111: Food Elimination Drama
Any time you start a new dietary challenge, your brain is going to resist. Here’s what mine has been saying to me since I made changes to work on my Hashimoto’s:
This is dumb.
This food is boring.
I don’t care if I have high antibodies, I want my bread.
You’re never going to be able to stick this out.
I don’t want to do this.
Eliminating food is hard. We don’t like it. Our brains resist it. It creates a whole lotta drama. But the drama starts in the mind before it starts in the mouth.
Most of us can relate to this universal struggle when it comes to cleaning up our diets.
Listen to this week’s podcast to learn how to help yourself through the tough moments of a dietary challenge and how even the Israelites struggled with food drama! This one is heavy on Scripture and Real Life feels.
EPISODE 111: Food Elimination Drama
SHOW NOTES
(0:00) Intro
Hello my friend! Welcome back to the club. How are you today?
To be honest, I’ve been having a little food drama here lately.
I am using a Carnivorish dietary approach to see if that helps my body calm down the Hashimoto’s situation.
I need my immune system to calm down and we can help a situation like this by changing the diet and taking out a lot of the common food triggers that can get the immune system riled up.
On Day 4, I hit, what I call, a meat wall. Like, I’m sick of meat.
I had to dig deeeeeeeep y’all. And it’s not like I’m only eating meat. I had cantaloupe a few times yesterday and. It tasted SO delicious.
I made these cacao butter and honey bombs - like a fat bomb but not because it has honey, which is allowed on a Carnivorish diet and I posted pics in the Club group
I'm already trying to push the boundaries, see what I can get away with.
This is one reason I didn’t want to do the Autoimmune Protocol. You can still have certain flours and there are plenty of AIP desserts out there.
I don’t want my focus to be on what concoctions I can get away with and still be .... compliant. But I already did that. 😆
(5:28) Eliminating foods from your diet is HARD.
We’re about to start Feast 2 Fast in May and for the new people coming and doing a Sugar Detox that first week - it’s the same feeling. It doesn’t matter where you are in your health journey - eliminating foods from your diet is HARD.
We don’t like it. Our brains resist it. It creates a whole lotta mind drama. And that, my friend, is the fascinating point here.
Our relationship with food doesn’t start in our mouths, it starts in our brains. And that is where we have to go.
It’s all relative…
One week of sugar detoxing seems like an absolute drop in the bucket compared to someone doing a 3-month elimination protocol. But for the person in the middle of the sugar detox week, it can feel just as heavy.
(7:30) It all comes down to perspective:
We even have to explore the notion of how we phrase - what we “can” have.
I mean, I can have anything I want. I can have eggs and cheese and sweet potatoes and cookies if I want to, but I choose not to right now. This is a choice. I
As I was grappling with all of this in my brain the Bible verse that flew into my head was,
For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. -Romans 14:17
This verse is really about the fact that what we eat or drink has no impact on our salvation, on our relationship with God. God loves us no matter what we eat.
We want to give the biggest portion of our brains to righteousness, to love, to joy to peace, to God - we want that space filled with the good things of the Lord and not mind drama about food.
We waste so much of our lives on food and dieting, wandering in the wilderness, circulating the same mountain just like the Isrealites who had their own version of food drama when they were wandering the wilderness those 40 years. Let’s talk about no variety.
Listen to this passage from Exodus - where the Isrealites are in the desert complaining to Moses and Aaron about their food situation.
3 They said, “It would have been better if the Lord had just killed us in the land of Egypt. At least there we had plenty to eat. We had all the food we needed. But now you have brought us out here into this desert to make us all die from hunger.”
4 Then the Lord said to Moses, “I will cause food to fall from the sky. This food will be for you to eat. Every day the people should go out and gather the food they need that day. I will do this to see if they will do what I tell them.
The Bible says it was like coriander seed that fell with the dew and the Israelites would gather it, grind it, boil it and make it into thin wafers which apparently tasted like honey wafers baked in olive oil.
That was their food. They ate it for forty years. Talk about little variety.
Bible says the Israelites began moaning “We don’t have any meat!
5 In Egypt we could eat all the fish we wanted, and there were cucumbers, melons, onions, and garlic.
6 But we’re starving out here, and the only food we have is this manna.”
And God was like - oh you want some meat - I’ll give you some meat. He told Moses:
18 As for the Israelites, I have heard them complaining about not having meat and about being better off in Egypt. So tell them to make themselves acceptable to me, because tomorrow they will have meat.
