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Living dairy-free is frustrating sometimes

Written on July 23, 2009 by hollie in Panic and Anxiety Issues

This guy probably doesn't feel sorry for me.

While I realize that there are worse things in the world than not being able to eat dairy products, like say elephantitis, or a third (or fourth) nipple, or having a few dozen nails shot though your head, it is sincerely frustrating to have to turn down every treat that comes your way because someone, a long time ago, thought, “HEY, you know that white stuff that comes out of a cow? Let’s PUT THAT CRAP IN EVERYTHING!”

And then the rest of the world was like, “Man, could those French get any more suave?”

I’m upstairs in my room right now, having run up here a half hour ago when I wasn’t sure if I was going to throw up or have a panic attack, or both. Now you could say that this is merely the karmic punishment of a food and fitness blogger who JUST YESTERDAY posted about how she was going to buckle down and get in shape and all that*, having had a decaf soy mocha and two chocolate chip cookies (the cookies were FREE, YO!) for breakfast. You could maybe argue that I sort of had this coming, but no, I’d like to blame it on the cows.

I just called the cafe where we got our treats, and yeah, the cookies are chock-full of butter.

LE SIGH.

*In my defense, I did 40 minutes of light aerobic exercise yesterday.

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The Twinkie Defense: “But I didn’t know it had DAIRY!”

Written on July 11, 2009 by hollie in Deep and Meaningful Commentary, Panic and Anxiety Issues

Last night certain monthly womanly things happened (subtlety, I has it), and I was craving something bad for me. Now, normally, I’d want Greg to run up to the corner store and get me a Skor bar, but for some magical reason, the mere mention of anything with milk (like milk chocolate) has me cringing. I haven’t had anything with milk or cow-derivatives since June 30th, and I sure paid for that salad and bread, lemme tell you.

Normally I start craving cheese about three hours after the last meal with cheese. The cycle goes something like this:

5pm: Eat cheese.

6pm: End up in bathroom for hours, cursing cheese’s name, calling out for chamomile tea, and sketching out plans for how I’m going to wipe out all cows with some kind of APPARATUS that I will call, THE BOVINATOR.

6pm-9pm: Vow never to eat dairy again.

9:30pm: Now that digestive system is completely empty, go to fridge to nosh. Hmmm……..leftover pizza sounds good….

Greg has been so fed up with me before that he’ll say things YOU JUST CAN’T TAKE BACK, like, “If you do that one more time, I’m never bringing you chamomile tea while you sit in the bathroom again,” or, “If you eat another slice of pizza, I’m not calling 911 when you think you’re dying later.”

So you’ll be proud to know, as he was proud to hear, that I turned to him after ten entire days off dairy and said, “I don’t want chocolate! I’d like a Twinkie, please! Everyone knows they don’t have dairy. They just have vanilla-flavored lard.”

“Well, that’s appetizing.”

“JUST DO IT, MAN.”

He came back with a 2-pack of them, and I dove in. Halfway through the first one things seemed a little suspicious. Don’t get me wrong, they tasted just as horribly and delightfully gross as I’d hoped, but there was something…..amiss. I checked the wrapper. Yep. About twelve ingredients down, after all the preservatives and lard and vanilla flavoring and what I assume must be some alternative form of embalming fluid, there it was: sweet dairy whey.

I threw the rest out. Aren’t ya’ll proud? I chucked those puppies.

I still consider myself emotionally dairy-free, since accidental dairy doesn’t count.

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Elimination Diet | Day #9

Written on June 30, 2009 by hollie in Deep and Meaningful Commentary, My experience with an elimination diet, Panic and Anxiety Issues

It’s been a few days since my last update, and I’m sure everyone is wanting to know how much money to hand to their buddy, right? HOW BAD DID SHE GO OFF? Because I’ve got bets ridin’!

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:

dairy
wheat
soy
legumes
corn
sugar
chocolate
caffeine
sugar/processed foods

Here’s what that list has shortened to, as of today:

dairy
corn
legumes
sugar (in large ridiculous concentrations – e.g., a candy bar? no. a bit of brown sugar on my oatmeal? okay).
processed foods
chocolate
caffeine

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.

Llyra, and me hiding behind her, for dear life, LOOK HOW HIGH WE ARE!

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).

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In which I invent a mental illness, and blame cows for everything that’s wrong with the world.

