My Number One Coping Strategy Is an App
In case you were wondering, I have discovered that you can eat very well on a restricted diet. For me that means gluten, grains, dairy, legume veggies (e.g. beans), nightshade veggies (e.g. peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant), eggs, nuts, seeds, sugars (not even much fruit), alcohol, and anything processed are all verboten. Happily, many of these recent dietary changes aren't permanent; they are designed to allow my body some R&R from processing some of the more inflammatory foods. (Systemic inflammation goes hand-in-hand with disease.) So, with some slightly creative workarounds—most of which have already been sussed out by health experts interested in nutritive healing—I don't think I'll be missing much. (That's not to say I don't miss cheese. I do. But mostly I don't notice when I'm eating plenty of deliciousness otherwise.) And, in spite of the ordeal cooking sometimes becomes for someone in my condition, mealtime is the highlight of my day.
My kitchen fluency was accelerated dramatically thanks to a website/app I discovered early on while perusing the NomNomPaleo website. Realplans.com is the only reason I am able to plan for and prepare every single meal I eat. It's a paid app, but the sting of shelling out for a subscription ($6 a month on the annual plan) makes you feel better once you realize how well you will be taken care of; the interface is thoroughly intuitive and they have thought of essentially everything—and continue to make improvements all the time.
Most impressively, you can tailor make a diet plan for yourself. In other words, you can choose a dairy-free mealplan as a template, for instance, and you can handpick any other ingredient(s) to avoid to boot. So, if for some absurd reason you want to avoid cherries, pumpkins, and cinnamon while on a Paleo diet, no problem at all. That's the kind of thing this product was designed for. (You can also select a "traditional" healthy diet and avoid nothing at all.)
You can import your favorite recipes from other websites (or manually) and include them in the lineup. You can tweak the existing ones. You can schedule which days to cook. You can choose recipes yourself or let the automatic function select them for you on the days you have set out for food prep. You can download an app for your phone that keeps your shopping list updated to the minute. And you can check things off as you shop, which is immensely satisfying for the OCD in me. You can add to the list yourself and shop for custom date ranges. You can change portion sizes for individual recipes if you have dinner parties (I'm working up to that one) and the changes in quantities are immediately noted in your shopping list. You can email or chat with their stoopid-friendly customer service people that make you want to be their actual friends. (Or maybe that's just me. I am a little clingy these days.)
Anyway, I was baptized by fire with suddenly having to cook every meal I eat from scratch 10 months ago, but Realplans made it manageable for me and satisfying. And, as I have mentioned before, they didn't pay me to say that. The product has just really helped me that much. (Though I would be open to kickbacks.)
Even if you aren't housebound with a laundry list of symptoms melting your atrophied limbs into the sofa—it's only cute when body parts shake like bowlfulls of jelly if you are Santa Claus—you still might actually find Realplans to be the cherry on top of your Type A, organizationally streamlined Life Sundae... (Mmmm. Ice cream.)
In short, forget chocolate right now; I can't even ingest much fruit. BUT I'm consistently eating more enjoyable food than I ever have before. Behold the Realplan riches.
