Last week, I discovered that I have an intolerance to soy.
I had been feeling just plain lousy all the time for... goodness, I don't even know how long. It must have been a few years, at least. Exhausted but unable to sleep well. Sore and achy all the time. My hair was actually falling out. And bloated, gassy and constipated. Oh my lord, it was so embarrassing, not to mention painful.
I was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome last year. Short explanation, my levels of estrogen and progesterone were wrong, and this caused my level of insulin to be wrong. My GYN put me on Metformin, a diabetes drug, and I felt ever so slightly better, but still pretty awful.
My health insurance is through the university where I'm a part time student, so I go to the student clinic there. I'm sure it's a little odd for them to be working with the problems of someone who has left 30 behind, as opposed to the 18 to 22 year old students. I made an appointment to go in and have my thyroid checked when my hair started falling out. The doctor, bless her to infinity forever, decided it was probably the insomnia, and she gave me a prescription for this amazingly wonderful medicine that has let me sleep well every night since. Sleep! Deep, restful, refreshing sleep for the first time in years! Every night!
But my stomach was still protesting pretty much everything I ate, and my hair was still falling out. A friend suggested that it might be artificial sweeteners. I pretty much lived on diet Pepsi and Propel, so this was not so good to hear. I decided to try going without for two weeks. Neither my belly nor my hair improved, but I felt so much more alert that I decided I was probably better off without the sucralose, aspartame, and so on.
At this point I thought it would be worth checking to see if I had a food intolerance, specifically lactose. This was a scary idea. I love dairy so much, but I was tired of feeling awful. I poked around on the internet and found a test I could do for myself at home before talking to my doctor again-- do an overnight fast, drink a big glass of milk in the morning, and see what happens. I drank my milk that morning with dread, hoping it wouldn't be my last glass, but horribly afraid it would be.
Nothing happened. I drank the milk around 7 AM, and by 10 AM I was feeling pretty good. No gas or bloating, I was comfortable, and it was weird. Usually after a couple of hours in my desk chair at work, I'm sore and uncomfortable. I was getting pretty hungry by then, so I decided the lactose test was over and had a granola bar. I was wondering if the gluten in the granola bar would cause the gassy reaction. It didn't. By lunchtime I was still feeling fine.
But then I had lunch-- a frozen Lean Cuisine meal. Within a couple of hours, my belly was up to its old nasty tricks and I was miserable again. It had to be the soy, that was the only common intolerance food I hadn't checked. And then I thought about how epically gassy I'd been the time I'd tried soy milk. Yeah.
I decided to give a soy-free diet a trial run to see if it made a difference. What I hadn't counted on was just how much stuff soy is in. It's in pretty much every packaged food you can name. Even worse, the labels don't always call it soy. It could also be known as:
Bulking agent
Emulsifier
Guar gum
Gum Arabic
Hydrolyzed vegetable protein (HVP)
Hydrolyzed plant protein (HPP)
Lecithin
Protein filler/extender
Mono-& diglycerides
MSG (monosodium glutamate)
Shortenings
Stabilizer
Thickener
Vegetable/gum/starch/oil/protein
Natural flavorings
Basically, since soy is cheap, if the label doesn't specifically say that one of these is NOT soy, I have to assume that it IS soy. (For example, I've seen sunflower lecithin on a label, and vegetable oils come in many varieties.) This puts so many common foods off limits. Store-bought bread. Margarine. Mayonnaise. Many ice creams and breakfast cereals. Chocolate (sob). Chinese food. (Although I suppose this explains why I've been sick as a dog after the last few times my husband and I went to our formerly-favorite Chinese buffet.) Many many others.
Still, this leaves me a lot, and I've eaten pretty well the last few days. And you know what? After less than a day , my belly felt better. I wasn't sore. I wasn't overtired. I felt, to my great surprise, good. I'd kind of forgotten what that was like. My hair is still falling out, but then, it took me a long time to get to feeling this bad. It will probably take awhile to get all the way back, too.
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