Written on June 7, 2009 by hollie in Panic and Anxiety Issues

It may sound contradictory, but while I have severe anxiety and panic attacks, I generally don’t have any depression or mood problems. When I’ve seen therapists for the first time, they typically ask me to sit down to various tests to measure THE CRAZY, and while I routinely score off the charts for anxiety (I love some of the comments I’ve gotten; “How did you even get to my office with scores like this?”), I consistently score low on depression.

I’ve always thought of this as a major blessing, because anxiety this crippling often feels like a sort of emotional paraplegia. To further weigh down this extraordinary metaphor, if I had depression, it would feel like I’d just gotten my arms ripped off, too.

For some reason, the last few days have been pretty awful for me in terms of mood. While I use the phrase “feeling depressed”, I’m not ready to say it’s a “depression”. I had one of those once. Just one, and it was enough. If I had to make up my own mental illness (OH WHAT FUN), I’d have to say this is something like Sudden-Onset Age-Related Mental-Exhaustion-From-Recurring Life Issues Spectrum Disorder. Or SOARMEFRLISD, for short.

While SOARMEFRLISD is based in real, quantitative issues, I feel sure that it’s exacerbated by diet. The last few days have seen me abandoning my vegan leanings, my paleo leanings, and my sugar-addict leanings, and settling instead into a place of “moderation”, which has stupidly included a fair amount of dairy. While I can’t prove it, because no one has given me a ton of money to begin my own study, and there’s also that nagging lack of a PhD to lend me some scientific authority, I’m convinced that at least in this particular meat sack I inhabit, dairy products makes moodiness, anxiety, and depression, significantly worse.

While this can’t be true for everyone, by all available data it certainly seems true for me, and why I continue to eat the crap is something I simply don’t get. Okay, it’s DELICIOUS, sure, and it’s addicting, sure, and it’s smooth and tasty and comes in a wide variety of awesome permutations (to be fair, we should really be including goats in this hate-fest), but it’s so not good for me. I think this post is intended to be something that you can all use as a reason to pelt me with olives the next time I report that I ate some pizza, because it was there, and it was looking at me, with that big doughy expanse of white, cheesy goodness, and EVERYONE ELSE WAS DOING IT SO WHY NOT ME?

My husband is leaving for California tomorrow, to cavort with other geeks at WWDC, and enjoy his rock-star status as a senior engineer at Omni. One of my favorite ways to make him laugh during the week before he goes is to ask him how he’ll manage writing GREG WAS HERE across the breasts of all those hot women programmers, and did he remember his black Sharpie?

My commitment, during the next 6 Greg-free days, which will be stressful for many reasons, not least of which is his absence, my kids possibly getting sick, myself possibly getting sick, and of course SOARMEFRLISD, is that:

1. I will eat no dairy. Not even a smidgen. Not even a skosh.

2. Okay, I will TRY to eat no dairy.

3. No, I’ll just commit to not eating any. That’s better.

And next weekend, we’ll see if I’m feeling better. I’m hoping the moodiness will have mostly packed it in, and maybe I’ll have learned something.

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Eating: it ain’t what it used to be (Part 1)

Written on April 3, 2009 by hollie in Deep and Meaningful Commentary

~ Let’s sum up ~

So a couple months ago I decided to lose some weight. First I tried Weight Watchers, and after a month of counting points and spending all my time thinking about food and its penalties, I found myself not only going far above my daily allowed points but having my already-disordered eating begin to worsen.

I realized I was pretty addicted to sugar, and I had a lot of problems feeling compulsive about food. Frightened by this, I decided I had an eating disorder. I decided that Overeaters Anonymous was the best place to work through the issue. I’m pretty sure this is where we left off, right?

~ That brings us to….. ~

Last week was my first week of “abstinence”, which meant that I had a food plan and I tried to stick to it. Mine was mostly avoiding trigger foods, and trying to get used to eating when full. I did great for the first few days, but then I started to waver. I snacked on a few “off limits” foods, in an attempt to see whether they were really that triggering. They almost always were, meaning the minute I was done with one serving I wanted another, and I felt almost painfully compelled to eat more.

Finally on Tuesday afternoon, a few hours before my second OA meeting, I did something I have never, ever, in my entire life, done before. I snuck food. I was upset about something, probably that general feeling of overwhelm that permeates my days, and Greg was working and I just needed something. I wanted sugar, and I made the decision right there I was going to have some. I dove through the cupboards but couldn’t find anything. Then it hit me: TOASTER WAFFLES. Greg always has some of those around. I threw open the freezer; NO WAFFLES. But there it was…….leftover ice cream from my Dad and bonusMom’s visit.

