Lindsay Maitland Hunt - Help Yourself: A Guide to Gut Health for People Who Love Delicious Food

Copyright 2020 by Lindsay Maitland Hunt

Photography 2020 by Linda Pugliese

Illustrations 2020 by Mlanie Johnsson

Black and white patterns Curly_Pat via Creative Market

One pot icon Rashad Ashur / Shutterstock.com

Quick and easy icon elnur SS / Shutterstock.com

Plant-based icon NeMaria / Shutterstock.com

Gut icon Arcady / Shutterstock.com

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-0-358-00839-2 (POB); ISBN 978-0-358-00838-5 (ebook)

v1.0720

Book and cover design and hand lettering by Laura Palese

Food styling by Monica Pierini

Prop styling by Lindsay Maitland Hunt

Cover photography Linda Pugliese

Cover illustrations by Mlanie Johnsson

This book presents, among other things, the research and ideas of its author. It is not intended to be a substitute for consultation with a professional healthcare practitioner. Consult with your healthcare practitioner before starting any diet regimen. The publisher and the author disclaim responsibility for any adverse effects resulting directly or indirectly from information contained in this book.

Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.

JEAN ANTHELME BRILLAT-SAVARIN, The Physiology of Taste

Sometimes I feel like I am living on a different star from the one I am used to calling home. It has not been a steady progression. I had to examine, in my dreams as well as in my immune-function tests, the devastating effects of overextension. Overextending myself is not stretching myself. I had to accept how difficult it is to monitor the difference. Necessary for me as cutting down on sugar. Crucial. Physically. Psychically. Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

AUDRE LORDE, A Burst of Light: and Other Essays

TO MY PARENTS.

For their love and support, and for hosting me as a symbiont.

Food has always been a defining feature of my life. Whether its work (developing recipes and writing about cooking for magazines and websites) or personal (regularly hosting dinner parties and showing my love through freshly baked cookies), I deeply identify as a cook and food lover, and for a long time I had no qualms about my life and career blending seamlessly.

That is, until I started collecting a grab bag of painful and debilitating symptoms like heartburn, migraines, itching, sudden and severe weight gain, joint pain, recurring yeast infections, stomach aches, and fatigue. Does that sound like a healthy, active, then twenty-nine-year-old woman? Not so much.

So, frustrated from years of sickness, I did something radical. I decided to cut almost every food out of my day-to-day diet. Goodbye sugar, not even fruit. No more gluten, dairy, soy, eggs, or any foods that the internetwhere I was looking for answers at the timeconsidered high carb like whole grains. Just about every food I truly loved was off the list (and youre talking to someone who co-founded the Cheese Club in high school). If this sounds extreme, thats because it was. And dont worry, that kind of restriction is decidedly not the way of eating I share in this book, noras I know nowis it supported by science. But my essentially scorched-earth approach of trying to get better through food speaks to where so many people are now: desperately mining the world of internet advice for what turns out to be fools gold.

By the time I attempted my drastic food-based approach to feeling better, I had been amorphously sick for three-and-a-half years, finding no cure or even an overarching explanation, but rather accumulating distinct diagnoses accompanied by pills and more pills. Traditional medicine had not just failed me, it had wiped out my bank account and left me so depressed I no longer remembered who I was or why I cared about anything at all. Changing my diet was the last resort.

While you (or someone you love) might not have collected all the same symptoms in the same order or even the same patterns, you might also be enduring any number of chronic issues such as allergies, joint pain, headaches, fatigue, or unexplained weight gain. Or, you might be right at the cusp of tipping from health to sickness without realizing it. And at the extreme end, a steady ramping up of symptoms, depletion of money from doctor visits and medications, and suffocating sense of helplessness are a combination many people know all too well. For me, there was a light at the end of the tunnel: After everything fell apart, I finally turned to food to get better, and in the process, I learned about the invisible community of microbes that lives in our guts and informs how we feel both physically and emotionally. Once I started eating with my microbes in minda way of eating that is abundant and delicious, not restrictiveit was as though I waved a magic wand across my body, erasing years of pain, misery, and confusion.

In spring 2017, after years of snowballing symptoms, my health had reached a tipping point, and I set about to change the way I ate. Id been a food writer and recipe developer for almost a decade, and saying goodbye to the foods I loved (and potentially changing part of my career) felt painful and lonely. Not to mention, I was, and still am, a true believer in everything in moderation. I mean, I literally wrote the book on eating healthyish. But, in the spirit of honesty, I admit that just because I wrote about balanced eating, it didnt mean that I lived it all the time. Sure, I ate whole grains topped with vegetables and knew my way around a kale salad, but I also used food and alcohol to cope with loneliness, anxiety, and stress.

What Im going to tell you is my honest story of going from being a child obsessed with food to an adult plagued by invisible symptoms, chronic pain, and a feeling of being lost in her own body. I learned while writing HelpYourself that truth often lies in the hyper-personal, and my hope is that if you read my story and recognize yourself in it, youll feel hope and be inspired to take your health into your own hands.