I’ve had this post in the back of my mind for months, but a series of client and blog reader questions this week has pushed it to the forefront.  I’ll probably post more about this in the future, but today I’m going to cut to the chase.

During my pelvic pain experience, I, like most of you, did a lot of research.  Everywhere I looked, I found information about diet.  There was the IC diet, the low-oxalate diet, the candida diet, and more.  In my panicked mindset, I tried them all.  For long periods of time.  At one point, I was trying to follow all of them at the same time, which eliminated so many foods that I was left with water, lettuce, and…well, maybe it was just water and lettuce.

It was at this point in the diet craze that I noticed one interesting fact.  These diets didn’t seem to be helping all that much.  I was not healed.  And I really, really hated all the different diets.  Any diet that makes me cut out avocadoes is just not going to work.

So you can imagine my relief when I started the mind-body healing work and discovered that my fear of eating the wrong food was completely unfounded.  My mind was simply freaking out, and the reality was that healing would come from feeling emotions, releasing the fight or flight response, and learning how to address my response to stress in new ways.  (And stop unwittingly creating stress in my own mind.)

A couple months into the mind-body process, I threw out the diets.  I had to re-work a lot of thinking around that, reminding myself that there really was no evidence that they were the magic cure.  It took a lot of repetition.  It helped me to do a little research and understand that living in fight or flight creates a lot of inflammation (among other things like hormonal imbalances and digestive issues) within the body.  It’s natural that the body, while experiencing this inflammation, will sometimes not tolerate certain foods as well.  This doesn’t mean that those foods caused the interstitial cystitis, the vulvodynia, or the irritable bowel syndrome.

Food is not the cause.

The mind-body approach does not include a single, solitary piece of dietary advice.  You don’t need a special diet.  If you listen to your body, you’ll know which foods aren’t helping you right now, and that’s all you need to know.  In the future, as you return to health, you’ll notice that your body likes pretty much everything again.

I eat a myriad of fruits and vegetables, I drink coffee, I enjoy chocolate daily, and just try to get me away from the avocadoes.  I’m not on any diet plan whatsoever.

It’s NOT about your diet.