Nuts and Raisins

I need to cut nuts out of my diet. Cheese, too.

Sadly, red wine as well. Ditto on the avocados, soy products, vinegar, dried fruit.

If I included any of the above in meals or snacks, a monstrous migraine ensued.
This recent phenomenon of light-sensitive, eyeball-searing pain was a tag-along side effect of
one of my meds. I hadn’t expected such a severe reaction to what was considered beneficial
to take.

Emerging from a particularly nasty skull-exploding episode, I shuffled into the kitchen,
slumped at the counter, hungry, drained, and wondering what I could possibly eat that wouldn’t,
quite literally, go to my head.

Crackers? No, there are nuts and soy it the ingredients list. PB&J? No,
the protein in the peanut butter would battle with my meds, not to mention nut’s
place on the anti-migraine list.

I boiled a pot of white rice and daringly added a touch of olive oil and a dash of salt.
That was lunch. I cut up some broccoli to mix with it for dinner. Woo hoo.

OMG, I thought. I’m already losing weight, and it’s not as though the foods
I need to avoid are loaded with transfats and high fructose corn syrup. Nuts? Avocados?
Those are the good fats. I won’t even begin to list the benefits of a glass of Merlot.

Hoping to come across a magical non-cheese-nut-soy recipe, I leafed through a cooking magazine.
An ad caught my eye. The banner across the top read:
“To create something truly unique, one must look beyond the expected.”

At first, I thought, how true. Isn’t when we’re caught off guard that the most notable
events occur? Or when we’re searching for something, we often find it in an unlikely spot,
whether that something is a pair of glasses or the answer to why we uttered words
we’d like to take back.

Glancing again at the glossy page,  I noticed that it wasn’t promoting the art of deeper
relationships or clever ways to enhance my skill with a paintbrush. The ad was for raisins.

Raisins?

Surely if the act of adding some dried grapes to a sauce deemed me artistic, I could find a
creative solution to this migraine mess that had left me so disappointed.

I studied the ad more closely. The yogi in me decided that no matter how hard I looked for benefits
of the medication, the reality was that the negatives were outweighing the positives.  I started to wean off the meds. Life is too short not to drink red wine with my avocado salad.

Every one of us deserves the best treatment available. I’ve learned, however, not to expect that each treatment will work for me. I now approach my diet and my day with this translation of the quotation:

“To truly create a unique experience, witness without expectation.”