I have decided I want to tell a story. One that is personal.
After struggling with many health/self-esteem/image issues all my life, I am beginning to understand food. How it hurts us and how it heals us.
I’m recovering from and suffering from many things at the moment. Mostly, Interstitial Cystitis, eating disorders, and borderline alcoholism. I am going through the process of re-inventing my diet and battling this mostly misunderstood and often mis-diagnosed chronic illness with basic nutrition.
Every piece of food I put in my body is medicine at this point.
It hurts to drink lemonade, coffee, and soda. Apple cider vinegar makes me vomit. Wearing tight fitted jeans causes me so much pain I can’t walk. No riding bikes anymore or sitting cross legged so tightly your yoni can’t get any air. No more alcohol. That’s right, no more bloody mary’s, whiskey neats, white wines with seafood. No more tomato sauce, no more pizza because I’m lactose intolerant too. No more caffeine, decaf coffee or artificial sweeteners. No more chocolate. No more citrus or fruit juices like cranberry. No more soda, carbonation is generally bad. No more energy drinks or black tea.
Hydrate.
Learn how to take deep breaths all the time. Remember to relax especially when you feel like getting worked up. Meditate. Remain calm, all the time. Don’t stress.
I pee so many times in a day now I am a pro at it. Even more than when I was 6 and my best girl friend and I would race each other to see who could pee and finish first because at my house we had two bathrooms kinda close together. So I am grateful a night passes when I do not wake up to pee at least a few times.
My nervous system is out of whack, sometimes it sends me false signals about how full my bladder is. My bladder’s lining is too thin and sometimes even just a straw taste of booze at work (because of course, I’m a bartender) can create intense painful sensations in my abdomen. The flora in my gut are all messed up and I can hear and feel my stomach react to food most immediately because of how I’ve trained myself to monitor my sensitivities and reactions. The more I research this illness the more it becomes an umbrella term for many things that could be going wrong in a diet.
And my diet was very wrong for a long time and I believe that combined with the suggestion that I have found in certain writings (and generally as a belief of the mind-body-connection) that illness when stressful events occur is likely. Or when there is severe excitement, fight or flight response, etc. Our bodies generally tend to take care of us the best way it can. I can only imagine that I’m also experiencing a large portion of previously unresolved grief, fear, and anxiety in a physiological way.
Let me step back a few as well. . .
So, a long time ago, I was quite young and naive, I was very unhappy with myself and my body image and I was only 13 at the time. Because I was raised in a Southern home that was conservative but not traditional I was expected to eat the way that everyone around me ate. Black eyed peas cooked in fat back, fried chicken, greens cooked in more fat back, flaky buttery biscuits, gravy, sweet corn, and mashed potatoes. This was more of my life coming up than I would care to admit. I ate more starchy, bleached, refined, processed, and sad antibiotic rich chicken than I should multiplied by hundreds.
C’est la vie. That’s living in the south for ya. I was growing up in a small town where nothing happened, eating that way for so long (and research has confirmed strong connections to obese female children menstruating sooner because the extra body fat triggers hormones to release) I hit puberty hard and I grew breasts overnight. At 13 I suddenly had D size breasts and I did not understand where they had come from and neither did my mother. This extra baggage got me extra attention too. I spent more time agonizing over my appearance because of these large floppy pieces of flesh I hadn’t asked for yet. I was confused about sex and sexuality too. I felt that as no one had really ever conveyed comfort when talking to me about sex. I had no idea what it was really all about or what my body was meant to be for me (not just a tool for someone else).
Combine that lack of education and truthfulness in the American southern white middle class culture I was growing up in with all those hormones pumping through my body and we soon arrive at my destructive body-hate and helplessness regarding a solution.
I of course became sick in the head. I was overweight and I started restricting my diet over night. I became obsessed with reading nutrition labels and facts. I stopped drinking soda everyday. Ten pounds fell off. I stopped munching on Doritos which had been my daily snack at the young age of ten, eleven and twelve years old. More weight fell off.
