Thoughts on Diet and Anxiety in Times of Chronic Illness - Meal Strategy Over Diet

Normally, this would be a post in my Long Covid Microblog, but I wanted to dedicate a whole, although very short, post to this topic because in the past months, it has been a re-accuring topic.

So when you suffer from a chronic illness, diet is a really important topic, because (as in most cases) your body is very prone to inflammation. So it is useful to avoid pro-inflammatory food such as sugars, highly saturated fats, etc. But if you suspect MCAS, which for many Long Covid patients is the case, you also wanna avoid histamine. If you read my micro blog, you know that diet is a big topic for me.

For the last few days, I've tried the Auto Immune Protocol (AIP) diet, which is super restrictive. By the third day, I was really craving carbohydrates other than sweet potato, which is one of the few rich carb sources on the AIP diet. So I cheated and felt terrible as a result. I felt guilty for breaking the diet, thinking that all my efforts of cooking two times a day (which is exhausting in my case), and spending more money on fish, meat and rare flours have gone to waste.

In this moment I've realised how much stress the whole topic of diet is inducing on me. I've came to the realisation that I just don't want to spend so much time thinking about what I eat. All diets that I've tried more or less failed in the sense that I was unable to stick to them over a long period of time or they just did not help me.

The more I learned about diet, inflammation, the microbiome, and Long Covid, the more questions I had and the more anxious I became about some foods. I wanted full control over every aspect of my health, but I dismissed the psychological feasability of this.

So this is my attempt at - instead of switching from diet ot diet - defining a general strategy of eating so that:

• I support my body in healing
• I support my mind in being calm

therefore, my dietary strategy is the following:

• avoid histamine rich foods
• avoid highly processed foods
• eat enough calories, much fibre, good fats
• allow yourself a cheat from time to time (and don't feel guilty about it)

That's all!