Food Grief

I just read this great post on the Five Stages of (Food) Grief.  Yes, that is right.  Mourning our old food lifestyle.

Just the other day, after my food meltdown (briefly alluded to in this post), I was whining to my shrink about how I LIKE Boston Cream Donuts and chocolate cupcakes and HATE liver and dislike sauerkraut.  Given my druthers I would eat lots of the former and few of the later.  However, if I want to heal my guts.  If I want to go Paleo/Primal.  If I want to start Crossfit when I get better.  The donuts and cupcakes have to go.  At least for a few months until my guts heal up and I'm starting to feel better.   However, they can NEVER be a regular part of my diet ever again.

Reading The Five Stages post made me realize that my food meltdown the other week was really step two of the food grieving cycle.  I was angry and I was going to eat "normal" food.  Dam it!!  Even if it made me feel really really sick.

The cool thing is that I seem to have passed through this stage.  I am no longer eating all the junk food in the house.  I have managed to remind myself, in the usual manner, that yes these foods really really do make me feel like crap.  And hence, remind myself why I'm doing this in the first place.  I want to get better.  I want my body to heal so why the hell am I damaging it further by throwing what amounts to a food temper tantrum?  I guess when it comes to food I'm more like a two year old than a grownup.  I hate it when people tell me what I can and can't eat.  This is probably why I won't commit to either a strictly WAP or Paleo diet.  I'm marrying the two together into a Primal diet hybrid: mostly vegetables, some fruit, nuts, dairy, meats and a few properly prepared grains and ferments.

Now before you start to tell me that this is only stage three bargaining kicking in I've already done that route with GF and I'm so over it.  I've tried the crappy pizza and the even crappier bread.  I've cooked with weird flours that taste fine when they come out the oven but mysteriously transform into sandstone bricks overnight.  I've wasted so much time and money on food substitutes.  I'm done.  I'm not going there.  I'm too sick and don't have the money to do that again.

Anyway, I don't need the substitutes this time.  To me this food seems more like going back to my English roots.  Eating steak and eggs and drinking unhomogenized milk.  What I remember of meals in England is roast dinners.  It wasn't until we came over here that I remember eating donuts and Wonder bread and Twinkies.  Not that I totally behaved in England.  I did acquire a lifelong chocolate addiction from there.  But I seriously only remember baked goods from the US.  So going Paleo or even WAP is closer to the food that I was raised on than the "healthy" low fat, whole grain diet I've been eating for decades.  So I'm not sure I will do the crying stage either.  I'm certainly going to mourn the loss of cupcakes and the loss of American "normal" diet but in a sense I'm going home to English cooking which makes me happy.  I'm looking forward to making a pot roast the next time my sister comes to visit.  She misses my pot roast.  I used to make a kick ass one.  She got really mad at me when I turned vegetarian and stopped making them.  Luckily I still have the recipe and I'm a way better cook now than back then.  I'm betting it is going to be spectacular.  So screw the cupcakes; bring on the roast beef!