Reintroducing Yeast
Yeast this morning, stirred into a cup of water. Milk and cheese for three days had done nothing to ail me, and that was an anti-climax. It makes it so much more difficult to explain to people. And I feel self-conscious already eating my own food everyday and explaining what I’m doing. Today, as I think I often do, I was working from one of the workshops where a guy has a microwave with my warmed up food and thinking how I would deflect any questions about my diet and the symptoms of it.
  Borderline paranoia today. Maybe that is part of the problem. Feeling vulnerable and especially inarticulate, unready with words.
  But no chair-through-window moment of rage, no especial irritability. Just feeling gauche and idiotic.
  Went from work to get my hair cut. I was looking stupid, with my thin hair coming out of my head like those stereotypical mad professors in the films. I had been thinking how this is part of the way people react to me, the impression they get. And then after that I binged on sweets from the health food shop. All were gluten free. We’re talking coconut macaroons, coconut bars and fruit bars. Of course all were high in sugar. Now, since I have started the diet and aside from one slip while in Wales when I tried so hard, and had spent my Friday night cooking something that turned out tasting pretty awful (when eaten from cold at any rate), I have eaten absolutely nothing that isn’t allowed. And it has been a good few weeks now. Maybe it was a result of the yeast, with candida repopulating my stomach and making me crave this awful food, but more likely, I think, I was trying to sabotage this diet which was putting nothing my way. I have been thinking a lot about ADD over the last few days, how I am still suffering from it despite the diet and all the effort I’m putting into it. I’m a little self-conscious about it all. Also a little depressed. I know I was thinking at times that with all the work I did with probiotics and capryllic acid I may have done more to rectify my problem over the last few weeks than I ever have before, but also ensured from this that there would be no easy solution on reintroducing this and that.
  I have been explaining to people that my problems are cumulative, and that diagnosing food intolerances isn’t always as simple as diagnosing allergic reactions which would certainly come up over a couple of days. I have been going through it all in my head. Milk could be a problem in any number of ways. Metabolites of casein could be a problem should candida proliferate in the intestinal lining making the membrane more permeable. This could occur, they say, with the presence of refined carbohydrates, and possibly with lactose itself. Additionally, should it be that the omega 6 fatty acids which are present in high quantities in milk and dairy produce are indeed problematic once they begin to supplant omega 3 fatty acids which are optimum for the passage of chemical messages in the brain and thus for optimum brain function, then this could be a further route by which milk could worsen the symptoms of ADD over time, but over a longer period than the two to three day reintroduction period. But then I am aware that this explanation probably makes it look as if I am rationalising. I have written before that I hate the idea that in pursuing this diet people would think that I am either a hypochondriact trying to medicate a vague malaise with vaguer ideas – like many of the people at work, it might be said – or that I am fussy about my food when nothing could be further from the truth. I cringe when I see books like This book could save your life by A.M. Holmes or characters like Fluff, or whatever she is called in Spaced who is immediately dismissed by her appearance (she claims to work in fashion and is a real airhead) but also because she vacilates over accepting a glass of wine because of the yeast. They seem so accurate (there are people who pick up on health fads, like all of Bill Clinton’s staff who turned out at Jamie Oliver’s restaurant demanding food from the South Beach Diet on one of his programmes) and yet are so utterly wrong.
I worry now. I have my deadline, with the possibility of giving up work in a few months time. But I worry if I will make it at all. If I will be medicated by then (I have decided over the last few days that I must push for this) or if I will even have got to the bottom of my food problems.
