In the beginning I was in denial. We’ve established that. (See the earlier post titled “Tears and Fears.”)   The denial phase lasted for a good three or four years. It began with delivery of a 9 pound 5 ounce baby boy born ten days early and a stressful job change soon after returning from maternity leave. Even though I have a big ol’ soft spot for fat babies, I’m not bragging when I tell you his chunky monkey weight. This is an integral piece of the puzzle…or so I thought.

Whether you are a parent or grandparent or aunt or uncle or if you’ve ever even seen a baby in the grocery store you’re probably aware of the travel systems used to cart said infant from place to place. Travel systems are one of the modern wonders of the world for one simple reason: you can maintain your busy, active lifestyle and drag the child from pillar to post all while not breaking your granny’s one rule of parenting. You know the one… “Don’t ever wake a sleeping baby!!!” And thanks to the travel system, if your baby can sleep through the opening and closing of doors and turning the engine on and off, you are golden! That famed carrier allows your baby to sleep anywhere AND as an added bonus, you throw a blanket over that sucker and it keeps little hands out of their face. And when I say little hands, I really mean those people that come up to you at the grocery store and want to touch your baby during flu season.   Don’t get me started.

When you have a normal size baby who eats a normal amount, the travel system is a functional and useful piece of baby equipment. When you gave birth to a toddler who eats like Porky the Pig every couple of hours and you’re putting rice cereal in his bottle at 6 weeks old to get him to go longer between feedings than those couple of hours, the travel system quickly becomes the bane of your existence, a literal thorn in your side. Men make it look easy. They sling those things around like juggling tennis balls. Some women have it figured out too. But for me, I would hate to see what an x-ray of my hips, shoulders and low back looked like during the timeframe that The Boy was cruising around in his carrier. If you’ve never picked one up, ask someone to try it…don’t go asking to pick up some stranger’s baby and freak a post partum momma out more than she is already, but seriously, ask your friend if you can pick it up…and walk around a little.   If the baby is asleep, borrow a couple of bags of sugar and throw in there. Two five pound bags will do. Then pick it up to chest height if you, like me, refuse to embrace the minivan revolution (SUV Momma right here), and pop it in and out of the car a few times. And then drag out the twenty-pound stroller and snap it into place a few times. Try your hand at figuring out exactly how the carrier is supposed to clip into a grocery cart. I’m going to go ahead and give you a freebie here…it doesn’t. Just admit defeat and put the carrier in the basket of the cart and carefully pack the groceries around it. If you have a long list, buy your dry stuff first, check out, take it to the car, change the kid’s diaper because we all know that grocery stores bring out THE best in babies, THEN go BACK into the grocery store, say a prayer that the kid will last for you to buy your produce and refrigerated items, check out AH-GAIN, kindly accept the help out to your car this time and go home completely exhausted from what was once a quick errand that you took for granted.

All of this to say that the pain (and denial) started the reasons as to why I was in so much pain were incredibly obvious: 1. I’d just had a baby, 2. the post partum period had never agreed with me, 3. the baby was huge, 4. carrying him in a travel seat had jacked up my body and finally 5. the stress at work was super high. If I could sit down with the woman I once was I would be brutally honest with her and say, “Honey, the travel seat ain’t helping but your list is in reverse order… stress is your main problem and the travel seat is your most minor difficulty.”  But I was young and dumb…31, to be exact.

The denial lasted for a few years while I saw an orthopedist, chiropractor, physical therapist and massage therapist. Can we just pause here to discuss how massage therapists are magical beings? My fibro has always been characterized by joint stiffness, trigger points and ropey muscle knots. We moved to Georgia from our home state of North Carolina three years into this process and one of my biggest worries was that I had not one but TWO amazing massage therapists in NC (listen, when they’re good they’re also in demand so a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do) and we were moving to a place where we knew no one. How in the world would I find a massage therapist that could do the deep tissue work that was required to keep me moving??? This would be impossible. IM-FREAKING-POSSIBLE. And the first couple I tried…I can’t even…if I wanted my back tickled I would recruit my husband. I needed a therapeutic massage. I finally found my magical massage therapist friend here and she became just that, my friend. She is amazing and awesome. She teaches massage therapy classes at a local college. For Pete’s sake, she made my husband’s 40^th birthday cake (told you they’re magical). She gets it. She knows how to keep me moving. I don’t see her near as often as I like but I have added some additional treatments so I have to balance them all and the time that it takes to go to all these appointments every week.  There are only so many hours in a day.   With that said, if my resources of time and money were unlimited I would make an appointment to see her every day for an hour and a half for two straight weeks and I bet she’d have me captaining a water ballet team!

