I can’t believe I ate the whole thing…

Are any of you old enough to remember that Alka Seltzer commercial?  Well, the whole thing I’m referring to is the idea that our food supply was safe and in the hands of Ma and Pa Farmer.

Wrong.

Just got through watching the movie, “Food, Inc.”  If I had any doubt about the food-fibro connection before, this movie ground it out of me.  Oh my god.  It’s so much worse than I even knew.  I cannot go through the whole movie right here but suffice to say you MUST watch it.  Seriously.  Because you can’t watch it and then blithely go back to your old eating habits.  Or at least I can’t watch it and go back to my old eating habits.  No more store bought meat for me and mine; it’s gotta be from someplace I trust.  Which is definitely not Albertsons or Safeway.

I hope I can get Kevin to watch it or at least understand why we’ve got to change our food…even more than we’ve been doing.   Who would of guessed I’d get so riled up about something at age 53?  But it’s got me going.

Besides having my daughter move 1000 miles away to Texas, my mother has been having more serious health problems.  I want her to stay in her own place as long as possible (and probably so does her husband, my stepdad) but it seems to require a hell of a lot more effort from me and my siblings.  I’ve been going over there 4 or 5 times a week to help her manage her diabetes.  And all the funny little things she forgot or stories she repeated 100 times are taking on a darker light.  The word “dementia” is definitely coming into play with her doctors.  Sigh…  And I’m the oldest child plus a female so I’m taking the lead.  My siblings probably couldn’t pry the job away from me even if they wanted.

The only reason I can even DO this now is because of my diet.  Otherwise, my fibromyalgia wouldn’t allow it.  It would be too much.  So I’m grateful but sad.  And I need to write about it.

So I guess the blog is back on.

Official Food, Inc. Movie Site – Hungry For Change?

Official Food, Inc. Movie Site – Hungry For Change?.

Closing up shop…at least for a while

My blogging has dried up to almost nothing since my daughter left for Texas.  I think I just need some time to get used to the idea.  Of course she moved to Killeen just in time for the shootings.  She’s fine and so are her friends.  It’s just weird to have someone so close to such an act of violence.  I can’t imagine how the families of the killed and injured feel.  Or the witnesses.

So I’m taking time off of blogging.  I’m still on my diet; my body would feel SO sick if I wasn’t right now.  Stress and I are not friends.  But I’m going to focus on my art work and the site to show it.  I’ll soon have it up at:

http://www.jackiputnam.com

Until then, take care of each other.

Jacki

Meet me at the impasse

It’s been pins and needles around here waiting for our darling Meghan to arrive safely in Texas.  Yesterday she made it and we are all relieved.  Of course, now I am free to miss her a LOT.

I’m amazed by this phenomenon of healing that we’ll call the “That’s Great Now What?” principle.   Even though I’ve been sick as a dog the better part of the last four years and since the Diet Experiment I’ve resolved about 80% of my pain, I find myself longing for more.  I want to feel even better…I want to eat even more.

In order to help myself through this impasse, I’ve started to jot down what all I eat during the day so I can get a better handle on what sets me off.  And trying some new things.  Almond cheese, cheddar flavor which was marginal.  Rice Dream ice-cream-ish dessert.  It was NOT good but only because it was chocolate chai flavor and I don’t like chai.  I’m not sure what my thinking was in buying it but it seemed like a good idea at the time.  It was on sale, that much I remember, and there were not any other flavors.  Hmmm….

I’m not craving a lot so that’s good.  But I’m worn out lately and kinda tired of cooking.  Plus,  it’s time to go grocery shopping and do some meal planning.  Not in that order I hope.

Oh by the way, my doctor emailed me today to say that all my food allergy tests were negative.  That’s certainly par for the course.  All my medical tests come back normal.  She offered to send me to an allergist but I don’t think I’ll go.  It might not be an allergy I have to these many foods.  It’s certainly not the typical allergic reaction with antibodies in my blood.  I can’t say that I understand it…the more I eat certain foods, the more I feel like I have fibromyalgia.  Is that a sensitivity?  Or am I just weird??

Whatever it is, it’s working a lot better to NOT eat these foods that seem to make me hurt; corn and tomatoes for sure, dairy, gluten and soy to a lesser extent.  I’m trying to eliminate or minimize these things the best I can.  And all I really have to do is learn to cook things from scratch.  Delicious things.  It can be done because there are hundreds of people blogging about doing this out there in internet-land.

I’m grateful for each one of them.

