When I first cut dairy, I was strangely confident. Okay. No milk. No cheese. No butter.

Fine.

I can do hard things. Then soy entered the conversation and I opened my pantry like I had just moved into somebody else’s house. Suddenly I did not know how to feed myself. I think this is one of those things that sounds much simpler from the outside. People hear “dairy free” and immediately start suggesting almond milk and vegan cheese.

Thank you.

I am aware milk alternatives exist. The actual problem was that I had a newborn, I was exhausted, and all the foods I used to grab without thinking suddenly required thought.

Breakfast required thought.

Coffee required thought.

Snacks required thought.

Dinner definitely required thought. I did not have any thoughts left. At first I tried to replace everything. I searched for the dairy-free version, the soy-free version, the dairy-and-soy-free version.

That was a terrible idea.

What finally worked was finding a few things I could eat and repeating them until I had enough energy to expand.

A breakfast.

A lunch.

A dinner.

A snack.

Something sweet, because I had already given up cheese and felt I had suffered enough. I wish I had done that from day one. There are moms who end up on incredibly limited elimination diets because their baby is still having symptoms and they keep removing one more thing, then one more thing, then one more thing. Some describe getting to the point where eating itself becomes stressful. I understand the instinct completely.

When your baby is hurting, you want to fix it. If someone had told me the answer was eating cardboard for six weeks, I probably would have asked whether I should toast it. But I also learned how quickly a sleep-deprived mom with Google can become extremely ambitious. And food was only half of what I was obsessing over. There was also the poop.

So much poop.

I became the kind of person who inspected every diaper like it had been submitted for forensic analysis. Color? Consistency? Mucus? Better than yesterday? Worse? Is that normal? Should I take a picture?

Of course I took a picture.

My camera roll from that period is dangerous. You could be happily scrolling through adorable baby photos and suddenly—poop. So much poop. And apparently I am far from the only mom who has done this. There are entire conversations between parents comparing diapers because when you are desperately looking for signs that something is getting better, a diaper can start feeling like a progress report. Before motherhood, I could not have imagined being this emotionally invested in another person’s bowel movements.

And yet.

Another thing I did not expect was how emotional food could become. I was not just missing cheese. I missed not thinking about cheese. I missed ordering food without a conversation. I missed grabbing something because I was hungry.

I missed convenience.

And I really missed someone else cooking. There are parents who describe the same thing—cooking constantly because it feels like the only way to know exactly what is in their food. I did more of that too. But I also started hunting down packaged foods I could eat because, respectfully, I did not have a baby so I could also become a full-time cracker manufacturer. Sometimes dinner needs to come from a box. Sometimes breakfast needs to be something I can eat over the sink. Sometimes I realize at 3:30 p.m. that I have consumed coffee and half a banana. That is the reality my food had to work with.

So I started smaller.

Feed myself today.

Tomorrow can have a new snack. Next week can have a new recipe. I did not need to rebuild my entire kitchen before bedtime. I probably needed sleep more anyway.

Eventually, eating stopped feeling like a problem I had to solve from scratch three times a day. I found enough foods that worked, enough shortcuts, and enough things I actually liked that I was not staring sadly into the refrigerator every afternoon.

I still had days when feeding myself was embarrassingly low on the priority list. I had a baby. Sometimes lunch was whatever I could eat with one hand while bouncing her with the other. Sometimes it was cold. Sometimes it was 4 p.m. That counted.

Looking back, I think that was what I needed most: not a perfect elimination-diet kitchen, just enough food I could actually eat while living my actual life. Preferably before the coffee wore off.