This is what I did:

- I grabbed a bowl.
- I put the ice cream in the bowl (there was maybe a whole cup left).
- I decided this was TOO OBVIOUS, and so I grabbed a box of Rice Krispies sitting on the counter, and I sprinkled that over the top. VOILA! Now it looks like my usual rice milk and cereal! I’m a fracking genius!
- I tried to pretend EVERYTHING WAS NORMAL, and I went and sat down on the couch and began to eat. I knew the dairy would rip out my guts later, but I didn’t care

Suddenly, to my total horror, Sonja appeared, having walked downstairs to let out the dog. I sat there on the couch, FROZEN IN PLACE, as if the ice cream had permeated every last cell. I knew she was going to see what I was eating. It’s a forbidden food! It’s on the Triggering Foods list! It’s creamy goodness is NOT SUPPOSED TO BE IN MY MOUTH.

She opened the back door and then stood there, watching TV with me and waiting for Tito to finish his inquiries. Inside my head is this ridiculous dialogue:

“What if she sees me? Why did she have to come down NOW? How will I explain this?”

“I’ll say it’s just cereal.”

“That’s LYING. I don’t lie. I can’t lie.”

“Well maybe she won’t notice.”

“But what if she does?”

“I’ll say it’s medicinal!”

“Are you HIGH? Medicinal ice cream? FOR THE LACTOSE INTOLERANT?”

“I can’t take this! Scheiße! Just eat it! Just hope she doesn’t notice!”

So I ate it. Did she notice? I don’t know. (Hey Sonja, did you notice?) Eventually she walked away, and I just kept eating. After the bowl was finished, and my blood pressure had finally gone down, I began to comprehend what had just happened. I was completely horrified. I had just done something I’d never done before. I’d hidden food. I was filled with shame and guilt, which I’d never felt in association with food before, at least not like this. I’d felt guilty before, directed toward myself, as I sat in the bathroom for half an hour coping with the meal of cheese pizza I’d just eaten, but never this, this public shame, this humiliation at having eaten the BAD FOOD, the horror that someone might FIND OUT.

So of course I had to go tell someone.

I went upstairs to Greg, and we went into our bedroom and closed the door. I said, “I need to tell you what I just did. I just ate ice cream.” He looked stricken. I couldn’t tell if this was because I’d just poured diesel fuel into the picky, premium unleaded engine that is my digestive system, or whether he was reacting to me going off my “plan”. He says it was the former, but at the time I was assuming the latter.

We talked about how I’d never done it before, and how I didn’t want to feel shame, because I never, ever want to feel shame around food. I certainly never want to feel like I have to hide what I’m eating from anyone, especially my family. I also expressed my fear that being in OA was what triggered this. Maybe I’m not the type of person who should have a food plan. In every case in the past when I had one, I began going nuts with food; that time I tried Eat to Live I ended up stopping because I was starting to see all food as Good or Evil. Weight Watchers was supposed to cure that, yet still I felt compelled to eat as much as I want, like some rebellious teenager. And now OA, with it’s “food plan”, where instead of just seeing Good or Evil now I’m seeing, Will Keep Me Safe, Might Keep Me Safe, Will Send Me Into Horrible Spirals Of Overeating, Will DESTROY MY SANITY (peanut butter bars, why do you ask?), etc. Food is now 20% good, 60% scary, and 20% petrifying.

The more “eating plans” I try, the more disordered an eater I’m becoming.

Let’s note that for later, shall we?

After the Ice Cream Shamester Incident, I went to my OA meeting that night and shared my story. I was supported and cared for, and no one thought it was wrong that I felt like leaving, but in the end I expressed a desire to stay, because where else was I going to go? This had to work. At the end of the meeting I got a sponsor, and I vowed that I’d be gentle with myself and keep trying.

That was Tuesday. In the last few days, I’ve done nothing but think about food. Food I can’t have, food I can have. It’s a hundred times worse, and I am not even remotely kidding, than when I wasn’t on any “eating plan” at all. Finally today I decided I’d had enough, and I made two large waffles and ate them all by myself. I felt guilty, but I also knew that if anyone came into the room and asked me why I was doing it, I’d give them the finger. And that, that awareness, that inner rebel alive and well, felt wonderful. For the first time in weeks I felt authentic, I felt like myself again, and I was unafraid of food. It was wonderful.

Continued in Part 2…….

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