October 12, 2002

• A pair of news stories caught my eye today.  The latter one is readily available on national news services, but this first one may not come to your notice if you aren’t in Alaska:

  
  

  Villagers call alert when coveted fruit vanishes.

  
  

  “It was unlike anything the village of Emmonak had ever experienced: All over town salmon berries, blackberries and blueberries were disappearing from freezers.”

  
  

  I suggest you follow the link and get the rest of the story.  It’s a doozy.

  
  

  Zookeepers suspended for eating animals.

  
  

  When I read the headline above, my first thought was that they shouldn’t have been suspended; they should have been fed to the lions.

  
  

  With a little thought, after reading the article, I want more details.  Were these guys poor and hungry?  Is Germany having hard times?  Or were they just sleazy creeps looking for a free meal?  I’ll be checking this out, you can be sure.

  Got my ducks in a row, almost….

  
  

  Yesterday, off and on, I worked on getting my 150 little bottles organized for the five-a-day doses of supplements and neurotransmitter precursors.  Toward bedtime, I heaved a big sigh of relief and told Greyfox that I was almost ready to start portioning out the pills.  Instead of an atta girl for my efforts, he expressed his surprise that, after two days of work I was “almost ready to start.”  Oh well, it was his honest response, and I do value that.

  
  

  Today, if nothing goes terribly wrong, I’ll get at least the 90 little bottles of “empty stomach” dosages filled.  Last night I sorted the “with a meal” meds from the others, calculated dosages, and put away all the surplus, to minimize confusion today.

  
  

  I got an unexpected number of great comments on yesterday’s addiction and pill blog.  I can see that I need to clarify a few things.

  
  

  My concern about losing readers had nothing to do with any fear that people might judge me as a pizza addict.  I was more concerned that the tale of my illness and pills and all would be terminally boring.

  
  

  I also need to clarify one big issue regarding my diet.  I’m not doing any of this to lose weight, although I understand that is the first thought that usually comes to mind at the word, “diet”.  Being slender was a big issue for me in my youth, and I did myself a lot of harm in that pursuit.

  
  

  I had no idea, back in my teens and twenties, that dieting and fasting could put my body into “famine mode” and cause it to store all the fat it could whenever I ate anything, just in case of another famine.  Consequently, my physiology is permanently set on “famine”, storing every calorie it can spare, contributing to my chronic fatigue by stowing away a lot of energy I could use in the present moment.

  
  

  Another area of ignorance that did me a lot of damage was the mistaken (but widespread) belief that dietary fat:  grease and oil, were the main culprits in fat deposition.  In fact, it is much easier for the body to turn carbohydrates into fat, than to convert dietary fat into body fat.  I ate a lot of “lo-fat” stuff that substituted sugar for oil, contributing to my obesity and my hypoglycemia and sugar addiction.

  
  

  Three years ago when a severe illness rendered me virtually immobile for almost a year, it did nothing to reduce my appetite.  Eating the same and exercising a lot less led to a sudden gain in weight, but that wasn’t my main concern.  My main reason for dieting, since the mid-seventies, has not been to lose weight but to gain energy and better health.  There simply came a point back then when my function became more important to me than my form.

  
  

  Those two golden months leading up to 9-11-2001 (yeah, I blew the diet in the wake of the stress of the shamanic healing work I did in the emergency) when I was eating frequently to keep my blood sugar stable, and was avoiding all my addictive foods, I actually gained two pounds.  It didn’t worry me at the time, because I knew that if the diet worked to restore my stamina and energy, I’d be able to dance the pounds off.

  
  

  I love working out.  Shortly before my health crisis in the fall of ’99, I had added some Tae Bo videos to my workout collection.  I look forward to being able to kick and punch and jump and dance again, but for now even my old Jane Fonda Easy Going Workout is too much for me.

  
  

  Kabuki generously provided a helpful mental image in her comment, of a “slug trying to have sex with a cat turd.”  I’m placing that slug and his beloved feline fecal matter right in the middle of the imaginary shit pizza I’ve concocted to arouse an aversion to my most dangerous addiction.  Thanks, sweetheart, that was priceless.  I really needed the laugh, too.

  
  

  Greyfox‘s birthday cake just came out of the oven.  He heard the timer sound and finally got out of bed.  Now, he’s on his way to the little general store down the road, to buy some birthday ice cream.  The cake isn’t going to be anything elaborate, just a box mix German chocolate, single layer, with canned coconut pecan frosting.  It was his choice, and I applaud it.  If I’d done something special, such as a 3-layer spice cake with butter cream roses and all, as was once my habit on special occasions, then I’d have had a much harder time resisting, and there would have been more layers to feast on.  It’s better this way, better that the cake isn’t a better one.

  
  

  I’m not going to torture myself by abstaining totally from the cake and ice cream.  They might actually help me get through that job of taking the pills from the big bottles and distributing them among all the little bottles.  When that job is all done, and I’ve had a night’s sleep, then I’ll start my new diet, with the support of those neurotransmitter precursors to help eliminate the cravings that sabotaged my efforts before.

  
  

  If this works, you’ll hear from me about it.  Everyone is going to hear from me if this works, because during those two months I white-knuckled it on the diet last year, I took the matter of the cravings to several egroups and other forums, looking for solutions to these cravings that were making my life tense and unproductive.  Nobody had any helpful advice, and I was clueless before I found the book, End Your Addiction Now, by Dr. Gant.  I’ll be talking it up if it works.

  
  

  Weather report:  Yesterday the morning snow turned to rain.  The rain has continued all day and all night.  It is still raining.  I hope I didn’t give anyone the impression I don’t like snow.  It’s Greyfox and Doug that don’t like snow.  I love it as long as it stays in its place.  I’m going to blog about that sometime.  Meanwhile, I’m watching the smoke from the woodstove drift down over my window and across the yard, where it is being beaten to the ground by the steady drizzle. 

  • 3:22 pm
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