Deep Throat

Just a brief note today, my love.

The downside of eating regularly and relatively well is that when one has to skip meals, one is devastatingly hungry. The reason for the meal skipping in a moment. It’s been no secret over the last decade that I’ve been struggling to be healthier. I’ve been struggling to eat healthier and to live more actively.

I’m not much one for things like special diets and crap like that. I don’t believe it’s a good thing to try to eat, f’rinstance, the sort of diet our primitive ancestors ate (The Paleo Diet). I don’t think it’s a good thing to eat only one food or food group (The Beverley Hills Diet, The Cabbage Diet) or to pay a lot of money for specially processed foods (Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, etc..). I’m not terribly interested in trying to figure out how much protein versus carbohydrates I’m “allowed” to eat (Atkins, Zone, South Beach Diets). I think it’s ridiculous to claim that people with certain blood types should eat in a certain way (The Blood Type Diet) I’m sure there are as many diets out there as there are dieters. And I know people pay an awful lot of money to lose weight. There are people who are very, very passionate about how they choose to eat, and for some of them, dieting becomes a kind of service of devotion.  That’s fine, but it’s not for me.

I’ve done a lot of reading about diets in particular, and about diet and nutrition in general. I am by no means an expert. But here’s something I find interesting. Many of the dieting books I’ve read make mention of how diets don’t work because people end up hungry throughout the day. I’m not that person. I often forget to eat on a regular schedule because I just don’t feel hungry all that often. I’ve tried a couple of diets (not devotedly), and I’ve never felt hungry.

The reason proscriptive diets have failed for me is that I find all of them – all of them – incredibly fiddly. I’m not interested in following meal plans. It’s just not going to work. We’ve made meal plans at home for dinners too. I guess I’m just not a “chicken Thursday” kind of gal. Add to this the fact that I’m just not interested in following dieting plans, and it all just seems like a huge waste of time (yes, the ‘for me’ is implied here).

I think that nutritionally, the things I eat are pretty sound. I follow other instructions, like eating low-glycemic-index foods, eating more frequent, smaller meals, drinking lots of water, reducing or eliminating sugars (and, yes, reducing simple carbohydrates like white flour). I will never, ever give up potatoes. Any diet or nutritionist that tells me to give up potatoes is just going to be discarded.

I don’t eat a lot at any one sitting (and you’ll remember that when you and I go out for something to eat, I usually end up taking half my meal home with me). I don’t snack very much. I don’t like sweets. Yes, I’m a sucker for soda, but I can cut that out of my diet completely without too much difficulty. I consume maybe one caffeinated beverage a week (and even then, I usually don’t finish it). I have approximately the correct caloric intake for my age, size, and exercise level. I don’t overeat, I don’t undereat. I don’t eat crap.

Of course, clearly, something has to change in something because according to MEDICAL SCIENCE, my hormones are in perfect order, I’m as healthy as someone half my age and size, and yet, I’m classed as obese. O-beeeess. Obese. I like how that word starts with a big, round O. I go to the doctor, and the doctor recommends I lose weight, and I say, “okay! Here is what I’m doing and what I’m eating. What do you recommend?”

And the doctors scratch their heads and say, “I dunno, man. That’s whack.”

And I say, “Whack indeed, Doctor. Whack indeed.”

I am not looking for advice. I am not looking for support. I don’t want you to cheer me on or rally behind me (stop looking at my butt, Coyote). I don’t want you to suggest a different diet (which I won’t follow) or exercise plan (which I’ve probably tried) or support group. I’m not good in groups. I’m just talking about something I find interesting. As well as distressing. I don’t want to belong to any “fat is beautiful” groups. I’m not interested in being “thin” or “skinny”. I don’t like the way I look, and I don’t want to hear people telling me I look fine the way I am. I respect that may be your opinion, and would like to ask you to keep it to yourself.

