How I Eat With Autoimmunity - part 1 - Principles
I mention food in every conversation about remission. I have avoided writing about it so far because it's easier to mention it offhand as 'a thing that's helped me' than to attempt to do it justice.
Food is tricky. It’s almost too close to home. To convey the impact of food, not just in my life, but its material and spiritual histories, is not a task I have felt up to, but I can't avoid the topic anymore.
Part 2 - family history - is here
Part 3 - Chiang Mai, Thailand edition - is here
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You are who you are because of what you eat.
You eat what you eat because of who you are.
Which comes first, the diet or the person?
How, what, when, and why we eat is riddled with layers of complexity.
There are individual constitutions and preferences. The things each body wants and needs varies between individuals, in Ayurveda this is prakriti. Is your metabolism naturally fast or slow? Are you hot-tempered or cool and collected? Is your tendency towards dryness or dampness?
And there's the cultural context. Where were you born? Who are your parents? Where are your ancestors from? Who raised you? What did they feed you? What neighbourhoods did you grow up in? Who cooked for you as a kid? What did they make? What ingredients did they use? What were your friends eating?
All of these factors influence present day habits, and the constantly changing state of the present day. That’s vikriti–a person’s present state at a given moment in their life. Vikriti refers to that which is changeable. It’s the result of all the factors that influence our being: constitution, plus lifestyle, nutrition, events, seasons, mindset, context.
Inquiring into the personal history and culture of food is key to understanding personal habits and bringing about lasting change and healing. The idea is to move through the received notions about "what you should eat", and develop a keen sense of "what do I need to eat based on who I am?"
Prakriti is a person's natural state. The prakriti is constant throughout life, and will always be the guidepost with which each person can make decisions about what to consume. Its’ companion state, vikriti, changes due to circumstances.
These are some clues towards answering "what do I eat and why?" for yourself.
There's no one-size-fits-all, and every moment calls for active listening into what an individual body needs.
I've been vegan or vegetarian for most of the past 8 years. I would love it if it were enough for me to say “I’m vegetarian," but that could mean anything.
I've been vegan when my autoimmune condition was at its worst, and I've been a carnivore during the same. I've been vegetarian at my best, and in my teens I felt fine while eating a diet consisting primarily of pizza and sausage.
In 2021, I started taking nutrition seriously and got off all my medication a few months later. (nb: I do not recommend anyone else do this without medical supervision)
Now I sort of eat the same thing every day. It's a formula. Most meals are some version of: grain+legume, vegetables, sauce. I eat fruit separately as snacks. I eat 2-3 meals a day.
My diet consists roughly of 40% whole grains and legumes, 40% fruits & vegetables, 20% other. In the other category, we’ve got nuts and seeds, algae, mushrooms, oils, spices, and chocolate.
The things that I don’t eat are what my Ayurveda teacher refers to as the 5 industrial poisons:
sugar,
refined salt,
white flour,
white rice,
pasteurized anything.
Add to that the active avoidance of refined oils or any deep-fried food.
Call it eating without a barcode. To the extent that is possible, I make almost everything from scratch, using whole ingredients. I prioritize raw fermented food like miso, sauerkraut, and kimchi. I eat only whole-grain sourdough bread. I add extra-virgin oils to what I cook. I love rich 100% cacao chocolate. I choose not to consume meat, because through trial and error I’ve found my digestion does better without it.
I eat what I eat because it works for me. I’ve got a pretty intense body situation. The Ayurvedic system would say I have a predominantly Vata-Pitta constitution. That means I eat a lot, digest fast, and need a routine to keep me grounded.
I don't just want my food to support my physical energy. That is, I don’t think about calories, ever. I want my food to support my consciousness, so food is an ethical and a spiritual choice, alongside a "health" choice.
The key to discovering what food to eat is having a set of principles to follow, not a rigid diet.
We’re swimming in oceans of information about food. There's a million courses to take, 30,000 reels to watch, 50 million Instagram accounts devoted to food, fitness, and health.
For the past three years, I’ve eaten primarily based on the principles found in the books Healing With Whole Foods by Paul Pitchford, The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Katz, and Cooking Without Recipes by Véronique Bouchard. I'm continually informed by my study of Chinese medicine, Indian medicine, and Naturopathy.
This is the first in a series of posts on the relationship between food and autoimmunity in my life and the wider cultural context. I’m going to describe my personal process of dietary transition, and also talk about food history. How did I go from hospitalized and medicated, eating meat, potatoes, white bagels and nutella, to where I am now? What influences our collective capacity to do similarly.
I’m interested in helping people develop an intuitive sense of what their body needs. That means: what food do you need to eat? What kind of activities do you need and want to do? How much sleep do you need?
Learning to listen means finding the body's ground state, the things each body wants and needs.
What we do together is ask a question and then listen to the body to hear the answer that naturally emerges.