I wrote up some tips for spoonies here. If you’re eliminating gluten, dairy, corn, and soy, and you have limited energy, check those out.

In the past, I’ve been too scared to try eliminating any particular food for more than a week. The reason was two-fold: one, I have such limited energy and I perceived dietary restrictions as being lots of extra work and two, I really like dietary indulgences. I savor good food. I think having something tasty is a great pleasure in life. And I tend to be a person who is fairly well-behaved (drinking rarely, staying away from drugs that aren’t prescribed to me, OTC, or caffeine, avoiding smoking, almost never going to parties). I think because I have so few indulgences, good food and laziness feel extra special to me. (Having limited energy does not equal being lazy. But sometimes, even when I do have a bit of energy, I give myself a lazy day.)

This time, I knew it would be different, because I’d have my health coach Monica to talk me through the plan, and to check in with me on how it’s going (an extra big deal since she’s going to have a little one any day now! so it’s very nice that she takes the time to email me). I’ve found those ways to deal with the diet that I mentioned in the tips post linked earlier. But I’ve learned some other things, too.

I’ve learned that I can be very happy with a salad, if I put the right things in it. I’ve learned that locally produced meats are amazing. I’ve learned that sometimes you really want butter, not olive oil or coconut oil, and that is a good time to use bacon grease if you happen to have it on hand.

My big takeaway, that I hope will stay with me even after I’m done adding foods back in and seeing what does or doesn’t make me feel bad, is that if I’m willing to do a little work and carefully budget, I can get high quality ingredients and make myself things that are not only just as indulgent as any foods I was eating before this, but tastier. Obviously, I shouldn’t subsist on a diet of Izze and Lara bars, or even home-made almond flour muffins (though anything made with almond flour is going to be much lower in sugar than any other baked good). But I hope that I’ve given myself a good foundation for expanding my diet to include a wider variety of healthier foods, without feeling deprived of the junk food I ate so often in the past. And I’ve learned that I don’t need to be afraid of changing my diet. I won’t starve, eat something that will make me feel bad because I decide it’s worth it, or live off of pistachios and fruit (though that has served as lunch a few times in the past 3 weeks).

Hello, friends! I’m on an elimination diet right now to see if I can identify specific foods as autoimmune triggers.  I’m using a protocol from the book The Immune System Recovery Plan. This is a very basic plan where I cut out gluten, dairy, corn, and soy for 3 weeks, then eat them again and see what my response is.

My hope was that I would be cooking more when I started this diet, but I have very limited energy and a fair number of obligations, so I have found myself choosing meeting those obligations over cooking for myself. (Are my priorities out of whack? Perhaps, but they are what they are.)

I’m trying to be very gentle with myself about this - I’m doing the best I can right now, and I have been pretty successful in avoiding these foods. I thought I would share some of the ways that I’m dealing with this. If you are on a stricter elimination diet (for example, no nuts, eggs, nightshades, caffeine, sugar of any type, etc), these tips probably aren’t for you. But if you’re just avoiding those big 4, this might help.

Tip #1: Mexican food is your friend.

Rice + beans + spices + guac + pico = DELICIOUS. You can order a taco salad and ask for it with no shell or dairy. Add meat if you want. Add guacamole if it doesn’t come with it.

Tip #2: Sandwich places that offer lettuce wraps are your friend.

Be sure to carefully investigate the sandwich fillings, though - a lot of them might have hidden wheat or soy.

Tip #3: Salad bars are your friend.

A lot of big grocery stores have them. I work on a university campus and it has one. This is great - I just get a container and load up on spinach, cucumbers, bell peppers, hard-boiled eggs, and chicken. Be careful about dressings, though. I bought a dressing from the grocery store that is free of all the ingredients I’m avoiding (balsamic vinaigrette is most likely to meet this requirement). I don’t get dressing from the actual salad bar.

Tip #4: LARABAR is your friend.

Check the ingredients on your particular bar to be sure, but these are all gluten free, and all the ones I’ve gotten are dairy free as well. They tend to be sweetened with dates (OM NOM NOM DATES SO GOOD) and brown rice syrup.

Tip #5: Scrambled eggs are your friends.

You can even make them in the microwave if you need to.

Tip #6: Smoothies are your friends.

This one’s easier if you have a high-powered blender, and I haven’t availed myself of it much yet because I’ve been slow in the mornings. But especially on a hot day, this is great. My recipe is 1c liquid (I usually go with water or coconut milk, but sometimes almond milk), 1 frozen banana, ½-1c other fruit, 6 ice cubes. I’m planning to add greens, coconut oil, chia seeds, and nut butter in the near future.

