In the last few days I was posting mostly about self-development topics that are pretty broad. Today I’ll write about something different: food allergies. I myself am someone who is quite affected by this topic and who took quite some time just accepting that I have to deal with those allergies in an appropriate manner. It all started about 2 years ago with a very nasty version of stomach flu. For 2 weeks I basically couldn’t eat anything without being completely sick and collapsing right where I was. After those two weeks of eating mainly apple mash and Brussels biscuits I tried eating normal things. And I felt very sick again. This time without the rather nasty stomach issues, but just in a way that I would feel dizzy, basically when I ate anything.
Even after a month I would feel really sick in the morning, terrible heart burn, and I would only manage to eat half my meal in the university canteen. It was just ridiculous and it seemed that nothing would help. I tried eating nothing but baby food for a while again, but now and then I would eat a yoghurt or have some normal food and it would start again. I remember one particularly annoying experience in the pub trying to eat hash browns and almost fainting. Back then I was also still drinking alcohol regularly – 1 or 2 glasses of beer / wine maybe once or twice a week. Right after almost fainting came food poisoning symptoms and I only just managed to get home without collapsing.
After a while I started to see some patterns in what caused such problems. It was mostly canteen food or when I was eating out. When I cooked something for myself it normally wouldn’t happen, unless I ate something really fatty or with lots of milk. My mum tried to convince me to take some natural medicine and I tried for a while, but I seemed to feel even worse.
One day I was sitting in a Japanese restaurant with one of my course mates and our block seminar tutor (in Germany we sometimes have 2 weekends of full-time classes instead of 14 weeks of only 1 1/2 hrs a week) and our tutor – a lovely girl – tried to order some Japanese ice cream. She went into a lot of detail and asked the waiter whether it was imported Japanese ice cream or European ice cream. Of course my course mate and I found that quite obsessive and asked why that is so important and she said: “Well, I can’t have milk or anything produced out of it, I’m lactose intolerant”. I wanted to know how she figured that out, because that seemed pretty random and she told me that she was in Japan for a while and there she didn’t have any problems, but after she came back she felt crap again, felt sick after eating and so on. So she went to the doctor and he said “One thing Japanese people almost never have is milk. Try not having milk, cheese, yoghurt or cream and see what comes out of it.” It actually worked for her! Now, of course I was impressed, because we had exactly the same symptoms. That same evening I threw out all milk products.
Ever since my condition was improving, at least I didn’t have any immediate symptoms anymore and as I found out a little later there was lactose in the natural medicine my mum wanted me to take. I experimented for a while, trying really evil stuff like drinking a glass of milk or eating something with added lactose and I would have the same symptoms again. There I was, having realized that I couldn’t have milk products at all. My main energy source seemed to be yoghurt and the university canteen at that time, yoghurt, alright that contains a little lactose, but the university canteen? Well, I investigated and found out that they bind their sauces with lactose. No wonder that I would almost faint after eating that!
It took some getting used to and some experimenting, but it seemed to get better a lot and I seemed to have it under control. The year after I was even healthy enough to go running and do some weight exercises and I achieved an awful lot at that time. After a while I was experiencing some setbacks though. My heart burn reappeared and I would feel sicker than ever in the morning. Then it would fade again and everything would be almost fine again. What I didn’t realize was that this was due to my strange eating habits. Sometimes I would try out something new and then eat a lot of stuff that is similar to the new food. Examples were semolina, couscous, a new type of muesli or a new kind of whole meal bread. I like experimenting with food, because old habits become boring after a while. I didn’t see that these waves of less energy and weird stomach reactions were connected to my food experiments and I thought I wasn’t sticking to my lactose-free diet enough. Lactose is fairly straight forward to handle – sometimes you know you can just about stand the effects of a chocolate bar with milk chocolate.
This year my lack of energy and the times when I was ill just became much more significant. It coincided with eating a lot of cereals instead of bread, because I really don’t like English bread. I was getting really sick of being ill all the time so I finally went to a doctor’s. Why didn’t I go earlier? Well, that’s due to a long history of migraine and problems with my metabolism – feeling crap in the morning was a big thing in my teenage years as well. I went to about 4 different doctors in my hometown and another 4 or 5 in the Düsseldorf area where I lived for about 6 years. None of them actually made any effort to help me. Regarding my metabolism I was told to drink coffee (?!) and for my migraine they just try to ease the symptoms with rather harsh pain killers.
