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requiemsFor the last two months or so, I've been having really bad problems with food.
This is not really unusual. ME does this to you. Hell if we'll ever know why ME does this to you because real research when??, but, because your body is basically shutting down and dying very very slowly it pulls out more and more intolerances and comorbidities as time goes on. This includes food related ones.
Right now I'm a year out from gallstones surgery. With gallstones surgery the optimal recovery that the NHS website tells you is, all will be groovy within a few weeks and you can eat anything you want immediately: but the reality is most people tend to take six months before their body starts adapting and they can start eating anything other than the diet they had prior to surgery.
Unfortunately I, as a person with ME, have horrendous recovery time. I know this from PEM. I know this from how long it takes bruises from bloodtests to fade away because only experienced phlebotomists can draw blood from my veins. I know this whilst qualified health professionals tell me I'm young and healthy (lmao) and that I should recover fine, because ME isn't a majorly debilitating illness that heavily restricts my life or anything (uh huh). They left my body in such a state for two years prior to surgery with constant pain and nausea that it's going to take many years for it to get back to where it was, if it ever does.
I've started adding a few foods back in here or there to see how it reacts. I've recently, in the last month or so, mostly cut my fibre supplements after discovering they weren't necessary all the time anymore (they sometimes are), so it is clearly now making an effort to adjust. And then my body also started rejecting pretty much every food I've been subsisting on for three years.
This is a bad thing to coincide with. Figuring out which is x or y or the wildcard of "it's probably also menstrual" is not really easy, tbh.
I really cannot emphasise how much I despise food and eating at the best of times but fine body. Sure. I don't drink fizzy drinks, alcohol, don't eat meat, no dairy but one hard cheese only. I cut likely culprits like wheat and gluten, and that didn't work, so elected to go back to basics of just two ingredients for meals that I make for myself and working my way up again until I figured out what the specific thing it suddenly despised was.
Unfortunately the answer fucking sucks, because it's tomatoes.
Tomatoes. That I eat. In everything. That I have eaten my whole life, even in my "I will not and never will eat fruit and vegetables" stage. I will eat chilli or bolognese every day for weeks and never get bored of it. Those tomatoes.
Lmao, says my body.
Thankfully the symptoms are an intolerance over an allergy so it may only be temporary. It's not nightshades, only tomatoes. It doesn't care a whit about potatoes. Eat them taters, we still love 'em, for now. That tomato upset only happens five or so hours after eating it, lasts a few more with discomfort, it stops, blah blah. But. Do you know how many foods have tomatoes in them. Pretty much everything. It is so. Annoying. To cut out tomatoes for a few months to see if you can eat them again. And not to mention the disinterest I have with everything else that I don't have with tomatoes.
It also might not necessarily be tomatoes, but histamine from leftovers, because in my testing I did notice it cared less about meals I'd frozen and defrosted. I'll test his again later in a couple of months.
My body really likes making it difficult.
But wait, there's more! It's also decided it can't eat onions. I know this from the way my abdomen feels like it's burning a full 18 hours after eating them, which it last did on Christmas Day, when I ate onions then too. This is annoying, not only as I had to expend spoons to cook a meal from scratch that I now cannot eat any more of but because it was an easy filler for vegetables. I actually think the reaction it's developed to onions is worse than tomatoes. That's cool, at least it can still eat beans... right?
Right??
(It can't.)
Well, I can get some of my five a day another way, surely. Salad options are awful right now because it's winter and everything is dire, so I've been eating cold mushy peas for lunch (needs must) and it cannot possibly be upset about that too, right?
Right?????
(It's upset about those too.)
So here I am, the day before groceries, sadly swapping food out because I can't eat tomatoes. My body really said "no vegetables and this time I MEAN IT". I really, really hope it doesn't develop aversions to asparagus and baby corn or carrots in the intervening time due to eating more of those.
One of these days I really will switch to solely eating fucking soup, lmao.
This is not really unusual. ME does this to you. Hell if we'll ever know why ME does this to you because real research when??, but, because your body is basically shutting down and dying very very slowly it pulls out more and more intolerances and comorbidities as time goes on. This includes food related ones.
Right now I'm a year out from gallstones surgery. With gallstones surgery the optimal recovery that the NHS website tells you is, all will be groovy within a few weeks and you can eat anything you want immediately: but the reality is most people tend to take six months before their body starts adapting and they can start eating anything other than the diet they had prior to surgery.
Unfortunately I, as a person with ME, have horrendous recovery time. I know this from PEM. I know this from how long it takes bruises from bloodtests to fade away because only experienced phlebotomists can draw blood from my veins. I know this whilst qualified health professionals tell me I'm young and healthy (lmao) and that I should recover fine, because ME isn't a majorly debilitating illness that heavily restricts my life or anything (uh huh). They left my body in such a state for two years prior to surgery with constant pain and nausea that it's going to take many years for it to get back to where it was, if it ever does.
I've started adding a few foods back in here or there to see how it reacts. I've recently, in the last month or so, mostly cut my fibre supplements after discovering they weren't necessary all the time anymore (they sometimes are), so it is clearly now making an effort to adjust. And then my body also started rejecting pretty much every food I've been subsisting on for three years.
This is a bad thing to coincide with. Figuring out which is x or y or the wildcard of "it's probably also menstrual" is not really easy, tbh.
I really cannot emphasise how much I despise food and eating at the best of times but fine body. Sure. I don't drink fizzy drinks, alcohol, don't eat meat, no dairy but one hard cheese only. I cut likely culprits like wheat and gluten, and that didn't work, so elected to go back to basics of just two ingredients for meals that I make for myself and working my way up again until I figured out what the specific thing it suddenly despised was.
Unfortunately the answer fucking sucks, because it's tomatoes.
Tomatoes. That I eat. In everything. That I have eaten my whole life, even in my "I will not and never will eat fruit and vegetables" stage. I will eat chilli or bolognese every day for weeks and never get bored of it. Those tomatoes.
Lmao, says my body.
Thankfully the symptoms are an intolerance over an allergy so it may only be temporary. It's not nightshades, only tomatoes. It doesn't care a whit about potatoes. Eat them taters, we still love 'em, for now. That tomato upset only happens five or so hours after eating it, lasts a few more with discomfort, it stops, blah blah. But. Do you know how many foods have tomatoes in them. Pretty much everything. It is so. Annoying. To cut out tomatoes for a few months to see if you can eat them again. And not to mention the disinterest I have with everything else that I don't have with tomatoes.
It also might not necessarily be tomatoes, but histamine from leftovers, because in my testing I did notice it cared less about meals I'd frozen and defrosted. I'll test his again later in a couple of months.
My body really likes making it difficult.
But wait, there's more! It's also decided it can't eat onions. I know this from the way my abdomen feels like it's burning a full 18 hours after eating them, which it last did on Christmas Day, when I ate onions then too. This is annoying, not only as I had to expend spoons to cook a meal from scratch that I now cannot eat any more of but because it was an easy filler for vegetables. I actually think the reaction it's developed to onions is worse than tomatoes. That's cool, at least it can still eat beans... right?
Right??
(It can't.)
Well, I can get some of my five a day another way, surely. Salad options are awful right now because it's winter and everything is dire, so I've been eating cold mushy peas for lunch (needs must) and it cannot possibly be upset about that too, right?
Right?????
(It's upset about those too.)
So here I am, the day before groceries, sadly swapping food out because I can't eat tomatoes. My body really said "no vegetables and this time I MEAN IT". I really, really hope it doesn't develop aversions to asparagus and baby corn or carrots in the intervening time due to eating more of those.
One of these days I really will switch to solely eating fucking soup, lmao.
