Missy Diggs

If you know me, you know that I love to eat. (Even if you don’t really know me, you may have been able to guess.) And what I love to eat is EVERYTHING. Especially if it’s wrapped in bacon, filled with cheese, or basted with its own juices. If it’s a roast turkey, I like to eat the crackly skin. If it’s a roast chicken, I like to break the bones and suck out the marrow. For a special restaurant meal, I love to be taken to the Salt Lick Bar-B-Q, where you can order family style and when you finish your platter of brisket, ribs, and sausage they will bring you another one! Or Fogo de Chao, where they give you a little round coaster, red on one side, green on the other; and when you turn the green side up a seemingly endless parade of gorgeous Brazilian men, each wearing gauchos and brandishing a skewer of meat, approach you and ask, “Would you like sirloin? Would you like lamb chop? Would you like butt roast?” until you are totally overwhelmed and swimming in your own juices and you slam the coaster back over to red so you can catch your breath and savor your meat. (All the while keeping your eye out for the guy with the filet, so you can flip back to green as soon as you catch his eye.)

I also like butter. And cream. And frozen custard. And the whole milk yogurt with the cream on top. I am a regular customer at a certain Indian buffet where I’m pretty sure they put crack in the meat balls. When I buy beef bones from our massage therapist who raises her own meat, I don’t just want the bones, I want the hooves. And the liver. And maybe the heart. (But not the brain, or the tongue…. cause that’s just gross!)  (unless maybe you have a good recipe?)

I also eat vegetables, and fruit, and grains or whatever. More than once in my life I have eaten so many orange and red vegetables that I have turned a bit yellow: once when I was a baby and my mother rushed me to the doctor convinced I had jaundice, and then again as an adult when I saw myself in the mirror under fluorescent lights and gasped at how very yellow I was.

So, up til now, I have not exactly been the poster child for moderation. (Don’t even get me started on chocolate!) Or, you know, healthy choices. Though I have actually always been interested in nutrition, and in supporting local farmers and finding the best organic pasture-raised animal products. And I have also always eaten a lot of salad (with blue cheese! and bacon!) and more collard greens and okra than your average person. I also got through pregnancy with the aid of a smoothie so healthy even my hoola-boola midwife was impressed when I told her what all I put in it.

In other words, I have tried to eat healthfully, more or less, but I have not hesitated to pursue full-out high-fat pleasure when it presented itself. Which was probably more often than it really should have.

And then I got cancer.

And the thing about having cancer, or at least one thing about it, is that at some point you are going to wonder why it happened to you. And you are going to think that maybe you did something to cause it… or maybe you just failed to do something to prevent it…. or maybe there’s something you could do now to prevent it from happening again. And if you’re like me, you’re going to wear yourself (and everybody else) out researching that last part of the question, which to me is the only one that even seems possible to answer or to make any difference at this point. When I was in treatment, I talked a bit about this stuff in my support group, specifically about how to figure out what to eat to prevent cancer from recurring, and my support group leader said that “cancer treatment is the worst time to make major lifestyle changes or major changes in your diet.” And this was kind of hard for me to get, at that point, though now I definitely see the wisdom. (Also, for getting me through chemotherapy with any shred of dignity I would now like to thank chocolate milkshakes. I couldn’t have done it without them!)

But now that I am pretty much out of treatment I decided it was time to find some answers. I had seen a nutritionist during treatment, who advised me to eat low-glycemic-index foods, to eat lots of protein (140 grams a day!), to always always have some protein whenever I had any carbs at all, to eat no bananas or other tropical fruit EVER (or melons), to eat nothing but protein and vegetables the day before chemo and then as soon as they started the drip to eat all the carbs I wanted for twenty-four hours. I went home and researched all the advice he gave me, and it was all based on scientific stuff. And more importantly, when I tried the protein/carb chemo routine I felt much better and had fewer side effects. I also lost some weight during treatment (many breast cancer patients actually GAIN weight, how unfair!) but not enough to be dangerous, and I stayed healthy enough to keep receiving treatment. So I called that a success at the time, but then when I got off chemo I started to gain back some of the weight I had lost (probably a sign of health but not the one I was really hoping for!) and I started to really miss bananas and to be really really tired of forcing myself to eat so much protein.

I also was feeling pretty worried about recurrence, and wanting to do whatever I could to prevent it. Most importantly to me, I was getting tired of worrying about what I was eating. And I was exhausted by the prospect of the cancer coming back and me feeling guilty because I hadn’t done whatever I could to prevent it. I just did not want to find out I had cancer and then spend my precious time thinking, “If only I had stopped eating those ice cream sandwiches!!!!” or whatever. So, basically I wanted some control over the uncontrollable, and I wanted some control over my own future mind.

So I started to research what to eat to prevent cancer. Here is an incomplete list of some of the books that I read:

Anticancer: A New Way of Life by David Servan-Schreiber

Eat to Live: The Revolutionary Formula for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss by Joel Fuhrman and Mehmet Oz

Green for Life by Victoria Boutenko

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan

The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite by David Kessler

The Spectrum: A Scientifically Proven Program to Feel Better, Live Longer, Lose Weight, and Gain Health by Dean Ornish M.D.

The China Study by Campbell T. Colin

And now I am tired of listing the books, of which there have been many more, and it’s not like I’m recommending that you read these books, which in many ways have only made me sad. So instead of listing more I will just tell you some of the more interesting things I learned from them.

• When possible, eat organic. It really does make a difference. Organic food is more nutritious. Also, kids who eat organic food have fewer chemicals in their blood, or urine, or something. Seriously, it’s worth it.
• If organic is not available, but the food is good for you, eat it anyway. This applies mostly to fruits and vegetables, and beans and grains I guess. The benefits of the food really do outweigh the negatives of the way it was raised. Good to know, right?
• Eat more fruits and vegetables. You already knew that, right? Actually, here’s the important thing: eat MOSTLY fruits and vegetables, of which most are vegetables, of which most are green and leafy.
• Making small changes to your diet will result in small changes to your health. If you want large changes in your health, you are going to have to make large changes in your diet.
• Nutritional research is notoriously difficult to perform and difficult to analyze. Most researchers do not have enough evidence to prove anything, and they probably never will. If you want scientific certainty to guide your choices, you’re probably out of luck.
• The diet that is best for preventing heart disease is the same as the diet that is best for preventing diabetes, cancer, and other ailments. In most cases.
• And here’s the kicker: there’s plenty of research to suggest quite strongly that the risk of disease goes way way down as people consume fewer animal products. All other things being equal, or as equal as possible.

Well, shucks. Based on all this, I have already made quite a few changes, and I am working on making some more. During some parts of my nutrition reading marathon, I was despondently convinced that I would have to become a raw food vegan or something equally terrible. Moderation has never been my strong suit, remember. But as I read more, and thought more, and tried to gather some kind of consensus from all this information I found a more middle-ish path. On a very successful day, I eat mostly vegetables and fruit, beans, whole grains, some nuts and seeds. I eat some food cooked and some raw, in salads or smoothies. I aim to have more and more days like those. On the other days, I might have some cheese, or even an organic burger! I still have ice cream with my daughter, occasionally. I have been known to eat a cupcake here and there. It has been easier than I thought it would be, and I do feel better most of the time. I’ve lost some weight, and my tumor markers went down a bit.

But even though I am now mostly a vegetarian, and mostly a vegan one at that, I still cling fiercely to the idea of myself as a person who eats everything. I still get to be an omnivore, just not all the time.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 8:15 am and is filed under Living With Cancer, Tasty Goodness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.