Eating My Cake

I don’t often post about my infertility journey here (okay, lately I don’t often post, period. Gotta work on that!). However, I wrote this poem recently, and felt compelled to share it in a place where maybe it might reach more who understand or need to hear someone else does.

Ready

I am ready to let go
To give up on the dream
Of holding our newborn son or daughter
I no longer imagine her face
Would his son have his eyes and my hair?
I don’t dream of these things…
Anymore

I want to move on
To different, if not better, dreams
But memories rush in
Painful splashes of red
And tell me I’m not really a woman,
Just a facsimile of one

My hell is this excruciating reminder
Of my failure to give him both of us
My soul as torn to shreds as my insides,
I’m barren like the trees of winter
My mind as twisted as their stark, black limbs

My heart repeatedly crushed,
Just as it beats again
The healing process endless
The pain a relentless rush of red

Okay… so….

In January, my husband and I began to play Second Life. It’s a virtual world, for those who don’t know.

In February, we met this girl… we soon developed feelings for her.

In April, we met her in real life. She’s been to our house twice now and is eventually moving in with us.

We’re redefining love.

We never would’ve looked for this, and never could’ve imagined we’d want it. If you’d told us this in January, we’d have laughed our asses off.

But it’s real, and should we walk away just because it defies convention?

It’s complicated and yet so effortless. We all just fit together.

So… that’s what has kept me busy these past few months. It’s a good busy, at least.

xoxo,

Juliet

I am posting all ten. In weeks to come, I aim to address each one and how I have worked through the principle or still am struggling with it. I am doing this because with stress and depression comes not being as attentive… and so this is a refresher course for me, and hopefully helpful to some of you, also.

Taken from the website that supports the book Intuitive Eating.

10 Principles of Intuitive Eating

1. Reject the Diet Mentality Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Get angry at the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back all of the weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating.

2. Honor Your Hunger Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. Once you reach the moment of excessive hunger, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating are fleeting and irrelevant. Learning to honor this first biological signal sets the stage for re-building trust with yourself and food.

3. Make Peace with Food Call a truce, stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself that you can’t or shouldn’t have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and, often, bingeing When you finally “give-in” to your forbidden food, eating will be experienced with such intensity, it usually results in Last Supper overeating, and overwhelming guilt.

4. Challenge the Food Police .Scream a loud “NO” to thoughts in your head that declare you’re “good” for eating under 1000 calories or “bad” because you ate a piece of chocolate cake. The Food Police monitor the unreasonable rules that dieting has created . The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its loud speaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking indictments. Chasing the Food Police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating.

5. Respect Your Fullness Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you’re comfortably full. Pause in the middle of a meal or food and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what is your current fullness level?

6. Discover the Satisfaction Factor The Japanese have the wisdom to promote pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living In our fury to be thin and healthy, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence–the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience. When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting and conducive, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content. By providing this experience for yourself, you will find that it takes much less food to decide you’ve had “enough”.

7. Honor Your Feelings Without Using Food Find ways to comfort , nurture, distract, and resolve your issues without using food. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Each has its own trigger, and each has its own appeasement. Food won’t fix any of these feelings. It may comfort for the short term, distract from the pain, or even numb you into a food hangover. But food won’t solve the problem. If anything, eating for an emotional hunger will only make you feel worse in the long run. You’ll ultimately have to deal with the source of the emotion, as well as the discomfort of overeating.

8. Respect Your Body Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally as futile (and uncomfortable) to have the same expectation with body size. But mostly, respect your body, so you can feel better about who you are. It’s hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical about your body shape.

9. Exercise–Feel the Difference Forget militant exercise. Just get active and feel the difference. Shift your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie burning effect of exercise. If you focus on how you feel from working out, such as energized, it can make the difference between rolling out of bed for a brisk morning walk or hitting the snooze alarm. If when you wake up, your only goal is to lose weight, it’s usually not a motivating factor in that moment of time.

10 Honor Your Health–Gentle Nutrition Make food choices that honor your health and tastebuds while making you feel well. Remember that you don’t have to eat a perfect diet to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or gain weight from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It’s what you eat consistently over time that matters, progress not perfection is what counts.

xoxo,
Juliet

This is from a writer with the company I am partnering with for some articles about comfort when you work. I feel this is an excellent piece and that it’s very relevant in a world of anti-fat sentiment. Enjoy!

