JOURNEY | microbemom

MY HEALTH JOURNEY

Exposed.

That is how the following section makes me feel. I rarely--or more accurately never--discuss my struggles with food. Struggling with food seems shameful. It seems to suggest weakness and failure. But really I think it indicates an imbalance, or a disconnect between the signals in our brain and what our bodies need. In my experience, journeying toward a healthy relationship with food is an ever-winding road, and I am constantly straying off course and getting back on.

So why am I sharing this with you? I want you to know that if you also struggle, you are not alone. Your journey may have taken a different path than mine, but together we will navigate towards finding peace with food and balancing the many aspects of food that affect us. Food provides so many things: fuel, nourishment and healing, as well as comfort, indulgence, culture, and sharing. Together we can achieve balance and find the harmony of a well-rounded diet that provides us all those things.

The main reason I share is to:

promote a healthy relationship with food
provide a sounding board for others who have struggled with weight and food issues
encourage a holistic view of health; weight is just one of many markers we have to evaluate health

Here's my story.

I became somewhat of a health fanatic around the age of 12. I grew up as a chubby kid, and I really felt out of place next to my tall lanky brothers who could eat anything and stay thin. I was very self-conscious of my weight and my “thunder thighs.” During my first year of junior high, I saw an ad in a teen magazine for a weight loss program designed for young adults. I assumed all the skinny girls in school had used it; how else could they stay in such good shape? So I scrounged up some babysitting money and bought the book, which called for a calorie-restricted, low fat, high carb diet. Maybe not the best nutrition advice ever, but it did offer some good tips on incorporating vegetables and controlling portion sizes.

Around the same time, I started running and got really into fitness. Between the diet and exercise I did lose quite a bit of weight and started to feel more comfortable in my skin. Looking back, these changes influenced my health in positive ways, but the early struggles were just the beginning of my lifelong battle with weight, health, body image, and relationship with food.

High school was a tough emotional time, and my weight fluctuated 5-10 lbs one way or the other according to my stress levels. So although the swings in weight weren’t huge, it was enough to affect my health. Sometimes I ate so little that I missed periods or barely had energy to get through the day, other times I was hiding under oversized hoodies and track pants.

During college, I developed some really poor eating habits. Late night study snacks were Diet Coke and CheezIts or endless bowls of cereal. Parties were also accompanied with binge drinking and gorging on junk food til the wee hours. My weight slowly crept up, but it wasn’t anything noticeable.

Although I thought I had managed to avoid the “freshman 15” in college, it sure enough caught up with me in grad school. Study groups centered around pizza, chicken wings and beer and who had time to work out? The atmosphere very much supported “face time” in lab—no not the iPhone video chat—actual, physical presence in the lab reading papers and performing experiments, which often lasted late into the night.

I’ll never forget coming home for Thanksgiving during my first year and having to go shopping with a close friend to buy jeans 2 sizes bigger. This was the biggest I'd ever been. It was demoralizing, but we had fun and she helped me make the best of it (that's what friends are for!). I knew I wanted to make a change, but I didn't really know how to at that point. I was kind of in a rut.

But I got bounced out of the rut shortly after, when I went through a tough breakup. To cope, I began running again. I found it so therapeutic! Running offered an amazing escape from everything that dragged me down. Almost immediately, 20 pounds fell off, as if my body was saying, “Thank you!” I loved the results--I finally felt like myself again. I tried to lose more weight. But my approach wasn't from a place of compassion or understanding of what I really needed. My approach was short-sighted and entirely results-driven.

This translated to countless cycles of intense calorie restriction and binge eating habits. It looked something like this:

Eat as little as I could
Continue that for as long a possible
Trigger: staying up late, failed experiment, drinking, LIFE
Eat everything in sight
Rinse
Repeat

The cycle was predictable…and seemingly endless. I knew I was wreaking havoc on my blood sugar, damaging my gut, and likely flirting with insulin resistance, but I couldn’t stop. It really felt like the feast or famine instinct taking over.

When I started training for my first marathon, I knew I needed to get my nutrition in order. Eating like a runner shifted the focus to fueling my body, so I incorporated more nutrient dense carbs like sweet potatoes and quinoa. I was amazed to find that I could maintain my weight, have energy and avoid major crashes. I hit a sweet spot, lost 5 more pounds while training and managed to stay within about 2-3 lbs of my new healthy weight for the next few years. A few blood panels measuring fasting glucose, cholesterol, etc. showed that across the board, my health was actually in pretty good shape. I felt like I finally had it all figured out!

So you can imagine my surprise when, at 26 weeks pregnant, I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes. Given the fact that I started my pregnancy at a healthy weight and didn’t have any of the risk factors besides being older (31 at the time), the diagnosis threw me for a loop. I was initially devastated, but with the help of my supportive husband and an encouraging dietician, I made the best of it.

I learned a lot about glycemic index of foods and how food combinations can slow the release of sugar into the bloodstream. I realized that a lot of the food I ate, although seemingly healthy, was actually highly processed, caused blood sugar spikes and wasn’t the best source of nutrients. I experienced how a 20 minute walk after eating can drastically lower blood sugar levels. I saw firsthand just how difficult it is to manage gestational diabetes—I was fortunate to control my blood sugar with diet and exercise, but many moms required insulin, even if they followed the recommended diet as closely as they could and did their best to squeeze in exercise after meals.

For me, gestational diabetes offered a clear-cut motivator to improve my diet: the health of my baby girl depended on it! Thankfully she was perfectly healthy at birth and continues to be. My gestational diabetes went away, but I am now even more concerned about maintaining a healthy weight to reduce my risk of gestational diabetes with subsequent pregnancies and to keep my risk of Type II diabetes low.

So over the past year, I have taken steps to really hone in on what foods work for me. I have completed two Whole Life Challenges, which is an 8-week program featuring a diet component that focuses on eating whole, low-inflammatory "compliant" food. This program helped me lose the last bit of baby weight and make better food choices overall. But its format rewards good behavior with "cheat days" during which I fell back into my old habits of eating everything "non-compliant" in sight. Although the binge only lasts one day, my whole body suffers--headaches, stomachaches, bloating, you name it. I also could never stick to the eating plan--at the end of the 8 weeks I would totally overcorrect and derail any progress I may have made.

Enter The Microbiome Diet. For me, fully understanding why I am cutting out certain foods and eating others really helps me stick with it. It motivates me in a different way. I can follow a program to the T for the allotted time, but then real life happens again. Without a mindset change, we will always default to old habits. After reading The Microbiome Diet, I was ready to dive into the diet plan and even more eager to learn more about the scientific studies linking gut microbiota to health and disease.

More importantly, I am using other markers to evaluate and define my health. Weight has always been the most important one for me, and although it remains important, rather than asking, Will I gain weight if I eat this?, I am asking:

How will I feel after I eat this?

Does this food provide the nourishment I need?

How does this food help promote my overall health?

Sometimes my goal for health is simply to feel full and satisfied, with fuel to get through the day. Sometimes my goal is to enjoy time with friends and family over a nice meal with some wine, BUT keeping in mind that if I overdo it and have too much wine or too much dessert, the enjoyment will be lost. I will pay the price with a headache, stomachache, bloating, etc. Finding that balance requires patience, compassion, and mindfulness.

Thanks for reading my story. I’m so excited to share what I’ve learned through my research and to share my experience of my new eating habits.