place, and I’m tired of being shamed because I have decided to take super hardcore painkillers (and other drugs) to manage my disease, and I’m tired of being told that if my doctors didn’t overmedicate me, I’d be better. My DNA is never going to change, and a degenerative illness means the best I can do is plateau—and I’m not the only one out there in this boat. It really hurts to have to constantly defend your choices when you’re already suffering, and it’s not just fellow patients—ill-informed clinicians unfamiliar with the realities of these diseases do it, too.
And it needs to stop.
Reblogging for commentary. My thoughts exactly.
I have an interesting problem in regards to medication. Things I have had all my life include depression/anxiety, insomnia, breathing issues, and some weird clotting and neuropathy illness that are easier explained that way then named.
The worst part though is probably not that I have these illnesses, but that medication has never really worked right on me.
I get side effects in a spectacular way. I get full blow replacement mock illnesses instead of a couple symptoms. I am almost always worse on meds than off, which is why I am currently one a whopping one prescribed medication, which is hormones for the cysts that kicked in at 13.
I never tried smoking or drugs, alcohol tastes gross anyway so why bother, my diet still has flaws but I am force limited on dairy, sugar, and fat by my body anyway so I think the worst thing I really do is salt? I have genetic cholesterol issues but it still hasn’t gone out of range for me.
So I’m still a mess because I haven’t found a treatment option that works in either of these yet. I get side effects to acupuncture. My opinion on this in the end is if it helps take it, if it doesn’t don’t. So far for me it’s mostly the latter and I hope I come across something with few enough added problems to warrant taking at some point.
I never say medication does not have a place and some can be life saving and indeed when Mum’s meds were revised (only after she was chewing them up and spitting them out at the carers, being violent, and having diarrhoea everywhere and smearing it all over the house), we added back in an anti inflammatory pain killer and and her melatonin to help her sleep. I would try ( if she will let me) to give her any medication that helps her, but my point is that, in my experience, doctors are often indiscriminate about what and how much is prescribed and even are dismissive of side effects.
Mum came off most of her meds and some of her personality returned and she became so much happier and calmer and stopped lashing out at all the carers. Her bowel function became normal and she stopped the smearing. She has been off the meds for 5 months now and I still have a care team looking after her. Believe me I wondered if they would all leave!
So, my concern is the indiscriminate prescription of drugs with no regard for the chemical cocktail that is being created.
I myself have weird adverse reactions to any medication I have tried. I have been using diet successfully to reduce my arthritis pain and other symptoms for some time now and I am even just now finding that I can reduce my sensitivity to chemicals by being really strict on my diet. Just experimenting with this now. The great thing about using diet is that I have a measure of control.
I have no idea whether I will be forced by my body to take medication in the future and I would not dream of criticising those who do. If I have to then then my problem will be finding medication that my body doesn’t immediately and violently reject.
I empathise with those feeling they have to justify their taking of medication. I am criticised all the time for my diet. People bring me books to show me that I going to be deficient in calcium or other nutrients (I get tested regularly). I am also challenged because I don’t look ill.
