"Here's What I Learned From Not Eating Food for a Month..."

Like you and everyone you know, I am obsessed with food. It keeps me alive, but it also keeps me social and happy. Eating a bacon grilled cheese on a rainy day or even just grabbing a (cheese-heavy) salad with a friend after work hits my every Millennial button: I am full, satisfied, and armed with legit quality Instagram content. What more does one really need?

The problem with food is that it hurts me. Not in the crampy way certain foods irritate your stomach. In a painful, havoc-wreaking, insides-twisting way. I have Crohn's, an inflammatory disease that affects your whole digestive tract, from your mouth to your rectum. Though some people live normally with the disease, I'm not one of them. Since I was diagnosed at age 7, I've had 10 very serious surgeries to deal with intestinal narrowings and fistulas (literally little tunnels that form from your insides to your outside). I have good months, of course, where I'm able to eat normally, but I've had at least one Great Disaster every year since '98. Typically, when I'm just about fully recovered from the previous year's debacle, a new one sets in.

In January, after a solid normal-person-pooping stretch, eating became painful again. It's a feeling I've come to recognize means time for another surgery. When I had all the proper tests confirm what I already knew, I told my doctor to "schedule that shit" (people with Crohn's r good @ poop jokes). But he stopped me. 

We'd gotten to the point where we needed to think twice about just removing intestine whenever it was bad, he said. With so much already gone, it was finally, at the ripe old age of 24, time for me to start thinking about a longer-term solution. His proposal: an all-liquid diet and enough antibiotics to kill all the bacteria in the world. Also, no alcohol.

The next day, 600 bottles of a chalky beverage called Peptamen showed up on my doorstep with a note from my doctor. Peptamen tastes like if vanilla had a baby with a metal rod and is meant (1) for children who also need to rest their bowels for whatever reason and (2) to be stockpiled in case the apocalypse hits and we all have to stay alive somehow but don't want to eat each other yet. It costs $1,300 per case, and a case lasts one week. This would be my new diet.

For a while, I just kept on eating in denial. I tried an entire day of delicious pastas, thinking the simple gluten of it all was low risk, high reward. I fooled around with cheesy eggs and thick bacon. My intestines fought me like the half-vampire ​Twilight ​baby, literally pushing themselves to the surface and making menacing noises constantly. My family told me if I was smart, I'd give this liquid diet a legitimate shot, and so after one Last Meal (tacos, because I am a masochist) I committed. 

In order to not die, I had to get at least five 250-calorie bottles of Peptamen down a day. Six would be ideal, but I physically could not handle that much liquid. For reference, a McDonald's hamburger is exactly 250 calories. If you put one of said hamburgers in a food processor and liquified it, the consistency might be the same as one of these drinks. Would you like to sip down six McDonald's hamburgers a day for a month? The breakfast Peptamen was easy enough — I sipped it slow and chased it with coffee. It was the midday bottles that gave me angst. How do you explain to your coworkers why you're skipping cafeteria ramen week for a nasty smoothie? And how do you explain taking up a shelf of the communal office fridge with bottles of liquid meant for underdeveloped children? Just a few days after my diet began, a coworker asked me to take a photo​ with Oreos and wine because it seemed so on #brand for me. I didn't have the heart to tell her that was no longer my brand. My new brand was Oreo-less and wine-less. I took the photo and died a little inside.

[instagram ]https://instagram.com/p/BBa6HsxSYZZ/" data-instgrm-version="14" style="background:#FFF; border:0; border-radius:3px; box-shadow:0 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.5),0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15); margin: 1px; max-width:540px; min-width:326px; padding:0; width:99.375%; width:-webkit-calc(100% - 2px); width:calc(100% - 2px);" >​

I decided it would be easier not to tell anyone (aside from my fiancé and family) that I was off food. I hunched behind my laptop for the first few days, cutting my Peptamen with water. If anyone asked, I tilted the periodic table of elements ingredients list away from them and called it a vanilla shake. "I actually brought lunch today," I told everyone who asked (and some who didn't). Whenever I could, I'd pick up food I couldn't eat and take selfies with it like a real, normal girl. I felt like Pinocchio, for more than one reason.

I was never not hungry or in pain. Being hungry led to being hangry, so I wasn't being nice to anyone either. ​I missed snacking and wanted super-crispy French fries with honey mustard more than anything. I felt rage when someone sent me cupcakes at work — perhaps the first time in recorded history free cupcakes have ever been met with that reaction. During all the office happy hours (it's Cosmopolitan.com, they are awesome and often), I'd roll my eyes and be all, "Ugh, I can't drink, I'm on antibiotics" (which was true!). Then I'd go home and weep to my fiancé and mom about how life was so unfair. ​I cried about how much I missed wine after a long day. I cried all the time. 

