Strict diet puts food in a whole new light

For the past month, Aaron Swaney, a hamburger-eating, beer-swilling sports nut, has followed a strict elimination diet. For his previous blog posts describing the journey, visit The Dish blog.

Why do we eat?

On the surface it’s an easy question: to survive. But why do we eat what we eat when we eat it? It’s a tougher question to answer because it makes a person analyze what void in their life food may be filling. For me those answers weren’t easy to face.

Over the past month, I’ve learned a lot about why I eat food and, honestly, very little of it had to do with nourishment. I was more of an eat-first, ask-questions-later type of eater.

I treated my stomach like a pinata, throwing down cup after cup of coffee in the morning, starving myself for six hours of the workday and then piling on a big dinner and washing it down with a fine ale. Then there were get-togethers, where I’d pound heavy microbrews and eat like I’d just finished winning “Survivor.”

I was eating for comfort. I was eating because friends were visiting. I was eating because somebody made a chocolate cake and you can’t throw away chocolate cake when kids are starving in Estonia.

So I hit the reset button.

Two days of smoothies

An elimination diet is used by people trying to find out what foods may cause an allergic reaction, so you can guess what foods I was allowed to eat. The first week you’re on a diet a vegan would consider strict and the first two days you can only drink smoothies, for crying out loud.

You slowly add foods over the next few weeks, but to give you an idea, the first foods we reintroduced were lemons and limes. So, you know, it’s not like you’re making reservations at Black Angus.

What I discovered from this diet surprised me. When a few days without coffee left me feeling like Charlie Sheen after a week at Shady Pines, I found that my energy levels evened out. No longer on the caffeine/sugar roller coaster, I didn’t stumble to the coffee maker like a zombie in the morning and tap my foot until there was enough to fill my cup.

Then there was the new foods. Some, like amaranth, didn’t quite make the cut — or my stomach — but others, like quinoa, adzuki beans and seaweed, found their way into heavy rotation and won me over.

As for the foods I wasn’t eating, I didn’t miss them as much as I thought. Of course, I’d crave beer during the Husky game or a juicy pork chop after long day at work, but it wasn’t my focus.

In fact, that was the biggest thing I realized: I wasn’t focusing on food anymore. I’ve probably never thought about food as much as I have over the past month, but it was no longer important to me. I didn’t build my day around my coffee breaks or count on a steak dinner to make me feel better at the end of the day.

And that’s when the ton of bricks hit me: Why had food become so important to me and what was it replacing?

As I wrote earlier, the answers weren’t easy to face. I was using food as a substitute for my relationship with God, my wife and my kids. Beer had become a cover for my depression, coffee a reason to get up in the morning.

This isn’t to say I’ll never again enjoy a beer with the game or eat my father’s famous raviolis. But I will look at the act of doing it differently. A week into the diet, my wife said something that struck me.

“You know food in its essence is just fuel,” she said.

It seems simplistic, but that’s how I plan to approach food from now on.

Strong motivation

One reason I decided to embark on this weird food adventure was my 10-month-old daughter, Grace.

Grace was born with Very long-chain acyl-CoA dehydrogenase (VLCAD) deficiency, a condition that prevents the body from converting long-chain fats, which are basically 99 percent of fats, into energy. Because of that she’ll be on a special low-fat diet her entire life, and my wife and I have talked about changing our diet to fit her lifestyle. So I figured, why not start a little early?

Also now I can claim the first 31 years of my life was just research, so that when she asks what it’s like to eat like Homer Simpson, I can say, “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

Aaron Swaney: aswaney@heraldnet.com, 425-339-3475