19-20 In fact, they will have meat day after day for a whole month—not just a few days, or even ten or twenty. They turned against me and wanted to return to Egypt. Now they will eat meat until they get sick of it.
Some time later the Lord sent a strong wind that blew quails in from the sea until Israel’s camp was completely surrounded with birds, piled up about three feet high for miles in every direction.
32 The people picked up quails for two days—each person filled at least fifty bushels. Then they spread them out to dry. 33 But before the meat could be eaten, the Lord became angry and sent a disease through the camp.
34 After they had buried the people who had been so greedy for meat, they called the place “Graves for the Greedy.”
God gives us this beautiful life-giving food from nature through plant and animal sources and we’re like - I want Doritos. I want donuts. I want Dairy Queen. We turn our noses up at what God has given us.
It’s also interesting and kinda sad that the Israelites were basically like we’d rather be in bondage and have the food we want than to be free in the Lord and be limited.
We often choose to live in bondage with our weight and health issues and a death-grip on our favorite foods rather than be free in the discipline of less variety.
(14:59) Food is a beautiful gift from God meant to be appreciated and enjoyed.
He could have made us without the need for food. Like we could have been these breathing human beings that just run on air without a food requirement but that’s not how we’re made.
The problem here is two-fold - one is that we often use food for entertainment - hence, party in the mouth - or comfort as a way to buffer or avoid feelings like sadness, boredom, frustration, guilt, etc.
I’ve talked about both of these issues before:
One is emotional eating and, again, that starts in our brains. We have to address emotional health to address body health. We have to be aware and make those connections and work through those times we’re using food as a buffer to avoid feelings.
The other is the party-in-the-mouth syndrome where our taste buds and the pleasure receptors in the brain have a warped sense of what is pleasurable because we’ve been eating too many hyperpalatable processed foods that manufacturers purposely make super sweet, super salty, super flavored - so that we will keep coming back for more.
When you do a sugar detox or an elimination diet and get those foods out of your system, your taste buds and your brain recalibrate, they reset, they recognize the deliciousness, the flavor, the pleasure of real food.
One of our anchor verses in Feast 2 Fast comes from Hebrews 12:11
For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.
Another one we focus on comes from Proverbs 25:28
A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls.
(17:54) We have to remember there is safety in boundaries.
If WE don’t set boundaries and practice discipline for ourselves nobody will.
Sometimes It’s harder when we don’t have a parent or someone enforcing discipline on us, we have to choose that for ourselves.
We don’t have that higher authority telling us what to do. But what we DO have is our Creator, the Maker of our bodies who, again, going back to Romans 14:17, doesn’t judge us by what we eat or drink, but loves us so much and wants us to use the gift of our bodies to live this life to the fullest and serve Him well.
(19:28) Feast 2 Fast: Purpose of the Body
The theme of the next round of Feast 2 Fast which starts in about a week, at the beginning of May, is Purpose of the Body.
I’m so very grateful that it will be this constant focus for me as I go through this dietary discipline right now - keeping things in perspective, focusing on appreciating the foods that I AM eating instead of the ones that I am not. Remembering that this is a choice.
Our human brains want to do - focus on what we’ve done wrong instead of what we’ve done right. Again, the word “wrong” is subjective here.
I promise you that every day of this experiment I have had thoughts like - this is dumb, I don’t care if I have high antibodies, I don’t want to do this. I’d rather eat my homemade bread and favorite crackers - heck, even a sweet potato at this point- and just deal with the consequences.
I 100% understand wherever you are in your process of trying to eliminate foods that are not serving your best health. Again, no matter what level that is at it doesn’t matter because it feels real and heavy to each of us in the moment and presents it’s own kind of drama in the brain.
(21:52) Leaning into gratitude:
I was going through the photos in my phone and wanted to cry in gratitude for the way I am able to show up in life. I feel good in and about my body - I have the energy, the confidence, the desire, the playfulness to experience life to the fullest without weight or lack of energy or lack of confidence or chronic illness or anything like that holding me back. And I want that to continue.
But I want to have peace in this process of what I’m doing. Romans 14:17 says,
For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.
So come join us in Feast 2 Fast, I’d love to have you.
I also want to invite any health professional that is interested in teaching Feast 2 Fast to join us for coach training, it is open this round.
I’m only one person and the more people on the ground focusing other Christians on more God and better health and giving them the tools to show up fully in life- the better.
(25:20) Outro & Disclaimer
Thanks for listening! Have a healthy and blessed week!