This article below immediately grabbed my attention. I’ve been waiting for someone to write about this penomenon:

http://saladandcandy.com/post/147075008/the-vita-mix-calls-the-mandoline-black

It’s no secret I have become obsessed with food.  I never ever thought about food in the way I do now.  That is, until I read tons of literature on curing oneself by eating raw vegan or almost raw.  Turns out not such a great idea for me to be a vegetarian at this point of the healing process (learned that lesson last year) but I have created my own diet that I suffer with day in and day out. It is little to no meat (chicken or fish only and grass-fed antibiotic free please), lots of greens and veggies, no dairy, sugar or white breads, etc..

After I decided I would cure myself by eating green and clean I tried so many different things.  Part of it is fun:  you are on this adventure to create things out of specific ingredeints, within guidelines, and also adhering to a careful balance.  Most of it is frustrating i.e. when I started out I thought “everything I actually LIKE is “bad” for me.”  Some has been fascinating (I learned that I am basically allergic to dairy but not in an obvious way that I could have ever known without eliminating it). I also feel TONS better than ever before. But the major problem that doesn’t seem to go away is that this has taken on a life of its own.

And as I sit down to honestly think about it you can even call it a sort of “disorder” I’ve developed.

I cannot eat a single meal without going over it again and again in my head and if I have eaten something “bad” I feel guilty for hours.  I feel like if I eat sugar or dairy or cave in and have a cheeseburger once every few months (grass-fed organic only of course), then I am directly contributing to my illness.  It’s simple in my head: Lauren, you eat bad, you are the reason you will be sick.  Paranoid, guilty, ritualistic… sounds like a disorder to me.

It sounds pretty hardcore as I type it out.  Only T truly knows the extent of this because he lives it with me.  I struggle to find balance.  I struggle every day.

I am not vegan enough for the vegans. I cannot read most of their blogs or listen to their podcasts because it makes me feel imcompetent.  I found this part most interesting in the article because they are in fact, a movement and I am lucky to live in a neighborhood where vegans abound so that I do have choices and can make them easily, BUT it is a circle where you have to be one hundred percent IN IT to be one of them.  There is even a specific language to how these slender clear-skinned folk speak.  I hear it in the colonic place, in the health food store, in the organic raw shop down the block from my home… If I spoke in the manner most of them do my friends would laugh in my face.

I am not allowed the carefree existence of my friends and family and I often watch them piling food into their mouths as I think about the havoc it is reaking on their bodies.  Buzzkill. So, most of this stays internal monologue because who wants “that girl” at a BBQ?  It is another ancellary problem that my illness has created. Awesome. More noise in my head.

And so, I try to get in bed and I can’t stop thinking about the pasta with butter and lemon I allowed myself tonight.  “It’s a slippery slope” commenters on the vegan blogs often echo, “you stray a little, and then a little more, and then before you know it you are feeling sick and it’s hard to get back to eating the right way.”

Big Sigh.

Even eating has become difficult these days. There isn’t much I can do with a clear head.