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28 February 2011

Chocolate

I ate chocolate on Saturday. I was very strict: no dairy, no gluten or unwhole grains, and I accepted sugar as a necessary evil--does anyone make chocolate without sugar? Mmm, agave nectar chocolate ...
No clue.

Anyway, I drank chocolate Silk (it was dutch process cocoa, unfortunately, but I'd been craving chocolate "milk" for so long), and I ate these really good gluten-free "brownie" cookies--they didn't really have the brownie texture, so I don't know why they claimed to be brownies, but they were yummy.
The rest of the day, I had a stuffy nose and a lingering headache (a headache that lingered from Friday?), and BS says that nose symptoms can happen within 15 minutes, so perhaps that was the chocolate.
Yesterday I was basically fine. A little lethargic/depressed, but hardly any headache at all, and my breathing was clear. Today I'm a little stuffed up again, and I have a tiny headache and a little more joint pain.

It occurs to me that I might have to run this test again, just to go through everything and make certain that I react the same way. I've had a little bit of nose-runniness today and yesterday, but nowhere near as bad as what I got after eating sugar. So, who knows what that means? The less sugar I have, the less symptoms I have? Or does chocolate mitigate the sugar factor?
Who knows.

Tomorrow's a new day, and I get to try a new thing. Not sure. I'm probably going to put off dairy a bit longer. Fried foods would be good to test (I miss my potato chips), but I think testing non-whole grains (basically white rice) would be better to try sooner. Turning down any food made of less than 100% whole grains is really hard, much harder than being gluten-free or accepting no sweeteners but agave nectar and honey and fruit juice ...

25 February 2011

Sugar and Black Tea

So, I've fallen down on once-a-week posts. But that's okay; a lot of February was spent depressed or busy or both.
I have hopes for the citalopram, and especially for both my doctor and my CSW telling me to do things that are good for me: look, the doctor said so! Obviously, I *have* to (at least try to) set aside time every week to write. (No joke; my doctor told me to write. At least once per week.) And I think that'll help me do it, because I'm not just counting on myself. It's not just me I have to answer to.

Similarly, when he heard about my anti-inflammatory diet, he told me to keep up with it. So here's what I have to report:
The anti-inflammatory diet lists foods to avoid and foods to eat. I spent January sort of gearing up to it, finding out what foods I eat normally that I cannot eat due to the diet (did you know some pasta sauces have sugar in them? I didn't), etc. The last Sunday of January marked the point where it was serious: it was three weeks of strict adherence to the lists, after which, I would start adding food back in, one at a time, and monitoring their effects.
The diet (found in Healing Depression and Bipolar Disorder Without Drugs) suggests testing sensitivities to foods by abstaining from it for three weeks, and then enjoying it three times in one day, and then monitoring the effect for the next two days.
So, Sunday, I ate sugar. I put raw sugar in my cereal and drank juices with sugar in them and ate organic fruit snacks with evaporated cane juice in them. The next two days I had blinding headaches hovering around my right eye, and a constantly runny nose.
Wednesday, I drank black tea (and was so glad to have my tea again!) several times that day. I have had a couple of bad headaches, but I don't know if they're related: they didn't stay in one place like the sugar-headaches, and they were off and on. Really two headaches yesterday and today. (At least so far. There's a fair amount of day left today). But other than the headaches, I didn't notice anything: pain levels stayed about the same, no unusual sinus reactions, etc. So, I will continue monitoring the rest of the day.

I'll decide what I'm trying next before I go to bed tonight. It'll either be really good dark chocolate (no milk involved) or dairy. I also have to decide whether black tea will continue to be avoided at least for now. I think it might be smarter to continue to avoid the things on the "no" list, at least for now.
I'll keep you posted.

03 February 2011

New developments

Um, I guess.
Some things are working out, some, not so much. My glasses are finally being shipped out. They may appear today, when the shipment arrives; possibly tomorrow. I just want them before the weekend: UU choir is doing two Requiem performances, one on Saturday at 4522 S 1300 E (it's a retirement home, but I don't remember what it's called) at 3pm, and one on Sunday at the First Unitarian Church (600 S 1300 E) at 9am and 11am.
Feel free to come.
And then I'm seeing a play (Persian Quarter at SLAC) with DP and our friends H&B. So I really want my eyes to not hurt for all that ...

Anyway, I've also started taking an SSRI, with mixed results: side effects I've noticed include yawning and nausea. The pharmacist told me I might get headaches while the serotonin levels were building up, so I don't know if my frequent/constant headaches currently are due to that or the eye strain, or the volume of my audiobooks, which doesn't seem to be louder than the music, but I seem to miss more sounds while "reading" ... Also, the constant fatigue may or may not be due to the SSRI, rather than being the same constant fatigue I've been feeling for years ...

On another note: my tattoo appointment fell through. Etc. I've talked about this on Facebook, so I'll probably skip the boring details, plus I'm depressed, which makes me less eager to share things with the internet ... (I've only been taking the SSRI for one week, and the pharmacist told me it would take up t three weeks for the "optimal" levels of serotonin to build up ... so I'm still depressed.)

I haven't been writing. I've been sleeping and "reading" and watching House.