How People Pleasing Showed Up in My Refrigerator
On food, codependency, and finally choosing myself at the dinner table
Let’s talk about “decentering men”
… and how it applies to our food habits.
Food choices and people’s diets are very personal, dare I say religious in nature. I’m no exception to that. But I subscribe to a belief system around eating that, to me, is very logical: Eat food that loves you back.
And I’ve absolutely sucked at doing this — especially since I met my husband.
One day I’ll write a rant post about how food is engineered to make you love it and make you sick at the same time (so it can keep the money machine of Big Food and Big Pharma in business), but alas! Today isn’t that day.
I will say, though, that their plan to sicken the population with addictive food and push the ones that make us the sickest… is working.
People love eating food that makes them sick.
I’m no exception to that, either.
The difference is I’m more aware of it than the average bear. I know what we’re told about what to eat is mostly wrong, on purpose.
Hell, breast cancer has long been linked to consumption of dairy products, yet Yoplait was a major sponsor of the Susan G. Komen Foundation for 17 years.
Plenty of people still don’t get how all industries work against us. Profits always come first.
I have been a “health nut” since my early 20s. People who’ve known me the longest know that I:
have spent nearly two decades as a vegetarian
have been obsessed with Medical Medium (MM) since I discovered his first book in 2022
have only very loosely followed MM protocols and still gotten some amazing results.
My husband is supportive of all of this. He says he wants me to be healthy. He eats nearly everything I make for him.
The problem is, he has… habits. He works really hard and looks forward to bagels smothered with cream cheese, pizza, or mac n’ cheese almost like a drug. He sees it as a sort of reward for making it through the slog of another workday.
And I’ve been letting him cook a little too often. He’s a great cook, but his favorites are — you guessed it! — pizza and mac n’ cheese. He even bought an awesome portable pizza oven that cranks out some fabulous homemade pizzas.
(Good for the taste, bad for the waist!)
But it’s not just my weight that has responded to my sustained increase in poor dietary choices… it’s also affected my mental health.
Recently, I experienced a brutal three days of severe inflammation symptoms: horrible headaches, extreme fatigue, brain fog, irritability, anhedonia (lack of pleasure), and depression that couldn’t be linked to anything else but “Oh shit, my body and brain are trying to tell me to lay off the garbage food I’ve been eating.”
Garbage food = heavy consumption of what MM calls “troublemaker foods” — gluten and dairy, primarily, but also canola oil, soy, and corn (and pork, which is a nonissue).
These crippling symptoms have forced me to conclude that it’s become glaringly obvious that I need to make some changes.
My health depends on it.
It’s become a medical necessity to remove certain things from my diet.
Again.
I’ve done this before. I’ve been here before.
This isn’t the first time a crash-out like this has happened in the last year, but it has been the worst… at least since the two-and-a-half years I spent sedated and suicidal on my sofa. That was the extreme, but these recent three days were enough of a reminder of that hell… I can never allow myself to go there again.
(Writing about it is helping too, so thanks for reading!)
Something I don’t talk about much: I have a “c-word” diagnosis.
In October 2019, I underwent a bone marrow biopsy in the hospital and doctors confirmed that I had the myeloproliferative neoplasm (MPN) called essential thrombocythemia. It’s in the leukemia/lymphoma family, and it causes your bone marrow to produce too many (and sometimes malformed) platelets.
Thankfully, it’s not immediately life-threatening, although in (allegedly) 5% of cases it evolves into leukemia.
I have my doubts about the cause. Even ChatGPT told me once that it’s an acquired condition, meaning it happens in response to an environmental cause. Of course, doctors don’t talk about the cause because then they couldn’t prescribe treatment, which is usually oral chemotherapy.
MM has hinted that blood disorders have to do with viruses consuming toxic heavy metals in the body (which can also exist in the bone marrow). Sounds like the perfect environment for my bone marrow to freak out!
The oncologist prescribed me chemo pills, too. Just called it into the Walgreens without even asking if I wanted it. I refused to even pick them up because I was convinced the treatment would be worse than the condition itself. And it is! It artificially lowers your platelets by lowering all of your immune system, making you more vulnerable to other illnesses.
To me, the costs far outweighed the benefits.
So while I’m not 100% sure if my crash-out symptoms are from that or the food I’d been eating, I feel pretty confident it’s the food because when I stop eating gluten and dairy (especially gluten), I feel SO MUCH BETTER.
As I write this, it’s been five days without gluten… and while I have a long way to go for maximum improvement, I already feel slimmer, clearer in my head, and resolute about what changes I need to make in my life.
I also had to kick caffeine.
Again.
(Seeing the pattern?!)
Caffeine is a robber. It’s only a matter of time before there’s a class-action lawsuit against “energy drink” companies because there is, in fact, ZERO energy in any of those drinks. They contain an average of 200 milligrams of caffeine, which forces your adrenal glands to secrete adrenaline… and that is where the energy comes from.
I’ve also been on-and-off with marijuana over the years, and right now I’m “off” with plans to stay off permanently.
I’ve noticed the same pattern with marijuana as caffeine: it robs you. It gives you the illusion it’s making you feel better, so you turn to it over and over in hopes of it shifting your mood. Over time, you grow dependent on it and feel worse without it than when you started.
Ironically, it’s very probable that the actual reason you were in the low mood in the first place is because you’d been neglecting yourself: late nights, poor sleep hygiene, not meditating or exercising, low nutrient foods, etc.
There are all kinds of people out there taking drugs (prescribed or otherwise) for depression and anxiety that, I dare say based on my own experience, would not need those drugs if they removed certain foods and eliminated harmful habits.
It really sucks that our society has programmed people to not even consider that their food intake or habits could be affecting the way they feel.
Now I know that every time I turn to junk food or substances, I’m ultimately sabotaging myself. It’s like I’m kicking myself in the shin and making it harder to become the best version of myself, the version I know I’m supposed to be: the clear-headed, creative, and cleanest version of Caitlin.
It’s crazy to consider. Why wouldn’t I want to give myself the gift of the healthiest body and brain possible? Yet in many ways, I see how food is a drug, too. I sabotage myself when I choose a “hit” of that blissful, greasy food… to feel good in the moment and pay for it later. I lust after that hit of dopamine I get every time I indulge in something that doesn’t love me back.
It’s a toxic pattern.
I’ve been struggling so hard with food choices not because of van life. I have over a year’s worth of history eating very healthy food in my van. No, the reason I’ve been struggling so hard with food choices is because of codependency patterns around food.
It goes like this: