This piece was originally posted on Creaky Joints last year, and explains a lot of why I loathe all the faddy diets that are out there, and provides a bit more context for my post earlier this week about starting the 5:2 regime to try and lose the weight I haven't been able to shift, despite a basically healthy diet.
Dragon Dad’s chiropractor, when DD asked
if there was anything he felt he could do that might be useful for me with my
rheumatoid arthritis: “Well, it all starts with diet. She shouldn’t be eating
any nightshades, wheat, dairy or drinking any red wine. They all cause
inflammation.”
A well meaning, but ill-informed
friend: “I have a friend who’s vegan, and he says if you eat vegan, your RA
will be cured.”
From another friend: “I hear that
the paleo diet is doing great things for people – maybe if you ate paleo, you’d
get better.”
And then there’s the friend who’s
both vegan and anti Western medicine, who keeps sending me stuff about diets
and alternative medicines, via email, Facebook, and whenever we actually see
each other – which means he says all sorts of negative things about my skim
milk latte…among other things!
And so on…and on….and ON…
I’ve had RA for twenty-three years
now. I didn’t ask to be sick. I don’t like being sick. I’ve been a compliant
patient. I’ve also tried all sorts of ‘diets’, because why the hell wouldn’t I,
if there was a chance they might help?
Now that my RA is no longer mild,
I’ve had a whole bunch of people come out of the woodwork and have another go
at converting me to this or that ‘miracle’ diet. Then I got diagnosed with IBS
(Irritable Bowel Syndrome) as well, and had the gastroenterologist telling me
that he’d like me to try the FODMAP diet. I sat reading the list of ‘forbidden’
foods on his printout, and my stomach sank…
You see Dragon Dad is a bit of a
fitness nut. He was an elite athlete and has never really lost the drive to be
as fit and strong as possible. These days, that is mostly focused on cycling,
and he’s taken up endurance riding, after a career as a track cyclist. Part of
his motivation to get back on the bike was that he’d decided he’d got a bit
heavier than he wanted to be, and coming up to his 40th birthday, he
decided that he HAD to lose weight. He tends to pick up on the latest diet fads
pretty quickly and it can all get a bit extreme. So he began a series of
different diet plans, all designed to work miracles, so by default, I ended up
eating them alongside him.
That meant I got to try paleo, and
another one that was very similar but more restrictive (I can’t remember what
that was called), and then there was the whole delete ALL carbs thing. It
didn’t help that I’d stacked on the weight, courtesy of prednisone, so I also
wanted to lose weight, so I let myself be dragged willy-nilly along with him.
Here’s the thing: NONE of those
diets have changed a darned thing about my RA. Not one of them. Not even a little
bit. In fact, some of them seemed to exacerbate certain things – paleo, for
instance, given that since my year as a vegetarian I don’t eat a lot of meat
any more, left me with constant indigestion, and gut upsets. The fact that it
was remarkably similar to what was allowed on the FODMAP diet my
gastroenterologist had strongly suggested concerned me enormously.
Eventually, I got fed up. I got SO
tired of being told what to eat by every second person I encountered. WHAT is
it about being sick makes people think they have a right to tell you what to
do, in a way I’m sure they don’t with well people?!
I went back to eating instinctively.
I calculated a reasonable average calorie allowance per day that would help
with weight loss, allowing for my fluctuating ability to exercise. I ate within
that. I ate my toast for breakfast – a boutique bakery bread with soy beans and
quinoa that’s low GI and gives me a massive protein hit, regardless of what I
put on it. I kept eating pulses and other grains that also help me maintain a
healthy protein intake, even though I don’t eat a lot of meat. I kept up my
dairy, because I’m a milk drinker, I love cheese and yogurt, and I DON’T want
to add osteoporosis to my list of diagnoses. And, I kept racking up enormous
bills at the greengrocer – bigger sometimes than the supermarket bill. I don’t
eat junk food – I don’t like it. I don’t have a sweet tooth, so my sugar intake
is well balanced. I DO eat chocolate – not much, and when I do it’s good
quality dark chocolate. I do indulge in a moderate amount of alcohol
occasionally. Without intending to, my regular eating plan is probably closest
to what’s being marketed as the Mediterranean Diet.
My RA got NO worse. OMG – I’m eating
dairy, some red meat, wheat (GLUTEN…), and what do you know, my RA hasn’t lost
the plot! My IBS got better – I still have flare ups with that, but they’re
milder and of shorter duration.
There are a LOT of articles out
there pushing this or that diet at chronically ill people. Most of those
articles call for you to buy a book or DVD to learn more. Most of them tell us
that if we adhere to the diet, religiously, we’ll be cured.
Don’t believe it.
Some people DO find that certain
symptoms ease if they eat a particular way. It could be that without knowing it,
they had sensitivities to some things and eliminating them has helped them feel
better.
In conversations with some people, I
found out that prior to really looking at their food, they’d been eating a lot
of packaged, and pre-prepared foods, so cutting those out had made an enormous
difference to how they were feeling – which made sense, since they were no
longer eating all the preservatives and other additives, let alone the amount
of salt and sugar. Convenience aside, I can’t honestly see how all that stuff
could ever make you feel good!
My bottom line, after all my
experiences with different diets, has been that there is no one way that works
the same for everyone. For me, what works is to eat fresh, local, seasonal
produce. Leave the packets on the supermarket shelves. Eat small meals – so
many of us eat WAY more than is necessary. Drink lots of water. DON’T eliminate
whole food groups unless you have a sound medical reason to do so – ie,
eliminating gluten if you’re a diagnosed Celiac. And, most importantly of all,
listen to your body. Pay attention to the times you feel bad after eating, and
see if there’s something that regularly upsets you and drop that from your
diet. That makes much more sense to me than listening to a bunch of people
pushing extreme diets who are, more than anything else, out to make money.
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