Someone from the Midwest Institute for Minimally Invasive Therapies commented on a recent post and sent me a link to the Chicago Fibroid Clinic. I'm passing it on for anyone who is suffering with fibroids and considering a hysterectomy. What I forget is that the...
So, I've been battling horrible menstrual cramps for months now and I've gone as far as I can with acupuncture, chiropractic, herbal supplements, diet, meditation and exercise. After eight months of drastically changing the way I eat and getting good results, the...
Last November, I cut out sugar, grains, dairy and caffeine at the suggestion of a doctor who identified those things as contributing to my hormones being out of balance. Having gone on this type of diet a few times in my life, it's felt familiar even though it's also...
Previous post on weight & health: The tyranny of sugar is over In my last post I wrote that I believe I could get physically hooked on sugar again, but not emotionally. Those can be hard to distinguish, but what I mean is that when I cut out sugar last November,...
Part I is here. The worst of the sleep disruption went away by the third night after she stopped taking Norco, but her mood plummeted the next day. She woke up feeling anxious, tense and worried. In the mirror she saw an ugly person with a ruined middle aged body. She...
It was just five days. Her prescription was for 20 pills to be taken every six hours. After the doctors in the emergency room couldn't figure out what was causing the intense pain in her abdomen, they gave her the prescription and told her to go home. It wasn't...
Previous post on weight & health: Kicking a sugar addiction Last night I dreamt I was eating layer cake. I scooped off the sculpted yet gooey white frosting with my finger and wrapped my mouth around it. In other dreams I've abstained from desserts or only...
There's a part of the human brain that processes face recognition. Being able to distinguish and recognize faces is a very specific skill that gets a region all its own because being able to tell family from friend from stranger is critical to survival. Unfortunately,...
Previous post on food & fatness: The pain has receded I am in the process of trying to kick my addiction to sugar. For almost seven months, since November 2014, I've done a pretty good job of reducing my ingestion of sugar of all forms, which means I've...
Previous post on weight & health: Hooray for fat yoga! I finally had a mostly decent menstrual experience two weeks ago. I'd been suffering since November from horrible cramping that made me cry. On a scale of 1 to 10, the pain's grip spent hours at 10,...
Released last May 2014 Katie Couric produced and narrates the documentary Fed Up, which might seem like just another film about the effects of the standard American diet on our health, but this one has a very specific and heartbreaking focus: the effects of sugar on...
Previous post on weight & health: Trying to eat well to avoid pain Yesterday I attended the Asian Human Services Spring Health Fair where I got "my numbers" checked. That refers to my blood glucose level, cholesterol level, blood pressure and weight. The one I'm...
I'm very grateful to my friends. I had a bout of depression in the past week and they responded in just the right ways. They asked how they could help and offered to talk, but they didn't give me a pep talk or keep asking why I was depressed. They just let me know...
The April 2015 issue of The Atlantic has an article called The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous. In the article Gabrielle Glaser, author of Her Best Kept Secret: Why Women Drink - And How They Can Regain Control, discusses the ways that Alcoholics Anonymous (AA)...
Previous post on weight & health: Get fit, THEN exercise My progress towards a cramp-free life seems to have slowed. The cramps I suffered during my last 28-day cycle were better than others since I stopped taking the pill last summer, but things still got pretty...