A Quiet Week? Ha. in Everyday Ramblings

I’ve been a bit of a missing person here lately. Last week I had a haircut and a dental appointment, a trip to the library as well as teaching my classes and working and working overtime. It all seems pretty straightforward if one has a car. Zip here, zip there and home again but these are all in different parts of town and walking and buses are involved.

Also, I have been consumed by the news and I can’t post here if I am listening to podcasts. On Friday when the notification came in that we had bombed Syria I turned everything off and went to bed. Absurdly early.

Oh and then there is the weather. I am grateful we are not dealing with mass quantities of snow like some of you but we have had quite a bit of wind and rain. After two below average months of rain we have now hit our monthly average half way through the month.

The other thing I have been focusing on is what seems like my endless quest to figure out why I am gaining weight in spite of making really healthy choices 95% of the time.

I am pretty much convinced that I have a food allergy, a relatively obscure one and that something I have been doing for the last year is triggering it. I am looking hard at anything I eat that generates craving in me because what is happening is I’ll get to this point, usually in the late afternoon, tiredness seems to be a factor, where all of a sudden I feel I need to eat and eat and eat and I do.

It happened to me on Friday maybe an hour before I was supposed to log off work, stress is a factor too, and in spite of all my well laid plans and logging of what precisely I eat and awareness of nutritional balance I started eating straight out of the bag this super healthy gluten free granola and then I moved on to a bag of Popchips and with my mouth full of them my work phone rang and it was the guy I am kind of sort of reporting to right now and I had to pick up.

He is a nice guy, very very smart, but he is on the spectrum, (kind of like Mark Zuckerberg) and his communication skills are challenged and he is working on a project that directly affects our work but is sort of off in his own world about it and I have feelings about this and my IT person has opinions and it is all awkward and loaded and I can’t wait to retire.

You get the picture.

But it is not that specifically that is making me eat. There is some trigger, like with a migraine or my back pain. The tiredness and the stress are just factors that make the overeating more likely to happen.

I think it is one of these FODMAP groups. “FODMAPS are short-chain carbohydrates that, if poorly digested, ferment in the bowel to cause severe digestive stress.” So this is something I have been basically ignoring, amazing how we do that. Chocking it up to the soda I drink or for a long time the ovarian cysts and the fibroid I’ve got. You know stuff like these strange growths, maybe even bone spurs, we get as we age.

Well and also the yoga mitigates the distress because it really does help with digestion. And I am teaching digestion this coming week so I am taking a deep dive into it.

I remember when the young doctor came into Mr. Finch’s hospital room after some additional testing the afternoon before he was scheduled for the brain surgery and told him that he did have lesions on his lungs and in a couple of his vital organs and he was like so this is okay, I know I have a brain tumor but lesions are not tumors and so it can’t be lung cancer, right???

He didn’t want it to be something caused by something that he was seemingly voluntarily doing to himself. (With the help of big tobacco I might add, adding addictive substances to a consumer product in this case cigarettes.)

There is a new book out by Barbara Ehrenreich called “Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer” that talks about what we are putting ourselves through to be and stay healthy. I think I will order the audiobook as I have a credit.

I want to understand why I feel the way I do and know if there is anything I can do about it but I also want to enjoy my life to the best of my ability in this moment and all the ones I have left.

Oh yeah. I went to the grocery today and I did not purchase any of the foods I have identified as triggers. Let’s see how I do in the week to come. Is it possible, she says snorting in disbelief, we could have a quiet one, umm, news wise?

Ha.

Last updated April 15, 2018