Resistance

The children and I need to go on a rotation diet. I've known this for several months now, and have been putting it off. Isn't that ridiculous? Knowing what you need to do to be healthy, and then not doing it? It's a major issue for me.

In our family, we already eliminate (except for occasional cheating) the gluten, dairy, and soy that I know is harmful to me and my children. Many people with food allergies also find that it's helpful to rotate other common allergens (or, for some people, all of the foods that they eat): if you eat a food one day, you don't eat that food again for the following 3 days. The idea is to lower the overall allergic response in your body by not allowing problematic foods to continuously irritate your system.

Ally and I used a rotation diet for two months in 2007, and it was the best I have felt in years. I lost major weight and had energy to spare. Ally's allergy symptoms, which persisted despite a strict elimination, were almost entirely healed by the rotation, and we identified several other allergies that I didn't know about before. I felt so good that I got pregnant again, almost two years ago from today.

Unfortunately, I also have vivid memories of standing in my kitchen and crying almost every day of that diet. It was so hard. Having to restrict our intake so severely, making everything that we eat every day from scratch, not being able to rely on leftovers for the next day's meal . . . it is hard, hard, hard! So I've been resisting, for months now.

But I can't anymore. Ally's been having headaches (one of my most acute allergy symptoms) off and on all summer. Walker's allergic shiners just won't clear up, he's dealing with bowel discomfort, and the quality and consistency of his sleep is really deteriorating. And I feel like total crap. All day every day, sort of a cross between having the flu and being sore after a hard workout--even though neither is true. So now I'm going to stop writing, go sit in a hot Epsom salt bath, and do some menu planning. And sigh--I just sighed out loud. Luckily, I know this time the work is worth it.