My ways with health and eating leans towards “adding things in”, and reducing things, but rarely strictly eliminating anything.
There are several reasons for this, some more personal, others more general, which I will explain.
People eliminate soy, dairy, meat, fruit, sugar, gluten, eggs, grains, nightshades, nuts, fats, starches, alcohol, chocolate, cooked food, raw food, beans, basically everything. For every given food, there is a school of thought that warns against it (and I have probably tried eliminating it). Eliminating certain foods makes some people feel better and healthier.
I need to eat a high almost everything diet: high protein, fat, vegetable, fruit, starch, calorie. So if I eliminated any source of protein, I end up eating more of others to make up for it, and I don’t do well with too much meat/dairy/soy/beans/grains. This is why I don’t eliminate dairy, soy, meat, or any other high protein source (even while they can all be mildly problematic for me both for my health and ideology), but rather eat them all in small to moderate amounts.
The only foods I eat a lot of on a daily basis are eggs, vegetables, and sometimes fruit or beans. Other than that, I rotate everything.
One issue for me is that I need to be an opportunivore because I have so much going on and I don’t want to be isolated in my own little food-iverse, so if I’m out and someone offers me food, or cooks for me, I’ll generally eat at least a little bit of what I’m given.
The only “food” I somewhat strictly limit is refined sugar, but I do eat a bit on occasion. I also limit dairy and refined flour, but do eat both of them a few times a week on average.
The other reason it’s important to me not to strictly exclude any “food”, including chemical preservatives (which I know are bad for me and do generally avoid) is that I have gone into states of food obsession that nearly killed me, primarily because I would lose my appetite and be unable to eat at all.
This was when I was 21 and perhaps a combination of parasites, digestive issues, trauma and spiritual emergence, which resulted in my being 5’8″ and weighing about 80 lbs. Looking in the mirror at my naked body was scary and my period stopped for 6 months, where I’ve been completely regular in my periods at every other time in my life. My loss of control over my life at that time was extreme, and it made me prey for psychiatry as well, with virtually no resources within myself to fight back or reclaim my autonomy.
While it has never gotten anywhere near that extreme since then (or before), I do still regularly need to be aware of tendencies I have to lose interest in food when I’m isolated, unhappy or stressed.
Almost every time I’ve had to move, I’ve gone a day or so without eating because I was anxious. Sometimes on my period I go part of a day without eating, which I know many other women do as well, and is “normal”, but since I have the tendency to stop eating due to any sort of stress, it’s important for me not to have strict rules about foods that are off limits, especially since I have adrenal fatigue, so not eating when I need to exhausts my adrenals even more.
I realize many people are allergic or highly sensitive to certain foods and that eliminating them has been life changing for them, so I am not proposing my way is THE way, but yesterday I was feeling isolated and had my period, and the only thing that appealed to me to eat was this frozen box of pizza, pesto pizza.
I usually justify eating freshly cooked pizza on occasion as the bread cooked that day feels somewhat “healthy” to me compared with shelf stable bread of most kinds. I grew up eating both fresh (Brooklyn) pizza and (health food store) frozen pizza almost every single day, so this is a food my body is “used to”.
Now I sometimes see pizza as a way to help me eat my greens.
I scanned the ingredients on the frozen pizza. The list was long and included preservatives and sugar. I popped it in the oven, topped it with a whole bunch of local organic baby chard, and ate the whole thing (minus the crusts). YUM.
And my day got better after that. It wasn’t perhaps the best nourishment in the world, yet so much better than not eating at all, which felt like my alternative at that moment.
So I do this often? No. Am I really really grateful I tossed those baby chard on there? Yes. Would I do it again? It just depends on circumstances so I never say never.