The Flip Side Of The Diet…

I woke up this past Saturday morning and felt…good. There was no trace of nausea, just a normal sense of tiredness and sloth. I got up, walked around, got dressed and still no feeling of nausea. It had become so common to have a background (and sometimes all-to-foreground) feeling of nausea that not having it was amazing. This was especially true given that the previous few days had seen some serious bouts of having to work at keeping my stomach contents inside my body. It was truly delightful to have my stomach feel normal.

So I started eating, and eating, and eating. I can’t eat much at any one time any more, so I grazed as much as I could all day long. It’s not that the food tasted a whole lot better, though I definitely tried to focus on foods that appealed to me, it was that I realized I had a chance to make up for the past few days when food had been the farthest thing from my mind. Even with all the eating, it wasn’t as if I managed to put away thousands of calories. I had a fruit smoothie for breakfast, some nuts, some cheese, a couple of fruit granola bars, two slices of pizza for dinner and the one attempt to pack on the calories, half of an éclair. Nonetheless I felt stuffed all day long, not unpleasantly so, just unusually so.

What I learned from this is that when you have a day when the old digestive tract feels like it did before you started treatment, take advantage of it. You need to eat to maintain your health and you probably need to eat more than you are actually eating. You are mostly going to feel like eating is a chore after several months of treatment. So when you can eat without the negative side effects raising their ugly heads, you owe it to your health to do so.

As a final note, the various books, articles and advice columns about Hep C all mention the benefits of a varied, balanced and nutritious diet. They are right and trying to eat that way is a good way to deal with the disease and the treatment. However, when food tastes terrible and your body doesn’t want to eat anyway, it doesn’t matter if the food is “good for you,” it only matters that you eat something. So eat what tastes good, eat what appeals to you. When you reach the point where the food tastes like crap and your stomach is jumping, eating at all is more important than eating particular foods. If you like it, eat it. If you can keep it down, eat more of it. That is the reality of Hep C cuisine.