Be careful what you wish for

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 with swallowing even small bites of it. I would then have to abandon the meal, as I became increasingly anxious that I would choke. It was a weird sensation, that crept up on me slowly and it may have been getting worse for far longer than I recognize now. But in October, this inability to swallow was not just for one meal but carried over several days and was worrying enough for me to get in touch with a GP.

I will spare you the boring medical appointments and admin but suffice to say that getting seen during a pandemic was not easy and it took some tears in the walk-in clinic for someone to finally speak to me, give me some medicine and recommend some tests. I’ve also got a name for the condition: “dysphagia”.  Is it a symptom of something else, an illness, something to do with my mental health? I don’t know.

Things got a little better but even now (three months later) I’m still struggling to eat. The issue seems to be cyclical as there have been times when I have finished my entire meal but then there are other days when I am barely able to even swallow my own spit. This can go on for about 5 or 6 days in a row and I have found that I am better in the mornings than in the evenings meaning that I can sometimes drink my smoothie in the mornings (but it does take me forever) but the same smoothie will not go down that evening.

Similarly, it seems to affect different kinds of foods with some days being ok for solids but awful for liquids, and then the other way around. During one of these “episodes” I was able to eat peanut butter on thins but nothing else! Surely a sticky, thick substance like PB wasn’t ideal? Well, on those days this basically kept me alive by providing needed calories. But then other times I can’t swallow those foods.

Medically, the tests continue, and I still don’t know what is causing this or how to fix it. It is incredibly frustrating as it is horrible when I can’t eat anything for days. On top of everything else, I’ve always had naturally low blood sugar so eating small meals throughout the day is the best way to keep me from fainting. As you can imagine, this is impossible to do when I can’t swallow much of anything at all. I worry about what this is doing to my heart and if there will be long-term consequences of these unwanted fasting periods.

Physically, this means I’m often on the verge of being dehydrated (I try my best to have small sips of water on the worst days) and of course, I’m always hungry. I get terrible headaches and I’m not sure if they are from the dehydration, the anxiety, or the fact that I’m unable to have coffee and I’m going through withdrawal. I’m also often light-headed and of course, my moods are all over the place. I can feel my stomach growling from hunger and when I try to have the tiniest bite of whatever it is I think I can eat (like half an almond) I will chew it for like 10 minutes and then attempt to swallow. It either goes down sort of ok, or I nearly choke which means I am certainly not going to try and eat the other half of the nut.

I hope that with further tests we can find out what is going on here and recover. There are SO MANY things that are impacted by the inability to swallow that I will cover in other blog posts. I think I am starting to spot patterns so I thought that blogging about this would help me try to help figure out what is wrong. At the very least, this should help my mental health which is being severely tested by this issue.  

As for my weight, let’s just say that this has been both the best and the worst “diet” I’ve ever been on. It has definitely helped to lose those pandemic kilos, but I certainly wouldn’t recommend.