Now I really have to clean up my act

Because my body has officially had enough. Enough of what? I'm not 100% sure but I'm thinking of the massive amounts of sugar, wheat flour, and processed foods I've been feeding her. In March, I posted about a challenge I wanted to take on to "rebuild a healthy life foundation." A major part of that challenge  was getting on track with eating healthfully consistently. Unfortunately my approach to that wasn't successful.  I won't get into details now but the point is that although I get my green smoothies and fresh juices in most days and though I only prepare vegan meals, my diet has been a far cry from what I know it's needed to be. I have always been funny that way, managing to eat large amounts of healthy food and junk simultaneously. And now my body is rebelling hardcore. How? Well, as I type this I'm experiencing severe discomfort. Intense itching and hives everywhere! Even on my face! It's almost unbearable and I'll be lucky if I have any skin left tomorrow morning.

The itching started a little over a month ago. At first it was pretty mild and I just attributed it to dry skin caused by the winter weather. But even after I resolved to become best friends with my lotion,  the itching persisted and got worse. Some mornings I would wake up with my skin scraped raw in places and realize I'd been scratching in my sleep :/. I was beyond confused and perplexed. My skin itched horribly but there was no rash or other sign of inflammation. And then about a week and a half ago the welts showed up. In beautiful patches, all over. They've been hanging out ever since. They decided to throw  a party tonight. An absolutely crazy party all over my legs, back, arms, stomach, neck, and face.

I don't know for sure why this is happening but I did some research and my symptoms sound alot like the ones attributed to Dermatitis herpetiformis which is closely related to celiac disease i.e gluten intolerance. Even though doctors have been absolutely useless to me over the past few years (completely unable to help me with any problem I've brought to them) I'm going to make my way to one soon. In the meantime I'm throwing out the sugar and gluten and majorly reducing my salt consumption. Although I'm not sure what's wrong I've done enough food/ nutrition research over the past year to know that  that my body is fully capable of healing itself from most ailments (especially allergies) if I allow it to do so. For many reasons sugar and too much salt definitely interfere with the body's healing process so they have to go for now. I think the hardest thing will be parting ways with my huge bag of Sucanat, and my even bigger bag of white whole wheat flour! I remember being so excited about buying that flour.  For months, I've been flirting with the idea of going gluten free--I suffer from a few things I've heard and read going gluten free is supposed to help with--but I could never get myself to fully commit. Now I have all the  motivation in the world because I can't deal with this discomfort for much longer.

After a month or so, I'll reintroduce gluten to see if it really was the problem. And even if it wasn't I'd have done something great for my body because I eat to much wheat flour in general (I consumed about 2.5 cups this past weekend--in the form of various baked goods haha. It was mainly whole wheat but still...2.5 cups in 3 days! Not okay!).

So that's that. I am partly excited.

In other news, here a few pictures of food I made/ate this weekend!

Made dinner with one of my favorite gals on Friday. Kristen is generally amazing and she is one of the few people in my life who it's easy to be vegan around because she is very enthusiastic about eating completely vegan foods with me! She is vegetarian but we all know that there's a big leap to be made between vegetarianism and veganism--she willingly makes it whenever we hang out :). That night we made Pepper "Steak" (seitan) over pasta with sides of kale salad (phenom) and cornbread (the best recipe i've ever tried). I got all the recipes from a book I just finished reading called By Any Greens Necessary and they were all great!  

I own a vegetarian Jamaican cookbook and decided to try the "stuffed vegetable patties" recipe last night. The traditional filling for a Jamaican patty is beef. The filling for this one was a mixture of cooked and mashed lentils, breadcrumbs, and various seasonings/spices. This is one of my little patties pre-baking.

The first one I tried!

It was absolutely delicious and tasted so much like the real thing!! I made about 10 and ate 3. Sadly I have to put the rest in the freezer for now b/c that yummy crust is not gluten free!

 Stay tuned for updates on my gluten free exploits!