Progress?

I’m still waiting for my results. I realised only this morning that actually my nutritionist was away with a group of people from work. I may find out tomorrow.

What was interesting about this discovery was the fact that it underlined something I have discovered in myself of late - my propensity to paranoia. I have talked about this before, I don’t doubt, but my experiences on a course the other day brought it to the fore. More

Peel me off this velcro seat

There’s been so much I haven’t related about my struggles with food of late. I’ve been coming to resent my blogs more and more, and let’s be honest, the division between yeswehavenobananas and masterkidderminster was always more of an ADD whim than a reasoned division, something that has allowed a lot of the food-related problems I have to run into the broader diaries in Unforgiving Minutes and the like. Quite aside from the blogs, I have come to resent too, more and more, the role that food plays in my life and the amount of energy it takes to try to cook the food I need to stay as well as I can be. When I am not moving forward with my cooking, I resent it, and since I am such a perfectionist and since I am limited in my choice of ingredients and condiments, my cooking abilities often depress me more than they console me (and all cooking should be consoling). The fact, too, that no matter how hard I try, my efforts don’t bring me any closer to [long reveries, confrontations with the boss on the subject of being articulate, or not, being the last of a long series] being healthy, and coping, whilst every single slip counts immediately. [further morning meeting reveries involving berating my colleagues for a lack of willingness]. More

Letter to the Newspapers

I see things in a preternaturally logical way, perhaps, and I’m freely prepared to acknowledge that it may be my autistic traits that leave me so incredulous on observing others’ logical slips, but when the government announces on one day a plan to fluoridate water across the country, and goes on to denounce bottled water the next week, even such an advanced state of cynicism as my own is not sufficient to hold me back. Chemicals in food affect me to an extent I barely could have guessed just a few years ago when I was diagnosed, mistakenly it now seems, with Cyclothymia (manic depression lite). A few penny sweets see me throwing my mobile phone against walls in busy-brained exasperation, cheese and dairy, coffee, alcohol or gluten see my head fill with abstract anger and intrusive daydreams of, say, storming out of work and thieving my boss’s car to drive to the continent posting back vituperative postcards. Only recently have I started putting the pieces together (the telegrammatic version would see it described something like this: profligate use of antibiotics by doctors, and prophylactic use of same in the meat industry, fast baked bread with high levels of yeast and high-gluten strains of wheat plus a diet of refined carbohydrates leads to an imblance in gut flora and a leaky gut, which itself leads to improperly digested peptides intefering with brain function, casomorphin from milk protein being one such), consequently it is only recently that I have started to repair the damage with anti-fungals and probiotics, as a result of which my “ADHD” mind is clearer than it has been for years and my Aspergic traits less rainman than light intermittent drizzle. For this to happen, though, I have had to assiduously exclude from my diet practically anything which is not natural (excepting those supplements which would be unnecessary had I grown up on a more natural diet, but which address some of the problems caused by processed food). In my work with autistic and hyperactive students whose problems in so many respects echo my own, I see again and again that they, as I did, proactively, though unconsciously, seek those very substances which cause them problems just as heroin addict would seek a fix. Quite aside from restricting their diets to the substances such as gluten, dairy and orange which have most often been shown to correlate with symptoms in the opioid-excess theory of autism propounded by, for example, Sunderland University’s Autism Research Unit, they also very often eat toothpaste. Now, since the precautionary principle has been so beneficial in my consideration of my own diet, I believe it is necessary to take seriously the idea that fluoride – the one chemical guaranteed in any of the toothpastes these students eat – might be doing me as much harm as the cornish pasties laced with yeast extract I used to binge on. Since I live in a fluoridated area (The West Midlands) and know that, despite the disingenous statements of Labour Politicians I have heard, fluoride is not removed by domestic filtration systems, I have seen no alternative but to buy bottled water. It is with a heavy heart that I pack up those bottles and send them out with the bins to Dudley Council in order for them not recycle but burn (when I remember to do it at all with my foggy head), but I have to recognise that we live in unnatural times which turn our body systems against themselves and that it is not without a great deal of research and critical thinking that I have come to the conclusion that many of the mental illnesses flourishing in our society from childhood onwards are a result of the piecemeal agglomeration of the very thinking, more perfunctory and peremptory than it is logical, that has led us back to fluoridation with no more evidence: we have some of the worst food and some of the worstly behaved youths in Europe, if not the world and it is all as a result of such shoddy thinking which flies in the face of the precautionary principle. Incidentally, I wrote to my MP, Linda Waltho, about fluoridation over a year ago. She is yet to respond. