At the age of 27, I was sick…really sick, and after MRIs and CT scans and Ultrasounds, no one could figure out what was wrong with me. Finally my doctor said, “I think the problem is that you’re allergic to everything, so cut different things out of your life until you feel better.” I didn’t feel like random trial and error was the best approach so I went to a naturopathic doctor and through extensive blood tests found that I was deficient of several key vitamins and allergic to dairy, gluten, corn, eggs, and oats. To give you some perspective: on the test they performed, a result above a 2 indicated an allergic reaction and my result on dairy was a 67! One of my ultrasounds also found that the painful lumps in my breasts were fibrocystic tissue that is aggravated by inflammatory foods so I also began consciously cutting caffeine, soy, tomatoes, eggplant, potatoes, red meat and lunch meats containing nitrates out of my diet.
My reaction to this news was the same question everyone asks me when I tell them about my food allergies and sensitivities: “…..so, what am I supposed to eat?? What’s left??”
At first I kept it simple, to test it out I did a lemonade fast for 10 days and then literally lived on raw fruits, raw veggies, and fish for the next month. The change in my life was so dramatic after just a month that I was blown away. For the first time in my life, I felt “good” and “normal”. My whole life I had been dealing with headaches and stomach aches and what I call “foggy brain” and I didn’t really realize that it wasn’t normal!!
After a month or two though, I began to miss foods. Even though I felt SO much better and the diet I was following was worth it, I missed things about my life before I knew about my allergies. I LOVE to cook and plan menus and grocery shop and I missed making the things I used to make, I missed the way certain things taste, I missed the process of cooking, I missed being able to create new recipes and plan meals around my experiments. I also discovered, through my own home testing, that a LOT of gluten-free and dairy-free foods on the market are TERRIBLE!!! So I set out to create meals that I can eat that taste great, even to people without my diet restrictions. This blog is where I will post those recipes and lifestyle tips and, because I know firsthand that not everyone in a household has the same strict requirements, I promise to only post recipes that are approved as delicious by both myself and one of my official non-allergy-restricted taste testers (pretty much anyone that I ever cook for since I know very few people with diet restrictions). I hope you enjoy the recipes!
healthy meals with sarah 