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Gluten-free
By Emily Moody
When I first started my restricted diet, it was nothing more than a conversation starter. "Hey!" I would strike up an exchange, "I'm on a gluten-free diet!" This inevitably led to the explanation of what gluten is (the protein present in wheat, barley and rye), and questions about what I could and could not eat (nothing containing those grains, which included some surprises, such as soy sauce).
People often offered me the gluten-free components of whatever they were eating; suddenly I was afloat in a sea of volunteered carrot sticks and apple slices. At that point, the diet seemed easy — I was getting free food. How hard could it be to avoid bread for a week?
Incredibly hard, it turns out. Most people on a gluten-free diet have celiac disease, a genetic disorder in which the body's reaction to gluten causes its immune system to destroy its villi, the tiny, tubular protrusions lining the small intestine that absorb nutrients. This leads to malnourishment, as no matter how much the sufferer eats, his or her damaged intestine cannot absorb the nutrients. People with celiac disease must therefore steer clear of even small amounts of gluten to avoid further damaging their small intestines. When you love carbohydrates as much as I do, adhering to this diet can be a challenge.
I cruised through the first day of my diet by sating my carb cravings with potatoes and rice noodles, but by the second day, my hunger for forbidden gluten was growing. As my favorite snack foods and the contents of my traditional makeshift breakfasts churned through my mind, I realized the common component in cereal bars, goldfish crackers and toast: gluten. Even my vending machine favorites of snack mix and animal crackers were off-limits. It was then that I started to get hungry, and with that hunger came the anxiety that I would instinctively grab a favorite wheat-filled snack, anything from a cracker to a cookie, and pop it into my mouth, only realizing that I had breached my diet once it was too late.
This worry was not allayed by my trip to Trader Joe's, where I discovered that gluten is present in tons of things that seem like they should be wheat, barley and rye-free. Oatmeal, clearly made predominantly of oats, processed on facilities that also handled wheat? Risotto, made of rice, that contains wheat flour? Gnocchi, or potato pasta, stuffed with semolina? ...Why? It felt like the world had specifically chosen to single out my stomach.
I needed to plan ahead. My restrictive diet did not go well with spontaneous food purchases. I began packing gluten-free trail mix in my backpack and brainstorming lunch options. I soon came to realize that Mexican food was my best friend in a gluten-free world. Once I eliminated flour tortillas and the burritos they encase, an entire menu of primarily bean, rice and corn based options become open to me. Downing nachos, tacos and corn quesadillas, I voraciously ate at many a taqueria during my gluten-free week. Another previously unappreciated food that I came to hold near and dear were eggs. As someone who usually avoids meat, I found that eggs were stuffed with protein and very filling when my traditional vices were not an option. I began eating them at least once a day, even for dinner, scrambled, hard-boiled or fried over-easy.
Even as I ensured that my stomach was filled with various wheat-less treats, the world found ways to make my diet more difficult. I arrived in journalism one day to find a surprise carrot cake, and my excitement turned to disabling disappointment as I realized that I could not eat it, and eating the frosting I had scooped off the top only made me want its starchy counterpart more. Another day I eagerly anticipated a sandwich after my mock SAT, only to realize I couldn't smother my school stress between two pieces of bread. And then there were my well-meaning friends, who offered me cookies or bites of their buttered toast, reacting with confusion when I acted as though they had offered me a bite of the beloved family Cocker Spaniel.
Besides cultivating my empathy towards people living with restrictive diets, being gluten-free made me realize how much of my diet is based in carbohydrates. It also raised my awareness as to how many foods contain gluten that don’t necessarily require it as a sole ingredient, and how life could be made easier for celiacs if companies eliminated it when it is not required. Now as I crunch down on my favorite gluten-filled snack mix, I am not overwhelmed solely by the tastiness of the pretzels, but also by gratitude that I can nosh on them in the first place.
Nut-free
By Laura Zhen
Seven days, 168 hours, 10,080 minutes, 604,800 seconds - that's how long I vowed to steer clear of nuts. Relatively easy, I thought. After all, it's not like I would go nuts without nuts. I'd like to think that I voluntarily starved myself (or was just deprived of a really important staple) for world peace just as Gandhi had done, but this diet change was merely for the sake of experimentation.
You might be thinking ‘no nuts, no big deal," but then again, you haven't experienced death by chips dipped in curry, as a 24-year-old woman with a nut allergy did in the United Kingdom, according to a Times article from April 1999. As harmless as nuts may seem, for some, they can be potentially lethal. And they are everywhere.
My initial plan was to limit my diet to simple, unprocessed foods. I knew that foods with a lot of ingredients like chili had inter-ingredients such as Worchester sauce and curry powder, which could also contain further substances, like peanut flour as a thickener. Keeping track of what was originally made out of what was as complicated as understanding biological magnification. That is, a person eating fish is also eating the fish's food, a victim who eats its own food, which eats algae, which absorbs the mercury in seawater. Did you get any of that? Me neither.
