Romance:From Fat To Fatale(18)
If I hadn't experienced the torture of my wildly protesting digestive system, I would never have believed that sugar could be the cause of so much suffering. It felt like a moment of truth. You know what it's like. You've seen the light. You've been saved.
You're on first name terms with the Lord God Almighty and Jesus is your new personal best friend and you just want to rush out there and share the good news with everyone else on the planet. Hallelujah! Luckily for me, the lady nutritionist was way ahead of me on the pilgrim's pathway to wellness and she wasted no time in sketching out the next stages in the plan to get my health and my body into better shape. Not exactly like a bucket of ice water as an early morning wake-you-up present on your birthday but pretty damn close.
We still had a long, long way to go, she said. Re-setting my whacked-out metabolism was the first and most important step.
Re-colonising my abused and long-suffering gut was another project entirely. And that could easily take two years. Two years?
Yep. That's right. A lifetime of abuse and a slow return to normality. To be more accurate, the benefits would start showing up in my medical charts pretty rapidly but the completed intestinal re-hab programme would still take the best part of two years.
It was a long journey. No quick fixes. We were making a total investment in my health and that was going to be a mission for the rest of my life.
Chapter 12:
Cleaning up the territory
Now I bet you were expecting the good lady nutritionist to hand out a list of forbidden foods at this point, admonishing me with the direst warnings of what would happen to me if I strayed from the path of true digestive virtue. Am I right? Well, you're half-right. To start with, she absolutely banned sugar from my life. Forever. She told me I'd get used to it much more easily now that my insulin levels had been re-set. The cravings would be a thing of the past.
She said it would have to be an all-or-nothing kind of adjustment and I nodded as if I really understood the commitment she was demanding from me.
No more processed sugar and that included all of those nasty, chemically-brewed, artificial sweeteners that everyone was claiming to be the satanic source of half the diseases in the developed world. That part was a lot easier. We only ever used pure, white, glorious, refined sugar to sweeten our lives in the Bulgari household. But how was I going to get this radical shift in eating behaviour past Mama Bulgari? According to her immovable, unquestioning viewpoint, sugar was as close to the Holy Breath of the Lord as a God-fearing Christian could ever get. At least whilst still dwelling in the flesh. It was borderline sacred. It was not, repeat not, to be messed with. Ever. I'd have to think about that one. The Bulgari clan worshipped at the sugar-glazed altar of gluttony and I was about to become their first home-grown heretic.
So we'd just listed sugar as my new number one sworn personal enemy and agreed in a sacred nutritional pact to banish the foul, disease-provoking substance from my life forever. Amen. After the nightmare of the past three days, I was hardly reluctant to bid fond farewell to this perfectly-disguised poison and I was starting to look forward to maybe losing a few pounds and getting my blood pressure off the critical list. But there was more to come. Now we were going to have to make some other little adjustments to help my body dump the extra pounds and heal as naturally as possible. That meant cutting all and any items that might be causing problems. The major challenge with the world's diet today, said the lady nutritionist as she pointed her fork at me across the cramped dining table for emphasis, is the age-old intolerance to grains.
Grains? But that's everything we eat. Pretty much. She shook her head. It's the gluten in grains, Honey. That's what causes the allergic reaction in the body and we're going to cut out bread and cookies and pasta for a while to see if it makes any difference to you. Some folks handle grains better than others.
Doesn't mean grains are actually good for them though. You're going to learn to eat naturally and your body will pretty much do the rest. You sure don't have to starve yourself to lose all that weight. And you're going to start to move that body of yours. Maybe find out what kind of a gal's been hiding out for so long underneath all that fat.
She was smiling as she forked the fried egg into her neat little mouth, looking straight at me with those deep blue eyes as if she could clearly see the future new me and that vision of natural-spun loveliness made her glow with happiness. I looked right back into those eyes and I could see that this crazy little lady really believed in me. I couldn't help smiling too. Her belief was contagious. And I was really beginning to like it.
If you've ever placed your faith and future health in the hands of a truly dedicated nutritionist, you'll know that there are usually long lists of Dos and Don'ts, advice and admonishments, warnings and caveats, penalties and punishments. But my total plan for health and happiness was so utterly simple, I could've jotted the whole thing down on the back of a napkin and still left plenty of space for a recipe for home-made chocolate fudge cake. It was about eating fresh and eating natural, adding as many vegetables to my diet as I liked.
She was calling a time-out on processed food. We crossed off sugar, grains and dairy and added salads, vegetables and organic meat. And exercise. Every day. For me that meant walking. No spandex-clad jogging routines. No Lycra-bound aerobics classes. No tattooed and muscle-flexing personal trainers gazing in wonder at themselves in the mirror. Just walking. Low impact, injury-free and effective.