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Food and medicine
Mar. 6th, 2012 11:44 amSo today is about 11 days since I started taking thyroid meds.
Last week was incredibly stressful and I ended up sick -again- on Friday and spend most of the weekend recovering. I still have that terrible hacking cough, but at least I'm not stuck in bed.
Over the last 5 years my relationship to food has been slowly changing. At it's worst I was only starving or stuffed. My body didn't register many other sensations about food. My healer says that the one leads to the other and at some point told me to focus on what's good for me and just to listen the best that I could (and to not worry so much about it)!
One of the things that I learned in my short stint in OA was: it's none of my business what size my body is and that I'm best served focusing on eating well and taking good care.
Anyway, what I've noticed is that 2 years ago I started trying to eat on more of a schedule and so I was starving twice a day, not just once. And that when that happened, I needed to eat Right Now! I ate too much because I was responding to the nausea and light headedness of not eating often enough. When I got to this place, the only thing I could eat was either chocolate milk or yogurt. Anything else would make me sick.
My digestion and absorption process was pretty completely broken.
About 7 months ago (August 2011) I started to get hungry more times a day without being totally starving all the time. But I was still starving often and still eating too much in response to starving. I was eating most of a chocolate bar every day. JM (my healer) told me a long time back now that chocolate helps balance blood sugar and while it would be good to not eat so much of it, that it was doing a job and that if my body said that I needed it, to eat it. (Imagine seeing a doctor who's supportive of chocolate!) In fact she supports me in eating what my body is craving - and then telling her about it so that we can test for nutrient deficiencies and imbalances.
In this way I've felt like my healer is in alignment with my spiritual path of deep listening to people and the earth's body as a way of coming into balance.
Sometimes I would get "just hungry" instead of starving and I would eat a little and then that feeling would go away so I often wouldn't eat nearly enough. And of course not eating enough leads to those feelings of starvation, but I couldn't see that at the time. Part of not seeing it was that I was comparing the way other people were eating (in any given 1-off meal) with how I was eating because I had no real internal monitor. In short, my body hasn't been giving me accurate signals and so there was nothing to hear. The last few months the chocolate habit has dipped from a full bar to often just a few pieces.
Also when I got an adjustment or saw my healer, I'd become really hungry - the work she was doing on my body activated all those systems and so I'd temporarily be regular-hungry. But invariable, somewhere around my period, it would just go away. And nothing I could do on my own would bring it back.
This week I haven't been starving at all. I have been hungry and needing to eat every few hours. And sometimes if I don't eat enough, I'm still hungry! This morning I ate leftovers from yesterday's breakfast and about half an hour later I was hungry! And so I ate again!
Both of those are major triumphs. The fact that my brain and body worked together at signaling and that I responded to that signal with food - yay! Not just that but that the signaling is managing to prioritize over doing other things like working or phone calling or whatever. I used to put off food while doing other mind things until the familiar super-hunger came and made me sick.
In some ways this feels so weird - both that I'm just not sure what "normal" eating looks like and that I have essentially no practice at doing that. I grew up in a household where my mom constantly dieted so food was either forbidden, secretive, or binging (often all three). And where I swore I'd never diet. In my teens my heavy exercise routine meant that I ate constantly to be able to dance and swim so much. There were 4 years between the end of swimming and getting pregnant and that's when this stuff started. That was 15 years ago. So it's been at least that long since I even had a shot at "normal" eating.
So I feel very new and unskilled at food. I don't know how much to buy for consistently making real meals at home, I don't know how often to expect to eat, I don't know how to plan my day around making sure that I get enough food and I've no idea if or how this will change. But unlike last year when I felt despondent about the possibility of having to eat all the damn time, it's happening with much less effort. Meaning: it's happening.
I have found that healing is like that. It happens in waves and it often has to happen a bit at a time. I could see that I needed to change food things, but I couldn't do it. And then sometimes I could eat more regularly, but it didn't stick (no consistently signals) and now it feels like it's a more solid change. That probably means there will be some backsliding, especially if I fail to take meds which I go through cycles of not being able to do. Those cycles get better and easier consistently, but they haven't stopped and I don't expect to ever be perfect. My guess is that it also means that I'm healing. That my body will eventually be more able to do this thing. And that's what we want!
What I do know is that I feel better. Eating balances my blood sugar and makes my moods more stable. Whatever is in what I'm taking is allowing my brain-body connection to work. Yay!
