Body Peace Series #3
The Autoimmune Protocol
TW/CW: eating disorders and ED recovery, food restriction/restrictive diets.
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything at all, and even longer since I’ve written about where I am with my body right now. This Body Peace Series entry is all about my recent journey with AIP. There are many I touch on in this entry that I hope to expand on in future posts and I hope you’ll join me in this ongoing reflection.
First of all, it’s hard to talk about doing something so rigid with food when I’ve been open before about my struggle with disordered eating in the past. I have never written about the specifics of my relationship with food, and I’m sure that there will be many mistakes in the rest of this post. All I ask for is your patience and understanding that I am navigating new territory, and above all, I’m writing about this because I hope that someone out there can learn along with me.
Before we get into that, let me explain quickly what AIP actually is. First of all, AIP stands for autoimmune protocol, and it is a way of eating that is prescribed to folks that suffer from autoimmune conditions and/or symptoms. It is based on the paleo diet, and involves an elimination phase followed by a reintroduction phase to identify any food triggers for symptoms. However, the AIP is not just about food, it’s a holistic approach that also involves improving sleep, reducing stress, and lots of self care and reflections. Ultimately, the purpose of AIP is to help the systems in the body heal so that symptoms are alleviated both in the short term while following the AIP guidelines and also long after AIP has concluded.
WHY I DID AIP
Six months ago, I would’ve never ever thought that I’d do something like this. Last year, I’m not sure that I was even ready to take this on from an ED recovery standpoint. However, in 2020 I started to feel physically awful in so many ways.
Throughout the fall, my joints ached, my sleep was low quality, my digestion was horrible, and I was so tired all of the time I often fell asleep without even wanting to. Seriously, one day while working from home I fell asleep while sitting up as I was eating lunch. That day was a serious wake up call for me that something was seriously wrong in my body. As a result I became obsessed with finding the explanation and cause of my symptoms.
Honestly, during this time I didn’t realize it but my ED was rearing its ugly head: I thought I was diligently defending my body when in reality I was rigidly holding onto controlling my life by controlling my body. A lot of the language I used around this time to talk about my body made my body into something broken that needed to be fixed, something wrong that needed to be made right.
I felt horrible physically and mentally and emotionally. I spent a lot of time crying, anxious, and frustrated, and in between breakdowns I consumed as many books, articles, blog posts, and podcasts as possible to try and get to the bottom of what could be causing my symptoms. And then in December I had a breakthrough in therapy when I acknowledged that I was still living through the fallout of a painful relationship from years ago. It made sense that maybe carrying that level of post traumatic stress with me without realizing it may have a physical impact on me as well, and could be causing my physical ailments.
I thought that after the breakthrough and working with my therapist, my symptoms might start to lessen, but they didn’t. I actually started to feel even worse and I was hitting the proverbial wall hard. I finally stopped trying to diagnose myself and had some tests run but all my results came back completely normal.
Now, this may sound counterintuitive, but when I saw my perfectly normal results I broke down in tears of despair. If nothing was wrong with me, why was every day so miserable in my body? There had to be an answer, there had to be something else going on. So I spoke with an autoimmune specialist, and they suggested that I try AIP even though I did not have a diagnosis because I had many autoimmune-like symptoms. So, with the help of the Paloma AIP app, I started the autoimmune protocol at the end of January.
WHAT HAPPENED
When I started AIP, I hoped that I would find explanations to the symptoms that had worsened for months, but I was also definitely apprehensive about how triggering it might be for me as it is a very restrictive diet program of sorts. Once I got started, though, I confronted things I would’ve never expected to even come up during the protocol.
At first, I was definitely triggered by the high level of restriction. Some of the foods I ate in the first few days, and the quantities I ate them in (i.e. I did not eat enough at first) catapulted me back to the darkest days of my disorder. I felt the same hunger, tasted the same bland foods, and became intensely irritable. I was frustrated about everything I could possibly find a way to be frustrated about. I had daydreams about heavily processed foods, longing for their highly palatable flavors and textures, and I immediately missed the convenience of takeout.
On the third day of the AIP elimination phase, I started to have some really big realizations. The first one was when I was talking to my sister. I noticed I had snapped at her for really little things many times in the span of a few minutes, and suddenly it clicked: “Was I this insufferable and irritable for the years that I was restricting?” And, without thinking, my sister said “Yes! You absolutely were!”
It was both devastating and relieving to put that together -- I had been triggered back to many of my disordered behaviors, and it prompted me to take a closer look at where I was over-restricting beyond what AIP requires. I realized I wasn’t eating enough, and quickly made some adjustments to my meal plan to practically double my food intake and vary it more often. Physically, I started to feel so much better with those minor changes, and my symptoms started to lessen by the end of the first week of the elimination phase.
However, the better I felt physically the more my emotional state came into focus. Almost every day I felt like I was on the verge of breaking down. I was in a constant state of overwhelm, but when I tried to list what was on my plate I had no idea what was weighing me down. At the end of each day, all I wanted was relief. But relief from what?
Well, my own emotions, feelings, and memories.
Perhaps the biggest and most jarring takeaway from the AIP protocol for me was acknowledging how much I had been using food as a way to numb and escape, usually in some form of overeating at best and planned binges at worst. Stripping away most processed foods and focusing on whole foods that are truly difficult to overeat forced me to realize how much I relied on certain foods as a part of my routine, not because of how they tasted, but because of how they made me feel, or rather, not feel anything at all.
While that opened many emotional and mental doors (more like floodgates), there were also physical takeaways. For starters, I found complete relief from all of my symptoms by the end of the elimination phase. Then, during the reintroduction phase, I identified food triggers for my symptoms: gluten, large quantities of soy, peanut butter, and raw tomatoes are all foods that make me feel less than ideal, at least right now.
WHERE AM I NOW?
I have learned so, so incredibly much about myself over the last couple of months on this protocol that it’s hard to even fit it into this one post. At this point, I am learning to integrate all of this new information into my everyday life.
My diet has changed quite a bit from how it was before AIP, and I’m sure it will change many more times in the future as well. My outlook on ED recovery has changed, too, and so has the level of trust I have in myself. I am incredibly proud of myself for doing this and seeing it through, because it was fucking hard in every way imaginable. I have a renewed confidence in my ability to do hard things and to take care of myself.
Some days feel impossible and I wonder why I’ve been dealt a life where restriction is somehow so necessary. Other days I couldn’t be happier to just be living without the symptoms I endured in silence for so long. What is constant, however, is how open I remain to the process of honoring myself and my true needs more every day.