I want to spend a little bit of time discussing what all I was eating before I found out about my corn intolerance, to demonstrate just how dramatic my food changed with this diagnosis. That part of the story can be found here.
Childhood Food Memories
Growing up I was fed those frozen meals from a package at least once a week. The frozen lasagnas are ones that I remember the most. The reason I remember them is because when microwaved to reheat, the middle would still be frozen, and the outsides burnt. How something like that burns in the microwave, I’m not sure, but they always would. So I would eat a piece, the outside burning my mouth and the center frozen.
Friday night was pizza night, either frozen or from places like Dominos. I lived in suburbia, so going out to eat would often be at places like Red Robin.
I hated vegetables and salads growing up. We would always have a side dish to our dinners of either canned corn, canned green beans, microwave steamed broccoli, or a basic salad. (Now I just hide my vegetables in my main meals, so I don’t have to eat them on the side. I also like how they taste better this way).
High School
I didn’t help my case any either, with my food choices. A weird thing I would do after school before I started homework is think to myself “I’m thirsty” and instead of getting something to drink, I would grab a handful of candy. Once I remembered that I was still thirsty, I would go grab a soda from the fridge. If I wanted a “better” snack, I would do microwave popcorn that had so much salt and butter on it. At high school, one of the cafeterias served pizza everyday. If you got the combo, it would come with water and chocolate chip cookies. That’s what I had most days. There was also a school store that sold miniature packs of twizzlers, and I would eat those almost every day as well.
None of these choices were healthy.
I wasn’t a big fan of cooking, but I liked to bake. Freshman year of high school, there was a class I would always bring cookies to. I remember asking some of them if they even knew my name, because they just knew me as “the cookie girl.” I brought the cookies in because I didn’t want to eat them all, I just wanted to bake them. Cookies and cupcakes were my favorite things to make.
I don’t know if any of this affected me getting my corn intolerance, but it made it way harder to figure out how to eat foods without corn once I started trying to cut it all out because I hardly knew how to make things for myself.
