Post #36: Vegetables, let's be friends

Well velociraptor, that's a thinker. I vote for YES.

I'm looking at this picture, and the only thing I can think about is the first Jurassic Park movie, the only one I saw in the theatre. Being a child of the 80's, my expectations for visual effects in movies were quite low, so this movie BLEW MY MIND. I remember coming home and being petrified that a velociraptor would jump out of the kitchen cupboards, so I made my dad check them all. And the closets.

Also, whenever my glass of water shakes, or when vibrations make those concentric circles in the water, I immediately think DANGER (fear being equally split between earthquakes and dinosaurs). My brain has a way of stubbornly clinging on to scary/disturbing movie scenes, which is why I refuse to watch horror films. I'm the youngest in my family, as were most of my friends-we had older siblings who gave us access to the cinematic masterpieces of the day: Jaws, Indiana Jones, Gremlins, ET, Ghostbusters, The Goonies, Chucky (shudder). Scenes from these movies, in all of their magical 80's glory, are indelibly stamped in my memory. Thus, I will never use a wake board in the ocean, resurrect an extinct species using DNA trapped in amber, or attempt to steal the ark of the covenant. Important movie life lessons!

But the velociraptor poses an interesting question, one related to my daily struggle to provide my body with healthy food. Do you know how hard it is to eat fruits and vegetables when you can't digest FRUITS AND VEGETABLES?! If left to my own devices, I would eat nothing but beige foods: baked chips, bread, hummus, rice, chicken. These are safe foods. Boring, bland, and banal (3 b's!), but safe. I did that. For years, actually. And while it helped a little (like putting the newspaper over your head when it's raining-you still get pretty wet), it also drained more of my already depleted energy. Thus, the restriction of "white" (i.e. refined) flour/sugar and the reintroduction of produce.

I'm not adverse to vegetables (ha, that's a ringing endorsement) but I am very wary of them. I was a vegetarian for many years, so I've shoveled my share of kale and chard and brussel sprouts (I always think of those as "advanced" vegetables, for some reason) into my mouth. But that was when I still had a gallbladder, and when my colon was only minor-league pissed. I could eat things from menus that were described as "crispy" and "decadent." I didn't order sauce on the side. I ate big salads. I ate dairy products. And even if I was eating like shit, my diet was varied enough that I got what I needed to fuel my body.

Fast forward to today: my gallbladder is a distant memory, and my colon is now major-league pissed. Dairy is a no-go. "Skins" from beans and vegetables are off the menu. Raw vegetables? Ha!

And yet, more than ever, I need to make sure that I'm giving my body the nutrients it's having trouble avoiding-but my body doesn't want to cooperate. It's like trying to feed pills to a dog. You can wrap it in cheese, cover it in maple syrup, or stick it in a piece of sausage, but at the end of the day the dog is still like, bitch please. I know there is a small white pill in this mess. I know you think my brain is the size of a walnut, but I still have EYES. Now watch me daintily chew around the offending pill while I laugh at your ridiculous human machinations! Victory for CANINE KIND! (this is always what I imagined our old dog's inner thought process sounded like. No dog could be that crazy on the outside without some sort of hilarious inner monologue going on.)

Even if I peel it, puree it to a pulp, boil the shit out of it, or blend it in a smoothie, my colon KNOWS when I slip it some of the healthy stuff. Sometimes it lets me get away with it, and sometimes not. Today's peeled/chopped cucumber salad has about a 50/50 chance of successful absorption and processing.

A serving of fruits/vegetables is only 1/2 cup. I try to visualize how many 1/2 cups of natural materials go into my stomach each day. It's not enough, but it's more than I was getting on the bread only diet, and that's something. Sometimes I can eat thinly sliced cucumbers and roasted red peppers and cooked string beans; sometimes, I totally count the tomato sauce on my corn pasta. Like everything else about this disease, there are bad days, and then there are small wins. Today I felt like a rock star, eating my grilled salmon and cucumber/tomato salad. Tomorrow, I might be lucky to get a 1/2 cup serving of anything that grew in the ground down my throat. What I do know is that if I don't try, and keep trying, that I'm denying my body something it needs.