Tip #7: Be kind to yourself.

What you’re doing isn’t holy. It’s not that you are a morally better person if you’re eating whole foods, or that if, like me, you need to take the prepared foods route, you’re a bad person. You’re just trying to figure out what works for your body. If you mess up, it’s not too hard to start over. You’re doing the best you can, with the situation you have. Always.

SPOILERS FOR CITADEL DLC CONTENT BELOW.

I started playing the Citadel DLC for Mass Effect 3 yesterday. I finished the “Identity Theft” mission and everything that comes with it. (I haven’t hosted my party yet.) A couple things:

1. It was super cool to fight Dark Shep, or Nega Shep, or Evil Shep, whatever you want to call her. I don’t know why, but I majorly dig this kind of story where someone feels they’ve been denied the life that is rightfully theirs. V. badass. This DLC is probably one of the most enjoyable aspects of the game for me.

2. I’m extra enamored of the way Clone!Shep was all, “Friends are a weakness. I’m better than you, because I don’t have friends.” And then all of my totally badass friends gunned down her mercs. All in a line, looking awesome. I told my husband about this part of the game, and he was all, “What, did you wander into a game written by Joss Whedon?” And I was all, “Kinda, yeah.” So good job, Shep. You’ve got that whole found family thing going on, and it’s really working for you. But you should feel free to tell them to go home - they sure seem to like hanging out at your place, and that’s fun, but maybe you need some Introvert!Shep time.

R: Are you doing the bar mitzvah show? B: Yeah… Boys becoming men… Everybody: Men becoming wolves… Me (on the inside): Yes! I have found my people!

I have a LOT of interests, and at various times I have kept up with not only the interest itself, but also the community surrounding the interest. I have too many interests to be an expert in anything. Several years ago I discovered the book The Renaissance Soul by Margaret Lobenstine. If, like me, you have trouble designing your life around your plethora of interests, it’s definitely worth checking out.

One of Lobenstine’s key suggestions is to limit yourself to pursuing 4 interests at a time. One can be a career interest and the other three can be personal interests, or you can mix it up differently, but career + hobbies should fall into 4 categories, unless you can work more hobbies into your career. You can rotate different things into your sampler of interests whenever you like.

I find, though, that thanks to my chronic illness and the extreme fatigue that comes with it, as well as the higher priority self-care must have in my life, that I can’t just pursue 4 things like work, improv, singing, and crochet. (Which leaves out so many ways I like to spend my time, including gaming, gardening, reading…)

Because of my illness, my sampler needs to look more like this:

1. Work or school

2. Self-care: food prep, exercise, hygiene

3. Home care: laundry, picking up, grocery shopping

4. ONE PERSONAL INTEREST.

This means I can only be intensely focused on one thing at a time, and it bums me right out. So I’m looking for ways to deal with it. One way is to rotate that one thing VERY rapidly - like “Today is an improv day. Tomorrow will be a video game day. The next day will be a crafting day.” And that’s sort of where I’m at right now.

The other is to combine things. For example, reading on my bus commute; crocheting while loading screens are coming up on video games.

I think I need to consciously utilize these two techniques to keep from feeling like I can’t have hobbies/interests.

I have my second session with Monica, my health coach/friend-from-childhood today. I wanted to write up how the past couple of weeks have gone, to help me think through things.

We set two goals: increase my water intake (simultaneously decreasing my intake of soda & coffee drinks) and prepare breakfasts at home.

My water intake has slightly increased - before I was ranging from ½ liter to 1 liter a day, and with the addition of mineral water (so good and better than the sparkling water from my Soda Stream) that’s up now to consistently at about a liter. I was sick with either a cold or allergies for most of the past couple weeks, and that did mean that I found myself inclined to consume Sprite or Ginger Ale when I should have been consuming water. However, I’m back off of those now and sticking with sparkling mineral water or berry-infused sparkling water from the Soda Stream. I did have one Coke last night after my improv class, but I think it’s the only Coke I’ve had in a week and a half. One thing I’ll say for being violently ill with cough and postnasal drip: it provides strong incentive to get off caffeine. I’ve had black tea a couple of times, but in small quantities and with no added sugar (which would tend to be in the form of honey).

