Having seen the miracles that the diet has done in my life I tend to evangelize about it to anyone with symptoms who will listen or who simply is unable to move fast enough to escape. That said, there is usually a period where they look at me and let me know that they do not think that they can do this. They wonder how I do it.
To which I always reply, “Its like having a baby. For three months its bad. It’s really mind-blowingly hard. Then, suddenly you get more sleep and the baby gets cuter and it all starts to flow.
But those three months are brutal.
Now here I must confess that we are lucky. We are wildly symptomatic. It is easy to stick to the plan when a deviation means a night spent sweating in the bathroom followed by three days of feeling awful. For people with mostly psychiatric symptoms it has to be harder.
But it is so worth it.
So yes, there is a period where you read every label trying to figure out if the natural flavors are made from gluten and learning the hard way that oats tend to be cross contaminated or that half of celiacs cannot tolerate corn or dairy. I had to learn to read kosher certifications and learn the rules of Passover (which is how a Catholic girl ends up on the Lubavitcher site). I messed up. I made at least ten inedible banana breads. I wanted to scream.
But then slowly, the fog lifted, and I stopped being tired, and I stopped getting sick, and I had a waist for the first time in my life and I suddenly realized what everyone else’s life had been like all along.
And then I doubled down.
Look, I am not going to tell you that this is easy. It’s not. Members of my extended family acted as if I was talking about alien abduction instead of a disease that impacts 1% of the population and is studied at Ivy League universities. Suddenly my best friend does not understand, but the nut allergy mom who cannot fly on Southwest Airlines is a kindred spirit. It is through the looking glass. For me, the “staff of life” is a deadly poison. Talk about bizarre.
So for three months its very very very hard.
Then suddenly when you are thinking of quitting or cheating, you see your new self. That woman with the great skin and the waist, who rarely gets ill and who now knows that she can indeed have a cookie binge, it’s just going to cost more, is you. That woman with amazing emotional equilibrium is you.
And from then on, its just a nuisance.