Suddenly, I was eating less and less. I was getting attention. I was struggling to love myself though. I was withering away. In the course of a couple years I had quietly whittled myself away to 108 pounds from my previous 155 pounds. And I was only 5′3 or so. I criticized myself for every morsel that passed my lips and I thought that as long as I was disappearing it was what I wanted.
I started to get flack for being thin. Instead of earning the approval I was craving so badly from my peers I was suddenly receiving all this concern. No one would ever want me the way I was! Even when I tried so hard!
I binged ate and starved myself for the rest of high school, the last two years were the most self-destructive times for my body in other ways than restrictive eating. My best friend at the time was a part time cook and she always whipped up food that I couldn’t say no to and that was her intention. She probably saved me from wasting away on more than one occasion.
I proceeded to have a backwards relationship with my body in spite of finding yoga around my 19th year. I was taken with it and practiced it enough to feel some benefits but it would take me a couple more years to get my teacher certification.
I was washed up from a bad relationship that had ended so negatively I had given myself ovarian cysts with the amount of self-loathing I possessed. I was put onto birth control pills for the second time in my life. This time it was to prevent me from ovulating so I wouldn’t suffer from my middleschmertz. I was still upside down, struggling with self-love, my unhealthy relationship with my father whom I hadn’t spoken to in 6 years, and how to function in a world that wasn’t as kind and forgiving as I had once been led to believe.
I fell into another terrible relationship. Fast forward 5 1/2 years later, I finally have the courage to end the toxic relationship (about two months after I came off of birth control pills for good.) During that time, I suffered numerous indignities that I am still working on forgiving myself for letting happen. I cannot wrap my head around having this person in my life ever again. He's triggering, reminding me of the fights, verbal and physical altercations we’ve been in and a whole bunch of icky negative shit I don’t want to relive everyday.
So, as soon as I ended this relationship which I had considered my bedrock (as I have moved away from everyone I ever knew and everything familiar to the opposite side of the U.S. in search of my soul-happy spot with this person) I started to feel like I had lost a tremendous amount of weight off of my shoulders. I felt renewed and like my entire future had been swept clean for all this potential to unfold.
I started getting sick shortly there after. Perhaps I was always a little sick and never noticed. I think that is the case now, in hindsight. That for years I may have struggled with leaky gut, or dysbiosis or candidiasis and never knew it. I was drinking heavily during my toxic relationship and regularly binging on sugary foods at night.
Then this sickness started to plague me more and more frequently. I was still drinking as frequently but not as heavily and also having my 2-3 cups of coffee and other acidic goodies. My doctor and I struggled through the list of possibilities for months, taking holistic naturopathic solutions per my request. I eliminated the possibility that it was any number of other illnesses until we came to this one.
I elected not to have the super invasive and expensive testing procedure done to confirm this, instead I started researching interstitial cystitis religiously. I started paying attention to the reality of my illness and what triggered it. It was easy to deduce very quickly.
Once diagnosed, I put myself on the restriction diet. I simply couldn’t wrap my head around the other options at this point. The antibiotic route doesn’t seem wise for me given my history of 7 years of birth control pills. I can’t afford bladder retention therapy as often as it is recommended. I do not want to visit a hospital for wellness and I cannot imagine getting more sick. I have healed myself from ovarian cysts and other conditions. Thus I have decided that in spite of the chronic nature of this illness I am going to heal myself because I believe that it’s possible.
After all the research I’ve done and all the different nutritional philosophies I’ve read, I feel prepared to make this leap of faith. I have very little left to lose and my health is now in a grey zone. My family has a history of diabetes and high blood pressure. My personal history is riddled with self-deprivation, self-destructive actions, and harmful choices. I am shifting hard into a zone of creation now.
After spending so many years destroying more than anything else, I finally feel like I am circling back to creating. Creating habits that heal, creating space to be kind to myself and forgiving. Creating patience, compassion and understanding. Creating space for others and for myself.
Sustaining follows me next.
This is where I want to post about my journey with this illness and the way it impacts my life. I am a bartender, a massage student, a yoga instructor, and a lover. I’m so enchanted with my life in Oregon, my dog Vida and our morning walks, my partner and his infectious laughter and kind nature. I will share many different aspects of my life.
