One of the frequently asked questions I see from those seeking TMS advice is to ask if food sensitivities are TMS. But what does that question mean? What does it mean if something is TMS? I think this subject could probably be an entirely different blog on down the line.
My TMS case was textbook Sarno. I had pain that I was attributing to spinal abnormalities made worse by an incorrect medical diagnosis. I discovered Sarno, started to think emotionally instead of physically, resumed normal activity by stopping all physical treatment and anything I was doing to protect my back. I learned that I was not actually injured but just had typical abnormalities like everyone else. Knowledge, insight, awareness, and information were my magic medicine for this syndrome just like it was for millions that Sarno treated or reached with his life’s work.
But can food sensitivities be treated as a TMS condition? Are food sensitivities possibly becoming the new back pain in society? Many people online think so and I might agree. I have also had quite a bit of success treating food sensitivities using mind body medicine. Except that most of my experience was before I even heard of Sarno or TMS. Where I am today, the Sarno teaching about GI sensitivities meshed perfectly with what I was already doing with my food sensitivities.
I am completely certain that most food sensitivities are mind body curable. Here is the long version of the story that led me to that conclusion.
(Disclaimer: For those with Celiac Disease or any other known and confirmed dangerous allergic food sensitivities: I concede that mind body solutions do not apply to you if you will also concede that the great majority of people do not have Celiac Disease or other dangerous allergic food sensitivities.)
“The most striking evidence that these GI conditions are emotion related and can be attacked in the same way as TMS is the story of the man who accompanied his wife to the lectures and experienced relief of lifelong stomach symptoms on learning how the mind affects the body”
Dr. John Sarno, Healing Back Pain
Like a lot of people, around 20 years ago, I started getting into nutritional therapies for health and wellness. The basic idea is that you try to find the right balance of optimal foods for optimal health including who you are, your activity level, your health goals, and health challenges that you might be experiencing. Like a lot of these alternative medicine approaches, the “nutrition therapy” worked for me. Basically, I cleaned up my diet, cut way down on sugar, processed foods, and stopped drinking diet soda. I ate lots of healthy whole foods and grains and lots of eggs, chicken, and turkey. Fast Food, and over the counter medications were out and fruit smoothies with spinach, and vitamin supplements were in.
I Googled and researched foods and supplementation to boost certain nutrients based on my own perceived deficiencies or ailments. I also started eating less meat starting with Beef and Pork. I never really liked the thought of eating animals for humanitarian and environmental reasons but now, with the new clean diet plan, Beef and Pork were and easy decision to quit. I couldn’t give up chicken or eggs though because 15-20 years ago the high-protein, low carb diet was the way of the future and my only smart option. I had just watched in complete amazement when some guy at work ate a pound of bacon and eggs every day and lost like thirty pounds. Something was going on with this Atkins thing. That kind of sucked for me, because I was an animal lover and I have always loved pasta and have always been energized by carbs. But clearly that was not going to work going forward in the 21st century if I was serious about my nutrition.
Basically, anything I had going on with physical or mental health, I found could be solved or at least treated by nutrition or supplementation. Google was the perfect place to confirm that. As I expected, my physical and mental health improved immediately. I stopped getting colds and flu and would swear to anyone that my diet plan was my cure after years of having them regularly. I coasted through a solid decade without getting a significant cold or flu and I also credited my improved diet to some mental health hurtles I was tackling. Much to my surprise, absolutely no one that I knew was impressed or cared. Didn’t they realize how many of their issues were solvable with nutritional therapies like mine? Does everyone else just like being sick, tired and depressed all the time? MacDonalds is pretty good, but is it that good?
My fascination with nutrition therapy soon led me to a “nutrition therapy” school that was located in the city I was living in at the time. I was a successful and gainfully employed electrical engineer, so I was not looking for a career change, but my curiosity and personal success with nutrition therapies did lead me to enroll in an introductory course. I was excited to see what I could learn from trained experts considering how much I had already accomplished just from Googling nutrition stuff online! I was also getting into the power of plants and leaning more toward vegetarian eating in my personal life and was finding some people that claimed it was perfectly healthy not to eat meat. I leaned toward the nutrition advice that resonated the most with me and was having great results on my own but I wanted more confirmation beyond just Google searches.
The first few weeks of class were a sort of basic training. We covered very simple nutrition information and common ailments and things to help. Basically, if you have a cold, you should eat oranges and other foods high in vitamin C. If there were questions about what foods were high in vitamin C, we were encouraged to use Google to find out. We also googled supplements and how much were healthy to digest at a time. This is how our assignments and tests were structured as well, and we were even trained on how to spot misinformation in online sources. Considering that my most recent formal educational experience was a 500-level electrical engineering course, the overall certificate coursework seemed a bit overly simplistic, tedious and somewhat of a waste of my time. This proceeded for a couple of weeks and our open book assignments got slightly more challenging as we ventured into things like food sensitivities and elimination diets but nothing I hadn’t already explored on my own. The class was OK but I was mostly there for personal information while the instructors and other students seemed to believe we were in training to be nutrition medical doctors of some sort.