Happy Halloween

Time has gotten away from me the last couple of days.  It was all great suspense as DD Meghan drove into a Wyoming to Colorado blizzard.  We got lots of updates and plans changed by the hour as she holed up in Sheridan, WY to wait it out.  When she left Sheridan she was halted by road closures, compact snow and ice as well as blowing snow.  Yikes!  My jaws ache from gritting my teeth.

By yesterday she was with friends in Colorado and by this evening she was almost to Oklahoma.  She drove in warm sunshine the whole day.  What a relief.  But I don’t think I’ll stop grinding until she arrives safely in Killeen, TX.  It should only be one more day, I hope.

In the meantime, I’ve not been feeling all that great.  Stress really sucks the energy out of me.  Plus, I ate cheese again, convinced that I was wrong about the reaction last time.

Uh…nope.  I was right.  No more cheese.

So today I was achy and sore and dragging butt.  I tried to eat cleanly; apple for breakfast, hot buckwheat cereal for lunch, and some lovely baked chicken thighs for dinner.  I’ve still got the dried rosemary my Auntie brought me from her garden and I am loving it with chicken!

I also wanted some kind of sauce or gravy to go over the leftover cooked buckwheat which we were eating for dinner.  I made a roux with Smart Balance margarine and brown rice flour, then added some chicken broth I had in the freezer.  Tasted pretty good.  It’s true; everything is better with gravy.

I’m trying to do a little more planning since last month I waaaaay overspent on groceries trying to find what I liked out of what I could eat.  Now I have to get seriously organized in my meal plans, shopping list and food budget.

That does not sound like me.  But I’ll give it an honest try.

In the meantime, I need to learn not to let the fridge and pantry get too low on safe things to eat.  Right eating doesn’t come naturally to me yet and once I get hungry then my decision making skills deteriorate fast.  That’s the situation where I thought maybe eating pepper jack cheese would be okay if I just put it on a rice cake.  Yeah, right.

Speaking of cake, it’s about that time again.  I haven’t had a cake or dessert or a cookie in too long.  I think tomorrow I am going to try Apple Cake from Karina’s Kitchen.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

Sadness and chocolate pudding

The sadness is from saying goodbye to Meghan for an indefinite period.  She left yesterday morning to move to Texas.  She’s driving..alone..all the way.  I already talked to her this morning and she’s holed up in Sheridan, WY, socked in by a blizzard and counting her diminishing cash.

So yesterday I was sad, anxious and tired.  This calls for treats, right?  It’s the end of the month, the cupboard is bare but I need some comfort food.  Seriously.

Enter chocolate pudding.  I found a simple recipe here.  I substituted arrowroot for cornstarch, used rice milk and Baker’s unsweetened cocoa.  Gluten, corn and dairy free.  Oh, and I used organic brown sugar instead of white.  The result?  A passable extremely-dark-chocolate-tasting pudding.  The only complaint is that the recipe calls for straining (which I skipped, of course, because it would take too long) and I should have tried it because it was kinda grainy.   But it hit the spot and did the job.  Whew!

The other exciting event happening today is that I’m going to see my doctor for the first time in about 6 months.  Last time I visited her I was still taking 6 tramadols a day and having breakthrough pain and exhaustion.  This is going to be so fun to share with her all the wonderful news of doing so much better!!!  She’s going to be happy for me.

Changes…

I’d put something totally cool and pertinent in here if I was a little more awake.  So feel free to pause and think of a clever pun or quote.

There…

Wanted to get down a couple of thoughts before the day starts going by too fast.  I really need to update my page called, “What I can eat” because I’m pretty sure I’m off that list.  And probably make a boring page called Food Diary just for me to keep track.  These are the tasks for this week.

Yesterday I felt hungry all day.  Which is frustrating because I ate…but just that ongoing craving for something that I can’t decipher.  Could there be a withdrawal period for corn?  Or for gluten?  God knows I’m still getting corned enough through hair products, packaging, hand sanitizer, etc.  Plus I’m still in denial that my health has anything to do with corn.

Which is a weird thing.  Intellectually I can put 2 and 2 together and come up with corn sensitivity.  I eat corn, I wake up with a bad case of fibromyalgia. But it bumps up against the part of my brain that says, “but I’ve eaten corn products all my life, how could I become sensitive to it?”  See the disconnect?

Plus I feel myself becoming one of those people…you know, the kind of person who is seething with the impassioned speech, “How Our American Diet is Poisoning All of Us”.