Fastforward a couple years… still running from my diagnosis…while I remained with the company where I’d worked for a over ten years, two of those working remotely in GA, an opportunity came along that I couldn’t refuse.   Changing from working remotely to going into an office, I worked with a woman who became familiar with my crazy symptoms and struggles. One day she mentioned that she had a friend in Nashville who was a semi-retired chemical engineer who had gone back to school to study nutrition and suggested that I email him. I had nothing to lose and everything to gain at this point. I was in so much pain. I could use a bunch of analogies and clichés to explain but probably the most vivid example was putting away dinner plates. I reached the point that I had to split the stack of dinner plates because I couldn’t pick up the FOUR that I removed from the dishwasher and put them up in the cabinet at shoulder level. I was 35 years old and I couldn’t put away FOUR DAMN DINNER PLATES at once.

To say that the chemical engineer turned nutritionist was bit of an odd bird might be an understatement. His knowledge interested me though…he had an analytical nature but was frank. He didn’t call it an elimination diet because the word diet would have made me run like Forrest Gump but he told me that I needed to clean up my diet. Now.

I grabbed my pen to jot down some notes and our exchange went something like this…

“And when you say ‘clean up my diet’ exactly what would that look like if I were to entertain this radical idea?”

“For thirty days you would stop eating dairy, sugar, artificial sweeteners, soy, corn, potatoes, all red meat, pork, gluten, some acidic fruits, all processed food and the only meat you can have organic chicken and wild caught fish.”

Crickets. Thinking. Give me a minute.

“Uhm, ok.” Thinking to myself that this textbook crazy nutritionist person had obviously lost his ever-loving mind if he thought this was possible much less maintainable. “And so what CAN I have?”

“Vegetables, fruits in moderation, beans, most nuts (even had some of those on the forbidden list), organic chicken, wild caught fish.” In my mind I heard, “You can eat lettuce and chicken.” Dear sweet Lord.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“WHY exactly would I agree to this?”

“Because this will help you get all of the foods that are contributing to your inflammation out of your system. Then after 30 days you can add some of them back one at a time and you will be able to determine what affects your body.”

“Gee. This sounds fun.” In a clean out your refrigerator kind of way.

“You’ll have answers. And your pain level will be reduced. You will feel better.”

Hmpft. I’m stubborn. SO. INCREDIBLY. STUBBORN. (God bless my sweet husband and my parents too!) But this man just tried to tell me that he’s given me the keys to unlock the pain switches. Well, I call bullshit. What kind of quack has my friend recommended??? Does she KNOW that he’s a quack? This is ridiculous.

But he started explaining how food contributes to inflammation in the body and how the only way to test food’s effects on a person is to clean out your system and add them back one at a time to test for any reactions whether digestive, pain related or otherwise. Years later, I can tell you that this IS an elimination diet. And unfortunately for my stubborn streak, the dang thing works. I thought about it for a few days. I had nothing to lose and only answers to gain. I like food a lot – especially sugar and bread – but, well, four dinner plates.   So, on the Friday before Thanksgiving 2012 I gave up his list. What a time of year to give up this list?! But I did. And slowly I began to feel better. And better. And even better.

By just before Christmas I had improved significantly. And I was dropping weight (always a welcomed side effect for this anti-exerciser). Like close to ten pounds. I had stopped sweating buckets even in cold weather. Weird. I hadn’t been cold in years and suddenly I’m grabbing a sweater on my way out the door to work.   My pain level had decreased. I was having less headaches. My life seemed less interrupted by whatever was causing my pain because for once, life was winning over the pain.

Of course, the stubborn streak in me was pushing to add foods back. And add them back, I did. Well, some of them. I tried my artificial sweetener in my coffee again. I’d really missed it. That didn’t go well at all. “Ok, I thought. If I am going to eat or drink something sweet, I’m going with raw sugar. At least it’s real.”   I ordered BBQ pork (one of my faves) at a BBQ joint around the corner. Hot stabbing knives in my back and neck.   “Well, that didn’t go well,” I thought. Dairy didn’t negatively affect me and sugar in moderation wasn’t a culprit either. I don’t remember testing gluten because I think I was so motivated by losing weight that I just kept it on my Do Not Fly list.   In my mind I knew but if I tested it I’d really know and sometimes it’s easier not knowing. You know?

The weight kept coming off and I was feeling so much better but to say that changing my eating habits to this level was an easy feat would be a blatant lie. And I missed the good stuff…the convenience of a sandwich for instance, toast with breakfast on occasion, pancakes.   Not only did I miss these things but I was beginning to be put in situations that made me look like the quack because I had this laundry list of foods that I didn’t eat. And when I was placed in a social situation and started learning how to interrogate the wait staff properly it not only depicted me as the difficult patron but it also was a gateway to demand that I tell my story to servers and anyone I dined with, whether it was family, friends, coworkers or clients. You don’t roll off a list of food sensitivities like mine without getting a few follow up questions at minimum.   I felt exposed. I had to open up myself to explain that I had this unexplained pain and nothing was working well enough to control it and I refused to go to a pain clinic or take narcotics so I had turned to a nutritionist to seek help.

