Food Woes

 

I have had food issues for years and the list of foods that don't agree with me has grown steadily as time has gone by.  

However, in January of this year I was quite ill with stomach things for  several weeks and while things are much better I have never gone back to being able to eat the way I did before January.

For the last couple of months I have been trying to follow a low fodmap diet and that does seem to have helped.  I'm a person who has tended to be rather unsympathetic to the gluten/lactose etc crowd but now I'm one of them.  (I have watched my lactose intake for quite a while now, but I do seem to be ok with gluten.)

Last Saturday I was at a restaurant with friends and ordered something that has always been ok for me, but they have added some flavouring (a herb maybe?) to the dish and it really bothered me on Sunday and Monday and I'm still not feeling totally back to "normal".  My friends and I tend to go to the same restaurants but I'm pretty much down to one dish I can safely order at each of them.  

Restaurants like to have interesting offerings but it would be so nice for people like me if they had at least one or two really plain meals.  Certainly in downtown Toronto it seems to be pretty much impossible to find a simple roast chicken or roast beef dinner with plain vegetables and plain (i.e. without garlic) mashed potatoes.  Or a grilled cheese sandwich that is just plain bread and a slice of simple cheddar cheese. I know of only one lunch place where you can get a straightforward sliced chicken sandwich.  

I do better with brunch since you can usually get simple scrambled eggs and toast.  Often they serve home fried potatoes with I like, unless someone has decided that they need to be "seasoned".

I think I'm approaching the day when I have to say "no more restaurants" - which is a problem since the only way I now socialize is to go out for a meal with friends.

On my own I tend to eat the same things every day.   I think I have to start approaching food less as avoiding the things I can't eat and more as seeking out the things I can eat.  

I think I have to stop thinking of eating as something pleasurable and approach it as something I do to keep my body functioning - the same way I take my medications in the morning.