Most importantly, I had to develop a sense of what a nut really was. According to dictionary.com, a nut is generally a "a dry fruit consisting of an edible kernel or meat enclosed in a woody or leathery shell." That definition did nothing but get me thinking that walnuts were interrelated with apples, trees and cows somehow. I also had to consider that not all nuts were called peanuts or wider-known ones like pistachios. Those are easy to recognize, but for something foreign sounding like Mongongo, I would have no idea. And for another, nutmeg is, in fact, a spice and not a nut. Perhaps most baffling of all was the fact that nuts were a type of seed, and seeds are the basis of practically all the world's food sources. Because the botanical guidelines of a genuine nut do not correlate with the culinary guidelines, I had a really hard time deciding if a particular nut was within my dietary restrictions.
So the hardest part of this experiment was not avoiding nuts, but obsessively reading the ingredients for everything, paranoid that I might have consumed a molecule of the nut variety. When my week was up, I thought I had been successful at avoiding them. But I had neglected to take a seemingly unimportant detail into consideration.
In most cases, I would read a list of ingredients and become overwhelmingly happy that I the product did not list "nuts." Little did I know that "nut-free" in the ingredients list just meant that it didn't contained nuts directly, as indicated in the Advisory label "made in the same facility as peanuts and tree nuts," which ambiguously means "product may contain nuts." According to peanutallergy.com, consumer products with peanut protein typically include African, Chinese, Thai and other ethnic dishes, baked goods, candy, cereals, chili, spaghetti sauce, chocolate, crackers, hydrolyzed plant protein, hydrolyzed vegetable protein and ice cream. According to an August 2008 Edge Boston article, a woman even found a warning label on a basket of fresh fruit.
In the span of those horrible seven days, I empathized with the food-handicapped as I learned that products have misleading nutrition facts and nuts sneak in there like ninjas. I felt like an idiot when I found out I had actually been eating nuts all along, realizing that if I were actually allergic to nuts, I'd be a dead idiot. Since I am evidently alive and kicking, I celebrate the end of my trial by happily rewarding myself with a bland granola bar, no longer taking my nut privileges for granted.
Vegan
By Matthew Estipona
According to those who love nothing more than eating a cheeseburger stacked with bacon, there is only one thing crazier than a vegetarian: a vegan. Put simply, vegans are absolutely out of their minds; perhaps the lack of protein in their brain has deprived them of their natural instinct to eat animals. This summed up my opinion before I started my vegan diet. I too lumped both vegans and vegetarians in the same radical anti-meat category. But as I researched what I was getting into, I found that while vegetarians can eat fish and eggs and drink milk, vegans are forbidden from any animal products whatsoever, from cheese to the gelatin in jello. Whether it is to spare animals from a horrible fate or to live a healthy lifestyle, vegans follow a strict code of conduct that dictates their lives – a strict code of conduct I was to follow for a whole week.
Properly done, going vegan is a very healthful choice, yet a study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that fewer than 10% of U.S. high school students eat the recommended daily amounts of fruits and vegetables.
By not eating red meat, vegans lower their risk of heart disease and high blood pressure, and by eating vegetables, they more easily reach the recommended amounts of vitamins. For an adolescent looking to lose a few pounds, like myself, the vegan lifestyle also offers a healthy way to shed unwanted weight.
However, for a professed meat addict like myself, it posed a daunting challenge. In my opinion, to deny oneself the joy of savoring the taste of a medium-rare, two pound t-bone steak, and dipping your despised green beans in the juice that comes out of it, is the equivalent of suicide. Restricting my diet to plant life feels like eating dirt. But for this experiment, I became something previously unimaginable for me: a vegan, and despite the hardships of being meat sober, going vegan proved to be a gratifying experience.
I initially struggled to find my footing in my new vegan diet. On the first day, I scoured my refrigerator for anything that could serve as a meat substitute, but to no avail. My whole refrigerator was full of frozen meat and poultry. I ended up nearly starving myself by eating only oatmeal.
Desperate to avoid another bowl of goop, the next day I found salvation at Trader Joe’s in an astonishing multitude of tofu products and frozen vegan cuisine. I immediately loaded the shopping cart with whatever I could find. Surprisingly, the total for one week’s worth of tofu and soy products was around $70, much less than buying a week’s worth of meat and poultry.
I was ready. Gone were the days of bacon, sausage and an egg omelet with a large glass of milk for breakfast. In their place were tofu bacon and sausage, tofu egg replacements and cereal with soymilk. My usual lunch of a heaping stack of pastrami, ham and roast beef with a teaspoonful of mayonnaise was replaced with soy bread with tofu turkey, sautéed mushrooms, spinach and my personal favorite: eggplant. Dinner, my heaviest meal, where I generally stayed within the family of fried chicken and barbeque ribs, became tofu galore with an abundance of mixed vegetables and brown rice. With all this variety, maybe being vegan wasn’t so bad after all.
However, by midweek, I noticed that I felt much more tired than I normally do; instead of going to sleep after I finished my homework, I started sleeping while I was doing homework. Naturally I blamed it on the lack of protein, despite my tofu-heavy diet. Besides the lethargy, I was constantly hungry, despite religiously snacking on an assortment of fruits and vegetables along with high-fiber granola bars to help stay the hunger pangs. I was forced to bed early, too exhausted to stay awake. I realized the caveats of going vegan. My body was withdrawing from the pork fat, chicken breasts, and oxtail that it had become so accustomed to. The abrupt transition from meat had been too quick, my stomach couldn’t cope. Despite this, I had invested too many meals to give up now and I pushed on.
Yet, as the final day of my diet approached, I had grown so accustomed to tofu that chicken and pork seemed like a distant memory. My body had finally accepted the lack of meat in my system, seeming more comfortable with roasted stuffed bell peppers and tofu imitation crab over organic brown rice.
On the final night of my diet I had pasta with tomato sauce and tofu chicken strips and did not miss the cheese or meat. I slept that night comfortably, but not sure whether I would embrace my old ways or continue on my current diet. Although part of me desperately wanted to eat that two-pound sirloin steak again, the other part was content with my new approach to edible plant life and wanted to live in tofu heaven forever.
As a reward, by the end of my diet I had managed to lose four pounds! Additionally, going vegan taught me that life without meat was...tolerable. In the future I will substitute fried chicken with a salad, or instead of having eggs, a bowl of oatmeal. And, according to Peta’s Benefits of Going Vegan (www.peta.org), I also can congratulate myself for saving fifty animals from a horrible fate, saving an average of two hundred dollars a week on groceries and redirecting twenty acres of farm land that would have been used to feed the livestock.
Has my experience changed my outlook towards food? Absolutely. My stomach is now open to the fact that it’s possible to rely just on broccoli and tofu. Has my experience permanently changed my diet? Absolutely not. The following day I devoured a three-pound freshly ground steak burger smothered with real American cheese, gulping it down with a large glass of whole milk.
Raw
By Nicola Householder
As I rode home on the 52, the girl sitting across from me on the bus probably did not realize how much I could relate to her as she smugly announced, "I'm sick, I'm raw," into her cell phone. But as my stomach grumbled with every pothole the bus stumbled over, I was probably more literally raw than that girl could ever hope to be.
Inside my growling stomach was a lunch of strawberries, a peach and dried mango, and I was headed home to fill it with cold gazpacho soup and dried pear. No, I wasn't on a starvation diet; this was just my weeklong endeavor to satisfy myself with a menu of completely uncooked and mostly unprocessed food - which was hardly satisfying at all.
Though there are many schools of thought on exactly what constitutes a raw diet, most "raw foodists" agree that most of one's food intake, approximately 75 percent, should not be heated over 116 degrees Fahrenheit. Raw "cooking" techniques include juicing, sprouting, soaking, blending and dehydrating. Proponents argue that such a "live" diet promotes overall health due to retaining enzymes that may aid in digestion.
As I cut out bread (baked), hot drinks like coffee and tea (boiled), and even dairy products (pasteurized), the question of the week from family and friends quickly became "What can you eat?" The answer lay mostly in lettuce wraps, raw coleslaw and homemade juices, all of which take copious preparation time and are rarely as satisfying as their cooked counterparts. In fact, on the first few days, I felt nauseous because of the abrupt change in my diet, which normally consists of veggie burgers and grilled salmon.
Despite the raw philosophy that an uncooked diet brings one spiritually closer to food, I discovered that it is hard to feel philanthropic on an empty stomach. Rather than feeling like I was doing a great service to the earth or to myself, I mostly felt extremely envious, not to mention hungry, as others perused five-page menus. Even when my friends didn't mean to tease me, I constantly felt as jealous as if they had deliberately purchased their toasted, heavily butter-scented bagels just to spite me.
During my raw week, I learned that food is powerful stuff. It can bring people together, and can alienate others if you don't eat what they eat. On the third day of the diet, I was not quite used to my removal from the community that food can provide, and completely forgot my raw obligations when two friends in my registry brought in a peach pie made from scratch. Let's just say that it was one of the best things I have ever accidentally eaten.
Subsisting on mainly fruits, vegetables and unroasted nuts was not all bad. For one thing, I never had to worry about exercise on such a restrictive diet. Because I was cutting out so many calories, I lost six pounds without a single sit-up, not that this is a healthy rate at which to lose weight. As a more lasting effect, I learned to think more about my diet and gained a greater appreciation for all the foods I normally eat. Before this, I had never properly understood the importance of the Stone Age discovery of fire.
Nonetheless, the return to my normal pescetarian diet warranted much relief from my parents, my friends and myself. I quickly chucked the disappointing raw foods in my kitchen, including a lousy excuse for raw crackers from Rainbow Grocery and my sad attempts to sprout mungbeans. I was now free to consume anything I pleased, even the most decadent chocolate mousse, without a drop of guilt. My days of gagging through hemp-seed "raw-eos" were thankfully over, and my first real Oreo tasted ten times better than any Oreo since I was five.
There was more to gain back than just taste. When you take all major cuisines away from a foodie like me, you take away a part of her identity. Returning to my regular diet was like reconnecting with an old friend - plenty to savor and many old memories to share - and thankfully, there was absolutely no raw food in sight.
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