Food Sensitivities

One major thing that sparked my interest in eating healthy was my realization that I do in fact have food sensitivities. I've mentioned this before, but I trialed a raw vegan diet for awhile. Once I came off it, I really noticed feeling inflamed if I ate dairy (specifically milk). I also noticed that if I ate stuff like bread that I'd feel a bit off and my blood sugar would spike. Same goes for anything with refined carbohydrates (eg. fried stuff, store bought desserts/candy, chips, crackers, etc).

Looking back on it, I'd always had the hugest problem with milk. I would have cereal and milk for breakfast every morning (as most normal people do), and in that there should be about 30-40 carbs. I would treat it as being 80 carbs, and my blood sugar would still go sky high after eating breakfast.

I also realized that as soon as I stopped eating the raw vegan diet, that my whole face inflamed. My eyes looked a thousand times smaller, I could barely see my cheekbones anymore, and I felt like I did when I was in the hospital and they pumped me full of 10 litres of fluid via IV. I just felt puffy all over.

So, I manned up and eliminated dairy from my diet entirely and cut back majorly on the refined carbs. Actually, let's be honest, it wasn't that hard. I felt so crummy and puffy and sick eating that stuff again, I was happy to be rid of it.

Now, here I am, still struggling with my blood sugar 'cause I'm "brittle," ya know? But so much less. It's completely insane and wonderful. It's also so great to not feel like my eyes are eternally squinting.

Just to back up what I'm saying about food sensitivities messing with diabetes: There was this whole period of time where one test result for being Celiac (gluten intolerant) came back slightly positive and my doctor was insisting that I needed to stop eating gluten because it must be causing all the problems with my blood sugar. Sorry mate, I'm not Celiac and I definitely don't react worse to gluten than anything else. Any grain in general (buckwheat and all those other substitutes included) are not my best friend, but I have just as much luck with oats (which have gluten) as I do with buckwheat (which doesn't have gluten).

So, how do you test for food sensitivities? The "proper" way is to eliminate everything that's a common food sensitivity (eg. nuts, gluten, dairy, etc) from your diet for 2 weeks and slowly introduce them back one by one and see if you notice a reaction of any sort. That's basically how I ended up realizing that I'm sensitive to certain things. But that can be a pain in the butt, and I believe that if I had been more aware of food sensitivities and more keen to notice what was happening with my body that I could've discovered what made me inflamed/spiked my blood sugar/didn't make my body happy by just being more aware of what I ate and how I felt. I believe that's something easy that anyone can do and should do (if they're interested). There's also some sort of pulse test that I'm less familiar with. You can feel free to look into that. It wouldn't work for me because my veins are really deep and I can never find my pulse, but yeah that's just me. If you notice something and don't want to give it up, you don't need to give it up. You've been living like that all along. It's just a little bit more information/awareness of your body. You can ignore it if you like. I still eat grains, because I love grains. I still eat refined carbs occasionally just 'cause I can't bear to never eat them ever again. I don't eat dairy as a hard-fast rule though, because of how strong the reaction is for me and because it involves intense animal cruelty. But yeah, it's really interesting to me how much better you can feel on a regular, healthy human level/how much diabetes can be affected by what foods you eat. And I've found it incredibly beneficial to be more aware of what does what to my body/blood sugar.