I’m not sure about other parts of the country or the world but I think that it’s fairly safe to assume that food brings people together. In the south, we eat for EVERYTHING. Not most everything. EV-ER-Y-thing. We eat when people get married, have babies, when loved ones die, someone gets a promotion, to celebrate or mourn a highly anticipated divorce, someone has a birthday, anniversaries – wedding and otherwise, someone gets a demotion, sicknesses, surgeries, sending their kids to college, someone gets a new job, you have a good day, you have a bad day…whatever is on your mind, we are pretty sure that food will resolve your issues and or magnify your happiness.   In the book, The Sweet Potato Queens Book of Love by Jill Connor Browne, she talks about how little old women in the south get up and fry a chicken every day so that in the case someone dies that day they can be the first to deliver fried chicken to the bereaved family’s doorstep.   Bake sales are not just for charity, Honey. They are competitions in disguise with the winner being the one first to have nothing left on the table.   The southern belle cook may not admit it but she made that pound cake to move!   And when she does we all know that she’s the winner.

I’m convinced that MY mother-in-law is the real Betty Crocker. We’ve never seen them in the same room and her cooking is to die for so I think my theory is pretty solid. The Girl, my eleven year old daughter, has plenty of Grandma’s favorites but the top spot goes to her meatloaf. Did you hear me? Read that again. Eleven Year Old. Favorite Meal. Grandma’s Meatloaf. These words don’t naturally go together but I’m telling you…she’s Betty Crocker, I just know it.

Maybe 6 or 7 weeks after this whole Dump All the Things Good From My Diet Because I’m Desperate phase began, Betty C (aka Grandma) came to visit. We had lived here long enough that I realized that meal planning was a futile exercise when she was in town. My food would go to waste. She brought coolers – plural, boxes of food, bags of food, watermelon, produce, you name it. She shows her people love by cooking for us. I just needed to turn my kitchen over to her and let her work her magic. When I knew that she was coming into town I decided that I wouldn’t make a big deal about my newfound dietary constraints. She had been cooking for many years and I didn’t want to stress her out or take the good eats away from my family.   So I vowed to eat what was safe that she prepared but to have a few things in the wings to make up for any holes.   And that was a well laid plan…

Until she fixed that meatloaf with fluffy mashed potatoes and pinto beans and corn bread. I could do without the meatloaf (even though I was a huge fan like The Girl) but…but…she sat the prettiest pone of cornbread on the table…she had turned it over on a dinner plate straight out of the cast iron skillet and it was perfect, just perfect. The crust was golden and…perfect. No other words do it justice. It was perfect.

Growing up, pinto beans and corn bread constituted a meal, especially in the winter time. Think chili beans. Pinto beans with cornbread was our chili beans.

So I sat there gazing at this beautiful cornbread before me. And the pinto beans in soup of the perfect consistency. And the smell of my grandmas’ kitchens right there in MY kitchen…at MY table.   And I made a decision. In that moment I decided that all this gluten free mess was bullshit. Mr Quacky Nutritionist had suggested these modifications to my diet and not only was I disrespecting my mother-in-law who had prepared this lovely spread of food for my family but I was depriving myself by not eating these southern delicacies that I so enjoyed. I decided that it was all in my head. So, I cut myself a slice of that pretty cornbread and crumbled it into my whopping bowl of pinto beans, threw in some sweet pickle relish for good measure and cut myself a second slice of cornbread as a side dish. And I enjoyed every single morsel. I can still taste the crispy golden crust of that cornbread drenched in pinto bean soup. I mean, Ya’ll, you can’t go to a restaurant and eat like this.

The next morning I could barely move. I crawled out of my bed and dragged myself to brush my teeth. My stomach looked like I was 5 months pregnant. My joints were tight. The hot stabbing pain underneath my shoulder blades had returned. My neck was no longer on swivel.   My head hurt. I was certain that I just needed to move around a bit to loosen up. But I didn’t loosen up. If anything, it worsened throughout the day. It was so bad that I had to lie down in the middle of the day.

As I sprawled across my bed flat on my back positioned on my trusty old heating pad and rolling around on my baseball in a sock (to loosen the knots in my back) big hot alligator tears welled up in my eyes. In that moment I knew that I was wrong. Undoubtedly, it wasn’t all in my head. This newfound sensitivity was real and if I aspired to heal my body my days of eating gluten were over. I had to kiss cornbread goodbye.   In the quiet of the moment I closed my eyes as the huge tears fell down the sides of my face and I began to mourn the loss of the taste of the foods that provoked vivid memories of the events of my childhood and the years that followed. I mourned the loss of my attempts to recreate my grandmothers’ comfort foods and my mother’s summer feasts. I mourned the loss of how just one bite of my mother-in-law’s cooking laid out on my own dinner table took me back to my adolescence sitting at my MaMa’s table with my sister and cousins where my Papa sat mixing ketchup in his mashed potatoes making us all laugh.

But if one of my children had walked in and asked why I was crying…it was cornbread. I was cryin’ over cornbread.