The day my coffee grinder became a flaxseed grinder was the day I figured out how coffee affected my sleep patterns. For some “unknown” reason I was waking up at 2 a.m., unable to fall back asleep. Given I was in my late 40s, health professionals attributed my insomnia to peri-menopausal symptoms. But hormone tests discounted that theory. Instead, I stopped drinking coffee and voila! A full night’s sleep.

I turned 50 on New Years Day 2009. While I don’t have a problem saying I’m 50, it does sound like an age that belongs to my mother and not to me. Physiologically, however, I’m starting to feel it. And that’s disconcerting given I expect I’ll live at least another 30 years, not to mention that I have an 11-year-old daughter who wants me to dribble basketballs and throw footballs with her.

In my search for health alternatives, I’m embracing the ‘we are what we eat’ information for my new visiting symptoms of aging. I’ve found, if I eat dough I feel like dough. No wheat, no joint pain. Caffeine keeps me up, but also affects my vision, gives me bladder infections, and runs havoc on my digestion.

Ah, my digestion. This starts at your food intake and ends with where you eliminate the waste. This includes your mouth, throat, stomach, belly and lower torso. That would be more than 50 percent of your body. I’m starting to agree with Dr. Angela London, a naturopath on Vashon, when she said to me, “If your digestion isn’t right, nothing in your body is right.” Who knew?

In my discovery process of how to feel better, which included Kathy Abascal’s popular anti-inflammatory diet, I realized some interesting things about my relationship to food. For one thing, that I even had a relationship to food. And it wasn’t good. I thought that because I didn’t consider food, I didn’t have a relationship with it. But not relating to food IS a type of relationship.

I had a Velveeta cheese/hamburger helper ’70s upbringing. My mother didn’t like to cook and struggled with her weight all her life. I was skinny (up until my 40s) and could eat anything. My high school lunches consisted of Cheetos and coke. I got through all-night study sessions in graduate school on popcorn and M&Ms. I didn’t taste a fresh pea until I was in high school and that was by chance. MSG were the initials of a girlfriend.

Comfort food? I had never used food as comfort, especially to comfort a broken heart, at least I didn’t think so. Some girlfriends would point to their large thighs and say that one was for John, this one is for Sam. I, on the other hand, stopped eating and got skinnier. Given I liked being thin, breakups were good for my body, or so I thought.

So while I didn’t have an eating disorder, per se, I’ve now come to realize I had a eating disorder because I was so disconnected from my food, its nutritious value to my body and soul and how it connects me to the earth and the cycle of life.

Now I live in Vashon Cohousing, where farmers and organic food advocates abound. I remember the first time I cooked a dish from kale I had gotten from my Vashon farm subscription. It was more than nine years ago, when I first moved to cohousing. I was so excited to show the dish to my neighbor who farmed the kale — excited because I’m a timid cook, not comfortable having others besides my daughter taste my food, and because she had grown the kale.

As I showed her my dish, I had an extraordinary experience. I handed her a fork, and as she speared the kale and brought it to her mouth, I saw one of those energetic circles that I judgingly thought only New Age people make up — a circle from her strong earth-worn hands that had dug the soil and grown the kale at the farm next door to my house, to the kale that I had cooked and put in a bowl and that she was now bringing up to her mouth. It was one of my first visceral experiences of our connection to the earth. It wasn’t made up. It wasn’t New Age. The following year I grew kale myself.

A friend just sent me Dr. John McDougall’s book, “Healthy at 100,” packed full of medical studies supporting that we are what we eat. I sat in Kathy’s class with an 82-year-old man who changed his eating habits and walked three miles that week. “A miracle,” he said.

For me, I don’t have that clogged-dough feeling in my gut. My digestion is healing. And I’m even getting a bit more confidence in my cooking. I figure if I’m going to live another 30 or more years, I want them to be healthy, vivacious ones.

— Lynann Politte is a producer, mother and activist who is currently writing her first one-woman show.