A Theory

I have this long-running and mysterious ailment that I have taken to calling, very scientifically, my "funky stomach pains". They are exactly that: funky and unexplainable, and they can range from just the mildest nausea/discomfort, juuuust enough to make me lose my appetite, to all-out feeling of ohmygodI'mgonnabarf-ness.

What makes them even more unexplainable and funky is that there is no pattern to when the pains decide to announce their presence. Goodness knows I've tried to figure it out, first by visiting a doctor and having hundreds of dollars worth of blood tests done, which revealed zilch (thank goodness I was still a minor and mom and dad's insurance covered that.  Thanks, mom and dad!). That failure behind me, I attempted to simply observe when it happened and determine a pattern, also to no avail. Sometimes it's before I eat, sometimes after. Sometimes right before I go to bed or when I wake up. Sometimes it pops up at 3:23 PM while walking down the block with a slight breeze blowing.  It's never at the same time of the day or month.  There is really no pattern to it whatsoever. As you can imagine, it became incredibly frustrating.

The closest pattern I could eventually deduce was that it tended to pop up more frequently when I was eating badly.  Mind you, this is years and years and yeeeaars before the Au Naturale diet was even a thought in my mind. But yes, when I went through phases where I managed to stop eating Pappa John's pizza at midnight for a week- okay, slight exaggeration there- and focused on a more (somewhat) balanced diet, the funky stomach pains went on a vacation.  I finally just decided that I had nothing more than an overly-sensitive stomach and considered the mystery solved.  That being said, I realized this self-diagnosis has also had the added bonus of being a nice self-warning system, like a built-in nutritionist. Whenever a funky stomach pain shows up, I stop and reflect on what I've been eating the past week and immediately change.

Lately, though, the funky stomach pains have returned with an alarming frequency- alarming in that I've had a series of them over the course of the week including one severe enough that I had to briefly excuse myself from a social gathering and hide out in the bathroom.  Thankfully it passed, but again my brain began to replay my meals of the previous week or two.  As usual, I saw patterns of bad eating, from granola bar lunches during the Mississippi trip to moderate gorging at a couple of summer BBQs (as you will remember, I break the Au Naturale diet when a guest at someone else's house.  I won't be THAT person).

But something else stood out in my mind like an alarm. These funky stomach pains came on much more quickly and severely from less "bad" food than they had in the past.  I've noticed that one of the changes since I went Au Naturale diet is that I have become more sensitive to processed food than I ever had before, such as when I indulged in that Easter candy and felt heavy on the bus ride home. Now I wonder: is that sensitivity catching up with me?  Is it possible that I could have organic-ed my way out of being able to handle any processed food ever again?!?! Say it isn't so!

This seemed counter-intuitive to me. I should be feeling better and stronger, having purged preservatives and toxins out of my body through organic, natural, and basic foodstuffs, not more nauseous.  If this is what is going to happen to me all summer, and possibly for the rest of my life, is it worth it? Are all my Au Naturale efforts really for naught?

Once again, I decided to self-diagnose and have come up with what I think is an interesting theory.  Everything I am attempting to eliminate from my diet is all things humans should never be ingesting anyway; preservatives, pesticides, lab-invented additives, you name it.  Could it be that the severe resurgence of the funky stomach pains is really a warning system that my body has reached it's limit of acceptable amounts of these things for the day? "Alright, Cohen, that's enough.  Slowly back away from the Velveeta dip and nobody gets hurt."

So, following along on that theory, if our bodies do have a warning system to protect us from these toxins- a  harsh description, but I'll go with it- why aren't 90% of Americans walking around clutching their abdomens and moaning in pain all the time?  Why are there no airplane-like sick bags at every table in fast food restaurants?

My immediate answer was that my theory was wrong. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought I may be right.  The biggest difference between my stomach pains now and in the past is that they now come on much more quickly, almost immediately after eating a number of "bad" things. In contrast, back in the day it took a while, a gradual build-up of bad meal choices, to finally get me to the point of discomfort.  The more I mulled this over, the more the thought of a "build up" took hold in my head. Is it possible that we eat so much processed and artificial foods that we've built up our tolerance to them?  Is this why, as the fattest nation on earth, we can comfortably keep eating and eating and eating long after we should stop? Perhaps the funky stomach pains are a self-regulatory system, that if my health is already in a good place and I've hit my calorie/fat/sodium/preservative intake for the day, my body automatically tells me to stop to maintain that good health balance. All humans do have a fullness factor, but perhaps it's been diluted and stretched.  Perhaps the fact that we've over-saturated our bodies with all of these things has meant that we've not just muted that warning system, but we've turned it off completely.  This could be yet another explanation for why it has become so easy for us as a society to get too big and stay that way.  Our fullness factor is numb. There is nothing telling us to stop until we are, as we like to say, completely stuffed.

Does this make sense?  I realize I came by this theory through my extensive background in nutrition and medical training, which is to say I still have not yet figured out how to successfully put a band-aid on a knuckle. I could very well be way off and some PhD food researcher who will stumble on this post in a Google search will laugh his ass off and then go about his day. It's also very possible that my funky stomach pains are just back with a vengeance because they feel like it. And of course I know, even if there is a grain of truth to my theory, that my reasoning is not the whole answer.  Americans are still obese because we simply eat too much. But perhaps this "numbness" is part of a root cause of why we allow ourselves to get to the point of mindlessly eating too much.

And every day I'm learning that my own Au Naturale journey has brought up questions and surprises that not even I expected when I started.