Body Acceptance in the Office

Most Americans spend the majority of their day sitting at a desk or in front of a computer. That’s roughly 8 hours a day, 4 hours a week spent sitting. It goes without saying that it is important to make sure you are seated properly throughout the day to help avoid back pain. Nothing makes a job harder than attempting to do it while you are uncomfortable or in constant pain. This can lead to stress and stress can lead to a host of other problems.

It is for this reason that it is important that you consider ergonomics when you choose an office chair. Ergonomics is essentially the science of comfort. You want your work station to be ergonomic in order to help banish back pain, stress, and increase your overall physical well being. Things like chronic back pain, neck pain, and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome can all be avoided if you are working in an environment that is ergonomically sound. This entails sitting up straight, with your feet flat on the ground and your elbows resting comfortably at your side. Perhaps the most important factor in achieving ergonomic nirvana is your chair itself.

There are many office chairs on the market today that have been specially designed with ergonomic specifications in mind. Options like lumbar support and adjustable arms help make sitting properly easier. However, as everyone knows people come in a variety of shapes and sizes. This means that a chair that may be considered ergonomic for one person may not necessarily be right for another.
People with larger frames will require a chair that is taller and wider to help give them the proper support. Luckily, many chair manufacturers have taken this fact into account and have designed models that are specifically designed for the big and tall. These chairs help make ergonomics possible for people that can rarely find comfort within the confines of a basic office chair.

There is no reason for you to be forced to buy your own office chair at your place of work. Consider asking your employers if they will supply you with a chair that can better support your specific body type. If it is causing you pain, then the situation is serious and should be dealt with as such. Most employers would most likely gladly pay the extra money for a new chair to help avoid having to pay your chiropractor bills later.

I have never been comfortable admitting when I am depressed. It is such an unusual sensation for me, and therefore one I fight tooth and nail every time.

However, right here and right now I will say it… I’m depressed.

It’s not as if I haven’t battled this ugly monster before. I experienced severe depression twice in my life. Once when was between fourteen and fifteen, and then again my freshman year of college when I was between eighteen and nineteen. While I’m human and have certainly felt depressed for a few hours or days at many times in my life, that is NOT the same as being in a severe depression.

Rationally, I understand that there are many things in my life right now, many challenges before us, that would cause any person to struggle to cope. Here’s just a short list:

1) My husband has MS and I worry about him because of it
2) I have fibromyalgia and live in chronic pain
3)I had my period for about seven week with terrible cramps and think I have endometriosis
4) Having my period is a slap in the face of my infertility issues
5) I’ve come to realize that it’s better we didn’t have kids because of our health issues
6) I hate knowing I’ll never hold a child created by us in my arms
7) My therapist essentially abandoned me, and she and I really clicked
8 ) My father-in-law, a wonderful man, died recently
9) My baby sister has been struggling and is now back in the hospital for depression and cutting
10) My brother’s in jail, and while I think it serves him right, he’s facing 18 years and it’s deeply upsetting for Missy and my dad, who will probably not see him outside of a jail cell again in his life
11) My mother’s a bitch who dropped 30 grand on his criminal case, but was never planning to pay for Missy to go to college
12) The economy has definitely impacted us

And I could go on and on…

So I look at this list, and realize… well, duh, sweetie… of course you’re depressed. If any of my friends had just one of these challenges on her list and was depressed, I’d tell her how understandable that is, and do all I could to support her through the difficulty. So, why am I so hard on myself???

I’ve made an appointment to see my doctor, and will have my medication tweaked. I take Lexapro, mostly for anxiety… but it IS an antidepressant, so hopefully if the dosage is raised, I’ll feel somewhat better (just as an aside, I have no issues accepting my anxiety problems… perhaps because I’ve been dealing with them for about as long as I can remember and that makes it just a part of who I am?).

The real frustration for me is how little of what I listed up there I can control, and how it impacts things I can control (like school, which I’ve been struggling with). I start to feel like, well, I can’t change any of it, so I just have to suck it up… but that hasn’t been easy to do, and there’s an awful lot up there to suck up.

