The Only Elimination Diet You Should Follow is Eliminating Bullshit

Like anybody campaigning for "most enigmatic cool person you know 2021," I made it a point to limit my social media use for January. In December, I noticed the more time I spent on insta, the more I got bombarded with autoimmune diet inspo ads and marketing - the kind of bullshit programs aimed at people with autoimmune diseases, and it was bringing up a lot of shit for me.

I have an autoimmune disease.

I'm also fat. 

I also have not fully recovered from or received appropriate treatment for a life-long eating disorder. Fat people can have those, too. 

Seeing autoimmune fitness and "heal through food" influencers pop up is one of the worst, if not the worst, trigger for my eating disorder and subsequent autoimmune shame spiral. The more I dug, the more it became apparent and problematically ironic that the people pushing the diets… .don't have the disorder or disease or allergy it treated? They were just….thin? And talking out their asses for money? 

The skinny is that elimination diets were created to help people with allergies and inflammatory responses, as disease and symptom mitigation and diagnostic tools. Adipose reduction, fat loss, or "getting a snatched waist" is occasionally a byproduct of elimination diets but not the initial purpose or goal. Elimination diets fundamentally aren't meant to create a calorie deficit; they're a method of mitigating symptoms and reducing inflammatory responses. For some people, that means no sugar; for others, that means no wheat or alcohol. For me, it means don't eat Sweet'N Low, or I'm going to blackout in agony and come to with eldritch summoning sigils on the wall in chicken's blood and a portal to the giant scorpion dimension in my closet. 

Before we get into it, I say this with all love and respect, the next person who tells me to stop eating nightshade plants, I'm gonna shit on your lawn. 

I will.

Try me.

It's hard to find value and fact in something once it becomes co-opted and gimmicky. Rheumatic and autoimmune diseases are still a substantial gray area, so there's rheum (see what I did there? #SOPUNNY) to realize that these diets may be contradictory and not that solid in their application on an individual basis. 

Case in point: I have polymyositis, and the polymyositis diet urges people with that disorder to eat red meat, grains, and dairy. I have rheumatoid arthritis too, and that diet says don't eat red meat, dairy, or grains. Guess I'm just going to stick with this vodka and dog food smoothie diet until they figure something else out. At least my hair is shiny.

 Like many people with autoimmune diseases, I assumed there was some intense moral failing of mine that I, despite my frequent and in-depth self-hatred-induced scrutiny of every single daily action, had somehow missed. I thought I could regain control of my life through an elimination diet or a severe, unsustainable lifestyle. Spokesperson-driven elimination autoimmune diets succeed in driving home the idea that yes, you worthless turd if you hadn't eaten that bag of Swedish Fish in May of 2001, you'd be perfectly healthy. Suffer, peasant. You deserve this hell. 

I fall for this shit at least once every few months. Before I fell for it this time, I talked to my husband about how I was sure it would work and solve all my problems. Being an arrogant biologist who is, well, arrogant, he laughed at me a lot and then reminded me about the time we accidentally went on an elimination diet and how that diet solved zero problems and was terrible.

We were on an elimination diet accidentally, you see because there was a period of time in 2009 when we could not afford food. This isn't hyperbole or me being glib or a blue-collar takedown to own the food libs, or whatever else sounds like a Republican with a brain injury. Yes, we had jobs as in plural per. No, they didn't pay enough. Yes, we were frugal. No, we didn't waste all our money on Starbucks and avocados. No, we couldn't hunt or plant a garden or pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.

The problem started when our refrigerator died, and we lost about $200 worth of groceries (keep in mind the statistic that most American families are unprepared for a $400 emergency). Our landlord had something shitty in the lease about not being legally required to provide us with appliances. While trying to save for a new refrigerator and not having one to use, we were subsisting off cheap protein we'd buy day-of and cook when we got home, stale bran cereal that was past its sell-by date, rice, tuna, and a canned vegetable, usually beans or peas or green beans.

