The "nu" plan

I keep telling people I'm thinking about going back to school to become a nutritionist. Writing just seem so... impractical, hit-or-miss, and devoid of a 401K. Maybe I should've listened to my childhood friend, Barbie (so dubbed because it's thanks to her that I hate the dolls of the same name), when she told me in sixth grade that I would need a back-up career, such as pediatrics, if I didn't want to end up "relying on a rich husband" my entire life. (Turns out that this was the sort of thing her parents used to tell her all the time, and yes, it made her grow up to be just this side of certifiably crazy.) This isn't to say I'm giving up on writing, but I've sort of stopped fooling myself into thinking I can turn it into a career.

So why nutrition, when we all know that Elle is not-so-much with that new-fangled science stuff? Well, since we're all friends here, I feel that it's about time I discussed my bowels with you people (and by "you people", I mean "everyone other than C-List, who already gets to hear about my bowels on a near-daily basis").

I started getting IBS symptoms around my sophomore year of college, just a few months after I'd lost my virginity (coincidence?). I remember walking back to my dorm one night and having such bad cramping that I had to sit down on the curb. I remember more than one instance, my senior year, where I had to to surreptitiously kick friends out of my apartment ("It's getting late and I have homework to do") so I could sit on the toilet in peace. In France, I called off a dinner with my mom and Sunshine, who were both visiting, at my favorite Lyonnais restaurant, because I couldn't trust my stomach to cooperate in the humid weather.

And last year in Wales, I hit my all-time low. I can hardly remember a day when my stomach didn't hurt, and instances like that of the Lyonnais dinner became all too frequent. Medicine recommended starving myself for a few days. More knowledgable medicine wanted me to get a colonoscopy that would've cost upwards of 800 quid and which I really felt I didn't need - because if there's something seriously wrong with you, you know it in yourself, and I didn't (so I opted out of that fun-filled procedure). Homeopathy wanted me to take peppermint oil and charcoal tablets with every meal, and start a course of accupuncture. Alternative therapy allergy testing put me on a wheat/gluten/potato/onion/coffee-free diet for three months, and when I started feeling sick again after the first five weeks or so, recommended cutting out starches altogether, for the rest of my life; I became so paranoid about what I could and couldn't eat that, by the end, my diet was pretty much restricted to rice cakes with peanut butter and jelly, and I was floating through the days like a zombie, with zero energy. I joked that IBS had given me an eating disorder, but have since learned that there is such a thing as food disorders, and that the latter was much more accurate, and not a joke at all.

So one desperate afternoon, Lui, my eternal hero, looked up nutritionists in the phone book - "real nutritionists, none of this hippie shit allergy testing," he said - found an ad he liked, and called. The woman told him she'd send a packet that I needed to fill out, about my medical and dietary history, and send back for her to review before we could set up an appointment. That in itself was comforting - that I was a real person again, rather than a set of molecular frequencies - but I still called her back after Lui had left for work, and, nearly hysterical, told her that if she was going to make me cut out entire food groups, I wasn't going to bother. She reassured me that that wasn't her intention; that it's about incorporating good things rather than removing all the bad ones, because depriving yourself of things that make you happy will only put more stress on your body and thereby make things worse. "Most of what I tell you is going to seem like common sense anyway," she said, "but sometimes it takes hearing it from someone else to make it really click."

A few weeks later, Lui's mum took me to [nutritionist]'s house for my appointment. [Nutritionist] lived out at the end of a nearly un-navigatable dirt road, which under normal circumstances would've made her a hippie. But this was Wales, and pretty much everyone lives out at the end of a nearly un-navigatable dirt road. ...Ok, so she was kind of a hippie anyway, but the kind that you figure at least believes in deodorant. We sat at her kitchen table sipping water with lemon slices in it, and she told me all sorts of reasonable and comforting things, but kept coming back to the point that what was causing my IBS symptoms was most likely my birth control pill.

It all checked out: the onset of symptoms coinciding with the loss of virginity (and therefore the pill), the excess hormones and other harsh drug material waging war on the flora in my GI tract, the symptoms worsening over the years as my poor friendly bacteria lost the war. So in August, I decided to stop taking the pill, just to see if that would work when nothing else had. (I vowed to try eating better too.)

The result was like night and day. I no longer feel like the bad days outweigh the good, like my stomach is upset all the time for no reason; I feel like a normal person, who occasionally gets an upset stomach from something obvious, like drinking, or fast food, or not getting enough sleep. My Imodium intake has reduced dramatically, too, which is in keeping with the whole "not letting pills invade my body" approach I've since taken to my overall health. And the fact that no one - medical doctors, alternative doctors, or crazy hippie allergy testers who were trying to talk me out of deodorant - had thought to suspect the pill, completely baffled me (well, ok, except for the medical doctors, who seem to generally like pills). Because yes, it just seems so damn obvious that putting something foreign into my body on a daily basis for almost six years would fuck with my system.

So I switched to chiropractic. I switched to real butter. I switched to green tea. I switched to wheat bread. (Yes! Bread!) I didn't need to switch to working out regularly, because in that department, I was already awesome. But I know I can do better, and I fear for Lui and his refusal to eat raw vegetables (did I mention we registered for a bamboo steamer and a soup cookbook so that at least he'll get some nutrients out of his cooked ones?) So really, I want to study nutrition for my own selfish needs. But I also want to do nutrition because - and I know how this sounds - I want to help people like someone finally managed to help me.