Anyway, this is why I haven’t been posting much lately. My husband and I have spent a lot of time playing in SecondLife together… it’s an escape we desperately need right now, and since he’s with me there, we have a lot of fun. It gives me a chance to do things I can’t do in real life… like not have pain or seven week long periods. Like have a baby. It sounds silly, but it helps… and my doctor supported this for my husband, so I know she will for me, too.

I’m going to be taking on a neat little partnership of sorts here soon. I’m excited about it because I think it has the potential to really help some of my readers be more comfortable in their home and work lives.

More soon…

xoxo,
Juliet

This post is dedicated to the memory of my best’s friend’s brother, who recently died of this complicated disorder. When she found out why he died, I promised her I would post in his memory in an attempt to use what little presence I have in the blogosphere to raise awareness of this relatively unknown and extremely dangerous condition.

Imagine being able to eat virtually whatever you want while losing massive amounts of weight, or maintaining an extremely svelte figure. This is a dream many have had, and an opportunity few would turn down. It would be wonderful… but nothing like this can exist without dangerous risks. This is the story of a condition that allows for that “magical combination,” but at a deadly price.

In Type I diabetes, one of the first clues the condition exists is often dramatic weight loss, or an inability to gain weight. Since this condition often starts in childhood, this is a critical period in terms of learning how to have a healthy relationship with the body and the food that fuels the body. Diabetes takes something most of us take for granted as children - eating without much thought beyond “I’m hungry” and “I like this” - and makes it extremely complicated. Food becomes almost like a prison. It’s regimented, organized, structured… and there are major penalties for breaking the rules.

When you add insulin injections to the mix, the situation becomes even more challenging. Suddenly, the body holds on to weight in a way it previously couldn’t and didn’t. This fabulous article details the experiences of diabetics who have struggled with a relatively unknown eating disorder that grew out of a childhood health crisis: Diabulimia.

In diabulimia, the diabetic learns that withholding insulin results in weight loss. Some learn from other diabetics, or websites. Some learn by accident. Regardless, the lesson is a dangerous one, “if I starve my body of insulin, I can eat and lose weight.”

The risks are obvious. Without insulin, the body begins to rapidly deteriorate. Many diabulimics learn to withhold their life saving medications just long enough to avoid a diabetic coma. This, from the article mentioned above, describes that experience.

God, she needed air. Erin Williams lay in bed, her lungs aching with each long, excruciating gasp, and still she couldn’t get enough. Her heart was racing, pounding against her small chest. And she was so thirsty. She’d been up only an hour before to greedily gulp down water before falling back into bed and succumbing to a restless, uneasy sleep. Now she was awake again, her bladder unbearably swollen. Williams pulled herself from the bed, so dizzy she could hardly stand.

She reached in the dark for her purse, which held the drug she so desperately needed—insulin. She rummaged through her makeup and car keys, fumbling until her fingers encircled one of the cool glass vials. Merely looking at the bottle filled her with dread, knowing it held the medicine that had become so hated. She drew back the syringe, her shaky hands measuring out just enough to pull her back from the edge of a diabetic coma. Never a full dose, never enough to feel well…

Without proper treatment and insulin dosing, diabetics are at risk for heart conditions, damaged kidneys and visual problems… and ultimately, death. Sadly, this was the ultimate price paid by Matthew, my friend Melanie’s 38 year-old brother. He died just a few short weeks ago, after falling into a diabetic coma and going into cardiac arrest. His heart was strong, and ultimately revived… but the lack of oxygen cause irreparable brain damage. Matthew was gone, and after deliberation and grief, the family made the painful decision to remove life support and donate Matt’s organs.

At the time, they didn’t know yet that Matt had diabulimia. What they did know, was that his Type 1 diabetes had been recently raging out of control. He’d been in the ICU several times in the period of about seven months. He lived alone, in the city, while his wife lived in the home they shared in a rural part of Illinois. It was unconventional, but this was worked for them. Perhaps part of why it worked for Matt was that it gave him privacy his disorder craved. We will never know for sure.

When his wife went through his computer, she discovered dozens of bookmarks linking to sites about diabulimia… and suddenly, the mystery of his relatively dramatic weight loss and frequent visits to the hospital was solved.

