This is the end of my first month of moderation! I updated the progress page to reflect this week’s achievement of staying pretty nearly in the exact same place. And it’s okay! It doesn’t look like anything is happening, and yet I just know it is. I’m not worried at all about the lack of anything visible on the outside, because I know a lot is changing on the inside. Blogging is such a huge help, it really keeps me focused on this project, when I’d otherwise get bored and discouraged and wander off. I had some really hard days this week, and at one point I felt pretty sick and thought I was getting the Hamthrax, but through it all I kept thinking about how I could keep working toward my goals, even while I was miserable and curled up whining.
Food tracking success – by which I mean success at tracking, and success at inhaling anything chocolate that came near me
I tracked 4 days worth of food this week, which is a new habit, and an incredibly useful one. I don’t know if it was being sick, or what, but my nutrient percentages are awful. This is the daily average of four days worth of tracking food:
- 10% protein
- 51% carbohydrates
- 38% fat (which is hilarious when you consider that I myself am about 38% fat – suddenly that phrase “You are what you eat” takes on a whole new meaning).
This isn’t normal, for what it’s worth. I’ve eaten a heapload (that’s the technical term) of candy over the last four days, easily many times more than I usually would (normally I don’t really eat candy, to be honest – I’m more inclined toward cookies). What have I learned from this? First: Halloween is evil. Second: a bowl of candy in my house is sort of like a bowl of beer in a frat house – it just isn’t going to last long. Next year, there MUST BE PLANS put in place for the leftover crack cocaine candy.
I’m going to try and kick it up a notch in Month 2, starting with daily tracking using Lose It!, and a more structured exercise program that will include working with weights 2-3 times a week.
Panic attacks and lactic acid?
I’m currently doing research (uh, that is I have a good friend of mine doing research, she’s a librarian) on the connection between lactic acid and panic attacks. I’ll write more about this in the coming weeks, but basically I’ve noticed a very specific kind of “attack” that happens to me after weight lifting. It very rarely happens after aerobic exercise. For years I’ve tried to tell people that I have trouble with panic attacks after working out, and for years the response from shrinks and doctors has been, “Oh yah, people who are anxious get nervous about their heart rate getting high, and they panic.” I get that this is probably true for a great many panic sufferers, and I admit I’m not a big fan of my heart racing, but what I’m feeling is very different. I can do an aerobic workout with my heart thumping and be just fine, but it’s after I do anything with weights that I have this very particular kind of attack.
I finally made the connection to lactic acid, and the small amount of Googling I’ve done on the issue seems to suggest that there is a connection between lactic acid and panic attacks. For that reason, I’ll be starting my strength workouts very, very slowly, and build up. It will take a great deal of consistency to make the slow and steady progress I hope to make, and it’s really important to me that I stick to it. If you notice me over-focused on strength work for the next few weeks, this is why!
. But reading every day, or every evening, means that when I go to bed I don’t sit up until 2am with my headlamp and my book. And getting more sleep means I’m more awake during the day and have a much more cheerful attitude, which makes it a lot easier to eat better and stay on track. Win win!
, which happens to have an entire chapter on how anxiety can be treated and even reversed with exercise. I was reading this list night in my bath (yeah, on my 
, in the bath – did I mention he also has a chapter on how exercise can make you smarter? I’ll get on that chapter next), and it was the most hopeful I’ve felt in awhile. Exercise, combined with staying off dairy, combined with relaxation and combined with (as long as I need them) my twice daily meds……could I have hope here of approaching a normal life?
Elimination Diet | Day #9
In fact I have gone off the diet in the last few days, but it’s actually been okay. I don’t feel like I’ve ruined anything.
Here’s my original list of things I was going to chuck, just so’s you remember:
Here’s what that list has shortened to, as of today:
As you can see, I’m adding back wheat, and I’m eating small amounts of unprocessed soy (miso soup, soy sauce).
On Friday, Jason came out to spend the weekend, and the six of us (Me, Greg, Jason, Sonja, Bethie, Miles), went into “Weekend Mode”, where we tend to be busy going on little trips and doing a lot of eating out. It became intensely difficult to figure out what to eat as we were traveling around, especially considering I wasn’t able to figure out what to eat much at home. So I faltered a little bit. I began eating wheat in a a few things, and some soy (mostly in the form of soy sauce).
At first, after I had that first bite of Something With Wheat, my mind wanted to go into Dieter Failure mentality, and chuck the whole entire thing out the window. After all, I FAILED, what’s the point of going on? Fortunately my inner drama queen calmed down, and once I got past the failure mentality, I realized I was learning a lot, and I could continue to learn, even if I wasn’t following the diet in the exact same way I’d planned to.
Some things I’ve observed over the last few days:
1) Dairy continues to be a problem.
