When I was younger my brother used to get pissed at me for pouring milk into my cereal, stirring it around, and then pouring a majority of the milk down the drain.

I’ve never been a milk fan. I have been a dairy fan–ice cream, butter, cottage cheese, yogurt–but am starting to realize that perhaps my body is having adverse effects to dairy. I always blamed the symptoms on something else, which is easy to do since the main symptoms were gas and bloating. So if I felt bad after eating Mexican food (which was just a taco salad – not even the shell!), I blamed the meat. If we went to Mucho Gusto (the Oregon equivalent of Moe’s), I would get a meatless burrito, just beans and rice and lettuce and cheese and sour cream and salsa. When I felt sick afterwards, I blamed it on myself for eating too much (note: I felt the same amount of sickness whether I ate the whole thing or only half, so perhaps I was unconsciously aware of what was going on and did not want to face it).

The decision to phase out dairy as part of my regular diet has very much to do with the way it makes me feel. We made the switch from milk to almond milk about a year ago, though when we have company I always buy regular milk for them. When Garrett and Emily were here I got a carton of organic milk, and when we ran out of almond milk on Thursday, I used the regular milk in my trusty Cheerios.

That was a mistake. It was also the kind of definitive proof that I needed to stop consuming dairy products. Gassy and bloated are the only two adjectives I feel comfortable using right this moment, but there were others and they rhymed with “quitting.” I feel it important to point out that Cheerios are a fairly innoccuious breakfast cereal. I thought about that when I was on the toilet (for the third time). I thought “Cheerios! How banal! The have made me so full with their fiber and the whole grains help my heart. No. WAIT. WAIT A SECOND! I HAD MILK TODAY! Milk in the bowl, and then we swung by Human Bean so I could get a sugar-free chai with nonfat milk. MILK.

An aside: I find it strange that people drink the breast milk of another species, and the measures the dairy industry goes through to ensure that their cows are at top milk production means keeping the cows pregnant for a majority of her life, just so they can separate her from her calf and then suck the milk out of her udders. There is much much more that happens after that so it would not be incorrect of me to say that I’m going dairy-free as much for the animals as I am for myself.

I don’t know if eliminating lactose will stop my break outs or problems falling asleep or weight gain. It will for sure help with the bloated uncomfortableness that happens whenever I eat cheese. If there are other benefits, I will let you know. I’ll make my husband write his down, too. We’re doing this together.

We know how we want to eventually be eating, but stopping our bad habits cold turkey and assuming new ones would probably make us cranky and hate our lives. There would be very little follow through because it’s all too new. Instead, we’re going to do it in stages. Dairy is the first stage because we’re already kind of there. There is no yogurt or sour cream in the fridge, no ice cream in the freezer. We do have some coffee creamer that will have to be disposed of, but that shouldn’t be an issue.

We will reevaluate after ten days of being dairy-free to see whether we’ve noticed anything different and if it’s worth keeping up. Onward!