Lanie is beside herself. She knows eating disorders all too well, having struggled with one of her own. I know she feels like she should’ve known, somehow. The reality is, though, that even if she had known, Matt might have fooled her into thinking he was fine. As is the case with bulimia and anorexia, diabulimia has its secret tricks to fool those who care. The article mentions one of the women featured dosing her glucose testing strips with alcohol to falsely lower her blood sugar by hundreds of points. Since diabulimics eat, and often have hearty appetites but do not (generally) purge their food, it’s hard to blame the more known, traditional eating disoders… and most people don’t know about diabulimia.

I was one of those people myself, until last Friday when Lanie told me about Matt. I have since discovered several groups to raise awareness on facebook, and have joined those groups. Those of you who have facebook, please consider doing the same thing.

If you know someone with Type I diabetes, and his or her behavior suddenly becomes odd, or they are losing a lot of weight, try to ask questions. Try to raise awareness. Talk to friends or family members who can help.

I know that Lanie loved her brother dearly, despite the expected sibling differences they struggled through. Her mother is distraught over having lost a child, something no parent should ever live through. My gift to Lanie and her mother is this blog post… a chance for Matt’s struggle to turn into a legacy that can help others get the help they desperately need. It’s such a small gesture in the face of so much anguish, but it is the most I can do.

Please, pass along the link to this post to anyone who might know anybody that needs help with this frightening condition. Those of you who blog about ED, if you feel it is appropriate, please link to this post as a way to help raise awareness.

Let’s help Matt’s death not be in vain, and pass along some sense of peace to his grieving family in the process.

xoxo,
Juliet

This is a horrifying story.

My heart breaks for this poor girl. First of all, she was 165 pounds. I expected her to be far heavier, based on how the story opens (not that it would’ve been acceptable at any weight, but I just didn’t expect the girl to weigh under 200). Second, I can relate, having been locked out of the fridge and cabinets (literally - the padlocked them) when I was about 13. It was an awful feeling. To add abuse and being chained to the bed on top of that, I can’t even imagine.

The thing that really kills me is that he says he did it for her own good and because she was sneaking food. He knows this because he found corn and pea containers in her room. So, this poor girl was chained to her bed and hit with a stick because she ate VEGETABLES!

This makes me sick. I can’t imagine it’s the first time a child has been abused by a parent because of being too fat, and I’m sure it’s not the last time it will happen. This man should be locked up for a very, very long time.

xoxo,
Juliet

As you know from looking at my sidebar, I am a Wellsphere blogger. I am asking for your vote in their People’s Health Blogger Awards competition. The voting closes on 1.15, and you can vote for me by clicking on the badge in my sidebar.

Thanks for your support!!! It is appreciated more than words can express.

xoxo,
Juliet

Maybe it’s asking too much, but I expect better from a “medical” site like WebMd. Wait, given the mainstream medical profession’s attitudes towards weight, I guess this isn’t so shocking.

I get email updates from them on the category of weight loss/dieting. This “find the perfect diet for you” quiz caught my eye, so I took it. My results? Weight Watchers came up at least three times. However, so did Atkins, Pritikin, What Color is Your Diet? (which I’d never even heard of before), South Beach and The Zone. Okay, so I answered six questions and they came up with FIVE choices. Five radically different choices, too.

Here are some of the suggestions to me:

Because you’re impulsive and don’t like to plan meals in advance, a flexible diet program may work well for you. Avoid diets that tell you exactly what to eat and when. Instead, look for plans that let you choose favorite foods at any time of the day, as long as you keep your calories low enough to lose weight.

Believe it or not, you can diet and still feel full after a meal. In fact, for many people, that’s key to weight loss success. You may enjoy a diet that encourages complex carbohydrates — vegetables and whole grains. You can stir-fry your favorite vegetables in a tomato sauce, Thai paste or with chilis for a hearty low-calorie stew. Or toss them in vegetable stock for a heart-warming soup. Many diets encourage vegetables, including The Pritikin Diet, Weight Watchers and What Color Is Your Diet.

Then there was this wonderful tidbit, in response to the answer I chose for the question on what type of vacation appeals to me (I selected “cruise,” because spas are not for vacation and kayaking isn’t compatible with fibromyalgia).