[instagram ]https://instagram.com/p/BB-wm4bSYUZ/" data-instgrm-version="14" style="background:#FFF; border:0; border-radius:3px; box-shadow:0 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.5),0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15); margin: 1px; max-width:540px; min-width:326px; padding:0; width:99.375%; width:-webkit-calc(100% - 2px); width:calc(100% - 2px);" >​​

Going in, I knew I would miss eating. As you might recall, I love food. What I didn't realize was how integral eating and drinking is to my social life. I started canceling 95 percent of my plans because they revolved around one or the other. "Hiiiii! I miss you and love you so much, but I can't do dinner because I'm not actually eating food right now? Like I'm doing that formula thing where I can't eat or drink, and if you're not, like, weirded out with me sipping from a bottle during dinner then let's do it!! But also being around food makes me sad, but really, whatever!!!" became my text message auto-response. My high school best friends, who had seen me through eight weeks of this same diet senior year, responded kindly with, "Why didn't you tell me sooner, bitch?" or, "Let's do anything but be around food so you can tell me about it." When I did manage to be social, I'd show up packing Peptamen in my purse. When I didn't, I had a lot of straight-up, college-era FOMO. 

But after a couple weeks, I started to see my friends for things other than food and alcohol. A lot of walking and talking, it turns out, is cathartic AF. Instead of dinner dates, my fiancé packed three Peptamens and made days out of non-food-related New York City things for us to do.​ I was pulling myself out of my self-pity hole, and realizing how great my friends are and how lucky I am that most things in my life are good — besides my intestines.

But one thing had been looming in the back of my mind. My fiancé and I had tickets to go to my friend/coworker's wedding in New Orleans — a boozy event in the foodiest city of food cities — in the fourth week of my no-food funtimes. Not wanting to be a killjoy on such a lovely moment, I thought about backing out last minute. He wouldn't let me. I am more than just my love of food and #brunch Instagrams, he told me. I am a good friend who wouldn't do that and a vengeful person who would be pissed if my friend did the same to me.

I scheduled an appointment with my doctor two days before we left and literally begged him for a 48-hour hiatus from my diet — at ​least ​from the antibiotics so I could drink. If I had a ​Hurricane vat​ glass of wine — just one! — it would let me forget about the especially good food I wasn't eating and how dumb I look when I dance. When he said no, I looked so sad it almost made him cry. The night before we left, I packed eight Peptamens and some antispasmodic pills and told myself to stop crying. If I had to be a sad, sober buzzkill in the city with my favorite food in the world, I sure as hell wasn't going to do it with a red, blotchy face. 

The first thing we did when we got off the plane was go to Cafe Du Monde so my fiancé could get some beignets. I wasn't going to make him go alone; if you love someone, you accompany them to eat fried dough morsels loaded with confectioner's sugar even when you can't. But he looked so happy. I deserved this. I deserved to have fun at this wedding, dammit. It didn't matter if I couldn't drink, I wasn't going to waste the one happy weekend I'd had in months. I ordered a beignet.

At the wedding reception that night, the beignet (and the bites of food I snuck at dinner) came back to haunt my stomach and I was stone-sober, but I danced without caring that I looked like an idiot and enjoyed the city and the weather and the marriage of two awesome people who deserve to live their best lives together. My happiness was bigger than the pain in my gut. When I got home, I felt proud of myself for going, and I pitched a story about not eating or drinking for a month and how it gave me motherfucking perspective.

[instagram ]https://instagram.com/p/BClUHhQSYWS/" data-instgrm-version="14" style="background:#FFF; border:0; border-radius:3px; box-shadow:0 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.5),0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15); margin: 1px; max-width:540px; min-width:326px; padding:0; width:99.375%; width:-webkit-calc(100% - 2px); width:calc(100% - 2px);" >​

Saturday was the five-week mark and, after more appointments, it was decided I will stay on the liquid diet until further notice. I've lost 15 pounds since I started this. I am still tired, still hungry, and still sad sometimes, but who isn't? I'm scared I'm wasting my twentysomething nights by staying in when I feel I should be going out, but who isn't? Now I know I don't need a meal or a cocktail to laugh with my friends or go on a date with my fiancé, and I'll keep dancing sober even when I'm back to eating, drinking, and shitting normally. Because choosing to make happy moments for yourself when it seems like there is nothing to be happy about is what life is all about, right? And beignets. Delicious, Instagrammable beignets.

Follow Tess on Twitter.​