Last week was incredibly stressful and I ended up sick -again- on Friday and spend most of the weekend recovering. I still have that terrible hacking cough, but at least I'm not stuck in bed.
Over the last 5 years my relationship to food has been slowly changing. At it's worst I was only starving or stuffed. My body didn't register many other sensations about food. My healer says that the one leads to the other and at some point told me to focus on what's good for me and just to listen the best that I could (and to not worry so much about it)!
One of the things that I learned in my short stint in OA was: it's none of my business what size my body is and that I'm best served focusing on eating well and taking good care.
Anyway, what I've noticed is that 2 years ago I started trying to eat on more of a schedule and so I was starving twice a day, not just once. And that when that happened, I needed to eat Right Now! I ate too much because I was responding to the nausea and light headedness of not eating often enough. When I got to this place, the only thing I could eat was either chocolate milk or yogurt. Anything else would make me sick.
My digestion and absorption process was pretty completely broken.
About 7 months ago (August 2011) I started to get hungry more times a day without being totally starving all the time. But I was still starving often and still eating too much in response to starving. I was eating most of a chocolate bar every day. JM (my healer) told me a long time back now that chocolate helps balance blood sugar and while it would be good to not eat so much of it, that it was doing a job and that if my body said that I needed it, to eat it. (Imagine seeing a doctor who's supportive of chocolate!) In fact she supports me in eating what my body is craving - and then telling her about it so that we can test for nutrient deficiencies and imbalances.
In this way I've felt like my healer is in alignment with my spiritual path of deep listening to people and the earth's body as a way of coming into balance.
Sometimes I would get "just hungry" instead of starving and I would eat a little and then that feeling would go away so I often wouldn't eat nearly enough. And of course not eating enough leads to those feelings of starvation, but I couldn't see that at the time. Part of not seeing it was that I was comparing the way other people were eating (in any given 1-off meal) with how I was eating because I had no real internal monitor. In short, my body hasn't been giving me accurate signals and so there was nothing to hear. The last few months the chocolate habit has dipped from a full bar to often just a few pieces.
Also when I got an adjustment or saw my healer, I'd become really hungry - the work she was doing on my body activated all those systems and so I'd temporarily be regular-hungry. But invariable, somewhere around my period, it would just go away. And nothing I could do on my own would bring it back.
This week I haven't been starving at all. I have been hungry and needing to eat every few hours. And sometimes if I don't eat enough, I'm still hungry! This morning I ate leftovers from yesterday's breakfast and about half an hour later I was hungry! And so I ate again!
Both of those are major triumphs. The fact that my brain and body worked together at signaling and that I responded to that signal with food - yay! Not just that but that the signaling is managing to prioritize over doing other things like working or phone calling or whatever. I used to put off food while doing other mind things until the familiar super-hunger came and made me sick.
In some ways this feels so weird - both that I'm just not sure what "normal" eating looks like and that I have essentially no practice at doing that. I grew up in a household where my mom constantly dieted so food was either forbidden, secretive, or binging (often all three). And where I swore I'd never diet. In my teens my heavy exercise routine meant that I ate constantly to be able to dance and swim so much. There were 4 years between the end of swimming and getting pregnant and that's when this stuff started. That was 15 years ago. So it's been at least that long since I even had a shot at "normal" eating.
So I feel very new and unskilled at food. I don't know how much to buy for consistently making real meals at home, I don't know how often to expect to eat, I don't know how to plan my day around making sure that I get enough food and I've no idea if or how this will change. But unlike last year when I felt despondent about the possibility of having to eat all the damn time, it's happening with much less effort. Meaning: it's happening.
I have found that healing is like that. It happens in waves and it often has to happen a bit at a time. I could see that I needed to change food things, but I couldn't do it. And then sometimes I could eat more regularly, but it didn't stick (no consistently signals) and now it feels like it's a more solid change. That probably means there will be some backsliding, especially if I fail to take meds which I go through cycles of not being able to do. Those cycles get better and easier consistently, but they haven't stopped and I don't expect to ever be perfect. My guess is that it also means that I'm healing. That my body will eventually be more able to do this thing. And that's what we want!
What I do know is that I feel better. Eating balances my blood sugar and makes my moods more stable. Whatever is in what I'm taking is allowing my brain-body connection to work. Yay!