I remember one day when the doctor urged me to take the pill right away so that he could see whether it helped and then afterwards I spent 2 hours trying to find my way home – the doctor was just down the street and I lived there for 10 years! Well, mostly they just told me to deal with my bad health and go complain to someone else. How successful would that type of doctor be in identifying the cause of my stomach problems?
At the time when I decided to see the doctor in the university health centre I was desperate though – I had been sick for 2 weeks and I was missing classes a lot, because I was too sick to go out of the house. I told the doctor all my symptoms – it took about 5 minutes of explaining I think – and he just said “Lactose intolerance sounds about right, but I think we better make a gluten test.” Of course I had done my homework – I knew about every cause stomach problems could have including weird bacteria and weird intolerances against sugars like fructose or lactose. The reason why I didn’t consider gluten allergy was that I didn’t want to have it! How very goal oriented of me! I knew that there was no cure for it, and that gluten free food was ridiculously expensive. Well, two weeks later my blood test came back positive and there you go, I can’t eat milk products and products out of crops! I knew that they had to do a bowel biopsy and that was what I was trying to avoid in the 2 years before!
In retrospect knowing the reason for all this suffering helped me a lot. Now I can’t only actively make a difference for my body, but I can also look forward to something. If you’re ill and you don’t really know whether it’s ever going to get better, it is pretty devastating – if you in contrast know that latest in 2 years you should be healthier than you ever were in your entire life, it makes a huge difference!
Just last week I actually got a reminder why I should be so obsessive about the food I eat. Accidentally I had gluten contaminated food, because Oatibix didn’t label their product properly. It is produced on the same production line as Weetabix and therefore is not safe to eat, but the product wasn’t labelled with “May contain gluten”, because oats were only quite recently declared as safe for people with coeliac disease. Sometimes I really can’t know whether a products is safe and I actually need to google it first before eating! Last week I wasn’t careful enough and I was so incredibly tired all week that I couldn’t concentrate at all. I can’t really imagine how I finished a degree with those kind of energy levels!
This might seem to be a severe limitation and I have to admit that it made me really inflexible in regards of holiday planning and even easy things like day trips become quite complicated, but after all, what am I supposed to do against it? It is a genetic disease and I just have to cope with it. My doctor said “Don’t be sad about it! You will learn so much about food that you could write books about it and you will probably eat healthier than most of the people you know!” and he is absolutely right. I am forced to eat healthily, because almost all processed foods contain ingredients that I can’t have. I usually get even more than my 5 fruit & veg a day! I cook every day and I discovered so many unusual ingredients that it makes me wonder what I ate before I had any food intolerance.
Even only my lactose intolerance made me quite obsessive about food, but now that I can eat even less of the stuff I normally ate (Pasta mostly, I love Italian food) I have to be even more creative if I’m not in a position to get gluten free foods on prescription. At the moment I am at the University of York and because there is no pharmacy on campus getting my prescription gets really tricky if I work from 9.30 to 5 in the university! Last week I learned a lot about potatoes and how lovely they are if they’re fresh!
The message I want to send out there today is that, if you have any stomach problems whatsoever – may it even only be occasional heartburn – then go see a doctor about it. Insist that he tests you on all bugs that can cause stomach problems and especially insist on the gluten blood test. Coeliac disease is the most common genetic disease, mainly because eating crops is a fairly young practice in human evolution – it has been around for only 15.000 years. Therefore there wasn’t enough time for evolution to completely adapt everyone on our beautiful planet to eating crops!
Even though coeliac disease is very common it has an incredible amount of cases where people just don’t know that they have it. The reason is that the symptoms in the less severe cases are rather unspecific like headaches, migraine, low energy levels, depression or bad teeth – all things that could stem from something completely different as well! Even if you only feel depressed quite often, go see your GP about a blood test, because if you actually have coeliac disease your depressions will just go away if you stop eating gluten. It would be a so bad to suffer through depressions without any reason!
In some countries – and especially in East Germany – it is almost impossible to find someone who would make that blood test for you. They are just not aware of the disease and its risks – cancer, osteoporosis, infertility. If a doctor refuses to make the blood test for you, quote the risks and be outspoken about how backwards his attitude is!
Do you have the lurking fear that you might be ill and don’t really act on it, because you are afraid or you don’t want to show weakness? If you have this fear and react towards it like that then read tomorrows post. I will tell you how I dealt with a possible life threatening situation, which in contrast to your lurking fear was a very realistic threat. Maybe telling you how a real threat feels like helps you to face your own unrealistic fears.
