I have an Alicia in my life. Monday afternoons she calls and checks in on me like an overbearing partner.
Alicia is my dietician. She's paid to call me.
I'm pretty sure after these first couple of weeks of teething she's going to become the bitch from hell, but at the moment, she's okay. Very nice. But most monsters will start out this way.
I remember seeing a naturopath a few years ago who made me give up gluten, dairy, caffeine, sugar and alcohol cold turkey. I was ready to rip her head off, especially over the coffee. Strangely, five years on, I've never gone back to the caffeine and try to keep the others to a minimum.
We had our first check in yesterday.
It was interesting.
She asked me what I thought about the process.
Truthfully, I found the whole thing of photographing what you eat and thinking about how you feel about it all fucking confronting.
And yes, some of this has a bit to do with my current mental state at present, which is a little on the fragile side, but to actually articulate what you're thinking when you're eating, or about to eat, is hard. I mean, eating is something you do. Sometimes you do it for pleasure, sometimes for energy, other times for boredom and stress.
It wasn't so much the recording, but what I was thinking at the time when logging all of this.
So, I told her this.
It seems it's not an unusual thing to think like this.
But that is why I've enlisted the help of Alecia - to help reassess my relationship with food.
She was pleased with many of my choices - she could see them - I'd photographed everything I'd eaten in the week, down to the choc tops I downed at the cinema to the toast I'm partial to at 3.30 p.m. when I'm bored.
The other thing I jotted down was the sweet cravings I get at around 10 p.m. which I try my best to ignore.
And her fruit challenge. I managed to have some sort of fresh fruit on six of the seven days. I still feel strange about fruit. If somebody isn't there to cut it up for me it just doesn't taste right.
We also worked out I'm a lot more social than I think I am. I was out all of Saturday - and part of Sunday. And Friday night. And Monday lunch. And Wednesday lunch. Yeah.
It's about making good choices.
For the next week it's more of the same. Get comfortable with recording everything I eat. Look more into the things I'm feeling when I'm eating. Keep up with the fruit. I have a box of grapes to take to the office tomorrow.
And lastly, start taking an iron tablet. After receiving some blood test results, it was found my iron was a bit low. I'm not anaemic, but my results were just out of range. The sooner I start working on this, possibly the sooner my general malaise and occasional dizziness I've been experiencing when going from horizontal to vertical might abate.
And we're food shopping twice a week, rather than my regular once a week. This way, I can buy fewer veggies and keep them fresh.
She's also been complimentary about my seeking out a mental health plan with the G.P. It needs to be done. But that is a job for next week. This is something that won't be a quick fix.
For now, it's a matter of one foot in front of the other, one bite at a time, even if I get triggered writing about what I'm eating. I just have to learn to deal with it.
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