Stories of Triumph

Stories of Triumph Introduction:

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.

Clement
I am a 13-year-old girl. I stand 5'7" and weigh 125 pounds, but 3 months ago, I weighed 145. Now that I'm not eating reactive foods, I have a lot more energy. I have fewer headaches. My asthma has improved a little bit.
When my family started this way of eating, a few things made me happy. We started eating red meat and eggs again. I realized that I could still eat potato chips. It was nice when my mom took me to the grocery with her and I could buy lox and raspberries.

My friends say they can't believe that I have so much self-control. It's not really that I have such great self-control, I just know that if I eat sugars, flours, or wheat, I will get sick. At school, when I eat little of something "illegal", I get a headache or hyperactive. I'm in a cloud. At camp last summer, I ate candy. I felt drowsy. I was much more moody. I got cranky. I gained weight, even though I was doing tons of activities

.After the first week, if I ate something reactive, I only got a little sick. But after a month, if I ate something, I got really sick. After about two or three weeks, eating reactive foods got much less tempting. But if my family were not eating this way, I wouldn't be able to either.

I thought it was cool that my mom didn't force me to stay off reactive foods for my birthday. If a friend asked me about eliminating reactive foods, I would tell her to throw away all the sugars, flours, and wheat in her house. I would tell her to learn to read labels. I would especially tell her not to give up on it in a week or two. It's worth it.

Linda
I became aware that I had a weight problem at age 8. By age 13, I had taken my first diet pill. Over the next 35 years, that pill was followed by other drugs, diet candy, canned diet drinks, a liquid protein diet, an expensive avoidance clinic, starvation, overdosing coffee, and finally, Overeaters Anonymous (OA). I wish I had known that my weight problem was simply a reaction to sugars, flours, and wheat.

The refined carbohydrates caused swings in my brain chemistry which drove my appetite completely beyond human control. These substances caused horrifying changes in my moods and perceptions. I was miserable, isolated, angry, and disgusted with myself. No matter what I weighed, my self-esteem was gone.

When I first married, I made and ate one layer of cake every day. I remember with agony the intense feeling of isolation as I ate those cakes. I might as well have been shooting up drugs. I had a husband, a baby, a house, and two cars, but I was not happy. I was depressed and confused. I abused my child because her crying made me so irritable. I really didn't know what to do for myself, much less for her. My moods and foods were out of control.
This low self-esteem led me to other substance abuse. I used marijuana and alcohol to numb my feelings of despair. Over-the-counter decongestants made me float.

However, I had to "hit bottom" before I was willing to accept help. "Bottom" came one day when I was stuffing a bag of cookies into my mouth as fast as I could. I was conscious that I didn't want to be eating the cookies. I was painfully aware that some force, other than myself, had complete control over my actions. The terror and dark despair that I experienced led me to call a friend who had joined a recovery program that eliminated sugars, flours, and wheat. I was saved.

I gave up a heavy caffeine habit at the same time that I started avoiding reactive foods. Withdrawal from these substances took 14 days. I was extremely disoriented, insecure, fatigued, and confused for those 14 days. I never want to go through that again.

I would love to take up another addiction, but recovery is the only good substitute for addictions. I have spent my whole life asking myself, "Where am I going?" Today, I feel like I am here. Thank God.

Candice
I am a 12-year-old girl. I stand 5'3" and weigh 104 pounds. Last January, nine months ago, my mom took sugars, flours, and wheat out of my family's diet. A lot has changed since then, things like, I lost weight, my headaches stopped, my nose is clear, I don't wheeze, and I'm not so sad. Also, my mom is nicer and she's around more.
I can't get all sugars and flours out of my diet. Like today, I ate cake at a birthday party. About 80% of the time, I eat the cake and pizza at parties so I won't go hungry. I'm getting better about having my mom get me something special that I can take with me to parties. If a friend's family is having something I can't eat, I eat the side dish. But this morning, I spent the night at a friend's house. All they had for breakfast was bagels. So I had one. Next time, I will bring oatmeal with me.

Now, my reaction to an allergic food usually starts the same day I eat it. A hammer starts pounding in my head and a faucet starts running out of my nose. Seven or eight hours later, it gets really bad. It takes several days after that for the effects to go away.

It would be impossible for me to eat this way if my family didn't. I couldn't watch my parents eat something different. Anyone who wants to stop eating reactive foods should get them out of the house. Parents would make a mistake by yelling or forcing their kids. They should just make sure that the stuff is not available. They shouldn't force their kids. This worked in my family and I think it's a good way to help kids. I'm glad we're off reactive foods. Although there are hassles, I like feeling and looking good.

Joan
My own story begins at the end of 1995 when I was getting ready for Christmas vacation. I was overweight by 30 pounds. I was depressed, anxious, afraid or angry most of the time. Physically, I was at the end of a year in which my respiratory allergies had made me miserable. I had suffered four sinus infections and countless episodes of sinus attacks similar to migraines. I was tired in spite of getting all the sleep I needed. My asthma had improved as the result of intensive emotional recovery work, but I was discouraged about ever healing my lungs. For the two pervious years, I had worked a number of personal growth programs simultaneously to heal the wounds of my childhood so that I could get my emotional and respiratory problems under control. I had experienced improvement, but I was far from satisfied with the results.

I read about an eating disorders program that I decided to try. This program eliminates sugars, flours, and wheat in order to control brain chemical reactions that stimulate appetite. I was extremely pleased to lose my hunger pangs along with two pounds per week on this program. But I was positively stunned to also lose my allergies, sinus pain, fatigue, mental fogginess, depression, and rage. I removed all the sugars, flours, and wheat from my house. My family lost weight and a wondrous calm descended over my household. The crying and fighting over homework quieted down. My husband became less irritable. We left for outings calmly, well-organized, and without chaos. The sound of morning coughing disappeared. The children's daily afternoon headaches eased off. It was a miracle. With stability established in my body rhythms, I eventually was able to discern that citric acid and tomato sauce were contributing to my asthma.

I began to spread the word about reactive foods. I developed summary sheets of what to eat instead of foods containing reactive substances. Eventually I started teaching a system of eating that eliminated sugars and flours and allowed identification of other commonly reactive foods. I developed a network of abstinent people to track their progress, to offer them support, and to get support.

Today, I feel like I have walked away from a train wreck. I am shaken by my narrow escape, but I am otherwise unscathed. I turn around to go back and help people who are still on that train. Every time I talk someone into giving up reactive foods, I feel like I have pulled them from that train wreck. Through the grace of God, they also can walk away.