On the Wagon
Staying on the Wagon When Everything Else Is Off It
Most days I’m reminded how little of the world around me is set up for the way I’m trying to eat and live. The grocery store funnels me past the things I don’t buy. Restaurants still treat bread, sugar and seed oils as the normal choice — especially in this small southern town. Family dinners look the same as they always have. None of it is aimed at me personally. It just isn’t built with my version of eating in mind, and that gap shows up every time I have to navigate it. It gets “old”.
I keep coming back to a mostly keto / carnivore approach because it’s one of the few things that has actually moved the needle on the psoriasis and the psoriatic arthritis of which I’ve been suffering for nearly 20 years. When I stay with it, the inflammation quiets down. When I drift, it comes back. The connection is clear enough that I don’t really question the approach anymore. What I do question is how often I can stay close to it without turning every meal into a negotiation with the people around me.
I don’t want to be the person who makes dinner about their restrictions. So I usually take what’s closest, skip what I can, and try to keep the focus on being there instead of on what’s on my plate. That works until it doesn’t. A few bites that don’t fit, a restaurant meal that looked fine until it arrived, a holiday plate I didn’t want to refuse—none of them feel like much while they’re happening. The part that lasts longer is what comes after. The stiffness returns. The skin flares. And then it takes real time, sometimes weeks of being strict again, to get back to where I was. That lag is what makes the small choices feel heavier, and heavier, and heavier each and every time.
It also leaves the whole thing feeling so much lonelier than I first expected. The online groups are helpful for information and for knowing other people are dealing with the same constraints, but they don’t know me — my situation, my life. There’s really no one in my life who truly understands why certain foods matter more than others or who can sit at the table and just get it without an explanation, or a criticism about whether that is on my diet! Most of the real support I receive stays on a screen, and a screen doesn’t share the struggle.
I still choose this way of eating because the alternative has its own clear costs. What I’m still figuring out is how to stay close enough to it that my body notices the difference, while staying flexible enough that I can keep showing up for the rest of my life. Some days that balance is easy. Other days it isn’t. The hard part isn’t the food itself. It’s how rarely the world around me makes the easier choice the one that also helps me survive.