I haven’t had breakfast from a restaurant or convenience store in about a week and a half either. The abovementioned-illness kept me from wanting much food at all for a few days, but since I started to feel even the littlest bit better, it’s been all gluten-free toast with nut butter & chia seeds, fruit, or yogurt. I’m finding that the fruit+yogurt combination isn’t very filling (probably because I’m eating less than a cup of yogurt, and the yogurt tends to be fat-free). It is convenient though, and that’s great. I also experimented this weekend with two new ways of cooking eggs - fried and poached. Previously the only way I’ve prepared eggs is scrambled or hard boiled. I don’t prefer fried or poached to scrambled, but it’s nice to have a bigger repertoire. A traditional weekend breakfast for the past several months has been a biscuit with egg, cheese, and sausage + a donut, both from Rise. Weekend before last I was sick, but this past weekend I made the eggs and then added sausage that I found at Target. It was maple chicken sausage, and it didn’t quite hit the spot, so I’m going to experiment with sausage from a couple of local providers over the next few weeks and see how that goes.

So there’s been some success with both of these, but I’ve also discovered new obstacles. I like Leo Babauta’s model of habit sprints, where instead of just plunging forward with goals you reassess them weekly (or in my case, bi-weekly), so it’s good to identify these obstacles and figure out how to solve them. The first obstacle is that I’m having a hard time getting my water intake up above 1L. I think there are two solutions here - only increase my intake by .5L a week, so it feels manageable - and go back to using the Water Your Body app for reminders. I learned how to set the notification volume for the app low without setting all my notifications low, which I think will help, as the biggest obstacle there was that the notification was loud and annoying.

The other obstacle I ran into was that, while I had every intention of making smoothies for breakfast occasionally, I got overwhelmed by the possibility of combinations of ingredients and didn’t make any smoothies this week. Which is too bad because, as a rule, I love smoothies. To help with that, I ordered the book Green Smoothies for Every Season, which will provide me with suggested seasonal flavor combinations but doesn’t prescribe quantities/ratios, so I can experiment to see what I like best.

I’m looking forward to tonight’s session, when I expect we’ll tackle plans for lunch and dinner!

Yesterday I had my first session with Monica Barco of Nourish Health Coaching. Monica and I have known each other for about 25 years. When I heard about her health journey and how similar it was to mine, I knew she would be a great health coach for me.

I am big into research, of course, so I know that whole foods are the best things you can eat, and in the past I’d had a session with a nutritionist where the only advice she gave me that I hadn’t already heard was to buy produce from the salad bar if you only need a small quantity. I have done a lot of reading about nutrition and exercise, and familiarized myself with many possibilities, tried and failed on a variety of restrictive eating plans, and currently practice intuitive eating which, because of the food science that food companies use, lately has led me to eat more and more processed foods. Time for a change!

I recently took Gretchen Rubin’s four Rubin-types quiz, which told me that I’m an Obliger (which I kind of already knew). Based on this, I figured that if all I gained from Monica was a person to check in with me, to make sure I was actually doing the things I know I’m supposed to do - somebody whose job it was and who I wouldn’t get annoyed with for asking (as I might do with family) - then that would be worth our time and her fee right there.

But of course, a health coach isn’t just a person who asks you if you’re doing things, and the most helpful thing Monica did for me in our session yesterday was remind me of stuff I already know and give me some new things to try. And that’s, I think, very high value. Because I forget that there actually ARE black teas that I like. I forget that a person could potentially have nut butter on toast for breakfast with a bit of fruit and it would be fast, easy, tasty, and, if it’s the right toast, healthy. So I need someone like Monica, not only to ask me if I’m doing the things, but to ask me questions and draw out what I’m willing to do, what I’d like to do.

If you at all think that you could benefit from health coaching, you should try it out. I think Monica would be willing to work with you over Skype or similar, if you’re not local. Can’t hurt to ask!

Stay tuned for food photos as I start having a wider variety of healthy breakfasts and drink more tea!

While having the most fun playing Dragon Age: Inquisition, I remembered that, oh yeah, I like video games. So I’m working my way through Metacritic’s list of RPGs (sorted by Metascore; I know the methodology might not be sound but I don’t really care). Top of the list was Mass Effect 2, but I’m the kind of person who reads BSC books in order, so obvs I had to start with the first one.

I chronicled my experience primarily through Facebook status updates. Here they are for your entertainment:

So far, not as obsessed with Mass Effect as I am with DA:I, but I’m definitely into it enough after the first hour and a half to keep going.

 

…

Mass Effect update: definitely more into it now. Going full paragon.

