Pumpkin Pie Woes
Pumpkin Pie Woes
This writer fights to balance physical pain and the overwhelming desire for all the sweet treats.
Special Thanksgiving edition of Northwoods Recorder. I hope, whether you’re American or not, that you’re eating well this weekend and that there are things to be grateful for.
This essay is cross-posted with my Medium account.
The season of food binges are quite literally just around the corner. Have you been fantasizing about slipping that succulent turkey into your mouth or feeling the texture of fluffy stuffing on your tongue? Maybe it’s the taste of your mother’s sweet potatoes that has saliva dangling from your chin.
The holidays are a hella stressful time punctuated with falling asleep in the recliner, bellies overfull to bursting with our families’ favorites. Some use exercise (punishingly, as if eating itself were the enemy) to balance the scales, and others resignedly vow to begin eating more nutritiously in their New Year’s resolution.
Our relationship with food, my relationship with food, has often been abusive (sometimes I’m doing the abusing and sometimes I’m abusing myself, it really depends). Food, especially to women, has been a love/hate relationship that usually correlates with the love/hate relationship we have with our bodies, more specifically the shape of our bodies.
The more we hate food the more it’s an indication we hate our bodies (I speak from experience), but conversely the more I’ve come to love my body (whatever shape it is) the more I love feeding it food that makes it stronger and healthier and, the big one, pain free.
I don’t know when exactly I felt my first twinge of arthritis. But I do remember it in my left ring finger knuckle. What felt like a small prickle rose up into a sharp, extended pain as if I’d been punctured by a needle from the inside. If it had been in my gut, I might have curled over it was so excruciating. But I as I breathed through the pain I thought to myself, Sure, makes sense.
Christmas morning 2001 I was slicing a tomato open with a knife I was warned was sharp, and it went straight through the tomato and into the meat of the inside of the same finger just below the middle joint, severing a tendon. (I haven’t actually thought about that moment in ages, but I’m getting a bit sick to my stomach just writing it.)
I received stitches on the day, and had to return for surgery, in which they had to cut into my finger in a zigzag pattern to find the tendon and reconnect it. They do this to reduce the scar tissue on the tendon itself, which will already resist extending and contracting to it’s formerly full glory.
With all that scar tissue and trauma on that finger it made perfect sense to me that arthritis should start there. But also, it hurt something fierce. It felt like such a small, sharp pain, much more debilitating that it felt it should be.
That first time, however, it flared off and on over the course of a few hours and then subsided for weeks maybe even months. And I shrugged a sigh of relief, Thank goodness THAT’S over.
I didn’t, as I normally, do start looking for any kind of cause or fix for the problem, arthritis seemed like a natural part of life even if I was only in my early 30s and a half day of little twinges hardly seemed like something to write home about (though I’m pretty sure I did text my mother).
Flash forward to today, a few years later, and after having just three small Russian teacakes (gluten free with protein powder, flax, and chia seeds) yesterday (and, okay, a giant bowl of pasta for dinner) my knee is so inflamed I can hardly walk up and down the stairs without excruciating pain. Someone please get me one of those motorized stair chairs because stairs aren’t a thing I can do today sort of pain.
I’ve slathered my knees, hips, lower back, and hands with enough CBD balm I wouldn’t be surprised if it got me high. My elbow hurts just typing. And frankly, I’m not sure how I’m functioning at all.
Some days my whole body is so inflamed it takes me hours to coax myself out of bed, even with a practice of long-hold passive bed stretches to loosen the joints, and I still spend most of the day stiff and immobile. Other days, I feel, well, normal, whatever normal is, as our bodies shift so drastically from year to year. But it does seem as if those good days are few and far between at the moment.
There are many reasons why inflammation flares: the overcast, cold and snowy day we’re having for one; hormone shifts; lack of exercise, but this summer I shifted for a time to a high protein diet (or protein forward diet as a friend pleasingly calls it), admittedly I was hoping to drop some of the COVID weight I’d recently realized was upon me, but I stuck to it because I actually felt full for maybe the first time in my life.
Well, aside from all those times I binge ate massive quantities of carbs because I spent the day accidentally half-starving myself having spent the last three, nearly four decades, internalizing both that I was fat AND the pervasive diet culture even though I tried desperately not to participate. This full feeling, as most all will experience more than once over the next 30 or so days, isn’t the good kind of full feeling.
In those months that I was eating protein forward, however, I was filling up on meats, protein smoothie and veg, with starches only accounting for a small portion of my diet. This was completely incidental, because I was so focused on my aim to get a certain amount protein, it left little room for the piles of pasta and bags of tortilla chips I usually ate.
It also left little room for my favorite box of paleo chocolate chip cookies and other sugary snacks.
I wasn’t keeping a food diary or marking the days I felt pain, but I’m quite sure I was rising earlier and that I was in a lot less pain than I’ve experienced since I’ve been in the north woods, where in the chaotic mess of moving and changing routines/shared space and the shift in seasons, haven’t quite been able to keep up with the protein forward diet, which has put more sugar and grains in my path.
