Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

One quote that keeps popping up is "this is not hard compared to birthing a baby, quitting heroin, or beating cancer." Actually, it is. I haven't got any experience with heroin, but I had 7 unmedicated births, 2 c-sections, and I beat cancer. Those things are hard, too but that doesn't make this easy. This is hard. It's hard to eat this way in a world that doesn't. It's hard to cook for a big family -- either all eating this way, or them eating this way and me not eating what they're eating. It's hard to stick with it day in and day out. It's not too terribly hard for a few weeks, but it is hard as a lifestyle. I feel anti-social. I know my eating habits put a damper on others' enjoyment when our eating out choices are dictated by my "can'ts." I know I've offended more than one gracious hostess with my polite, "No thank you." And I do miss crafting a perfect loaf of artisan bread or making my grandmother's homemade pasta. I miss tomatoes fresh from the garden with olive oil and fresh mozzarella. I miss handing on food traditions of generations to my own children. I couldn't care less about sugar and I'm not lamenting processed foods at all. They were never in my diet. I'm struggling with the limited choices of real food left for me. Admittedly, because of autoimmune issues, I'm eating the extreme end of this spectrum, eliminating nightshades, eggs, nuts, and coffee in addition to the other foods. This kind of eating got just a passing mention in the book, yet a large population of readers is reading precisely because they're battling autoimmune disease. Note: this book doesn't recommend giving up coffee even in cases of autoimmune disease, but other research (and my personal experience) does bear that out. And giving up coffee wasn't terribly difficult. Peppers, curry seasoning, eggplant... those things are missed. I'm not complaining and I think it's worth it, but I do think that in a future edition, the reader would be better served if there were more practical ways to cope with the everyday challenges of eliminating what is objectively a lot of food choices. For instance, two of the "go-to" recipes call for nuts. That works for some readers, but it doesn't work for the autoimmune folks. So, what's offered as a standby is just one more (two more) thing on the "don't" list. I still think this is a valuable resource, but for most folks, longterm success with eating this way is going to take more than, "You can do it. It's not as hard as childbirth or cancer."