You enjoy relaxing and being pampered. But you’ll lose weight more easily — and keep it off — if you build exercise into your daily life. Look for a diet that includes support for fitness.

Right, since I want to relax on vacation, that translates into “you obviously hate to exercise and are lazy.” That’s logical.

Okay, so the take away is that any one of five fairly different diet programs is the best diet for me. Great, that’s helpful. Seriously, is this quiz sponsored by the dieting industry?

Wait, I know what the problem is… there are no PERFECT diets. They’re inherently all the same. They’re all, in some way, restrictive ways of eating that encourage disordered eating behavior.

Besides, I’ll be damned if I would ever take dieting advice from a website that also has a video on how you can save money on your next cosmetic surgery procedure.

xoxo,
Juliet

It is very common for those of us who have fibromyalgia to also struggle with irritable bowel syndrome. IBS is a frustrating and embarrassing condition. It can also be quite painful and debilitating.

I have actually struggled with IBS far longer than fibromyalgia, and my presentation is somewhat unique. Nausea tends to be my biggest issue, but it’s not the only problem. Just recently, Hope was diagnosed with IBS, too. She’s on a medication which seems to have helped, and I may ask my doctor about it, because I’ve been dealing with a “flare up” of IBS symptoms.

There are some fairly general “food rules” I have to follow. I cannot tolerate citrus fruits. I love orange juice and I adore clementines. I’m crazy about pineapple, but I can’t really eat it at all anymore. All of these fruits cause my stomach to be very angry. I experience acid and nausea. It’s awful. It’s the same with most raw veggies. I love salads, but especially if I am eating a vinegar-based dressing, I’m setting myself up for misery. There are times when I *can* tolerate salads, but I have to pay very close attention to how my stomach is feeling, and I have to get a creamy salad dressing, like bleu cheese or ranch.

IBS forces me into an entirely different type of intuitive eating, one with which I am still struggling to become comfortable. Worse, there are times when it throws me off track with the IE I am attempting to do for my ED. One of the principles of IE is eating what you enjoy… and with IBS, this if frequently not as simple as it sounds. I enjoy pineapple. I don’t enjoy the misery that comes after I eat pineapple. Same goes with salads. Whenever we go out to eat (which we do when we go grocery shopping) I am faced with “what can my stomach handle today?” as a component of deciding what I will order. Obviously, I am faced with that at home, too. It’s just when there are so many choices, as a menu gives, it can be tough to ignore my body’s craving for a good Cobb salad, which is full of great stuff like chicken and avocado and olives, but which will sometimes cause miserable IBS fallout because of the raw veggies.

Carbs are my stomach’s best friend. This is why diets that are exceptionally carb restrictive failed me every time. People said I was making excuses, but walk a day in my body and feel what it’s like to not get some type of carb at every meal, and you’ll understand. Frankly, it’s a pain in the ass to have to make sure I’m balancing my meals with carbs that will help to negate any problems the rest of the food might cause me to suffer.

One of the trickiest aspects is that sometimes, foods that seem like they should be totally taboo, are just fine. Other times, foods you wouldn’t imagine could cause a problem will. Tomatoes are often an issue, but not always. Bananas are usually safe, but sometimes cause me nausea. It’s crazy, frustrating and makes eating a huge hassle and challenge.

I take Protonix, and add Zantac when needed. I must, at all times, have Pepto Bismol caplets on hand (because the liquid is vile). Imodium is always in our house. Gas-Aid is another staple of the medicine cabinet.

What I’ve been struggling with during this recent flare up, is realizing that when my IBS needs go against what my IE needs want, I feel unsatisfied and therefore tend to overeat before I realize I am doing so. Which doesn’t help the situation, because then I am adding to the IBS discomfort by being overfull. Not fun.

So, I’m trying to learn to recognize what my body needs from an IBS perspective and balance that with what I need from an IE perspective. It is not a fun process, and it’s something like this that really makes me miss my therapist. It’s part of “self-care,” though, and so I know it is important. I also recognize that I am not perfect, and I will screw up while continuing on this journey towards self-awareness and being healthier, emotionally and physically. I just need to step back from my tendency to be very hard on myself and realize that it’s okay to make mistakes. More than okay, frankly, because from mistakes come growth and discovery.

xoxo,
Juliet