One of the ways that my maxims and priorities shift is with food. Managing to eat no sugar, no yeast, no gluten or dairy products, no fruit, no starchy vegetables, no fermented products, etc. etc. even, on some accounts, no grains, is, as you can well imagine, phenomenally difficult. What makes it worse is that there are, as I have indicated, so many different conceptions of the diet.
One type of diet which certainly benefits me is the candida diet. There are many forms of this. Some recommend that no fruit whatever be consumed with the diet since even fruit sugars help the candida parasite to thrive. Others recommend fresh juices and smoothies. Some say there may be no gluten. Others recommend whole wheat flour. Some say that honey can be consistent with the diet, it being a shorter chain sugar.
Then there is the gluten free, casein free diet for those with autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. This also benefits me. But of course, because the gluten and casein are avoided due to the fact that they break down into neurotoxins/opiates it is, in most conceptions of this diet, unnecessary to avoid sugars etc. One consequence of this is that whenever my mind has shifted towards this diet and I have allowed myself these sugary mass-produced gluten and dairy-free products that exclusively fill the free-from shelves, I have become very angry very quickly, my head full of intrusive daydreams and abstract anger.
Then there is the tricky problem of alcohol. There is a slight difference in the severity of the effects of beer and wine, which really knock me about for a couple of weeks, and spirits, which don’t affect me quite so badly, or in quite the same way. This small difference often becomes exaggerated in my mind, and also falls prey to the shift of priorities in my mind that keeping in touch with friends who may struggle with me when I’m not drinking, my social skills needing a little helping hand, is more important than excluding all substances which may aggravate a problem with candida, a maxim which most often alternates with the ‘weighty’ conception of life (on Milan Kundera’s polarity, discussed above) and of Candida in which it is necessary to be almost inhumanly disciplined for a period of a few months to wipe out the problem for good.
Most recently, a reading of a piece by Erica White on the Institute for Optimum Nutrition website sent her conception of the Candida diet racing up in the maxim stakes, replacing, to a degree, the one that has been foregrounded for a couple of months, that of the Gut & Psychology diet of Natasha Campbell-McBride. This led to my buying oatcakes on going out to buy water, and then, going further, to pop into Sainsbury’s, buying both gluten free porridge and rolled oats with soya milk.
On this conception, it would be better to eat a little gluten but be consistent with the diet by introducing a few ingredients that may be a little less bland than the usual fare, than to struggle so hard to exclude everything, but break every now and again and feed the candida by doing so, as I did, almost inevitably, over Christmas. Read the rest of this entry »