Sigh…except I really believe it.

Another factor in all this food stuff lately is that my only daughter, precious Meghan (who is a grown woman by the way) is getting ready to move back to Texas on Wednesday.  Therefore I feel sad.  Therefore I crave old school comfort food which I cannot have.  Therefore I am pissed.

Okay, on to lighter news.  Yesterday I tried to eat simply with GF oatmeal for breakfast, cold cauliflower and chicken for lunch (tasted awful), and sweet potato fries and carrots for dinner.  Also not good.  You can see I’m having trouble making the effort.  I was hungry when I went to bed and thought it would be good just to BE that.  Go ahead and be a little hungry…and a little crave-y, and lose some of this fear around it.  I seem to have survived the night intact.  🙂

My plan for today is to stay simple, eat protein, try to take care of at least one problem that I’ve been procrastinating about ($$), and work in my studio to get something completed.

I’ll let you know how I did.

Not so mighty fibromite

I’m really discouraged today.  I woke up stiff with a band of pain around my abdomen about kidney height.  And anxious as all hell.  The lists of foods and food categories that are safe and unsafe are spinning around in my head like Dorthy’s twister.

I need to get a grip on myself.

This corn thing is much more overwhelming than the gluten.  How I’m going to go about this is beyond me at the moment…except to say for today, I can eat oatmeal, sweet potato, chicken and veggies.  Basically.  That can be my diet for today.  I don’t think there is anything bad in these things (my oatmeal is GF).  I could probably find many things wrong with the chicken but I’m drawing a line.

And if the truth be told, I ate pepper jack cheese last night like I was flipping off a stranger.  Boldly and aggressively even while knowing it was wrong and I would feel shitty later.  Sigh…

Oh, and get this.  When I was taking tramadol for my fibromyalgia it would work less and less so I’d take more and more.  (any addict will tell you how that works!)  The last couple of years I took 6 pills a day.  And still had pain.  And brain fog up the butt.  This last spring I went slowly off the tramadol and felt tremendously better.  I am still taking the hydrocodone but it works really well and I have little to no side effects.  Except dependency but I can deal with that.

Anyway…….I googled tramadol and guess what the first “inert” ingrediant is?  Cornstarch!  I could not find any evidence of cornstarch in the hydrocodone.

This is crazy…

So all signs point to corn and it’s devil spawn of derivatives.  Last night I went through the cupboard telling Kevin in an increasingly rising voice, “oh god, this has corn in it, this has corn in it, etc, etc.”  Until he suggested I might want to calm down.

Just for today (thank you AA) I know I can eat unprocessed meat (if there is such a thing), vegetables (except nightshades) and fruits (except citrus).  That’s not too complicated, is it?

I’ve gotta laugh or I’m gonna cry…..

A big a-ha moment

So I’m dinking around on the web, not feeling good because of the tomatoes.  And I decide to investigate corn.  I’ve been really focused on gluten free and I know nightshade plants such as tomato get me bad.  But remember when I had corn one evening?  Of all the things I’ve challenged and gotten a reaction to, it was the worst.

I’m reading these corn allergen/intolerance sites and things start falling into place.  When I’ve been eating my baking I get a stinging throat.  Not a big body thing but a nasty sting.  Well, all my baking has vanilla and guess what kind of alcohol they make it with?  Yep, corn.  Ditto baking powder.  And some corn sensitive people can’t do sorghum or xanthan.  All in my baking.

Plus I’ve had several surgeries in my life.  Everytime I get sick as a dog and always have problems right afterward.  I definitely vomit my guts out, even with a surgery that is supposed to be a day surgery.  I end up staying overnight at least.

Guess what was in my IV the whole time?  Glucose.  Made from corn.

I’m not kidding.

So next up on this Diet Experiment path is focus on eliminating corn and it’s bajillion derivatives.  I’ve got to admit it’s a little overwhelming.  But maybe if I clear out corn, I’ll find I can bring other stuff back in.  One can always hope.

Makes me wonder if tramadol has a cornstarch base or something because I got so much better after I stopped taking it.

Next week’s doctor’s visit is going to be good.

Addendum to Ugg..

You know, maybe it would be good to re-read my own blog.  I decided to hit the tag “pain” and read the entries…maybe there was a clear pattern.

Yeah, whatever, because my entry dated the 15th of this month (found here) talks all about the pain I had from tomatoes.  Seriously.

Okay so note to self.  You can NOT eat TOMATOES, Jacki!!!

Geeze.