Fear of Food

How can someone who is so overweight be afraid of food?

 

I am afraid of food.

 

So far today, I am feeling better than I was yesterday.  Not good, but better. 

 

Yesterday my pain was getting pretty severe.

 

I am afraid I ate something made me sick.  I don't know what it was.  The peach cobbler at the Truck Stop?  The Frangelica?  The beer?  I'm not supposed to have alcohol.  The banana, which is on the no-no list? All the shallots I've been eating, closely related to onions, a distinct no-no?  The white rice, another no-no?  The tomatoes?   Or what? 

 

It might not be something I ate.  It could be something else.  But so far, it seems that my pain is partially correlated with food consumption.  Soy, for example, exacerbates the fibro.  That is, it makes me hurt and makes me stiff. 

 

There is a list of items I am supposed avoid:  The list includes nightshades, coffee, chocolate, soy products, dairy products, apples and oranges, bananas, onions, alcohol, etc.  I can barely remember it.  To further confuse things, I can sometimes eat those things without adverse effects (but it may be cumulative) and sleep quantity and quality also effects me, as well as stress.  The list says not all fibromyalgics respond negatively to all the triggers listed.  So it is hard to ascertain which triggers affect me when.  But now that I've been sick all week, I am very nervous about eating.  And I want to get enough sleep.

 

Sleep is hard, because we always get to bed late, and I have sleep apnea and insomnia.  I don't know how to cure it.

 

The fourth factor is exercise--I supposedly need to get enough and it needs to be the right kind.  But it is not always easy to have enjoyable exercise if I'm in PAIN!  It seems like a Catch-22.

 

To be healthy, I need to do the following things:

• eat right. 
• eat less, eat properly, avoid trigger foods
• sleep well, sleep enough (hard to do with late bedtimes, insomnia, and sleep apnea!)
• get enough of the right kinds of exercise--aerobic and stretching (hard to do when in pain)
• avoid excess stress (yeah, right--unfortunately, when I'm in pain, everything seems stressful!)

The whole thing creates its own "downward" or negative spiral.  What I want to know is, what can I do to turn it around to create a positive spiral.

 

--
I am certain of nothing but the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination- John Keats
Mary

Looking on one of the rearview mirrors on TA's new Truck, photo by Mary Stebbins 

crying

I've been crying a lot today.  Every tear I shed makes me feel a lot lighter and more cheerful. 

 

I read somewhere that when you cry, you shed toxins.  I wonder if the chicken came before the egg.  Does the sadness create the toxins or the toxins create the sadness?  Do I have to cry over my own real problems, or will any problems do?  There is certainly plenty to cry about in this world.

 

Too bad when I cry for the people in New Orleans, it doesn't somehow help THEM.

--
I am certain of nothing but the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination- John Keats
Mary

Mary Dancing at Golden Harvest Festival

the funny things that cheer me

I sent a picture to Pam of me dancing at Golden Harvest Festival and asked if she could spot me in the picture.  She asked if I was the second pumpkin from the left and I said

 

Yup, that's me, all round and orange-faced, yuk yuk!

 

and she said

 

Well I would have said curvaceous and voluptuous!

 

and I said

 

Yes, that's me, that's what Keith says anyway.  He he!  LOL!  ROTFLOL!  Thank you, I needed that.

 

Because her saying that reminded me that Keith likes and LOVES me even though I consider myself to be fat in a bad way.  And I felt his love and it made me feel loved and happy--for a moment, anyway.  And I smiled.

 

(But now I feel sad again!  WAHN!  WHY?)

--
I am certain of nothing but the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination- John Keats
Mary

A Sense of Pressure

050906 MP Tuesday, September 06, 2005; 11:11 AM  I feel a sense of pressure.   I feel a little overwhelmed.  I feel tired and depressed.  I feel as if I am on the edge—on the edge of exploding, on the edge of anger.   I am not happy or well and for no particularly good reason that I can readily determine.  I AM TAKING A BREAK TO WRITE BECAUSE I FEEL AS IF I must WRITE.   I FEEL DESPERATE.  Oh dear, those cap locks were not intentional but they may as well have been.  I suppose.

 

I love Keith and I am happy to be in a relationship with him, but at the same time, I feel as if somehow I am being lost.

 

He may well feel the same way.