On Friday night we went out to a restaurant specifically because we though it would have a Hollie-friendly menu. I got some delicious salmon with “apple butter”, which to me means a dairy-free jam-like toast topping made from apples, cinnamon, and sugar. I wasn’t really sure how this would taste on salmon, but hey, I’ll try anything once. Instead, the apple butter was literally a monster pat of butter, with apparent apple flavorings.
The intestinal pyrotechnics that resulted from this one small serving of dairy was pretty impressive. I believe that dairy is something I’ll need to phase out of my life almost completely (I’m willing to suffer these pyrotechnics for very special occasions, like, say, this cake. Overall, though, I think I’m beginning to see the real possibility of a truly dairy-free life.
2) I’m recovering from episodes of anxiety much quicker than usual.
This change is simply incredible to me. Two good examples happened this weekend.
On Saturday night, Greg and Jason and I went to a movie (The Proposal with Sandra Bullock — anyone else get While You Were Sleeping flashbacks? Sandy in a white dress, apologizing to a family at the altar for why she can’t go through with the wedding, an orphan who misses the feelings of being in a family?), and over the last couple years movies have become incredibly difficult for me. I usually need at least one, sometimes two doses of anxiety medication to make it through, and when it’s done (if I’ve made it – I’ve left at least six movies over the last few years after a bad attack), I’m wiped out. I’m so drained from trying to hold it together that I need to take a nap afterward. This isn’t just action movies or thrillers; I could barely get through Pixar’s UP. Also, due to both the anxiety and the meds, I usually don’t remember much of the movie anyway; thus you can understand why I frequently just don’t go, even though before all this got bad, going to the movies was a favorite hobby of mine.
For some reason, during the movie on Saturday night, I was happy. I was having a good time. I didn’t need any meds, and I didn’t need my earplugs, and I didn’t need to leave partway through. After it was over, I was still doing great! We got in the car and I wanted to GO somewhere, like a cafe or or a restaurant, just to hang out and talk. I couldn’t believe how stable and good I felt! I wanted to take advantage of it while it lasted! Unfortunately we live in Ellensburg, and there wasn’t anything to do at 11:20pm on a Saturday night, so we headed home, but I was giddy.
Me hiding behind Llyra, grabbing onto her for dear life (do you see how high we are?)
On Sunday afternoon, Sonja had rounded up a bunch of us to go to the Salmon La Sac campground, which I thought wasn’t that far away from town. I was wrong, it was pretty far out, and by the time we got there I was so anxious I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was examining my options; do I make one of the guys drive me home? Do I take a whole lot of meds and just hole up in the car and sleep? How am I going to cope with this?
I grabbed a camp chair and plopped down into it. I opened up a bag of sunflower seeds and started munching. I put on my sunglasses. I grabbed a magazine. I endeavored to sit there until I felt calmer. To my complete shock, that only took about half an hour. Not an hour, not several hours, not here-let’s-take-some-meds-and-wait-all-afternoon-for-things-to-improve; I just felt good. Again. Quickly. And I continued to feel good the whole rest of the day. And to top it off? I drove us all home. Here, let me continue to italicize things to impress upon you the amazing-ness of this event.
I even ended up playing in the river, and climbing up onto a big pile of rocks. Llyra followed me, at which point we screamed in triumph, and then I realized how high we were – at that point I think I started holding on to her a little too tightly. Thanks to Jason for the photo!
3) Wheat doesn’t appear to be a problem.
So far, the small amounts of wheat I’ve been having (croutons on salad, in soy sauce), don’t seem to be causing me any issues. I don’t feel any more sore in the morning (in fact I continue to feel better, in very small degrees). I’m trying not to overdo it.
4) Soy in small amounts, so far, doesn’t seem to be causing any issues either.
I’m not eating a ton of it, and I’m not eating any processed stuff (like tofurkey or tofu dogs or soy ice cream).
5) I really need to learn how to cook and eat vegetables.
During the salmon dinner Saturday night, Jason endeavored to instruct me on how to eat broccoli with my salmon; by eating a piece of salmon, and then slipping a small piece of broccoli in, unnoticed. I tried it once, and was chewing, and he began saying, “You need more salmon! MORE SALMON!” I began waving my hand at him. “You’re making a face!”, he said. When I was done swallowing, I think I was still making a face, but to my great shock, the broccoli was not putrid. I ended up eating several pieces of broccoli. Miracle.
Clearly this means I need to continue trying to figure out how to get more veggies into my diet.
GEE, MAYBE I COULD WRITE A BLOG TO THAT EFFECT?
Going forward, I’ll be eating small amounts of wheat and soy, attempting to cook more veggies, and trying desperately to stay away from dairy and sugar, which are the two hardest exclusions. Corn and beans, which I’m leaving out for awhile as all this settles down (I’ll re-introduce in a trial in a few weeks), aren’t too hard to stay away from (the exception being corn syrup – but avoiding that also means avoiding most chocolate and candy, so it works out).