My friends tend to freak out at the idea of me doing any sort of restricted diet, since my normal diet tends to involve much restriction and I'm not, let's say, in a condition of excess. But I believe this is the first time I've undertaken a diet for self-care reasons rather than straight deprivation. Why??
Try this on for size: If I'm (1) attached to the familiarity of an old pattern and (2) eating inappropriate foods, I get cut off from my body's innate wisdom. And therefore: My body does have innate wisdom, she knows what is good for her. (Oh how amazing if that could be true!)
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I have so many positive associations around fruit. Eating lots of it helped me out of the very lowest point of my anorexia--eating it, but also getting involved in growing, harvesting, and sharing it. I was so much the fruit girl, that's how everyone knew me. And despite all that I came to know and understand about how unnatural fruit is today, I still find myself harboring a Garden of Eden fantasy; I still hold a belief somewhere within me that it's the "perfect"/"highest"/"most righteous/correct" food. And so even after I ate no fruit for a year as I cleansed the worst case of candida my naturopath had ever seen, I gravitated back toward it. And again last year, despite a year of mostly coconut cream which was one of my best years digestion-wise. What's more, the years of fruitarianism mean that my estimation of a serving size for fruit is still potentially inflated.
Back on the fruit this year, I was in trouble. Intense sugar cravings, blood sugar swings. I never used to think of food as a comfort source, and how that evolved in me is for another post, but fruit+sugar cravings was sending me into even sweeter foods; foods that I knew were terrible for me, that made me feel terrible. It's no secret that part of my m.o. is pretty serious calorie restriction. But eating so much sugar when I did eat, I was hungry all the time. So I relied on chewable vitamin C, drink mixes, fasting every other day, and the fasting+lots of fruit sent me into the horrifying unfamiliar territory of binge-purge.
Meanwhile, I couldn't digest anything, couldn't sleep for the stomach pains and nausea, and had such severe bloating, the gas often wouldn't even come out in a colonic session! I was walking around 80-some pounds with a balloon belly. I would read/hear about people who'd gone gluten free, cut out dairy, and were feeling like a million bucks, and I felt like such a victim! Here I was, no gluten or dairy ever, absolutely wretched in my body. And yet at the same time there was a dive into gluten-free cookies here, an energy bar (aka sugary soy) there; even brightly colored sucralose candy one time, to my own disbelief--things I knew made me feel worse and yet somehow felt either entitled to or compelled to. Yes, straight-up sugar, as well as some white grains. In some twisted way I was able to give the cane sugar portion a pass because I haven't historically had a problem with sugar, but cookies made of rice flour? Sometimes with omega-6 oils like sunflower and canola??? My system can barely handle any kind of whole grain, so what's a bunch of finely starchified poison-powder going to do in there?
Even as I felt sorry for myself, part of me had the "sucker" lights lit up. Part of me was calling bullshit. At the MFA program residency, where I had a little less control over food availability and timings, I brought protein powder and gave myself the informal limit of two servings of fruit per day. Two things: I felt much better, and I had godawful sugar cravings, resolving into a couple breakouts into the fruit.
Perfect, then! I knew what I needed to do, and I knew for myself that in order to circumvent self-sabotage, I needed a framework where I'd committed to doing it. Even though I felt completely like myself with the crave and intermittent binge/purge , I knew myself well enough to know that if I laid down a framework, I would comply.
And so, when I heard an interview with Diane Sanfilippo about her 21-Day Sugar Detox a day or two after returning from the MFA residency, I decided it was time.
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