Life after Salt

I had just started Jenny Craig diet for the 2nd time when I began to notice that my migraines were increasing in intensity.  I still wonder what was in those pre made meals besides salt. Don't get me wrong, I loved the "Jenny Crack" diet  (this is what the substance users I worked with used to call it when people they knew lost weight for no apparent reason other than increased drug use).  I had lost 15 pounds a year prior to this and I really liked the taste of the food.  That's why I signed up again.  I even remember my counselor's name was Jen.  She was a 20 something bit of nothing with green eyes and long blond hair.  

It irritated me that all the women who worked at the center were skinny, young, and looked like they never had weightier problems than what color to paint their nails that day.  Jen's solution to being overweight was to not eat.  Simple but for some reason I could never figure out how to do that, hence my return to ground zero.   I guess I should be grateful to Jenny Craig for being the catalyst that caused my diet change, but part of me can't help but blame J C for pushing me over the edge into bad health.  I had just signed up for a year long membership which wasn't cheap by any mean, when I noticed an increase in foggy thinking and what I like to call my pre-migraine  syndrome: the period of time when I could feel the ice pick pushing against my left eye but it hadn't broken the skin yet.

Since I was eating pre-made food three times a day, the additives were constantly saturating my body which lead quickly from pre-migraines to full blown migraines everyday.  I was smart enough to figure out that the food had triggered the headaches, so I quit Jenny Craig, but I wasn't smart enough at that point to change my diet in any other way.  My doctor gave me 2 prescriptions  but made no suggestions about what might be causing my symptoms.  The thought crossed my mind that I might have a brain tumor, but since doc didn't seem concerned I didn't push the topic.

After J C,  I noticed that certain foods triggered migraines within a few hours of eating them.  Usually the foods were high in salt, MSG, and preservatives.  Since that was my entire diet that really sucked.    
When I decided I was tired of feeling like a swollen balloon, I started reading food labels.  Yikes! sometimes real food was the 3rd or 4th ingredient on the label. Everything had salt, preservatives, and sugar. That's when I realized I wouldn't be able to eat  anything that wasn't fresh and homemade.

The sad thing about cooking without salt is that everything tastes weird, like  something is missing, which, of course, it is.   Once you get used to the taste of food without salt, everything else tastes weird.  I went to Whole Foods and bought kale and whit bean soup.  I took 2 bites and threw the rest out. The saltiness of the soup overpowered everything else.  I don' t eat out much anymore because salt seems to be the secret ingredient to making everything taste better.   I usually make everything from scratch and alter recipes that have salt in them.

Now when I invite people over to eat I have to remember to put some salt in whatever I am serving or risk their criticism of my tasteless food.  When people invite me over I always bring a dish if I can.  I  went to a friend's house one night and ended up eating peas because there was nothing else I could eat at the table, except maybe the table itself.  There is life after salt, it's finding the balance that makes it a little tricky.