I’ve made so many meal plans over the years, but they were inherently flawed. The primary reason is that everything I grew up eating became a trigger after my mast cell disorder developed.
What do you do when everything you were eating is no longer an option?
Of course, you go looking for the healthiest diet ever! Ha! This strategy is a joke. There’s just really no “best diet”. And…Surprise, foods high in histamine do happen to be “healthy” foods. Such as strawberries, peppers, and oranges.
What I’ve learned about diets:
Disclaimer: Many people make the mistake of assuming that diet = dieting. That’s not what I mean here. I’m simply referring to the routine foods consumed.
I’ve tried essentially “whole food” diets, “low-histamine” diets, and various actual weight loss or healthy heart diet plans. From all of this, it doesn’t work. At least not long-term. I’m not specifically referring to it not working for a weight loss solution. It didn’t work for learning how to build a sustainable and safe meal plan.
On the upside, I learned that I like many more foods than I knew existed because of Jenny Craig’s prepared meals. On the downside, I had increasing reactions because weight-loss meals often rely on nightshades for flavor or filling and the preservatives in the pantry foods are serious triggers. The other upside is that I learned that I’m sensitive, to some degree, to most nightshade vegetables. This is the knowledge that I’m leaning on while building this version of my meal plan.
What I’ve learned from experience:
The other common seasoning ingredient is onions. They are fantastic in cooking as you can caramelize them, stew them, fry them, and each way you cook them produces a different flavor or intensity. I haven’t figured out why, yet, but I frequently get triggered by onions. So I’m developing meals that do not need onions for flavor. My hope is that I can sometimes add them, but when I need to be careful I can remove them without ruining the meal.
I have also learned that “spices” or prepared spice packages trigger my dermatographia (skin writing). So does BHT. The weird thing is that I could create the same seasoning from the individual ingredients (even as dried spices) and I’ll have no issues. Though there are some spices that are always bad….nightshades for example.
Keep in mind that these are my unique issues with food. This is, unfortunately, the primary reason other diet plans don’t work. Most of us have some food preferences, many have food sensitivities, and others of us have actual allergies. I would wager a bet that most of us have more than one of these.
How to select meals and adjust for our preferences and sensitivities:
There are many people that will swear by certain diets or food restrictions and there are common threads across many. The reasons and details vary. The idea of “whole food” or “clean food” is founded on the idea that chemicals, additives, and dies trigger inflammation. The basis of low-carb diets is two-fold, gluten proteins can punch holes in the gut barrier and baked goods carbs are higher in calories for how full you’ll fill. This is overly simplified, of course.
Here are some of my current mast cell triggers (food-wise):
- Soy
- Red and yellow food dies
- Vegetable oil, canola oil, or seed oil
- Gummies
- Canned goods
- Juices (sometimes the actual fruit but mostly the stuff added)
- Too much sugar
- Aspartame
- Strawberries
- Bananas
- Cabbage
- BHT
- Onion powder
- Garlic powder
- Tomato (paste, powder, sauce)
- Paprika
- Peppers (Jalapeños are the reason I have an EpiPen)
- Nuts (it accumulates, seeds to a lesser degree)
- Peanut Butter
- Milk Chocolate (Hershey’s and Nestle more than others)
- Some ice-creams
I’m sure I missed some on that list but it’s mostly there to illustrate how complicated this can be.
Additional Health Needs:
Recently, I’ve been working with a nutritionist to help me figure some of this stuff out. I won’t go into the detail but most health professionals (even licensed ones) are not typically familiar with mast cell disorders, so it wasn’t important to me that the person I work with was licensed. It is more important to me that they are curious enough to even Google the disorder and mostly can help me figure out common threads and adjust.
This is a hell of a rollercoaster-learning-curve for me, and while I’ve been living with the disorder for at least 10 years, I am very much a novice in nutrition.
Anyway, the point of this is that I also had my gall bladder removed and I don’t process fats well. I’m not concerned with fat for caloric purposes or even heart reasons. For that and the triggers mentioned above, I’ve chosen to cook primarily with butter or olive oil.
Filling in Meals:
Meals that worked from previous Meal Plans:
Successful past meals are a key foundation to meal planning as they:
- Reliably meet personal taste preferences
- Have known reactions
- Are easier to prepare (experience and skill)
- Are easier to adapt (familiarity with what makes it work)
After adding the recent successful meals, I looked through recipes I have liked in the past but forgot about. When I was little, my family rotated foods over years based on who was the primary cook in the family. I was a very picky eater. Eventually, my mom had me help cook so I could understand what foods, like meatloaf, are actually made of and I was then more willing to eat it. This worked on meatloaf and lasagna.
Here are some foods I added back:
- Chicken & Spinach Lasagna
- Quinoa bites (snack)
- Egg bake
- Chicken and Rice (non-boxed version)
Meals I want to try:
- Steak (side of rice and veggies)
- Fried rice without any soy products
The goal is to have a full menu of options to choose from that can be adapted to what types of items are on hand, such as frozen veggies.
In the next post, I’ll be grocery shopping and preparing meats.