Episode 20: How can I cut out foods for health reasons, without it becoming disordered?
In this week’s episode, Jessica is discussing the question, “How can I cut out foods for health reasons, without it becoming disordered?” These topics can be quite complex in nature, and I would always recommend seeing a dietitian that specializes in healing from restrictive eating!
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Intro
Welcome to the art and science of eating. I’m Jessica Begg, registered dietician and clinical counsellor. I worked for fifteen years in programs for the treatment of eating disorders. I now help those that struggle with emotional eating and their relationship with their body. This podcast is where I answer questions to help people along this bumpy journey to creating peace with both food and their body.
Podcast
Hello my lovely listener. Thanks for joining me again. This week I have a question for you that was written into me, and I want to thank that person for sending it in but also to thank anybody that is thinking about sending in a question so please do keep them coming in. I can’t continue doing the podcast without you and we’ve got a small little group of listeners so if you’re sitting there and you’re thinking uhh I have something but I like to ask Jessica and I haven’t yet then I really love to hear from you. So let’s jump into this one. This one is from a listener that was on my email list that I had put out the call to my email list as well so please do join there. I send out little weekly notes but it’s from the listener that we’ll use her first initial C.
Hi Jessica,
I’ve been listening to your podcast and am enjoying them, thank you. Thanks C.
Everytime I hear you invite listeners to sending questions I think about how I would phrase mine so this email is irresist. I am doing a lot of reflecting on my relationship with food as I’m working to navigate my health and how it relates to my diet. I’ve had varying degrees of food sensitivities for decades from wheat and grains, dairy, sugar, all of the usual culprits. I’ve been tested for but not diagnosed with many conditions and diseases but I suffer from digestive discomfort, weight gain, joint soreness, and most recently gallstones and a fatty liver. As this has been a long road of restrictive eating for me and what I’m realizing is a lot of diet culture thinking is good and bad foods and behaviour. I have a lot of stress around what I should be eating and how it affects my body. This stress is compounded by my role as cook for our family. The best way I can phrase my question is this:
How do you navigate restrictive eating in a way that does not become disordered when it comes to managing digestive symptoms or ailments?
Ok so that’s the question from C. Gosh, this is a very medically complicated question that ultimately I would say you should see a dietitian at minimum. And I would suggest you see a dietitian that understands healing from restrictive eating or disordered eating, and not that you’ve indicated in your question at all that you have an eating disorder but they would be well versed, or should be, about helping with the understanding of what you’re thinking about and around good and bad foods and behaviour and diet culture. But to answer your question C with the general information that you’ve given me here and without your entire medical history. So keep in mind that this is not medical advice as with everything that goes on and said in this podcast but to help you start thinking about the other possibilities as you discuss this and bring it back to your own personal health professional team. So I hear in your question that you’re concerned about health and you want to make sure you’re doing everything that you can do to protect your health or at least maintain as best you can. So first thing’s first, I want you to know that whatever you choose to do to care for your body is the best choice. You know how you feel; you know how to care for your body and what is important to you and what decision you make with that in mind is the best for you in the context of your life. So that includes your family, your worklife, or if you’re working from home, any kind of activities that you do. So you are your best knower or seer or what’s going on. By the time that people often come to see, they’ve been shamed or felt shamed for something they might have thought they should have done better. My experience with working with all sorts of clients is that they always made the best choice for them at the time so please don’t feel like you’ve missed something or that you should’ve caught anything earlier or anything to that degree. But, let’s dive into this a little bit more. Where I would first start is to make sure the food items that you’ve taken out or think that you should take out are actually needed to be removed from your diet and this I would suggest going to your family doctor like I had mentioned or seeing a dietitian to figure out what actually needs to be taken out, because as you say that you have these food sensitivities that you’ve been tested for but not diagnosed with any conditions, there’s not enough concreteness in this comment to tell us either you or me definitively if you need to remove these foods for health reasons or not and that’s really important of whether you need to. What I also want you to know that is some tests that you may have done, not sure if this was the case for you but this is good for other people and yourself, because if you’ve had the IGG food sensitivity test that is often offered by an alternative health provider. Please know that this test does not have any actual evidence to support its use and in fact the Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, the CSACI, which is a group of doctors that specialize in the area of allergy and immunology have put out a position statement against the use of these tests and I’ll put a link in the show notes that has that paper but basically what they say is this test shows many false positives so then people think they should avoid all sorts of food, making eating and preparing foods very difficult to do so and I’m hearing that in your email. That you might be getting frustrated or that you’re very stressed around what you should be eating or also what you’re cooking for your family. Cooking, thinking about what to eat, grocery shopping, all of these are really big and difficult tasks. So if you throw on meatless hurdles like cutting out foods unnecessarily, it makes it nearly impossible to do. And to add to that stress, people may choose to still eat these foods because it’s too hard to cut them out and feel guilty needlessly because they never had any issues with these foods to begin with, so see some of the foods they’ve got listed in as intolerances are admittedly common allergens but you need to go back to talking to your dietitian about this because some of the thing that you’ve said is kind of confusing to me in that way you’ve said you’ve had varying degrees of food sensitivities for decades from wheat grains, dairy, and sugar. So dairy and wheat are common allergens as common as food allergies are which they aren’t as common as we think but it is very rare to have a negative response to wheat and all grains and more