Coping With Medical Diets

In March of 1996, my doctor put me on a diet like this:

• No dairy (that’s milk, cream, cheese, yoghurt, etc.)
• No yeast (bread, among other things)
• No gluten (that’s wheat, oats, rye and barley)
• No caffeine (tea, coffee, cola, chocolate)
• No eggs
• No MSG (lots of Asian food, plus things like stock cubes, savoury crackers)
• No preservatives (smallgoods, sausages, lots of stuff…)
• Only minimal amounts of sugar and fats

Now, that sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it!! For me, it only reduced about 10% of my aches and pains, but it cured about 2/3 of my severe gastric symptoms (nausea and stuff) and helped a lot with mood swings. Given that – at the time – it was almost the only thing I’d ever found that helped, I thought it was great! It took some getting used to, and I was lucky to have my family around to help me. Since then, at various times I’ve had to restrict various other things in my diet. At some points I’ve been able to eat absolutely anything I want, other times the restrictions have been very onerous.

So by now I’ve had a lot of experience with medically prescribed food restrictions. I’ve developed a list of things that I try to always do when I get new restrictions. These things help me to figure out what I can and can’t eat, and arrange things so it’s actually feasible to stick to the limitations without feeling like I’m in food-prison. Here’s my list:

1. Know exactly why you’re doing this. Make a list of the symptoms that are helped when you eat right, how much of a difference it makes you feel. It’s really important to be motivated or you’ll just eat whatever, but getting motivated to eat ‘weird stuff’ can be a challenge! Read your list whenever you need reminding (stick it on the wall?)
2. Get an ‘allergy-free’ recipe book or another comprehensive source that’s relevant to your food limitations and read through it to start the ideas flowing. You can also visit websites such as http://www.FoodYouCanEat.com/ which have recipes tailored to different allergies on them. This will help you to right away build up a list of recipes that don’t contain foods you can’t eat.
3. Go and talk to a nutritionist or dietician, a health food shop person or a friend with allergies about alternatives to things you can’t eat. Websites such as http://www.FoodYouCanEat.com/ may also have lists of these.
4. If you like cooking, then ask about different sort of flours and alternatives to other basic ingredients you can’t have. You can get gluten-free wheat flower, rice flour, buckwheat flour and all sorts of other “weird” stuff which will help you cook.
5. Sit down with a bit of paper (or your computer), the recipe books and websites and all your other resources. Put on your imagination hat and write a list of ever single meal or food you can think of that you CAN eat! Things that I thought of for the set of restrictions above, for example, included:
   • Rice bubbles with rice-milk on them for breakfast
   • Corn-bread toast
   • Corn-pasta with tomato-based sauce
   • Just about any sort of stir-fry
   • Vegetarian lasagne with corn-pasta sheets
   • Most sorts of BBQs
   • Kebabs
   • Salads with homemade dressing
   • Muffins, pancakes, pikelets and biscuits that I’ve made
   • Fruit salad
   • Homemade jelly (that’s American Jello) for specials (it’s got lots of sugar but not much else)…
6. Make sure your list includes alternatives for your comfort foods, and quick snacks that you can keep around. If you’re feeling grumpy/upset or hungry you’re more likely to make bad decisions about what to eat. Help yourself to make good decisions at those times by having thought ahead.
7. As much as possible given your living situation, remove temptations (foods you can’t eat, especially ones you really like) from the house or at least from the kitchen. If you have a family this may not be possible, but even a little bit will help you – obviously I couldn’t expect a family to stick with me on a diet like the one above but they might be able to share some of the restrictions without much hardship. If you’re the family’s cook then you can make meals where some parts are shared and you just make yourself an alternative for parts of the meal you can’t eat with them. If you live with just 1-2 other people they may be willing to share the restrictions, especially if they’re not hugely onerous. Ask!
8. Recruit your family or whoever you’re living with to support you. Make sure they know your limitations (I keep mine on a list on the front of the fridge) and what benefits you get from sticking to the diet. Ask them to support you in eating right. If you want to, you can also ask them to call you on it if they spot you eating something you shouldn’t be eating. Ask them if they’d be willing to try any new meals or alternatives to old favourites that you’ve thought up. Ask them if they have any ideas for more things to go on your lists.
9. Find a support group of people who are on the same or a similar limited diet. On the internet now, this is much easier than previously! Just put the name of your restriction into Google and see what comes up. Being able to share your woes and brainwaves and cooking failures and successes with people going through the same thing can really be helpful for motivation.

For me it was definitely worth sticking to the diet from 1996. If I ate something that wasn’t on it (say, a slice of pizza) then I was guaranteed to get mood swings, stomach cramps and the rest of the CFS symptoms would get worse also. Of course I fell off sometimes and eat stuff (like that pizza!), but the nice thing about this sort of diet is you haven’t lost anything by stopping. You can just pick up again and you start feeling better again.

I found that the ‘make a list of things you CAN eat and put it somewhere that you see it often (like the fridge door!)’ part was very important. When you first start you keep feeling ‘argh, I can’t eat ANYTHING!’ which isn’t true, and having some reminder of all the stuff you CAN eat is important.

The other most important thing is that once you’ve found stuff you can eat, make sure they’re easily available in the house… otherwise it’s too tempting to eat something that is easily available!