 

I just read this morning that widowers tend to remarry within two years and those that do tend to be unhappy, because they need to talk about their dead wives and the new wives, for appropriate reasons, don't want to talk about the other women their husbands loved.   The lack of ability to talk about their dead wives and their grief is not good for their health.  They need to talk about it.   They need to discuss what happened and how they feel about it.

 

I believe this and I have upon occasion invited Keith to talk about Susan in the past, but he rarely does, and I can't blame him, because of course it upsets me terribly to imagine him loving another woman, being intimate with her and so on.   I don't even like to write about it.

 

I understand of course that he hadn't met me yet and he wasn't being unfaithful to me or anything, and I too had previous husbands.   And previous intimacies, of course.  But knowing that intellectually does not make it feel any better—it still hurts. I don't know why.  I hate for my hurt, my possibly unreasonable hurt, to hurt Keith.  If he needs tot alk, I wish he could—to a counselor, to a friend, or even to me—he would just have to approach it with care and caution.   He would have to preface his remarks by saying something like:  "I really need to talk about Susan, would you be willing to listen?"   And then to also listen to my own fears about it.

 

I keep taking deep breaths and sighing, as if there were something heavy weighing on me, but I don't know what it is.   There are a lot of little things, but I am not sure what is upsetting me so much.

 

Here are some things that are bothering me right now:

 

• The lack of progress on selling the Kimbrook house and settling the divorce and marrying Keith and getting moved to Detroit
• The fact that NO ONE (including us, Keith and I, the lawyer, Bruce and so on), seems to care or be making any effort at all toward making progress in this direction.
• My constant pain, my fibromyalgia and associated symptoms, my insomnia, my fatigue and tiredness, my grouchiness, irritability and on-edgeness.
• My lack of energy and motivation—I feel so depressed I don't want to do anything at all right now, and when I do want to do things, I don't seem to have any energy
• Old age ("and treachery")
• A heaviness of heart
• The fact that I am not writing or doing any of my creative work
• The loss of all my work on the hard drive of Dead
• The disorganization of everything, my inability to locate any of my stuff anywhere any more, due to the move in part, and my forgetfulness, and lack of organizational skills and energy and the fact that there is nowhere to put anything.  
• The increasing messiness of the Detroit house—it seems to be heading in the same direction as the Kimbrook house.
• Tension in the family, between Keith and Graham, Keith and me, Graham and me etc.
• An overall sense of impending doom (I tend to have an all or nothing attitude when I'm depressed and it seems like everything is bad).
• I feel as if I am just too fat and always getting fatter and there is nothing I can do about it.
• I feel as if I can't get enough air, as if things are closing in on me
• I'm worried about my mother, her health and happiness, her house, her estate, her car etc.
• I want to write, but now that everything is lost I feel as if I have to start all over from scratch and don't know where to begin.   It seems like a hopeless task.  Everything feels hopeless.
• I feel guilty for feeling this way in the light of the hurricane victims in New Orleans, the Tsunami victims, the starvation victims, the war victims etc.   The English bombing victims and the Russian bombing victims and all the other suffering people in the world—those with Malaria and tuberculosis and cancer etc.   I feel bad for them but I still feel bad for myself and I also feel as if I have no right to feel bad but I do.  AK

Well, I could go on and on, but I guess this isn't doing a bit of good.

I guess I will go out and walk around the block in the sunshine.  Maybe that will help.

 

 

11:51 AM even the sun through the window is cheering me--a little!

--
I am certain of nothing but the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination- John Keats
Mary

Pain and Pleasure

Kate, my friend in England, made some remark to me about how the fibromyalgia must be debilitating and I wrote back to tell her I’d been feeling much better lately. I have been, but I never should have said so. That was this morning. This evening, my fibromyalgia is the worse it’s been in months. It is terrible. Everything hurts, and I mean everything. Every ligament in my body and pulled tight. My head hurts, my stomach hurts, my hips, knees ankles hurt. Everything. I feel as if I’ve been run over by a proverbial truck.

When Keith comes home, I tell him I hurt and that he may have to make dinner. He is patient and willing. I ask if he will lie down with me and hold me for a few minutes. His touch usually makes me feel better. I take two Ibuprophens, something I only do in an emergency and we lie down together. He holds me gently, offers to rub my neck and my back. Mostly, I just want him to hold me. I snuggle very close. I am in so much pain I think about dying. If I was in this much pain all the time, I would not want to live. I would not be as stoic as my father was when he was dying, refusing morphine in order to stay lucid and alive. I would die first, I think. I certainly was wishing to die this evening. And I know pain can get much worse, I’ve been worse.