I lost almost 25 lbs in six weeks; something people congratulated me for aggressively. Thanks. Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's a mentally draining socio-economic situation that's damaging her thyroid. 

I was also diagnosed with high blood pressure during this timeframe despite my BP historically being textbook low. My hair thinned considerably. I was experiencing mood swings and vision changes. My period stopped, I experienced one of the worst poly flares I've had to date, and I was the most medicated I'll ever be in my adult life (I hope). I also had an iron, b12, D, and iodine deficiency. And the cherry on that sugar substitute keto sundae was that I became severely clinically depressed. WOOHOO! I now see why my pilot about a plucky 20 something living in the small boring city went nowhere. 

The daily menu at chateau du depressing included rice, tuna, and canned vegetables one to two meals a day for several weeks on end. From a scientific standpoint, on days we could snag cake or pizza from work birthday parties or stale bagels and donuts from the break room, we reintroduced sugar, wheat, and dairy back into our diets with no adverse side effects. This sugar and gluten fest was about once a month or once every pay period. Having servings of sugar or dairy, or processed foods, this spaced-out should have highlighted my inflammatory response if I had one. It didn't. I had no adverse reactions. I didn't bleed from the eyes or poop out my gallbladder or see an increase in my autoimmune symptoms. I simply ate a piece of cake and went about my day, not in a detrimental calorie deficit. One day my boss bought our department Taco Bell and that limp, freezer burnt lettuce on what passed for a taco was the first fresh vegetable I had in a month. I lied. I did have an adverse reaction to the Taco Bell - I ruined my purse trying to smuggle a chalupa home. 

This is a bummer. Yes. It's not fun to talk about. But by being poor, we couldn't afford or refrigerate and therefore did not eat:

Most wheat or gluten-based products

Sugar

Nightshade based vegetables or really any fresh veggies or fruit

Eggs

Dairy

Coffee

Red meat and poultry unless we cooked it immediately. 

Lunchmeat/cold cuts

Alcohol 

This story does have a happy ending….kind of? We were able to get a fridge and groceries after a while. And after we got a tax return, we blew a small wad on garbage pizzas and wings and didn't die.

These six months were probably the most challenging and most traumatic of my young adult life. When you have to steal toilet paper out of a Wal*Mart bathroom (yes, we did that) and you rely on your coworkers leaving a box of stale donut holes in the break room for at least one daily meal, privilege becomes highlighted against the backdrop of your hunger. I try not to recommend or offer advice on autoimmune-type stuff unless someone asks, and there are only about four people I ask for autoimmune-type advice in return. It's in our nature to be helpful, so we make recommendations that may not be feasible for someone - emotionally, financially, medically, practically. That's the positive side of elimination diets in the autoimmune community. People are usually just trying to help. The negative side of elimination diets is that we generally assume the healing power of any elimination diet for people with autoimmune disorders is the calorie deficit and subsequent weight loss. This attitude creates a new web of food morality, trapping people in the idea that they're at fault and refuse to do better when that's usually never the case.

When we could afford food again, I went into a long bingeing cycle, which is a common reaction to periods of food scarcity or restriction. So the long-term impact of my accidental elimination diet was negative. The short-term effects were everybody congratulated me for losing weight, and nobody noticed I was staving off scurvy with a bunch of Halls Vitamin C lozenges I had leftover from a nasty bout of bronchitis. My takeaway from that experience wasn't a better understanding of my disease or a sense of preparedness for symptom mitigation. My takeaway was that many people conflated my weight with my symptoms and thought I was in control and just choosing not to solve a problem.

That's total bullshit.

Since I have a small and unimportant platform, what's my advice? If peppers don't irritate you, eat the peppers. Work out. Take your meds, stay hydrated, and stay off social media. The best elimination diet you can go on is refusing to swallow someone else's prejudice and bad science.