I am not being pressured by society to look a certain way. I am not being pressured by society to accept who I am as I am. I am not falling prey to marketing, advertising, or social mores. I want one thing, and one thing only. I want to like my body. Okay, two things. I want to be able to find clothes that fit AND I want to like my body. I have no interest in “liking my body the way I am”, because that, I’m sorry to say, is bullshit. I do *not* like my body the way it is, and trying to do so is, in my never-to-be-humble-opinion, failure. That’s akin to saying “I’d like to be a lawyer, but since I’m not a lawyer, I’m just going to be happy being an artificial bee inseminator*.” If you want to be a lawyer, go and take the education and become a lawyer. Sure, it’s difficult. It’s expensive. But if you really want it, then do it.

I’m not going to sit around and moan and whine and kvetch about how fat I am. Well, I might. But I’m also going to continue working on my body, even when it doesn’t seem to work. Doing what I do makes me feel physically good. I like feeling good. I’m not going to do things that don’t make me feel good, like never eating potatoes, or never eating grains, or eliminating fat from my diet. That’s dumb.

I’m sure it’s right for some folks, and that’s great. It’s just dumb for me. The same way you feel about people with any different belief from your own, I suspect. You might not believe in Jesus, and think that the belief in Jesus is dumb, but hopefully you can accept that other people believe in Jesus and that that’s okay for them.

And I’m not sure how I got from Deep Throat to Jesus, but there it is.

Now, this is not, as it turns out, a short note. And the reason I’m devastatingly hungry and ridiculously thirsty is that I’ve not been permitted ‘anything by mouth’ (except smooches) for ten hours because I’m having a PROCEDURE done.

This morning, I’m going to hospital to have a camera-in-a-tyyyyoooob shoved down my throat. I’m quite nervous about the whole thing. I don’t like having my picture taken, and I don’t like having things shoved down my throat. I would be a cruddy porn star. Anyway, the gastroscopy that I’m having is to look around in my upper chute to find out why sometimes I can’t swallow my food. And why sometimes I nearly pass out when I can’t swallow my food.

This has been a problem I’ve been having since about 2008. Most doctors have just told me that I need to chew my food better. Isn’t that charming? So then when I go back to them and I say, “no, seriously dude. I can’t swallow. I can’t swallow LIQUIDS sometimes. And I regurgitate foamy stuff. But the food stays stuck in my oesophagus. I can feel it. And sometimes I get all twitchy and nearly pass out.”

And then they say, “probably you should just eat slower.”

And I say, “It took me over two hours to finish a plate of rice this summer. An hour to eat a single egg salad sandwich. An hour to finish a bowl of broth.”

And they say, “Hrm. Maybe we should send you to a specialist.”

It’s only been five years. Maybe that’s a good plan. So last November I swallowed some radioactive crud that, sadly, did not give me superpowers, unless you count being constipated as a superpower, which I really don’t, because that’d be the WORST SUPERPOWER EVER. And the follow-up care I got from that was silence for nearly another year. Until the next time I made an appointment with my doctor to discuss the same problem and he looked all shocked and said, ‘but we did that in November!’

And I said, “I know. I assumed, since you didn’t call me to discuss the results with me, which you said you’d do if there was something untoward about them, that there was nothing wrong.”

And he said, “well, you have a small hiatal hernia. But it’s nothing to be concerned about. Probably your oesophageal muscles are just going in to spasm.”

“What would cause that?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” he said. “I’m not a GI specialist. But I’ll send you to one.”

And that reminded me of the Kids in the Hall bit where Dave Foley plays the doctor who doesn’t know what he’s doing but he keeps asking people for urine and they keep giving it to him and he doesn’t know what to do with it but he’s really good at referrals.

So wish me luck. If I die of a perforated oesophagus, you can have all my 80s CDs.

*No, I’ve never actually heard of artificial bee insemination. Either it’s some kind of high-tech bee fertility program, or it’s traditional bee mating using artificial bees. Language is silly.