My sister laughs at me when I make the devilled eggs every holiday. I use vegan mayo and she cannot understand the logic.  “But they’re eggs, so why not use regular mayo?”
 
It makes sense to me though. 
 
I fell in love with the texture of vegan mayo years ago when I was mostly vegan. It’s lightweight. And the ingredients in my favorite brands are also free of soy and hydrogenated oils and sugar. 
 
Preparing a traditional holiday meal while sticking to a gluten-free, soy-free and dairy-free diet is easy with some of my favorite products I use all year long. 

Miyokos Vegan Butter
When I first encountered this vegan butter at a tasting at Trader Joe’s, I scrutinized the ingredient list for soy. I walked around the store. I took one off the dairy shelf and read the package again. I walked back to the woman doing the demo. “You know this is soy free, right?” She said she “hadn’t noticed.” 
 
“That’s no small detail,” I told her. 

To find a butter substitute that is dairy and soy free is revolutionary. 
 
This product has changed my kitchen. There is no other butter substitute I’ve experienced that comes this close to the flavor and performance of real butter. 
 
This year I will be rubbing my turkey with it, sautéing onions for my sage dressing and stirring it into the mashed potatoes. ​

When we put labels on our diet, we may create unnecessary limitations for ourselves. After many years of defining myself by what kind of diet I was following, I found a sort of liberation in the stripping away of those labels.
 
I can tell you the precise moment I decided to stop labeling my diet. I was standing in my kitchen near the refrigerator, making a chocolate cake - a recipe of my favorite TV chef. It was December and I had been binge watching her shows, getting some rest on the couch.
 
She is one of those celebrity chefs who uses every ingredient with wild abandon, without apology. Butter…heavy cream…bacon: all of the foods that had become "evil" in my mind.
 
But here I was, whisking together white flour and sugar with the butter and cream and feeling something I hadn’t felt in awhile: free.
 
LETTING GO OF THE LABELS
That moment was pivotal for me. It was in that moment of abandon that I saw how caged I had become in my own dogma around food choices.  I realized that I never felt free because I was always judging every ingredient as good or bad, and respectively, myself and my choices around them.
 
Immersed joyfully in the moment of making a cake, it became clear that all of these self imposed labels were no longer serving me. Having been vegetarian for 12 years, then a carnivore, then South Beach, then a vegan, then vegetarian again, then Paleo for awhile, I was exhausted from trying to fit into a mold.
 
None of them fit anymore.
 
The truth is that the label itself rarely kept me within the confines of the diet anyway. I strayed often no matter what particular regime I was following at the moment. In retrospect, this was just another sign that the restrictions weren’t working for me.
 
The story doesn’t end, unfortunately, with me discovering that I, too, could cook and eat like the uninhibited TV chef without consequences.  I gained 8 pounds in the month after that initial liberation.
 
Luckily there was another profound experience around the corner…..
 
THE ROLE OF FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE
When you visit a functional medicine doctor, you are signing up to have them look at almost every aspect of your life in their quest to understand your health. They will never give you a pill and send you away.
 
What sets functional medicine apart from conventional is the belief that all aspects of our lives, as well as all systems of our bodies, are inter connected. Each one influences the other.
 
So a functional medicine doctor may test your blood, order diagnostic testing like X rays or prescribe a necessary pharmaceutical. But they will also look at your sleep habits, any emotional traumas you may be dealing with, how much exercise you get, food sensitivities and much more.
 
It is a truly holistic approach to health.
 
In January I finally got an appointment with one of the country’s renowned functional medicine clinics, after being on a wait list for over a year. Both my daughter and I had been struggling for a few years with a set of strange symptoms that none of our local doctors could diagnose. Between us, we had seen over 20 doctors up to that point.
 
So aside from taking 14 vials of blood, assigning me a health coach and prescribing various supplements, the functional medicine doctor insisted I do an Elimination Diet as a part of her discovery process.
 
WHAT IS AN ELIMINATION DIET?
A typical Elimination Diet works like this: you take out the “questionable” foods for a period of time, two weeks or so, and then one by one, you reintroduce each food group.  The process takes up to two months because you need space between each reintroduction.
 
Within the reintroduction phase, you pay careful attention to any symptoms that may come up. Those could be digestive problems, skin breakouts, itchiness all over, brain fog, headaches and so on.
 
So while we waited for all of the lab tests to come back, I dutifully began the two month diet that restricted the following foods: eggs, dairy, gluten, soy, alcohol, sugar, caffeine, shellfish and corn.
 
The plan allowed gluten free grains like brown rice; other elimination diets may restrict grains completely.
 
IT’S NOT EASY….
The first couple of weeks were hell. I was irritable, hungry all the time, not happy.  I called my health coach and complained. But around the third week, things started to shift. Weight started to drop off. I felt more alert. I felt less inflamed in my body.
 
And I completely immersed myself in discovering foods that would make me as happy as the ones I wasn’t eating. Food is my craft; I am not going to eat plain food.
 
THE ROLE OF INFLAMMATION
Smack in the middle of my elimination diet experience, blood results came back and my daughter and I were both diagnosed with Chronic Lyme Disease with a few little co-infections alongside. Tick born illnesses are bacterial in nature and there is some thought that they dwarf into an autoimmune type syndrome when left untreated.
 
Following the diagnosis, I began to understand the connection between certain foods and the symptoms I was experiencing.