Once a year for the next few years, I need to go on a crazy diet for a month for a scan to check to see if my cancer has come back. It’s a low iodine diet, and here it is.

Here’s the quick run down of what I CAN’T have:

• Iodized salt, sea salt, and any foods containing iodized salt and sea salt.
• Seafood and sea products
• Dairy products of any kind
• Egg yolks or whole eggs or foods containing whole eggs.
• Bakery products containing iodine/iodate dough conditioners or high-iodine ingredients.
• Red Dye #3.
• Most Chocolate (due to milk content).
• Some molasses (if sulfured, such as blackstrap molasses). Unsulfured molasses, which is more common, is okay. Sulfur is a term used on labels and does not relate to iodine.
• Soybeans and soybean products such as tofu, TVP, soy milk, soy sauce.
• On some diets, rhubarb and potato skins (inside of the potato is fine).
• Iodine-containing vitamins and food supplements.

Basically, I can’t have ANYTHING made by anyone else, if it could possibly have salt in it. And that BLOWS. Lately, I haven’t been eating anything much that would be disallowed on my diet, except for my morning cereal. I eat Honey Bunches of Oats EVERY single day, with skim milk and a banana. I looooove it. But I won’t be able to have HBoO on my diet, or my milk. In May, when I was on my LID, I had either egg whites, or toast with 100% fruit jam, or Fleishmann’s no-salt margarine. The bread was handmade by my brother (cause he rocks), so I knew it had no iodine in it. Then, one TERRIBLE morning, I woke up, and I had no bread. My father had finished it for breakfast. Seriously. I was having trouble sleeping, cause I was off of my medicine, so I was up and about earlier than usual, and he was still home before work (8am? 7?) And booooooooy, did I let him have it. Basically, I kept yelling “WHY WOULD YOU EAT MY BREAD WHEN YOU CAN EAT REGULAR BREAD???? I CAN’T EAT REGULAR BREAD, AND YOU ATE THE ONLY BREAD I CAN EAT. WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT??? THERE’S PLENTY OF REGULAR BREAD!!!!!!! NOW WHAT AM I GOING TO HAVE FOR BREAKFAST?????” And his response was, “I guess I wasn’t thinking.” It ruined my entire day. I’m the kind of person who goes to bed thinking of breakfast (because I love it so much), and I imagine what I’m going to have. So when I wake up, if I can’t have it, I get veeeeeery cranky. I think I’ve made my mom run out at 7am to buy me the right kind of cereal. And because she’s the best mom in the whole world, she’s done it for me. But seriously, if I’m jonesing for toast and butter, I can’t then switch to eggs. I’m not craving eggs!!!

Since I can’t have my HBoO, Megan gave me a great recipe for granola that I can make myself, but milk is still an issue. I can’t have soy (all soy is a no-no), I can’t have almond or rice milk cause they all have sea salt in them (why??? I don’t get it!) However, there is a hemp milk, made by Living Harvest, that does NOT have sea salt in it. Alas! A “milk” I can have!!!! So today, I went on a mission to find it.

I had to go to Woburn to see Stephanie, she had a fancy dress of mine that I’m going to wear to a wedding this weekend. There’s a Whole Foods in Woburn, so it worked out perfectly! The Whole Foods didn’t have the kind I wanted, they have the Original, sweetened kind, with 15 whopping grams of sugar. The UNSWEETENED kind has 0 grams. That’s a pretty big difference. So no luck, they didn’t have it. They had Hemp Bliss brand unsweetened, but it contained sea salt. Either way, I can’t have it on my diet, so I figured “why get it, if I can’t drink it when I need to.” So I passed it up, and moved on.

Next, I went to Framingham where there’s a Trader Joe’s that sells alcohol. Including $3 Charles Shaw wine. Yes, Please! There was also a Whole Foods RIGHT next door, so I parked at Whole Foods, and walked from one to the other (cause that’s the Green thing to do). Whole Foods didn’t have it either. But they DID have another kind, made by Hemp Dream. It had crazy tie dye stuff on the front. Cause it’s hemp, and hemp is like weed, and people who smoke weed like tie dye. Or something like that. This one is NOT unsweetened, but it was salt free, and it only had 6g of sugar. Which was a lot less than 15g. My regular skim milk has 12g of sugar, but my mom said it was “natural milk sugar” . . .whatever that means.

Emiliano said he was also going to look for hemp milk (cause he’s lactose-intolerant, and he usually drinks rice milk). He said he’d give hemp milk a try with me, and we are going to review it. I will post his review along with mine.

I’m going to have it for breakfast tomorrow, with my cereal and banana. But I guess the real test would be to try out the granola and have it that way. Cause that’s how I’ll have to have it on my LID. And I’m thinking it might taste different with different things. I tried Emiliano’s rice milk with my HBoO, and it was great!!! But maybe it wouldn’t have been as good with Cheerios, or something. My HBoO is already sweet, so it might have masked the taste of the rice milk. I’ll let you know tomorrow how it goes! I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Update: Emiliano can’t find hemp milk, so his review will have to wait.