I had already spent some time looking at food sensitivities, and I already knew I had at least a few. Specifically with bell peppers that I had already mostly eliminated and now had devoloped an allergy to. I would sometimes start sweating and would turn beet red and could almost feel my throat seizing up until I realized there were bell peppers in something I accidentally ate. Through my classes and the elimination diets that I was experimenting with, I also discovered, to my surprise, that I was sensitive to both dairy and gluten. I had probably been experiencing this for quite a while but just never connected my digestive symptoms to a specific food source. Although a surprise to me, it was not much of a surprise to the course instructors or to many of my classmates. Most of us were discovering similar sensitives and learning what we needed to eliminate from our diets to achieve optimal health results. I hadn’t even heard of gluten a few years before this and all of the sudden, I am finding out all sorts of issues with it. I didn’t think I had Celiac disease, but according to the class instructor it probably didn’t matter. Apparently, our flour here in the United States had more or worse gluten and everybody was encouraged to cut out all gluten and most flour. Places like France that were not having the same gluten issues as US populations had different flour with different gluten. This was pretty much my nutrition therapy 101 experience in a nutshell. I bought in the same as everyone else saying please and thank you to our amazing teachers. To be honest, this is the point where my real food sensitivity issues began, and definitely where my gluten sensitivity started. They lasted until well after the class ended for me. Like with Chiropractic care, the experts that I thought would help me get better actually made my condition worsen in hindsight.
The course work and tests were boring, but I was learning things about nutrition that I did not know and not expected. One of my biggest surprises was around the vegetarian diet that I was getting more and more into and thought I was having success with. Turns out my instructors and even the head chef of the cooking school were not too keen on a plant based diet. I learned that vegetarians were missing all kinds of nutrients like Iron and most were probably somewhat protein deficient. Turns out that when I couldn’t stay awake in Nutrition Therapy school it was not due to poor teaching and bad material but rather it was my vegetarian diet that was leading to this weekly in-class malaise.
I also learned that muscle development was a concern for vegetarians in my class that was heavy on Google and light on evidence. I asked about supplements and other plant-based ways to add some of these nutrients without so much death and violent treatment of animals and our planet but was told, unfortunately no. Fake butter wasn’t even good for me. It had to be the full-fat, straight from the poor, tortured animals utter, or my health would likely suffer. Since I also had lactose issues my real butter also had to be clarified through and extra expensive process. I heard many stories from instructors that were also health coaches working with clients. They insisted that when any of our future clients tell them they are vegetarian or vegan we should strongly suggest going back on meat. Answering questions on a test that promoted plant-based eating, even with a Google source, resulted in points off.
The next week we dove head-first into nutrition for joint, ligament, and spine health. I again brought up that I had been eating a lot of vegetarian, and I attributed the veggies to why I was not having colds or getting sick anymore. But unfortunately, I had started to develop some back pain. Bingo, bells went off and Google confirmed my instructor’s immediate insistence that my back pain was probably because I was not eating enough animal protein. But not just that I was not eating enough beef and chicken, the specific diagnosis and treatment plan that I learned in nutrition school was that I needed to specifically eat more animal tendons and even animal bone marrow in order to stimulate my body to produce more and better cartilage and tendons of its own. No plants could do the same according to the nutrition experts at this intuition. I was also informed by a classmate about these great back pillows that help with sitting on the uncomfortable desk chairs in class and I noticed the instructor and several other all sitting on something similar. They haphazardly carried these into class with a dozen other health contraptions flopping around everywhere.
To be honest I hated the bone broth, the whole chicken, and even organs I was now eating. But it appeared I did have much of a choice. My back was getting worse by the day and I had also started some chiropractic care where I discovered and confirmed the grave degenerative disc condition. Even the chiropractor seemed to have some knowledge about this bone broth thing and he agreed with the bone broth soup in conjunction with his pain management program was the way to go. The parallels and timing are so significant in hindsight.
The next week’s class which was about the second week into my new bone broth and cartilage nauseating diet experiment, we were introduced to another new topic that led me to a very poignant “moment of clarity” with my new nutritional education. We were introduced to Marc David the founder of the institute for the psychology of eating. This was just sort of a check mark in the class syllabus, and we were introduced to the idea that our psychology around our diet can have profound effect on our health outcomes. According to this author, even more than the nutritional value of the food. I don’t think our instructor was that keen on this week’s topic and we sped through the daily projector slides that day with even less useful discourse than usual. For me however, this new information resonated instantly, and my curiosity was activated for the first time in that entire class.
Very similar to the experience I would have a few years later when I discovered Sarno’s Healing Back Pain, this new information turned everything I thought I knew about nutrition completely upside down. I quickly started diving into Marc David’s eating psychology work on my own. I could almost instantly see a window into what was working and wasn’t and why. My problem was not lack of animal tendon in my diet, my primary problem was eating a diet that was conflicted with my core belief system. I could instantly see everything I was doing wrong and knew this had to stop! This also explained why diets don’t tend to work including my bone and cartilage diet. I was working from a deficit mindset and denying myself enjoyment, pleasure and even intellectual satisfaction. I was creating a moral dilemma which was the worst way to eat possible. This explained everything and explained why my gut sensitivity was getting worse by the day, and not better since starting this new class which I now realized I hated and was miserable attending.
