I compensate with cheese

My love affair with cheese began in earnest sometime during my pregnancy with Loren. Up until that point I associated the word cheese with the word fat and that simply was not something to be allowed anywhere near my inner sanctum. But an unplanned pregnancy while still in college pretty much blew all my prior principles out of the water, and so when I met up with Sir Brie or his friend Blue I no longer shied away but embraced them as the true loves I now knew them to be.

When I stopped gobbling gluten a couple of years ago I think it was not as hard as I thought it would be because I still had cheese. Had my issue been dairy? Somebody would have had to pay and pay dearly for that loss. I can roll with rice crackers, but take away my dairy? No sir, that would be like taking away Sarah Palin's crazy. It just doesn't work. Also, cheese helped me to avoid that emaciated look celiac sufferers tend to get. Cheese left me with plenty o' padding.

During the most recent eating nuttiness, the juice cleanse, the hardest part of the elimination phase was cutting out dairy. Matt and I both saved it for the last day because we both love cheese so much. In fact, now that I look back on the time line of things...Matt knocked me up, and then introduced me to cheese and the happiness derived from consuming large quantities of it. Bastard. I'll have to remember that little nugget for future warfare. Anyway, during the cleanse we both talked about how happy we would both be to get right back on that wagon as soon as the fast was over. And he did. But me? Not so much.

Turns out I'm having a much more difficult time rolling with the solid foods. No, it's not from my days of ballet dancing and tendencies to not eat. It's my damn stomach. There were afternoons during the cleanse when I would fantasize about cheese and yogurt and all the fun things we would soon do together.We were going to frolic in meadows, take baths together, fall asleep thinking of each other. We had plans, dammit.  But the few times I've tried to ingest them the results have been smelly, loud and not over all crowd pleasers. I didn't sign up for this and it's starting to piss me off and break my heart. What if I can't do it anymore? My social anxiety is bad enough, if at the few gatherings I do attend I can't busy myself with the cheese plate? What then? This is really no good.