Of course we all know that sugar does indeed increase inflammation and exacerbate arthritis symptoms but it took really truly experiencing the difference in order for me to truly grasp how it affects my body.
I’m not a stranger to diet changes for health reasons. Around 2005 I transitioned into vegetarianism in the hopes of correcting a life-long issue with Irritable Bowel Syndrome, it helped for awhile, and then it didn’t. I shifted back into eating meats if a bit less than your average American.
Leading into 2012, the Irritable Bowel Syndrome became debilitating. I found myself waiting around the house after I’d eaten breakfast just to be sure I wouldn’t shit myself on Chicago’s El on my way to class. And finally a friend with Celiac’s gently suggested that my symptoms sounded very much like hers and I went to get get tested. Tests came back negative, but I decided to cut gluten out of my diet for a couple of weeks to see what happened and, dear Reader, the results were so unexpected.
Not only did the daily diarrhea subside, but I had thought, at 30 yrs old, that the long hours I spent in bed and the high level of fatigue I experienced after just being out of the house for four or five hours, were symptoms of my dire old age! Wrong I was! I clipped gluten from the diet and suddenly I was a whole new person with massive amounts energy.
It really did feel like a new lease on life. Since then I’ve found I can in fact eat organic imported pasta and sprouted ancient grain breads without issue (as far as I can tell), that cow dairy (especially milk and soft cheeses, though not so much yogurts and hard cheeses) can be an issue, and then, the saddest problem that I’m still sorting through has been eggs (please don’t make me talk about it or I might cry).
Basically I’ve been a walking dietary experiment for more than a decade and in the next five years I’ll be eating nothing but tailored protein smoothies to ensure I’m getting the nutrients I need without the things that make me sick or set me off into painful days in bed. It’s not fun, it’s really not. I’m not the asshole at the restaurant asking about gluten free/dairy free options because I find all this wonderfully amusing.
And now sugar. Wonderful, sweet sugar. Addictive sugar. Taking sugar out has been an issue. I’ve only realized how important it is to stay away from in the last few months. And the funny part is that I never did like it very much. I’m chided by my grandmother for thinking strawberries are sweet enough without sugar. At some point in my teens I stopped putting sugar on even the blandest of cereals (Corn Flakes and Cheerios, I even ate Grape Nuts without adding sugar). I’ve hardly consumed soda at all since some time after moving out of my freshman dorm nearly two decades ago.
I’m not saying I’m a model for reduced sugar consumption, I’m clearly not, I’m only pointing out I’ve avoided some sugary snacks because I found them far too sweet. I can’t even imagine what a Mt. Dew tastes like. I don’t think I could stomach it.
But that first year or two after I went gluten free, I definitely ate anything that was gluten free if it was offered or available. Gluten free brownie? Don’t mind if I take two! Gluten free snickerdoodle (my fave cookie). YES. PLEASE. Pancakes? Glory be, the skies have opened and are showering down all the love and everything that is good in the world, I’ll have five!
So, it’s clear that, though I have removed harmful (to me) things from my diet before, I have absolutely no willpower when it comes to sugar, especially if someone has lovingly taken the time and care to make me a special gluten free sweet, and even more especially if it’s a holiday treat.
And thus here we are on the eve of Thanksgiving. My dear sweet, relatively traditional, grandmother who has always supported my dietary changes in the best ways she knew how, even when my own mother was weirdly angry with me for refusing to eat meat; who spends time looking for gluten free recipes she might like to try especially for me; who has made me my favorite sweets with new gluten free recipes because she wants me to have a treat at the holidays like everyone else, my lovely, supportive grandmother mentioned yesterday having made both a pumpkin pie AND an apple pie especially for me.
Can you hear the alarm bells going off in my head? The Debbie Downer WAH WAH horn blaring in my ear? And then of course there’s the yearning, the desire to put that pumpkin pie straight into my mouth, forget turkey and meatballs and potatoes, I never liked any of that much anyway, but this pumpkin pie is ALL MINE. The mixed feelings were far too much to bear, so naturally I handled it poorly with strained gratitude and a telling off.
“Oh!,” I say with true surprise, “I really don’t need all that sugar, Grandma.”
She says, thinking sugar has to do with my weight rather than pain, “Ah! but you worry about that AFTER the holidays.”
I try in vein to explain about the arthritis and the inflammation, ending with a haughty almost irritable, “I don’t want to spend three days in pain!” And she says, and do I detect a bit of hurt in her words? yes, very likely, “Well, then, you only get ONE piece of pie and I’ll put the rest in the freezer for Christmas.”
Dear God, yes please. Yes. Let these pies last me three or four years.
Lock it all away. Because I want to be able to walk come Friday. I want to wake feeling light and mobile. I want to climb the stairs out of the basement for breakfast pain free that, and every day of the year. And I truly don’t know if I have the strength.
Libby Walkup is a writer, book binder, and slow living novice who resides in the north woods of Minnesota with three dogs and her parents. Thank you for your support.