Issue #10 - Food As Hope

Ways to reduce pain and sacrifices worth making (or not)

Note from Editor

10 issues of We Have Food At Home! What a fun and exciting time!! Thank you so much for sticking with this humble little newsletter. Whether you’ve read one issue, four issues, or all of them, thank you!! I started this at the beginning of summer to practice my food writing. I started with long editor’s notes full of trips down memory lane and essay-length reflections. As it happens, I lost momentum. I’d find myself writing the editor’s notes in between meetings or last week, while at a layover. But know that the length of my editor’s notes never equates to the excitement I have for the pieces I publish. I am immensely grateful to the writers and poets who have contributed their time and energy into these pieces.

I’m sitting in my room in Bangladesh, visiting my family for the first time in a year. I’ve had some of the best food I’ve had in months. There have been kebabs and rice and beef and tripe and chicken and fish and everything in between packed with my favorite flavors and spices. It’s always disorienting traveling across oceans and adjusting to timezones, but I can tell you that eating the food that makes me feel the most at home is doing wonders for my serotonin.

Today, we have a striking piece from Amanda that expresses frustration. It spins the tale of reality—sometimes our bodies don’t cooperate with the food that we love. She writes about her struggle with chronic pain and change in diet in an honest way, and reminds us that there can be exceptions to certain rules. I keep coming back to this line: “I love food, and without a dramatic noticeable change, there can be little incentive to go without my comfort foods.”

This piece urges us to think about what is worth giving up and what the limits are that our body pushes us to. And I ask you a much lighter question: What are your comfort foods?

I hope you are having a wonderful week! Stay cool if it’s hot where you are.

Sending a nice breeze your way,

Padya

Amanda Nicholson

Amanda Nicholson is an author, poet, podcaster, and copywriter. She has written several books as Amanda Steel, including Ghost of Me. Amanda’s poetry has been broadcast on BBC Radio Manchester. She Has a Creative Writing MA, and her articles have been published by Jericho Writers, Reader’s Digest UK, and Metro.

Finding Hope in the Face of Pain

I’ve suffered from chronic pain for over ten years now. Just a couple of years ago, I felt like I had tried everything else and began to look into a change of diet.

This is when I discovered that a lot of sugar can increase inflammation. Although I have never had an official diagnosis of any particular condition, it seems that my joints are inflamed. So if I could reduce my pain by changing my diet, I was going to try it.

I won’t lie. It was a challenge at first. The list of foods that reduce inflammation was limited on it own. This includes foods like oily fish, blueberries, cherries, oranges, almonds, chickpeas, and broccoli. As you can see, it would have meant an extremely limited diet. I also discovered that dairy and caffeine could be the cause of flare-ups, or at least worsen them. So these were cut out of my diet too.

I switched dairy milk for almond milk, cut out cheese, which was difficult for me, and went without coffee for about six months, switching to decaf instead. I usually have two cups of coffee to get me going in the morning. So, this was challenging.

I had to have some sugary foods to give myself a more varied diet. I tried to balance these out by keeping my sugar intake between 25g and 50g a day. Depending on who you ask, some experts say it should be 25 grams a day, while others claim it’s 50. I aimed to be closer to 25. Most foods contain sugar, so I had to be really healthy to reduce my intake so drastically.

At this point, I had almost given up on reducing my pain. It had spread to my legs and I wondered if there would be a day (not too far in the future) when I could be unable to move very much at all. Maybe that’s why I stuck to my self-imposed plan as well as I did. I’m the type of person who fails at weight loss diets, but this was more important than losing weight.

Apart from my coffee, I missed breakfast cereal. I discovered that so many of them contained about half my daily allowance of sugar. I ate a lot of shredded wheat. It wasn’t fun, but I got used to it. I discovered that I liked spinach, which I had only previously associated with Popeye, and I felt like a rabbit when I ate salads without the fun food items like ham, cheese or eggs. With each mouthful, I told myself it was going to reduce the pain. Main meals took a while to get used to. I no longer ate potatoes, which were now on the banned list of foods. Instead I ate turkey or chicken breast and half a plate of vegetables to fill me up.

Looking back, the improvements were so gradual over the six months that I was on this new eating plan that I didn’t notice a dramatic difference. However, on my birthday weekend, I allowed myself a lot of my favorite foods that I had gone without. The increase in my neck, back and shoulder pain was definitely noticeable.

I think the changes in my diet reduced the pain, and I’ve since noticed that whenever I overindulge or don’t eat the right amount of inflammation-reducing foods, the pain is worse. I realize this is only anecdotal evidence, but it’s something I want to try again. I wish I could say I stuck to the diet and am now pain-free.

I went back to it several times, but I love food, and without a dramatic noticeable change, there can be little incentive to go without my comfort foods. Life has its ups and downs for everyone, and for me, food is something I turn to when I’m struggling with some of the problems life throws at me. One day, I might be in the right frame of mind to go back to my inflammation-reducing diet. I currently rely on supplements aimed reducing the flare-ups, but I know they’re not as effective.