I lay there in Keith’s arms, flipping back and forth between appreciating his loving embrace and wallowing in my pain. I felt truly sick. Deeply sick, something that ravaged my entire being and made me feel less than human. I was also itchy. I often am when I have fibromyalgia “attacks.” So I had to keep rolling painfully away to scratch myself. At one point, despite my pain, which was perhaps letting up just a little due to the Ibuprophen, I poked absentmindedly at Keith’s crotch and commented that there was nothing there. A eunuch. He poked at my breasts, saying he wished they were more accessible. Then, he commented, there’d be something there in his pants to discover. The next thing I knew, he had gotten up to close the bedroom door in case the eleven-year-old came home from his friend’s house. I laughed, thinking of Jo(e)’s recent post on sex on the beach, about attempting to hide adult sex from kids. About my on-going discussion on play with Pam.

Soon, we were busily engaged in wonderful love-making, beautiful slow sensitive love-making. I recalled sex during colds and fevers and flues and other times of illness and accident. I noticed that during the entire slow wonderful process, I was experiencing almost no pain.

Afterwards, Keith said it was survival of the species, species survival being more important than individual survival. I thought wryly that my individual survival was briefly in question, at least in my mind. When the pain returned again, it was not as strong as it had been. I wondered if the difference was the sex or the Ibuprophen, or both. Endorphins are wonderful pain relievers, related to morphine, and made me want to survive for another stolen cuddle. To more than survive, to thrive.

A Gentle Proposal

A Gentle Proposal

As I drove toward Detroit, I got more and more excited and more and more scared and nervous. I was eager to see Keith and Graham but terrified of the way we had left things--my engagement ring on the counter, a terrible blow up. The tension mounted. I was also totally exhausted from a long hard week and very little sleep the night before (and for the last two weeks since we broke up). I had to drink coffee and eat chocolate and was afraid the irritability those substances always give me would interfere with our re-bonding.

The wait at the customs was an hour an 15 minutes and the extra large coffee had percolated through, making me very uncomfortable. I stopped at the rest area halfway from the border to Detroit--as did a lot of other people! I knew at that point I was about a half hour from "home"--or from Keith's house, depending.

That started the countdown:  26 mile road, 10 mile road, 8 mile road. Vernier, Allard, Moross. My exit. Then the drive to Mack and the turn. Passing the school and the three churches, the rock where I turn to go around the block --all my landmarks for finding my way to Keith. It was dark, after 9 PM! Keith was waiting in the front yard. I saw him headed across the lawn in the dark. I was so tired I could barely get out of the car.

I said, "Hi sweetie!" I rose creakily and stepped into his arms. We stood there in the open door of my car and held each other. And held each other and held each other and held each other. Cars sped by down the dark street and we stayed there in each others arms. It felt like heaven. It felt like home. It was warm and smelled wonderful--like the man I love. Finally, we pulled slowly apart and unloaded a few of the things in the car. Keith made dinner for me--steak and a veggie stir-fry and beer.

Graham came down and had leftover hot wings and sat with us. Then left again. Keith and I talked about taking Graham to Parcells in the morning for summer select choir. When I was done eating, I wanted to see if I could get Dead going. He called me over and I went to him and hugged and kissed and held him. He told me he loved me, I told him I loved him, and he asked me if I would marry him. He proposed to me again. I said I would and I wanted to and I loved him, and he gently put the engagement ring back on my finger.

If that is not a man to love and cherish and treasure, I don't know what is. We went upstairs to read Harry Potter, and the celebrated our new engagement in the appropriate way, of course.

--
I am certain of nothing but the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination- John Keats
Mary

Lamp at Scott's. Sometimes, when light seeps through the crack in darkness, there is beauty. Photo by Mary Stebbins 

A really nice lunch

I made myself a really nice lunch today, and it made me happy and made me feel as if I'm recovering. I wrote a little piece about it, very short, but I put it in No Polar Coordinates because it wasn't "unbearably Dark". Then I thought, that's not fair. If you've been following the story HERE, you'll never know when things improve if I post that there!

If you want to read it, click here!

If this, or any other link on any of my sites don't work, leave me a comment and I will do what I can to repair them.