Processed? Out!

Well, I called Bob, Kris' dad, today. There's only so many days in a row I can spend in darkness, not moving, wishing for quiet, before every fiber in my body is going to scream for a solution to this ongoing problem. Three times in five months, I've had four in a row, and it's getting out of hand. If it's the wine, or even alchohol in general, fine, I'll stop drinking it.

When Bob called me back, he had some good dietary suggestions for me, which was what I was asking for. I was looking for an elimination diet, maybe to help me figure out what was my trigger. I thought I'd have to cut everything out of my diet and subsist on rice and beans for a while.

I was, thankfully, wrong.

Out of my diet is now: nitrates, nitrites, tyramine, chocolate, sulfites. When I asked how to determine if food has any of these in it, because, let's face it, except for "chocolate," the rest of them are sorta hard to figure out, Bob told me, "Avoid processes foods."

Okay, I can do that.

I've recently switched to a vegetarian diet, though didn't tell very many people about the change. I'm the easiest vegetarian you'll probably ever meet: if you serve me meat, I'll eat it. I like Andy's philosophy that (I'm poorly paraphasing here) wasting the animal is worse than killing the animal in the first place, so if it's there, better to eat it than refuse and have it thrown away. Or something like that.

However, my food choices have been remarkably fruits and vegetable based, even for me. I suspect Lisa would be somewhat pleased.

Update: Okay, after going to the store and buying a bunch of unprocessed snacks, I did the research for high level tyramine foods. I really should have done the check before I left. Now, I don't know if the auras and migraines are dietary triggered, but, if I had to guess, this could very well be my trigger. Check out the foods with tyramine: hard/aged cheeses (check), avocados (check), eggplant (check), oranges (check), grapes (check), nuts (check), soy (check), leftovers older than a day (check).

This is going to take some work. Though, honestly, anything has to be easier than that no meat, no wheat, no dairy, no soy diet I had five years ago. That one was hard.