Do Good Design

I admit it: it was shallowness that started it all.

Tired of ruddy and less than stellar skin, I was reading Superskin: The Natural Ways to Super Healthy Skin in the library when I came across a pivotal passage about your diet — and yeast specifically — being a huge source of problem skin. Not only for your skin, but for all kinds of ailments, from joint pain (achy wrists and elbows so acute I was sleeping with my arms extended perfectly straight) to mood swings (give me a chocolate bar every day at 4pm or I might kill someone) to itchy skin (a bit of dandruff appearing, oh the shame).

Candida, the mysterious yeast disease

Kathryn Marsden, the author, encouraged me to do some more research into this mysterious yeast disease known as Candida. Now I admit I feel a bit awkward every time I use the word “candida” because I associate it with yeast infections, which isn’t exactly something I like to bring into everyday conversation. But you don’t have to have a classic case of thrush to be suffering from it. Frankly, there are too many symptoms to list, but you can do a simple online diagnosis to see if you might have candidasis (though beware of pretty much everything on the internet about candida — there are a lot of miracle pills and crappy information floating around).

No milk, chocolate, cheese, or bread — or pizza!

The solution, as you may by now have gathered, requires you to spend 7 days on a restricted diet. Why? To starve yeast of all the sugars it adores. And bad news for me, sugars come not just in the usual suspects of chocolate or sweets, but also in all dairy (except yoghurt) and in carbohydrates like wheat.

Now I’m someone who adores pizza. It’s my very favourite food: pepperoni pizza, thick crust, loads of mozzarella cheese. Kick back a can of Coke followed by some chocolate M&Ms, and I’ve got the perfect meal. I’ve pretty much lived on cheese, bread and meat my whole life, struggling to get enough vegetables into a day. And I don’t do diets. Ever.

But I just couldn’t take all the bizarro and increasingly painful symptoms. I knew something was wrong, but it wasn’t until I made the connections that I decided the least I could do was try this diet challenge for a week.

The idea is you do it for a week and are so amazed at the changes, you stick with it for 30 days. Hm, we would see.

Day 18 and what a difference

It’s Day 18 now, and I can’t believe what a difference it’s made. The biggest one is my sense of self-control. I used to get nauseated if I didn’t eat regularly, cranky if I didn’t get my sugar fix. Food was more about making me feel a certain way, about picking me up from a low.

Of course I knew about sugar crashes and so on, but I had NO IDEA how profoundly food was affecting me. So much of what I thought was just being cranky, or stressed, or even PMSing, turns out to have been the food.

I can go without food if I need to — not in a crazy anorexic way, just as in I won’t fling myself off a bridge if I don’t eat. The body should be able to go without eating for 24 hours no problem, after all.

And I have more energy and far less mysterious bouts of the blues for no apparent reason. My husband Malcolm is very grateful (we’re doing it together and he describes the diet in much more detail on his blog).

Anti-candida diets don’t have to be boring

I’ve bought Erica White’s Beat Candida Cookbook, and that’s definitely livened up things. Shockingly, it’s been far easier than I’d ever imagined.

She recommends for sticking with this way of eating for TWO YEARS, and I’m going to try my best. I’m sure I’ll fall off the wagon a few zillion times, but I’ll get back on again.

Yes, I think longingly on occasion for a slice of deep dish, or a mint chip ice cream. But then I remember the itchy scalp, the extra few pounds every year (no, I’m not trying to lose weight, but I don’t want to keep gaining it either), the aches and pains.

I’m 32, not 62, and I’m not going down without a fight.