Friday, November 30, 2012

Going With My Gut: Instinctual Eating

Since going on my healing diet and getting more in tune with my body, I am sometimes surprised by the things that I crave and the things that I'm now adverse to eating.

As anyone knows who has gone on a diet that cuts out nearly all processed foods and grain, your palate begins to change. Getting rid of those unhealthy food addictions (like gluten, which activates the same part of your brain the opiates do) opens the door to new cravings, ones that aren't necessarily based on addiction, but rather what nutrients your body needs to eat that day. Doing an elimination diet and keeping a food diary really makes you tune-in to what your body is telling you. I've discovered it's actually quite intelligent, and quite LOUD when it likes or does not like something. And since this diet I'm on has totally reversed so many of my terrible health conditions, I now listen with respect.
I remember being astonished one day when I actually craved sweet potato. I had previously made myself eat my veggies, and liked them, but never craved them like I would a bag of chips. It was an exciting development.

I starting thinking about all this last night while I was munching on chicken. After eating a piece, I found myself at my kitchen counter, picking at the chicken carcass. What I always do now is instinctively gnaw on the ends of the bones, scrape the inside for bits of organ meat, and munch on skin and interior fat bits. I look, and feel, a tad bit like a rabid animal. The part of my mind that has been influenced by the anti-fat culture often chastises me while I do this. We've been taught that the only healthy part of the chicken is the dry white meat breast with no skin (or, when I was vegan, that the entire chicken was poison). In actuality, the muscle meat is the least nutritious part of the animal. I eat the flesh too, of course, but I always eat fat with my meat.

I do, honestly, feel a bit like someone who is still starving. I think this is probably because for at least 10 years I was technically starving without knowing it. My gut wasn't absorbing my food very well, and I wasn't eating a nutrient-dense diet, so even though I ate constantly, I still became emaciated, and the inflammation and nutrient deficiencies were eating up my brain, spine, and soft tissues. Now I feel like my body is trying to make up for it. And what does it want more than anything else? Animal fat! (sounds gross, huh? this really is a former vegan here... never would have thought I'd be writing a blog entry about craving animal fat in a million years...)

One of my favorite things to do right now is to research the biological underpinnings of my food cravings and aversions. I've really stepped away from eating what I think I should (what a diet dogma or book tells me I should eat) and instead am just listening to what I like to eat. The surprising thing is, my body really does seem to know what it's doing. I keep finding that my instincts are totally right.

One of the main reasons I went totally grain free is that after my initial elimination diet, my body freaked out when I ate rice or corn. Intellectually, this made no sense to me, as technically those grains are supposed to be gluten free. The more research I did, the more I discovered that ALL grain has gluten, and all of it triggers antibodies. So my body, not my mind, turned out to be right.
Coffee, too, used to give me brain fog that felt like a mild form of being glutened. So I stopped drinking it, and now I keep bumping into research about how coffee activates gluten antibodies in GF sensitive folks. Again, my body was right!

I know what's good for me to eat too. When I was little, whenever my mom would bake a chicken, I would always go right for the liver. That was just the most delicious part to me. (don't say "eew!") Now I know that the internal organs are actually the most nutritious part of the animal, and liver is both an essential and traditional food for babies and children.

Lately I've also been eating a lot less fruit. I've never particularly liked citrus fruit especially, but made myself eat it sometimes because it's supposed to be healthy. The funny thing is, I also have a topical allergy to citrus, so I might actually have an internal one as well (I'm too cheap to order a test...)
I was a bit worried at this dietary leaning of mine, if I don't eat citrus, aren't I missing some important nutrients, like vitamin C?? Well, you can actually get a lot of vitamin C from vegetables and, *gasp!* even meat. My love of green veggies and cauliflower has saved me there. I drink liquid chlorophyll and nettle infusion everyday, and I LOVE my sauteed greens. (I'm going to go make some kale right now actually...)
So instead of making myself eat fruit everyday, like I used to, I'm going with my gut and only eating it when I want. And forget fruit juice! That stuff is so sugary, it freaks out my system when I drink it.

Then there's cheese and yogurt... not so popular with vegan or paleo folks. But I've discovered, after years of thinking I was lactose intolerant, that I can eat goat and sheep's milk just fine, but not cow's milk due to a cow casin sensitivity. (Casin is the protein in milk, lactose is the sugar, and it's molecularly different in different animals. Cow casin is almost identical to wheat gluten in composition.)
My doctor told me to avoid all dairy on my gut healing diet, and I did, which was easy, because of the vegan thing. But after a few months I stared to randomly crave it. I hadn't eaten cheese in years prior to that, so I had no idea why I wanted it so badly. But instead of stifling my instinct, I listened to it. Oh man, now I love sheep and goat cheese and yogurt!
To look at the healthiness of this food instinct, I've been doing research on milk products of various kinds, and what I've discovered is that it is, actually, totally healthy for some people, given you are not drinking terrible factory farmed hormone milk, and as long as you are not intolerant to it. Raw milk and cultured milk are perhaps the best way to consume is as well. (it doesn't seem to cause cancer, either.)
Our ability to eat the milk of another animal is an amazing evolutionary adaptation that's quick development provided an much needed extra source of nutrients for part of the world's population. My northern European ancestors ate lots of dairy, heck, my grandparents even owned a cattle farm. My body seems to like it, and that's the most important part.
For more info on the health issues around milk, this is a wonderful article.

I know I technically call the diet I'm eating right now "paleo-esque" and I link to a lot of paleo diet research, but, I don't feel married to that dietary definition. I think it's a good inspiration. I'm in no way interested in getting all dogmatic about it, like some people like to (having silly arguments about what is more caveman-like is a waste of time in my eyes!) So I happily eat things on a regular basis that aren't "paleo."

I also crave chocolate like nobody's business. Which, actually, is not such a bad thing. I eat dark chocolate, soy-free and GMO free. Chocolate is actually both rich in antioxidants and high in magnesium. Given that I have a persistent magnesium deficiency, it makes sense that I crave it. (okay, this is an addictive one too... and I know, SUGAR! not so good... but a chunk of chocolate every day ain't really that bad. really.)

Again, this is all about dietary instinct. I'm glad that I've learned to listen to my body, and feel the different signals it gives me about everything in my life, including my diet.

One of my big "ah ha!" moments after going gluten free was two days into it when I ate a carrot. I suddenly realized that after eating it, I had *more* energy and felt good! This was totally weird for me. Food never gave me energy before, and once I gave-up the horrible life-sapping gluten, I could actually feel it. And now I know that feeling, so when I eat a wonderful meal, like bone broth veggie soup with a glass of coconut water, I feel AMAZING afterwards, and that lets me know, more than any research on any medical website, that I'm eating the right things.




On this note, I also just found this awesome video on the importance of animal fat (of course!)

It's a great watch, I highly recommend it.

http://vimeo.com/10533993#


More references:

http://towncenterwellness.com/learning-center/vitamins-and-mineral-info/

http://paleodietlifestyle.com/fatty-meat-potatoes-dairy-and-paleo-2-0/

http://www.westonaprice.org/childrens-health/feeding-babies

http://blog.cholesterol-and-health.com/2010/11/sweet-truth-about-liver-and-egg-yolks.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/gluten-what-you-dont-know_b_379089.html