Whilst this diet is new to me, the experience isn't.
When I was a kid, I used to get a lot of tummy ache. Not the slight grumble that meant you could try and cadge an afternoon off lessons for the school nurse, but the kind that got me sent home from looking so peaky. This all changed when I was 11.
I swear it was in a Geography lesson, and I do not have a clue why they would show it in a Geography lesson or even why they'd even show it, but they did indeed show us a video of a pig being slaughtered. In a Geography lesson. Obviously, being quite impressionable young things, everyone in the class became vegetarian overnight. Not many others stopped seeing the nurse as a result. Whilst my classmates were back in McD's in a week, I stuck with it, later stopping chicken in addition to the initial beef and pork. Whilst this frustrated the hell out of my mother, cooking two meals to suit my brother and I, it did stop my stomach aches. I stayed with fish and seafood because, to be frank,
I'm not giving that up for anything. Ever.
So, skip forwards - uni years (ringing my best friend from halls to ask her how long to boil a potato through to cooking French rustic flatbread with caramelised onion topping in my third year) I'm still not eating meat, and as the brackets there showed, getting better at cooking.
As an aside, I met my husband. Who is an AWESOME cook. And food is our big thing - not quantity, but certainly not artfully arranged nonsense (though that has its place). No, good food, cooked fresh. Allegra McAvedy and Nigel Slater are the heroes of our house, and rightly so. So, food is desperately important to us. Which makes the next bit so hard.
About ten years later, the problems started again. I hadn't reintroduced the meat (well ok, chorizo occasionally, but seeing as I hate bacon, that's my only meaty weakness). I just started getting bloaty, painy, and many more unpleasant things I'd rather not go into just now. I get fobbed off by a few nurses, until out of spite (another time) I insist on seeing a doctor - who, as the last patient of the day, decides I'm a puzzle and asks me twenty minutes of questions. He decides to send me to a gastro specialist.
Examinations, cameras, blood tests and more lead us into the expected answer. IBS. Well, at least it's not coeliac, but instead of being sent on my merry way (as I'd half-suspected), I get given this:
PICTURE TO FOLLOW
It's terrifying. How do people live without garlic. Or onions. Or, for that matter, nearly everything on this list. And then I went online, and discovered some recently updated FODMAP dietary details. And they said no avocado (amongst other things, but this was my main takeaway from this, frankly).
So, here's a list of what you can't have. There's no definitive list of what you can, and what do you mean you want meal plans? And don't eat meat? And can't eat soya as part of this diet?
I decided, seeing as I've had a week on this diet, to start writing down all the recipes I've knocked up with what I can have on the exclusion part of the diet. In a week and a half I start I introducing the naughty list foods, to see what are actually triggers,and what things I will simply have to live without.
I love food, and I don't want to give that particular fancy up for anything.
I will start on this tomorrow - promise.
And now the responsible bit. For now, please note that there are several irresponsible articles online advising this for weight loss. No. This diet is not designed for that, it's to see how your digestive tract deals with having all known irritants removed. My doctor prescribed it. Seriously, I'm waiting for blood tests. This is official business, people.
But I sure would like to know what you're cooking with if you're having the same problems.
