The Seated View

Eating a nutritious balanced diet helps you to be healthier, especially when your chronic illness is flaring. But when your chronic illness is flaring, you don't want to cook. It's a vicious circle. In my new post for Mango Health, I share tips for how to eat well when you don't feel like cooking : "Giving your body the best fuel possible is important, especially when living with chronic illness. The kind of good fuel that’s contained in a healthy balanced diet full of nutritious and tasty foods.  Well, that’s the ideal, anyway. The reality is that with the energy limitations that chronic conditions often impose, sometimes you have to make tough choices about where your efforts go. Occasionally that means shortcuts when it comes to food. Enter meals that are fast, processed, and ready-made, usually not known for being healthy or balanced. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Good nutritious food doesn’t have to be complicated. Here are some of the wa...

I spent over 30 years of my life being nauseated. It arrived along with my juvenile arthritis, and stayed put until 10 years ago when I started Biologics. One of the best and incompletely unexpected add-ons to my disease being controlled is a humongous reduction in nausea. An unfortunate and unexpected (likely coincidental?) increase in food allergies has prevented me from taking advantage of my new-found ability to eat yummy foods. These food allergies are probably also the only reason I am not as big as a house. Silver lining, right? I love food. I love trying new things (especially when no longer constantly queasy), and I live in a multicultural city that has foods from all over the world. You’d think that would be heaven, but you’d be wrong. Many parts of the world don’t have labelling laws, or fully comprehend the possible consequences of cross-contamination. So instead of trying a new restaurant every week as I’d like to do, I’m careful about what and where I eat...

It all started with the cherries. Cherry sauce is required for ris a la mande, the special Danish Christmas dessert. It has a French name, which apparently makes no sense at all in actual French. Every couple of years, we freeze 5 pounds of black Bing cherries in the summer and come November, carry them to my mother’s to make cherry sauce. It’s a long, involved process resulting in the most beautiful concentrated dark cherry sauce dotted with whole cherries. You drizzle that over the ris a la mande and… Heaven in a bowl! My mother insists on using a Danish product to thicken the sauce just a little, and followed the usual procedure this year. No need to look at the instructions on the back of the package, right? I know you can hear the foreshadowing. Turns out the product had changed, becoming much more concentrated. With the result that as the cherry sauce was being poured through a sieve, what came out on the other end of the sieve was a jellied cherry-sicle....

Eating out when you have food allergies is an adventure akin to playing Russian roulette.  Funnelcake at the fair. Thankfully, no nuts in the booth. It's not Russian roulette because restaurants don’t try to accommodate you — they do – but because the staff in restaurants have a varying understanding of what food allergies mean. Just for fun, I’ve gathered three examples from recent experiences at restaurants to illustrate my point. If you are a restaurant owner, chef, or server, feel free to use these as educational materials for your colleagues. Know the Ingredients of the Food I don’t eat out often, but when I do, I tend to go to one of a few restaurants in my neighbourhood where I’ve found a dish or two that I can eat. One of these dishes is a very yummy calamari that is normally served with a small container of hot sauce and a similar container of garlic mayonnaise. When I order food, I always tell the server that I’m allergic to eggs and nuts and they...