After our brief stop at the psychology of eating, our next week was back to the regularly scheduled class programing of identifying ailments and looking up the most obvious nutritional solution on Google. I just wanted to go back to the psychology stuff. I couldn’t keep this up after the week of exploring eating psychology in class and on my own. In last week’s class, we pretty much discussed that none of this week’s class is valid, but we are moving on anyway? I withdrew from Nutrition Therapy school a short time later, but I did accomplish my overall goal which was learning some new things from some self-proclaimed nutrition “experts”. Like with most TMS Facebook groups, and mind body medicine in general, I learned more about what doesn’t work for me in that nutrition class than about what does. My experience with golf lessons are similar.
Like I would later discover with the TMS pain, as soon as I would fix one food sensitivity via elimination, another would pop up out of nowhere and I could see the blind spot clearly. And then after elimination, if I did eat the food I eliminated and determined was a sensitivity, I would have a full-on allergic reaction. I quickly realized that everyone in this program, including the instructors, were hypochondriacs. Although I hadn’t noticed before, the classes sounded like the waiting room at an allergist’s office. Sniffling, sneezing coughing and belly aching. They were all sick all the time carrying around home remedy concoctions in thermoses and boxes of Kleenex everywhere they went. No one had any real control over their sensitivities, which were growing by the day for everyone enrolled including me. Most could tell you exactly how many ounces of water they were consuming per hour, and they could also tell you exactly how many days it had been since they were last sick. This was because there was some sort of expensive electronic device attached to their giant water bottle that they carried everywhere and because it had only been a few days since they were last sick. They were all also experiencing chronic pain and the bone broth we were all swilling was not working for me any more than the people sitting atop a throne of back pain relief pillows insisting that I consume bone broth for back pain relief.
The typical prescription of supplementation was also obviously working as a placebo for this group and nocebo was also out of control. I bailed on Nutrition Therapy school just like I did my chiropractor a short time later. When I later found the Sarno TMS approach, it meshed perfectly with the food psychology I was already exploring, and I took my results to another level. I applied the Sarno method to my food sensitivities and it worked the same as my back. I quit protecting myself and let go of any notion that I have any issue. I ate whatever I wanted and in accordance with my belief more than in accordance with Google. That doesn’t mean that I don’t still have some sensitivity to Dairy or Peppers, but I don’t avoid them to protect myself and every once and a while, I will even overindulge just to prove to myself that I can control my reaction to the foods I previously thought were the source of so much trouble. Don’t get me wrong, if I decided to plow a pepper and cheese pizza and a 6 pack of IPA there will be some amount of restitutions to pay for my indulgence. But this is much the same as how my back might still get a little sore after miles of hiking or a bunch of golf. How I perceive that common normal pain or sensitivity psychologically is what dictates how powerful, amplified, or chronic it becomes or doesn’t. Nothing else does or can!
I have also completely given up on the idea that eating any meat or bone broth, or animal tendons has any effect whatsoever on health or back pain outcomes. It doesn’t. I now eat a diet that makes me feel happy, internally at peace and in line with my higher spirit self. That does affect my outcomes and quite profoundly. For me, my current diet is primarily vegan, high in carbs, pasta, rice, beans, and grains by today’s standards. I also eat plenty of American gluten which has not given me any issues in a very long time. I have not eaten beef, pork, or chicken in over a decade and including the entire time that I was permanently curing my chronic back condition. The idea that my former back pain was in any way related to a vegetarian/vegan diet is laughable and the fact that this school is training and certifying people to medically treat people with this complete misinformation is such a shame for the planet and so many sentient animals. I haven’t taken any supplement or even vitamins and have never been healthier.
I have become very interested in vegetarian/vegan cooking and my wife and I have even become vegetarian foodies. I love food, cooking, and eating more than ever, and my health results reflect that. I occasionally indulge in junk and when I do, I do so without guilt or shame and typically have no issue. That is what works. You can absolutely get the same result out of eating nothing but meat you hunted yourself. It all depends on who you are, your mindset, and your core belief and values around your fundamental diet.
Although, I love my plant-based diet, the notion that my diet is or was the source of my strong immune response is also a thing of the past for me. My immune response is stronger than ever, but it is my brain and my psychological mindset that was in control all along! Just exactly like the TMS pain! This is just my 10th year being pain free but closer to 20th being cold and flu free! I have probably had a few minor illnesses over that time, but I have not seen a doctor, missed a days work or taken an antibiotic or even an OTC for a cold, flu, or sinus infection in 20+ years after having them chronically for the first 30. It’s is not because of nutrition, supplementation, or TMS work for that matter. It is because of me and my innate self-confidence in the power of my mind over my body that I have intentionally cultivated. Nothing else!
I would love to hear feedback on this one as I am seeing more and more GI symptom imperative issues on social media these days.