 

…

Mass Effect update: vehicular combat, not my fave, but I’m getting better at it. I’m also getting better at using cover, but Tali and Kaidan are doing the heavy lifting in combat. Finishing quests is almost as satisfying here as in Dragon Age. The terrain is very crazy. I keep expecting to crash, but the only trouble I’ve had is driving off the edge of the Feros skyway. I’m very over the Mako. I have to remind myself that games are supposed to involve challenge… I find myself getting frustrated if I die in a spot more than twice. Also, even though I don’t like the Mako, I’m getting the hang of zooming in, which does make my cannon fire much more effective.

 

…

It’s an all girl party for me. Shep, Liara, and Tali. Haven’t settled on a romance yet. Stringing them both along at present. But leaning toward Kaidan for no reason in particular. I just met him first and liked him right away. But Liara is so pretty and smart…

 

…

Pretty sure I ruined things with Kaidan and accidentally committed myself to Liara. Oops. …But they’re both so broken. I want to love them both! Mass Effect, why won’t you let me choose polyamory?

 

…

I was like, “Maybe I’ll replay this to be really completist” because I’m not going to finish all the collections. And then I thought “NO BECAUSE THEN I WILL HAVE TO DRIVE AND FIGHT IN THE MAKO MORE.”

 

I have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. It’s an autoimmune disease in which my body attacks my thyroid. The thyroid controls basically, you know, every bodily function. So if it’s under attack and starts to function poorly, your (or, rather, my) whole body becomes a sad mess. This affects both physical and mental stuff. The treatment I use is a combination of two synthetic hormones that supplement the hormones my body either isn’t making or isn’t properly converting into other hormones.

For more than a year, I’ve felt like this condition was getting worse. And the lab tests showed a decline, but were still kind of okay-normal, but suboptimal, and I was just too scared to bring it up with my doctor.

Then in January I got feeling bad enough, and the test results were finally suboptimal enough, that I went to my doctor and checked in about getting an increase in the dosage of these hormones, which after some hand-wringing about how they could actually be hurting me, she eventually agreed to. About a week before that appointment, I started taking a selenium supplement, which has been shown in medical studies to help Hashimoto’s patients.

In early January, I was having a lot of really bad days. I was too sleepy to accomplish much in the first week. I had an eight-day headache. My joints were constantly aching. Sometimes my muscles ached, too. I felt stupid and slow. Exercise sounded like something that would be difficult to get through both because I wouldn’t really be able to breathe afterwards and because it would just aggravate my joints more. Getting up in the morning was very difficult. Many days, I was not confident in my ability to meet my basic adult obligations.

About a week after starting the selenium supplement, I began to feel kind of like a person again. I hadn’t really, not for the first three weeks of this year. I felt like maybe I was capable of dealing with life.

It takes about 4 weeks to notice much of a change from a dosage increase in thyroid meds, and 6-8 weeks for it to show up on a serum test. But today is two weeks since my dose increased, and I can feel a difference in my body and my attitude. Yesterday I went swimming for the first time in more than a month. I got up, took my medicine, braided my hair, kissed my husband goodbye, wished him a happy morning of playing Dragon Age: Inquisition, and was on my way. I swam for I don’t know how long, but I swam until my legs started to say, “Please, no more, thanks.”

This morning, I went for a walk. It was a one-mile walk. A couple of weeks ago, I would do this same walk, and at the end of it, I would need to just sit for ten minutes to catch my breath. This morning, I came in, sat for a minute or two, and started making breakfast. I hard-boiled some eggs. For the past couple of weeks, all I’ve been able to do was mix up an instant breakfast powder with milk.

My mind isn’t as sharp as I’d like yet, but I feel optimistic that it will be in the next month or two. I still get sleepy mid-afternoon, but I get a few hours of good thinking-time in at work before that happens. I can’t convey just what a difference it is to feel like things are getting better, like it’s possible for them to keep getting better.

I need to remember this feeling. I need to remember, next time I start to feel low, that I can take control, I can talk to my doctor, and I can make it better. I have that power. I need to internal-locus-of-control this thing, and I can. I can. That’s the hardest, and most important, part to remember.

“You have horseys on your sweater,” my grown husband said to me. (I don’t have a husband who isn’t grown. I just want to emphasize that he was an adult using the world “horsey” when speaking to another adult.)

“No, I don’t.” I glared at him.

“Sorry. You have unicorns on your sweater,” he corrected himself.

“Yes. Horses are for children. Unicorns are for grown-ups,” I told him.