My Health Food Story

When I was young, I used to eat whatever I wanted and my family ate out often. It wasn't until I was in my teen years that I knew something was wrong.

I have always been on the lighter side. As a child, I took gymnastics and stayed with the sport for nine and a half years. When I got into my teen years, I took up other interests like playing the clarinet. In my sophomore and junior year of high school, I got seriously ill.

It got so bad to the point that I couldn't eat normal meals and I felt tired all the time. Even moving from one side of the room to the other was a struggle. However, I looked at everyone else and didn't understand why this was happening. My parents decided to take me to Eggleston, a hospital near Atlanta. There the doctors did a colonoscopy and other tests to rule out serious disease. Even though everything came back okay, for the most part, but I still had no idea what was causing my body to reject food that normal people ate. The only thing they found was that my intestinal tract was 75% full and they pinned it on stress. Thus my gluten diet began.

My gluten diet started right away. I thought eating less bread would help my digestional tract. However, it only helped for a few months as I started feeling bad again and much worse than before. Constant headaches, tiredness, and lack of interest were everyday things for me. I would break down and cry often and get sick once a week from a common cold or some other illness going around. At times, I didn't even want to get out of bed.

Skip a couple of years forward, I realized that I would feel bad after a heavy meal and started to journal what I was eating. I’ve always been vegetable-heavy in my diet but I would always have a meat protein with every meal. I then decided I wouldn't eat anything heavy for a couple of meals which included taking out the meat protein and substituting it with more vegetables. I craved the meat but I was desperate to fix my issue.

A couple of days without processed meats, I didn't get sick after meals anymore and could eat meals like normal people. I continued with the diet.

Two weeks later, I no longer felt bloated and actually had an appetite. I no longer needed to force myself to eat or worry about losing weight. However, I would not feel completely better until four months after my diet.

This is how I became a vegetarian. I have come to realize that the junk food I ate when I was younger created food allergies for me and the change was absolutely necessary for me.

It wasn’t until I started being vegetarian that I had a problem with sweets. Parties and anything sweet I ate caused me to “shut down”. I mean literally. My body would get cold and clammy and I would feel faint and even pass out at times. I would feel nauseous as well.

Then I started to look at the packages of the sweet things I ate and realized anything homemade I didn’t react to and the store-bought sweets shared one common ingredient, High Fructose Corn Syrup. I cut down on store-bought sweets. I had no issues until I ate something with ketchup on it and looked at the label and there was that four-letter word again. Everything sweet in the pantry had those words on it. The more food I took out with it in it, the better I felt.

It wasn’t until I cut out both meat and high fructose from my diet that I noticed other positive effects. My face has always had really bad eczema. Slowly my face cleared up. I also had really bad dandruff and that cleared up and my hair got healthier and stopped falling out. My digestive system became regular and was able to eat more food than before.

I am telling my story because I had to solve my health crisis when doctors were unable to and if you are in a health situation like mine, you are not alone as I have been through it.