My List of Frees

I am very pleased that Canada Post is finally off their strike. I regret that the children at the Post factory had to be forced back to work by their parents, but I am thankful that the result means that my free Fruit Loops t-shirt from my cereal box codes will finally be in the mail. Like a cruel twist of fate, however, I did not get my t-shirt in time to actually eat Fruit Loops while wearing my special mail-order Fruit Loops t-shirt because I've just started a new wheat-free, sugar-free diet.

But I did find these awesome pictures of Kellogg's old-school cereal "Sugar Smacks" over the years. This is probably the creepest cereal known to man. Notice the frog in the picture says, "Gimme a smack!" which obviously means the cereal is laced with smack, and after a couple days of eating a bowl for breakfast, I'm sure the marketers thought putting a picture of Spock pointing a gun at the children consuming their sugar-coated cocaine was a great idea. And freakish clowns, of course, are always a safe option. But why am I starting a new wheat-free, sugar-free diet? You know what? That's private.

Unless I write it in a blog and make it public. Like now. I am starting a new wheat-free, sugar-free diet to investigate why my body hates me so much. Usually it's the opposite and people hate their bodies, but for me it's the reverse. My body's like, "Why couldn't I have been assigned to that other girl? She's cool," and so it attacks me with all sorts of evil curses like chronic fatigue, depression, allergies, poor digestion and knee, hip and back problems. You might say, "Time to take up knitting and backgammon and get on with it," but no! I refuse to give up! Granted I have already scheduled in my knitting and backgammon lessons for this week, but if there's one thing I learned from "Extreme Makeover: Weight-loss Edition," it's that you've either got to get busy living or get busy dying. And then lose 100 pounds in 90 days...

I am not, however, on this diet to lose weight. If by chance I end up losing some unnecessary poundage as a bizarre side-effect, I will humbly accept my fate without complaining. A couple weeks ago I decided to go to an acupuncturist for my back pain, and after morphing me into a porcupine temporarily, my amazing acupuncturist at Elements of Health then blew my mind (no that's not part of the acupuncture treatment) with all the info she gave me about overcoming chronic fatigue and that most chronic fatigue and mood disorders are controlled by "the second brain" aka gut (read this breakthrough article in Scientific America). Gut is such a great word. Anyway, my acupuncturist has had to try a lot of different things for herself, but for the past seven years she has been wheat-free, dairy-free, sugar-free and chronic-fatigue-free.You would think having a list of frees would be some wonderful kind of liberation. But though being racist to certain foods can have some life changing benefits, it also lands you in food prison. At first I thought, "Wheat-free is not so bad, and if that doesn't work and nothing else in the entire world helps, then after another ten years of suffering from chronic fatigue I will consider sugar-free too." Because, you see, I couldn't imagine living in a sugarless world. I thought I would die of sugar-deprivation. My red blood cells would go on strike and I would get sugar-deprivation-induced-pneumonia. If that doesn't scare you, I bet you've never seen someone with sugar-deprivation-induced-pneumonia. It all comes down to the question of which is worse, being unable to eat a lot of delicious things or suffering from unrelenting tiredness and general ill-being. Your call. Yet here I am, still alive, and officially now dairy-free, meat-free, wheat-free, sugar-free, cocoa-free (okay so that's just a random allergy) and nicotine-free (okay so I never smoked in the first place! Gosh. So particular). As of yet, I haven't noticed a ding-dang difference.

Maybe you don't know this, but wheat-free and gluten-free are not the same. You can have wheat-free food that still has gluten in it, but if you have celiac disease you are screwed. I pity the gluten-frees out there, wallowing in their crappy bread. I know it's crappy because I bought some just to be on the safe side (I couldn't remember which grains I could have that were wheat-free, but I knew if it's gluten-free then I was covered). The gluten-free bread I bought is made of brown rice flour. Yes, you are right. The same principle does apply with rice bread as rice milk. Just as cats should not be milked, neither should rice. Cats should also not be made into flour. Guess what. Neither should rice. From what I have uncovered, I guess back in the day some genius decided to mess around with wheat and make some sort of genetically mutated super-wheat that not all of us can properly digest. Idiot. That would have been a good idea if it was a superhero wheat. But we all know that when it comes to food, natural is the only way to go. So really, if I am sensitive to wheat then technically I am just more of an organic, back-to-nature type of person, whereas people who can't handle gluten are just messed up inside. So we should all take pity on the celiacs out there and stop throwing eggs at them. Here is an educational video about the hazards of bio-engineering: