Having Food Allergies: Then vs. Now

Hey everyone! I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but I've had serious food allergies for the majority of my life. Ever since I was born, I was allergic to milk, eggs, peanuts, and tree nuts. If I ever ate any of these things, my throat would close up, I'd throw up, get hives, etc. At one point, if milk touched me, I'd get hives all over my body. I'm happy that none of them were airborne allergies. I've luckily grown out of the milk and egg allergy, but I am still allergic to nuts. If I was forced to have half of my allergies, that's exactly the way I'd want it to be. It was next to impossible to find food that was dairy free as a kid. It's much easier to avoid nuts than dairy. I had such a limited number of things to pick from, especially because I was a picky eater as well. I pretty much had a rotation of like 10 meals that I ate. It's interesting, because when I was a kid, my milk allergy was the worst, with eggs close behind and peanuts/tree nuts were not very severe at all. Now that's completely flipped. For some reason, my nut allergy has gotten way worse and my milk/eggs allergy is obviously gone. As I got older, I was able to eat things that had milk/eggs mixed in to it, like with flour in baked goods. That helped a lot, but I still missed out on all those elementary school pizza and ice cream parties. I sat in a specific section of the lunchroom that was "allergy-free," which was annoying to have to deal with. Dealing with my allergies now is tons better than when I was younger. I still hate being allergic to nuts, but it's more preferable to being allergic to dairy as well.

I wanted to do this post to talk about how my food allergies have affected my life over the years. My next post will be about how my allergies affected my EDC. I thought this post would be a nice little intro about how my allergies have evolved over the years. I feel like the world has become more careful when it comes to food than when I was a kid. I didn't end up doing the food challenge that made sure I was actually okay to eat milk/eggs until the end of 2015. I wanted to do it before I got to college, but I was so terrified that something would go wrong. It's a whole process where you eat the food in bigger and bigger doses and are monitored for like 4 hours. Luckily, they went well, so I've officially outgrown my milk and egg allergies. Even after I passed the challenges, I still didn't eat milk/eggs for a few months. I was afraid I was actually still allergic to them. I think pizza was one of the first things I tried. Dairy Queen ice cream was another big thing I tried, and it was nasty. It tasted just like cold, solid milk, which I guess is fitting since that's exactly what it is. I had a really awesome co-worker that brought me all sorts of food to try too. After I realized I actually was good with milk and eggs, I started being way more adventurous with what I ate. I do find that I'm not as cautious with double checking labels now, but luckily, I haven't any issues that I could have controlled.

By far the best part of growing out of my milk/egg allergy is that I can have dairy. Cheese was the big food group I always felt like I was missing out on. Italian food is what I've enjoyed most with my newfound food freedom. Some of my recent food obsessions are Goldfish, pizza, lasagna, chicken Parmesan, Philly cheesesteaks, cheeseburgers, yogurt, quesadillas, scrambled eggs, and the list goes on and on. I still hate chocolate and milk to this day. People always look at me weird when I say that, but when you go like 16 years without having them, you find you don't really have the taste for them. I'm not much of a sweets person either, since all the good desserts/candy always had milk in it. Whenever I went trick-or-treating, my family got the majority of my candy. Smarties are my go-to candy of choice.

I've had a handful of allergic reactions over the years, and they're not fun to deal with. Fortunately, I've only had one where I had to use my Epi-pen, but that was in elementary school. I had eaten some sherbet at a family get-together at some restaurant that had promised there was no milk in it. Of course they were wrong, and I ended up going to the emergency room. They just gave me Benadryl allergy pills, which I found out was really good for getting over future reactions. I've had others since then but was fine after using Benadryl. My most recent allergy attack was probably two summers ago. In the last 5 years, I think I've had two major reactions. One was caused by what I think was some sort of ranch chicken on a Subway sandwhich when I was a freshman in high school. That was the only time my throat was actually starting to close up. It was definitely the scariest one I had to deal with. The most recent one was at the beach during a summer vacation. I had eaten at a restaurant there before with no problems. For some reason, I had a massive reaction to the chicken tenders I had. My eyes were swelling shut, I was getting hives, and my nose got super stuffed up. Either they were fried in peanut oil or there was some other cross contamination. I've heard people with peanut allergies can actually eat peanut oil since it's so refined. That really showed me that you can't always trust everything, even if you think there's none of your allergens in it. When things are prepared off-site, you have absolutely no clue what they contain or have come in contact with.

My biggest annoyance with food companies is their reluctance to stop cross-contamination in their factories. Like I said, my nut allergy is very severe now, so if a food label says it could contain traces of nuts, I'm not going to risk it. It would not be hard for food companies to restrict common allergies to certain areas in their factories. You wouldn't believe how many foods that have nothing to do with nuts may contain traces of them. I've been trying to find easy snack foods, and practically all of them contain nuts in some form or another. Companies are losing out on so much money from potential buyers, because they refuse to fix their contamination issues. I can't ever find any granola bars that I can eat, since they're all made on the same equipment as the ones with nuts in them. Plus on a side note, why does every desert/granola bar have to have chocolate and/or nuts in them? It's not like food allergies are so uncommon.

I honestly didn't think having allergies was all that bad, because it wasn't like I had been eating these foods and then had them taken away from me. The worst part was not knowing if I'd react badly to something for whatever reason. You do get used to what you can and can't eat pretty quickly. I was very cautious about everything I ate. I always had to scrutinize the allergy label on every piece of new food I wanted to try. My mom was really good about making me allergen-free foods and checking labels. My dad never quite knew what I was allergic to. Once he made me eat a Hershey kiss in pre-school thinking I'd be fine. Let's just say it did not end well. Maybe that's why I still ate chocolate all these years later. All of my reactions were when I ate food from restaurants or other unknown sources. To this day, I still don't enjoy eating out, because you never know what is in something. I love home-cooked meals, since you know exactly what is in them. The question I always was asked when people found out about my allergies was how I managed to survive without being able to eat all this stuff. I just answered I eat food, drink water, and breathe air like everyone else. It's a lot easier now to work around food allergies than it was when I was a kid. Allergies are so common that many companies have moved away from common allergens. I know gluten/wheat allergies have been on the rise in the previous years. I'm happy I was never allergic to those, because there would have been even less things I could safely eat. With veganism growing every day too, there's also a lot more dairy-free options now than there used to be. Going on another brief tangent, I don't see myself ever going vegan or on any other sort of diet in the future. I've already lived more than half of my life on such a restrictive "diet" that I don't want to willingly limit my options again. I have mad respect for people that go full vegan though. When I was a kid, unless you went to a specialty food store, it was hard to find many good, dairy-free options. I never liked soy milk, and there weren't many other alternatives. A lot of the dairy-free things I did eat as a kid got discontinued, because they probably didn't sell well enough to the general masses. I'll do still find myself slipping up sometimes and telling people I have all my allergies. It's easier to explain why you don't eat certain things if you're allergic to them.

So yeah, I think that's about everything I wanted to say. I hope you enjoyed hearing a little more about me. Stay tuned for the post about what sort of things I had to carry for my allergies even before I had an EDC. Thanks for looking!