Fire and Ice

  It seems like we can get used to anything.  For another week my struggles continue , except that this week I seem to be in the "good" part of the cycle. These days, good means that I can eat something, often very small meals that can take me hours. But at least it's something and it also means I'm not quite so tired or dizzy all the time. This part of the apparent cycle can also be falsely reassuring: I may manage a little plate of pasta (plain sauce, no cheese) and think I can have a bit more... only to find that actually, no I can't. Or I'll absentmindedly grab a morsel of cake and immediately regret it, as I've also discovered that crumbs are a big NO-NO. But otherwise, at least on good days, I can carry on with my life as mostly normal. I can go for walks without feeling faint, complete a full working day without feeling exhausted and can sit and join people while I eat my tiny, slow meals. All this leads to better mental health, less anxiety and eve...

  A few days ago, a friend of mine posted a meme similar to this one on Twitter and it made me stop and think. I don't normally spend much time on these sorts of things, but given what I'm going through, this really resonated. I have certainly been trying to work out "why is this happening to me", all the time. I have also spent so much time trying to get it fixed. But when I saw the image, I decided that it was worth shifting the perspective and spending some time figuring out what this is teaching me instead. It was an interesting thought experiment, at the very least! I spent a few minutes that day just pondering the learnings and came up with a few but the interesting thing is that I've not really stopped thinking about learnings since.  Sure, it is still annoying, infuriating, worrying, depressing and concerning that, I can't really swallow food. I'm not going to say that just by changing my thinking everything else just magically resolved itself. On...

At the start of this pandemic, a lot of us tried to find new ways to amuse ourselves at home. I remember people knitting, tie-dying, reading more, getting into yoga, doing puzzles, binge-watching TV and a bunch of other stuff.  I wasn't very original: I really got into cooking.  I have always liked cooking but didn't particularly have much time when I worked full-time in the office and sometimes I had to come home from work, throw some food on the table so that the kids could then go out and do their other activities in the evening (football practice, Scouts, swimming, that sort of thing). These weren't necessarily the best circumstances to try and get more adventurous with my cooking so when lockdown changed all of that, once I got over the shock of feeling generally a prisoner in my own home, I pivoted to cooking. Now I had time to prepare better meals, to experiment more, to try those recipes that I'd collected through the years but had never had the chance to try. I...

Anyone that has been on any sort of restrictive diet probably already knows this: starving yourself drives you mad.  I kinda knew this already, and not necessarily from dieting experience, but from knowing how I feel when I haven't eaten for a few hours. You know the drill: hunger makes you cross, grumpy and terrible company. Some people call this "hangry" which is probably pretty apt. However, now that I go various days without eating very much , "hangry" doesn't even begin to cover it. Besides being moody, irritable and grouchy, I have also been anxious, on edge and depressed. Not surprising given that I don't really know when this is getting better, worse or when I'll be able to have a normal meal again.  The worst part is that food is everywhere, which means that it is very difficult to distract myself with something else. I may start watching a great Disney+ series and find that it is entertaining... until the characters then decide to sit down ...

I mentioned before some of the physical effects that not being able to eat has had on me. I’m obviously hungry and thirsty but there are some other things that are worth talking about a bit more. Even before any of this started, I was already having a slightly different relationship to food than most: my low blood sugar meant that I was prone to fainting spells if I, for example, skipped breakfast. So I am pretty religious about eating when I wake up, if I want to be able to make it through without passing out. This has also meant that I can function better when I have a series of smaller meals throughout the day and have always ensured I have a couple of snacks to hand. Of course, this doesn’t mean that I was 100% healthy in all my choices - and more often than not, my snack of choice was a sweet coffee. But in terms of blood sugar, this was fine although it wasn’t great for my weight. Having said that, I did try to make these snacks at least not terrible, and I’d made great friends ...

During the summer of 2021, it became obvious that the extended pandemic lockdown wasn’t doing me any good. I’d spent a lot of time cooking, baking, and working out mostly in a “casual” way – certainly not doing the hard workouts I had done before 2020. So, a bit of extra weight was beginning to show and some of my jeans were a little too tight. I have never been a great fan of diets, having tried several and found them unrealistic, unsustainable, or just dangerous. Plus, I love food too much so that wouldn’t be the option. Instead, I made a plan to eat smaller portions and try to increase the strenuousness of my workouts. I only had 5 or 6 kilos to lose, so done in a safe way I should be back to my baseline weight in a few months. But little did I know that much like that pandemic , the universe had other plans for me. Sometime in early October 2021, I noticed that sometimes I struggled to eat certain foods. I would sit down to eat some pasta, for example, and was having issues w...