Last weekend, a friend came to visit. It was wonderful to see her, and a few of us did the usual thing you do when a friend comes to stay: we went out one night to a fun bar, spent a day and night with drinks & movies & chatting into the wee hours, and spent another day at the beach & ate at a fabulous Greek restaurant at the end of the day.

In other words, fantastic time, but not much concern for real food (or moderation).

Well, ok, that’s not entirely correct. I talked real food with my friend quite a bit. She’s very interested in it, and she has inspired me to create a couple of things for this site (more on that to come later this month!). And she was perfectly ok with me making eggs & bacon for breakfast each morning, of course. So the days started with good food. But as the days went on, all bets were off.

And now I must recover.

Since everyone’s body chemistry is different, everyone will have different reactions to various food additives. Things that bother me won’t bother you, and vice versa. What I do know, what has become clear over time, is that MSG is one of the toughest additives for my body to deal with. It isn’t even the bloating or swollen fingers, which I don’t get very often anymore…it’s the cravings!

We’d ordered Chinese food not once, but a couple of times from our favorite local place (which means 3-4 actual meals from it!). It was incredibly tasty, as ever. So good, in fact, that I keep wanting more, even though I know it’s the chemical making me crave it. While my friend was here, we had Greek food, and it was fantastic, but I’m not craving more of it. We had a 3 a.m. Denny’s jaunt—I think their food tastes best at 3 a.m.—but I’m not craving more of it. All the other non-real things I ate were good, but they left me with the “wow it was yummy to enjoy those things, but I’m eager to get back to real food.” All except the Chinese food. Just writing this has me thinking how good it would be tonight for dinner…

You may not react to MSG the way I do, but I bet there are a few “trigger” foods that set off intense, hard-to-deny-cravings for you. Try to make a list and narrow it down:

1. What foods do you regularly crave? What are your top 3 “indulge” foods/dishes? For me, it was always Chinese food, salsa con queso, and potato chips (especially Doritos).
2. Do any of these foods have anything in common? For example, are they fried or cooked a certain way or contain chocolate or come from a certain restaurant? For my list, I know it’s MSG. I’ve tried natural salsa con queso, and while good, I don’t crave it like I do the Frito-Lay stuff or the stuff in restaurants. As for chips, I used to eat entire bags in one sitting…not because I was ravenously hungry, but because they were so good that I wanted the high I was getting off of them. The brands that affected me the worst all had MSG in them.
3. How do you feel after eating these foods? For me, I began to slowly realize that I felt horrible after eating any of this stuff. Everything from vicious mood swings to headaches to swollen joints to general bloating. It took awhile to recognize various symptoms as being related to what I’d eaten, but once I started to wonder at it, I could experiment: Eat some, note how I feel. Don’t eat it for awhile, see how I feel. Eat it again, note reaction. That’s how I became sure of the culprit.

I think the lesson here is twofold: one, it drives home the lesson that chemicals in food do indeed affect our brain (if that was ever in doubt!), and two, identifying your trigger food(s) is is key to figuring out how best to deal with them when you inevitably eat them again.

I’d never say to completely eliminate your trigger foods from your life, because as soon as I feel like I can “never” have something, I want it all the more.  Thankfully, most things I liked that contained MSG are available without it, so it was easy to phase almost all of it out and not feel like I was losing anything. But Chinese food is Chinese food…I have to accept that I’m going to eat some MSG when I indulge in Chinese*.

As for this recent indulgence, I’d gone long enough without eating additives and had been eating so much nutrient-dense food that I didn’t have the really bad reactions I used to have (no mood swings or headaches, for example). What affects me now is the cravings.

Knowing this, I can make a plan to deal with it. This is the real-food equivalent of a hangover remedy. It’s similar to knowing you will feel horrible after a night of heavy drinking, but you want to go nuts for [insert crazy celebratory occasion here], and you learned years ago how to best recover from a hangover. You get your remedy ready, and go enjoy the party.

Here’s a general approach to recovering from an indulgence in your trigger food(s). This has worked wonders for me so far, although the longer I continue on my real food journey, the more this list will grow and develop:

• Get back to eating real right away. Lots of good fat, butter, eggs, veggies with butter, pastured meats, raw milk, etc. Get the nutrients flowing back into your body.
• Have bone broth every day. I swear, bone broth is so wonderful and so healing that I call it my “magical elixir” or “pot of gold.” (A post coming soon on all the wonders of bone broth—promise!).
• Get moving. Daily exercise will help your body flush things out faster.
• Don’t beat yourself up. I talked about this in my last post, but it bears repeating. Don’t be hard on yourself for eating “bad food.” It was good, at least at the time you ate it, and you enjoyed eating it. Maybe you enjoyed it with friends. It’s ok that you enjoyed it! Remember, the body is an amazing healing organism. Eat real most of the time, and you’ll equip your body to be able to deal with the times that you don’t eat real.
• Other ideas: You’ll undoubtedly come up with other ways to recover. Maybe long, hot baths or getting a massage. Anything that helps circulation & relaxes you will be beneficial. I like to take liver-supporting herbs, both in tea and tincture form. You’ll learn as you go what things best support your body.

Was the food good enough to be worth all this? I’m not sure. But I am sure that after a few months go by, I’ll forget how irritated I was to have had these cravings and will be up for some Chinese food again. I am thankful that my reactions to MSG are not as severe as they used to be, and I attribute that to eating real 99% of the time. My body is better able to deal with the additives when it’s been getting lots of nutrients and has shored up its defenses.

Do you do anything specific to recover from eating your favorite “bad” foods? Please feel free to share!

* I could find a Chinese place that claims not to use MSG…but I’m pretty sure they all use it, just in other forms. I’m going to look into this and do a post on all the hidden ways MSG is still used in food, even when it’s supposed to be “MSG-free.”