Why managing food sensitivities feels impossible some days and hopeful others

We all know the days when managing food sensitivities feels like exactly what it is: inconvenient, limiting, sometimes even relentless. You have to plan what you shop and eat while everyone else can enjoy the full breadth of meals. You read labels constantly, nothing can be left to chance. And you manage bad days and weeks without fully explaining it to anyone. Some days, the honest reality is that it is tough.

I’ve also had other days, when my mood shifted and I felt almost grateful that I was forced to look at my diet and make healthier choices. I was also convinced that I could get better, that my body wasn’t broken beyond repair. I dived into the connection between body and mind, trying to decipher how my mind influences my physical wellbeing and vice versa. It might sound strange but food sensitivities gave me a sense of purpose - on the good days.

Feeling stuck and low on some days and feeling a sense of purpose and hope can both co-exist. Sometimes even on the same day, and that’s a useful thing I have learned over time. The bad days are not evidence that hope was naive. The hopeful days are not denial of how hard the hard days are. They are both true.

What hopelessness costs you

I’m familiar with the feeling of hopelessness. Being told you’ll never get better. From now on, you can consume 40 items including food, drink, spices, herbs. You need to rotate the limited number of foods because otherwise you’ll become more intolerant to them. And if you don’t stick to this, your inflammation will ramp up, you’ll feel sick and won’t have any energy. That inflammation could even do permanent damage to your health.

On the days when I was worried about my health or simply fed up eating a limited diet, I closed myself off. I stopped looking for information and inspiration to feel better. I didn’t want to try new recipes or search for ways in which I could heal. In practical terms, I mentally filtered out any social media feed that would show me relevant information before I even properly considered it. I didn’t actively research, and avoided podcasts that I’d usually dive into for inspiration and emotional support. It wasn’t so much self pity but just resignation and tiredness. Not wanting to deal with it for a while.

What shifts when you let yourself hope

As I mentioned above, one of the things that inspired me was the body mind connection. And I need to continue here with a warning because the last thing this is meant to be is a "think yourself to health" argument. The idea that belief alone influences physical outcomes was actually damaging to me.

What that belief does, when I was genuinely unwell and not getting better, it handed me a new thing to feel bad about. If the body heals when I believe it can, and my body is not healing, the implied conclusion is that my belief is the problem. Clearly, I’m not good or strong enough to do it right. At times, that was more exhausting than useful, and it took a while to untangle the good instinct underneath. One of the techniques that genuinely helped was EFT - Emotional Freedom Technique. It genuinely helped to lessen the anxiety around food and eating.

I even remember once when I was at the start of a cold with a bad sore throat that my symptoms had disappeared after a short EFT session. That was the only time I remember though so I want to be careful to position EFT as a cure. Nevertheless, it’s a tool I still use today and without my food sensitivities challenge I’d have probably not come across it.

Leaving aside advocacy of mind body healing, a more open attitude can lead you to general positivity. It keeps you curious and you end up reading, watching or listening to things you might have otherwise dismissed. Even just one piece of information you pick up can become a thread to feeling better. It might point you to a practitioner or technique that is right for you. The microbiome piece I came across in a Hayhouse podcast by Shann Jones only landed because I was in a period of exploration and curiosity rather than closing them down. If you want to read more about what my recovery looked like, I've written about it in The body can recover but it’s not a quick process

What you pay attention to

The practical upshot of all this, if there is one, is not to suppress the bad days or pretend they are not there. It is more about noticing which state you are in, and understanding that it has consequences. Not because feeling hopeless means you are doing something wrong. But because a more open state genuinely leads to different things like breadcrumbs. You allow yourself to be curious and to look things up and even if healing is not the overall outcome, you’re finding ways to feel better about your situation.

That is not toxic positivity. It is just an observation about what happens when you stay in the search instead of leaving it. Some weeks it is very hard to stay in it. Some weeks "this is hard" is the accurate description and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. The point is just that both are true, and only one of them moves things forward.

If you're interested in learning more about your coping patterns, I've developed a free resource that can help you recognise where you are in the journey: https://www.nurtureandthrive.live/free-resources‍ ‍