Comfort Food

I am an unabashed emotional eater. I eat when I’m emotional, and eating makes me emotional. I love food.

We need foods that comfort us when we are sick. When I was too sick to work, I would still walk over to the sushi restaurant a block from my house once a week for supper with a friend. I couldn’t afford it, and it probably wasn’t very good for my bowels, but I needed to eat a food I loved. I needed to enjoy food.

Crohn’s doesn’t just destroy your ability to digest. It destroys your ability to relate to food in a healthy way. No one should be afraid to eat. No one should avoid nourishment because of pain avoidance. But this is what happens with Crohn’s, and for many people the bodily experience of the disease turns you off from food.

How can we eat healthy when we are afraid to eat fruits and vegetables? When we are told to eat low fiber diets and processed foods? The body cannot heal itself without proper nutrition, but it also can’t heal itself if it rejects the foods that are the vehicles for that nutrition.

We have to figure out a way to make nourishing food digestible and palatable. Our food must nourish us and comfort us, so we will rebuild a healthy relationship to food.

In those first months of a flare, we have to figure out what we can tolerate that will still provide us with essential nutrients and healing sustenance. After we are able to eat more variety in our diets, we must nurture this relationship to feel comforted by the wholesome foods — the whole grains, beans, lentils, and starchy vegetables.

I was in the international market the other day, staring at an aisle of legumes. An entire aisle! The noisy din of the store was muffled by the plastic sacs of red split lentils, chaana, mung beans. I felt safe there, surrounded by food I knew wouldn’t hurt my body.

So that’s weird.

But the moral of the story is, as we shift our thinking and our relationship to food, we can find comfort in surprising places. I used to drive to Cane’s or Taco Bell after a hard day of work when I needed to eat something immediately and take a nap, when I needed something hot and rich to hit my stomach lining and release hormones of satiety into my brain receptors.

Now I feel that way about my mom’s three bean salad, sitting in the fridge waiting for me at home.

Calico Salad

• 1/2 sweet onion, diced
• 1 bell pepper, diced
• 1 can red kidney beans, drained and rinsed
• 1 can garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed
• 1 can cut green beans, drained and rinsed
• 1/3 cup olive oil
• 2/3 cup vinegar (I mix white, red, and garlic rice vinegar)
• 1/2 cup sugar (or less, to taste, or you can use honey or maple syrup)
• Salt and pepper to taste

Put all of the ingredients in a large bowl. Mix. Let sit in the fridge for 24 hours. You can add any kind of bean to this. Yellow wax beans are a very nice addition!

I hated canned green beans until I realized they were in this salad. Now my world is different. Give it a try.