Previous post on weight & health: No change Working with an NRT practitioner since 2016 has taught me that there are endless ways our health can be messed up. We develop physical problems and/or inherit them from our parents, grandparents and ancestral line. We...
Previous post on weight & health: Not getting better I run a depression support group Meetup and this week we talked about ways to treat depression other than with medication. I've happily been on anti-depressants since 2010, so I'm not knocking meds, but I wanted...
You might be clinically depressed if: you're back on cigarettes or junk food or alcohol or shopping or whatever your addiction is that you've been trying to kick for decades. you can't concentrate on work for more than a few minutes at a time. the long minutes you...
On this April Fool's Day, I feel like stating the obvious: depression is not productive. At the age of 49 and three quarters, I'm still learning how to manage my chronic depression, which sometimes gets triggered by a specific circumstance, but often shows up with no...
Previous post on weight & health: Wheat is the culprit I've spent most of my life as a thin person. I was a skinny kid and then a gym rat who constantly struggled to stay down at a size 10 or under. My raging sweet tooth that never stopped somehow never tipped the...
After my year of austerity (drastically reduced sugar, dairy and grains), I totally indulged last week when I visited familia in Houston, Texas. I ate cookies and cupcakes and pie. I also had grain-y foods like pancakes and tamales because I wanted to take a break...
I'm amazed to blog this, but after a year of struggling with horrific cramping, today is day two of my period and I'm not in agony! Four ibuprofen every 3-4 hours has kept me comfortable, as in PAIN-FREE. Oh, my god. I'm so, so grateful. I can hardly believe it. I'd...
Doing "cleanses" is a popular practice, which usually means temporarily purging certain foods from your diet and taking some kind of supplement (often a juice or shake) to help your body release toxins. I think afterwards many people just go back to the way they were...
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,...
49 candles ablaze Previous post on food & fatness: Sweet dreams Now I know I've truly turned a corner on my sugar addiction. On the morning after my birthday party, with a quarter of my birthday cake sitting in my refrigerator, I wasn't even tempted to have cake...
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...
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...
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...