Lynne

I am 35 years old. I am the single mother of 3 boys and a full-time professor. I have anorexia. I have been fearful, depressed, co-dependent, and I have had a shopping addiction. I have contemplated suicide. Reactive foods played a role in my problems and their solution.

Nine months ago, I had a very traumatic break-up of a 3-year relationship. The break-up challenged every coping mechanism I had. Because I was so depressed about the loss, I started CoDependents Anonymous (CoDA), a 12-step program aimed at managing relationships. I was feeling good progress toward new behavior, but I also felt that there was a visceral, almost tangible barrier standing between me and the issues that I needed to deal with.

I had been in CoDA for probably four months when I heard that reactive foods might contribute to depression. I decided to try eliminating them. Looking back on it, the benefits really started within a few days, but I wasn't paying attention because I thought it would take a few weeks.

I was talking to a friend on the phone when it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was suddenly aware that for the last week, I had not fallen into the abyss of despair. Right before I eliminated reactive foods, I was suicidal. I was in the kitchen looking through the cabinets for enough pills to take to die. I took out a knife and I actually held it to the skin on my abdomen to see what it would feel like. There was no reason to go on living. I was filled with the most despairing, hopeless feeling. It was as complete a hopelessness as a human could experience. This despair disappeared when I eliminated sugars, flours, and wheat.

Today, it's hard to believe that it was all body chemistry. It felt like life. It can create a completely believable reality. The feeling is seductive, convincing. The terrible thing is that I am being taught to listen to my feelings. But now I know that it is very dangerous to listen to feelings that are induced by food. It is as if I had a translator inside of me that took life's events and translated them into despair. Without knowing it, I was allowing the food to mediate between my head and my heart. Now I know why I could think the thoughts that I learned in CoDA, but I couldn't feel them. The food acted like a saboteur between my head and my heart. It was sending out untruths.

I am trying to think of the right way that the refined carbohydrates and wheat acted. It is as if they had a persona of their own. Not exactly like a poltergeist, but like a prankster playing jokes with my perceptions. Like a magician who creates illusion. Today that prankster/magician is no longer in control.

I still have the same amount of sorrow over my ended relationship. I still think about the losses in my life. I hurt just as much. The difference is that it's my real life hurt that I'm feeling, not the despair brought on by the food. I have my feelings without the anxiety and despair. I have my sorrow, but it's not connected to an annihilated landscape. Three weeks ago, I felt so empty. I felt empty inside and out. There was absolutely nothing there. Desolation. Now, I exist and the world exists. When I feel the sorrow, it's in there, inside of me. But there are other things in there too.

I also feel more honest. I think I was feeling dishonest before because I was filled with shame and fear. I felt like there must be something I needed to cover up. Being free of the sugars, flours, and wheat made me more honest with myself. This is very important, because now I can be that way with other people since that is the feeling that I carry within myself.

I will give you a dramatic example of how my new honesty works. I teach an adult class in educational cultural diversity. I gave my class an assignment before I changed my diet. I told them to pick out a school, interview the staff, and make an assessment as to how well the school is handling their cultural diversity. I told the students to be very careful as to how much they told the staff about the real nature of the assignment. I was very afraid that if the staffs knew that we were evaluating them, they might be angry and refuse to cooperate, or even threaten my students.

After the diet change, I was listening to one of my students tell me about her interview with a school principal. My student said she had trouble questioning the principal and listening to the answers because she was so aware of what she was holding back. So I told her to be completely open, direct, and honest, but tactful. I advocated telling the staff ahead of time what we were doing and offer to share the results with them.

It didn't dawn on my for several days that the second round of instructions was directly opposed to the first round. I realized with a shock that during the first round of instructions, I was still under the influence of the sugars, flours, and wheat. They created fear in me. The second round was free of the food influence. I had my honesty and integrity to guide me. Thank God.

Another very wonderful and unexpected virtue of this change in diet is that I got a real appetite. I am a recovering anorectic. I can't remember the last time that I got hungry. I think that eliminating reactive foods has leveled out my serotonin because the other day, I was driving along and I had the thought that I was hungry. And I was! I hadn't eaten on time and I really needed to eat! I pulled into a grocery store and got a salad. It was awesome!. I have my body back. I feel like I exist in my body.

The last story I have to tell you is about another problem that I am recovering from. I have a shopping addiction. I have it pretty seriously. Last Sunday, I left my sons in front of the television. I got in the car and drove down the highway to the department store for an afternoon of shopping. As I got near, I had the thought that I was driving into darkness. In one sense, I literally was. It was an absolutely beautiful fall afternoon and the store would be dark by comparison. But I was also driving into another kind of darkness, a kind of numbing. A place to go to obliterate problems. Problems that I now know were created and made unmanageable by chemical reactions to foods.

Well, I turned that car around. I went back home, picked up my sons and our dog, and went to the outdoor blessing of the animals at my church. I did something with my sons instead of going shopping.

I have a whole new definition of life. Life is not worrying. The life I used to have didn't feel like life. I did things like shopping to make myself feel as if I were experiencing life. The day that I took my kids and our dog to church, I got to be IN the day. I experienced life as life. Not as an addiction or as despair. I have gotten back my mind, heart, body, and soul. Thank God.