Well, the last three days I’ve had two servings of meat a day, a whole slew of fruits and veggies, and hardly any grains at all. I feel a little confused and guilty admitting this, but I feel amazing. In two days:
- My anxiety has been much better. Yesterday I almost missed a dose of my daily medication because I just forgot (anxiety didn’t remind me), and I didn’t take another medication that I use for acute panic attacks – because I didn’t have any. In the 9 days prior to that, I’d taken this medication at least once a day, sometimes twice.
- My mood has improved dramatically (likely a morale issue based in the anxiety improving).
- My joints aren’t stiff when I get out of bed. I roll over, stand up, and walk away from the bed with a startling lack of pain. I had no idea how much pain I was having until I realized it was gone. This has perplexed me for the last year – why am I so stiff and sore in the morning? If I were running marathons in my sleep, wouldn’t I be losing weight or at least noticing an increase in workout-wear laundry?
- I don’t have my usual mid-day slumps in energy. I feel great right up to bedtime.
The important thing to remember is that this is 72 HOURS. Not a week, or a month, or six months. It’s nice and all, but what I’m really curious about is how I’ll feel on June 30th. I’ve read many times, especially from people struggling with anxiety, and it has been true for me countless times; any significant thing in life done differently tends to make you feel better for a few days. In my case, I think of it as the 3-day rule. Whenever I’ve changed meds, or tried a new herb or exercise or habit or whatever to help my anxiety and panic attacks, EVERYTHING generates some improvement for about 3 days.
When those 3 days are over, usually the improvement goes with it, and I’m back where I started. Perhaps this is some version of the placebo effect? I don’t know for certain the mechanism, but I know it happens, so while these changes are fascinating to me, I’m not counting my chickens quite yet.
Yesterday Greg made me some strip steak for lunch, in the wok. It was delicious, but I felt horribly guilty eating it, because I haven’t had time to locate any respected, grass-fed beef yet (I think I found a place last night online – Agape Wells Farm) and this was just from our regular grocery store. I know some people are probably rolling their eyes at me, but hopefully others get it. Anyway, the entire time I thought I could practically feel my arteries hardening. I was laughing to myself that I might need some anxiety meds just to cope with this.
An hour later Sonja and I were in the backyard setting up our new pool, and I said, “Is it possible for someone to eat meat for three days and then DIE FROM CORONARY ARTERY DISEASE?”
The look on her face was priceless.
“Uh. No.”
“Right. I totally knew that.”
I’ve been a vegan groupie since I was a teenager. That’s a loooooong time. I have a scrapbook from High School with articles cut out about the benefits of becoming a vegetarian. I’ve had years and years of self-conditioning that meat is BAD, and I’ve eaten it only because I had to – because I didn’t like vegetables. I’m startled at the depth of my own beliefs around food, and that of people around me (even moderation begins to sound dogmatic when it’s spoken of in a certain tone).
This whole food journey gets more interesting by the day.
The perks of being married to a programmer
One of the annoying things about doing an elimination diet, or trying to find out any useful information from your day to day routines, is that to do so you have to be fairly religious about writing everything down. EVERYTHING. This can get really old after awhile, yet it’s so important, especially when you’re trying to track down things like anxiety triggers – stuff that impacts my life in a major way.
Enter my programming god of a husband: Greg.
About a week ago, I said something like, “Man, it would be so useful if I could just record what I eat on my iPhone, or when I take a pill, or when I have a panic attack. I’m tired of lugging around this notebook.”
He got that look in his eye, the one that means he’s thinking he can make me really happy (I love this look, it always ends with him inventing something crazy and wonderful), and said, “Like maybe something where you could put in an event and then it would stick it on a calendar? You know, I could do that. I could make something would enter an event on, say, a Google calendar.”
And so he did.
Right now it doesn’t have a name or an icon: we just call it “Event Tracker” – it’s the white icon down at the bottom:
What it does is going to, for lack of a more mature phrase: rock my world.
Over time, I’ll be able to see trends a lot faster, and I’ll have a lot more data, since this is so easy to use and I won’t skip days because I’m tired and forgot to log what I did or what I ate. The data will also be more accurate, since it will have the date and time, and not lame notes by me, like, “I think this is what I ate, I can’t quite remember”. Basically, I’ll get better information while being able to obsess a lot less about tracking. Win-win!