concerning you’ve listed as one of your sensitivities and this may have been a confusion in the way in the email because saying you have a sensitivity to sugar is like saying you have a sensitivity to water. Just like water, sugar is an integral and necessary part of every cell in our body. And yes we can operate on ketones if people out there have or are considering doing the keto diet. If it is absolutely necessary, if the optimal fuel sugar is not around but our brain really prioritizes sugar as its primary fuel source as it works and functions much better on sugar. Sugar as a compound gets inappropriately confused with added sugar where there was a public health push for people to decrease, not cut out, to decrease the amount of added sugar they ate but what’s unfortunate was at some point in this telephone game of disseminating information, someone and i’ll say ‘hint hint’ someone selling bogus health products heard that quote on quote sugar is bad and decided they should cut it out in its entirety and that’s not the case. The problem with thinking that sugar is bad is that we need it as a primary fuel source. If we don’t have it we will then crave and often sometimes binge or feel out of control with food, with sugar. So this fuels this thought that sugar is addictive because now people feel out of control when they eat it but really it’s that your body desperately needs it so it’s pushing it to get it whenever it can but this phenomenon also cuts out super healthy foods that break down to sugar like fruits and all grains. In these foods we get the most important thing sugar that our body needs but also things like antioxidants in fruits, B vitamins, fibres, and grains. So this is why I suspect someone had made this mistake with you. Ok so it’s a little bit of a roundabout way to answer your question. So after that, we can kind of get to it. So your question is how to navigate restrictive eating in a way that does not become disordered when it comes to managing digestive symptoms or ailments. So in light of what I have said ahead of here, it sounds to me that you may be thinking that you need to cut out more stuff than you need to. So that will dramatically ease the amount of possible restriction that you might have to do and have is even not a necessary thing but once you sort that out, there still some maybe some foods or way of eating that may be better and align better with your digestion still so if you’re asking me that then with your dietitian you can start figuring out what is going out that is upsetting your stomach or that might be needed for any of the ailments that may improve some changes in the way that you eat or what you eat. So in light of that, you or anyone else listening may have gotten some health professional on ways to eat or things to cut out to improve your health so this is the next thing that I would suggest you consider is that the food restriction are only suggestions that are merely things to consider. So if you don’t do them in the exact way that it was suggested, you can implement them into your life in the way that best fits you and that’s how you should do it. Even speaking as a dietitian, it’s not that i’m expecting that these restrictions or suggestions be implemented too rigidly and restrictions become particularly triggering when they’re put in this rigidly and particularly when we don’t make them our own that these suggestions become disordered when they’re implemented as rigid rules followed for fear of something bad that might happen if that rule is not followed to the top. We can try to care for our body in a way to protect yourself as best as we can from getting sick, from getting aches, and pain, having to take medication. However, even after our best efforts, we’d likely will still have or get all of these things. We’re going to get sick no matter what we do, we will get things within our body that we will need to manage with medication. We’ll get aches; we’ll get pains. Something is going to happen to our body that we will have to manage. And while I say don’t just throw up your hands and say forget it I can’t do anything I have no control over my body I’m going to get sick regardless, I need to say that not everything you do will make you sick and therefore not everything you do will keep you healthy that this is not a burden that you necessary need to carry such a heavy load, knowing that you can decide how much time and effort that you want to put into whatever suggestion you’re offered, knowing what kind of impact that will have on your body. So with that in mind, you can be a little more gentle with these quote on quote food restrictions and I wouldn’t even usually, it’s kind of a harsh word to use, but around these food restrictions that you’ve talked about, you can be a little more gentle knowing how much effort or how much impact -- how much effort you want to put into it for the impact you’re going to get. And this obviously isn’t the case for food allergies or something where you specifically can’t eat something and usually those are one item, two items, tends to be a little bit better to be managed but again I would suggest you would go back to your team. Ok so lastly C, I would also suggest going to your team if the food restrictions are needed for some of the things you’ve listed as concerns. They may not be correlated. So as an example, let’s just take your joint pain concern that you’ve listed here. Likely you or someone listening has been told or thought that the joint pain that they feel would improve if they lost weight. Actually research has shown no movement or activity, it doesn’t have to be a crazy amount, just walking or swimming here would keep the joints moving and strong has better outcomes on joint pain than losing weight. Joint pain is neither lessened or increased by any food in particular. Same thing with gallstones. Just because it’s related to the gut, we may unconsciously think that we can prevent gallstones through food and no that is really genetics. Now we may need to redistribute or make sure that don’t have too too much fat at any one time because when you have a fatty meal, your gall bladder contracts and your gallstone can move out of there and block the path. However, you can also get that same blockage after eating say your morning oatmeal because we’re going to use bile acids. We’re going to use bile at any point of digestion so even that kind of recommendation isn’t necessarily going to protect you from having gallstone issues. So I say this to lessen your mental burden about this, not to just shut off and ignore your bodies and say well, again there’s nothing I can do, but a thoughtful choice on what you do depending on how much control you have on each situation. And this can all be done with some open discussion with a caring medical team C. If you don’t have a caring medical team, dump the ones that you have and ask around to find ones that are. Ok C, I hope that answers your question, gets you thinking about how you can be more compassionate about yourself and how you choose to care for your body. Let me know how that goes. Take care everyone.
Disclaimer
This podcast is for education and information purposes only. Please consult your own healthcare team to discuss what is right for you and your care.