Why I Made This Site…
Soy allergies are real!
I’m Tarra, affectionately known as “Tarrita,” and I am terribly allergic to foods and products containing soy. How did I discover this? Well, back in 2001, although living a very healthy lifestyle, I came very close to death due to some non-cancerous tumors. I had no idea how I had grown them, and was told by my first and second opinion doctors that there was no medicine known to man to shrink them and they would have to be removed surgically. Long story short – as I was coming back from under anesthesia on the day of my surgery I was informed by my screaming doctor that I had indeed shrank them, one was completely gone! I had done this by accident – I was simply trying to prepare my body for surgery and had followed an herbal protocol I found in an old book on the clearance rack of a health food store under the care of a Licensed Naturopath (ND); and well they did shrink! My doctor told me that I was still operated on to remove the one which remained.
During my surgery recovery, I kept getting sick and additionally grew some new tumors, again non-cancerous. My hormone levels were tested and I was also diagnosed with excessive estrogen. I started researching estrogen dominance symptoms and I noticed that I had many symptoms. I won’t go into them all here, but some of the symptoms I experienced were: random fatigue, bloating for no reason whatsoever, thinning hair, thin and weak fingernails, freezing cold hands and feet, even if it was hot outside, small light yellow bubbles in my eyes, painful female cycles and insomnia just to name a few. I just couldn’t figure out where in the world all of this estrogen was coming from! I wasn’t taking any estrogen replacement, so I figured that it had to be something I was unknowingly eating or drinking that was driving my estrogen up; so I just went through my kitchen cabinets and tried to see if there were any common ingredients in my food.
I always love to work out, but at the time I was super skinny and trying to gain weight. I was drinking a protein shake to add extra calories to my diet and I noticed it had soy protein isolate as an ingredient. Also, I ate a lot of salads and so I had a lot of salad dressing in the fridge, and I noticed soybean oil was in all of the bottles from different companies. Additionally, I eat a lot of baked fish and I was using vegetable oil, which is soybean oil as my cooking oil. So, I simply internet searched estrogen dominance and soy, and wow did I find out a lot about how different forms of soy can significantly increase estrogen levels!
To see if the information I was reading was true, I started eliminating items containing soy from my diet, and in approximately 2 weeks’ time I started feeling a little bit better. I also started taking an estrogen detox supplement and without making any other changes to my diet, my bloat was reducing. In 4 weeks I was getting a lot better and I could tell my estrogen levels were coming down because my hair was starting to grow again and my hands were warming up a bit, but the biggest thing – the bloat was going down – that was so awesome! So I kept up the diet and the supplements.
Later, I ate out at a fast food place and got bloated within 30 minutes! That triggered a super bad cycle – although I had already gone through a cycle that month – which in turn caused me to be anemic, weak, listless and very tired. I stopped eating fast food and continued my regimen. From that one time of eating out – it took my body almost a full 12 weeks to get back to where it was on the day before I ate out! Honestly, that was very discouraging for me.
In the meantime, as I was recovering from the fast food incident – I went to the individual websites of the fast food restaurants that I like and read the ingredients of what I always ordered. I then realized that the foods all contained soy or were fried in soy oil (always called “vegetable oil” – the soybean is the vegetable)! It was so frustrating!
I kept track of the supplements I took as sometimes companies would stop making them, and I also created a list of soy-free “alternatives”to the foods I like to eat, and even recipes to make foods that commonly contain soy. I created a different website “tarrita.com” and I wrote about my experience and I wrote a little book about the supplements I took and shared it with other women. These women privately shared their struggles with me and I noticed that pretty much all of us had the same symptoms at varying degrees of intensity. Other women started avoiding soy, taking the same or even different estrogen purging supplements and avoiding or eating the foods in my list and also started feeling better.
The problem was that some of the women who contacted me did not have the same stores in their area that I do and could not find the products. On the other hand, some did not live in the U.S. and so they could not find and buy the foods or supplements. That is why I decided to create this site – to share information, and to provide access to soy-free foods and other products.
I hope this site is inspiring and makes it easier for you to find and buy soy-free foods.
Good health to you!
Tarrita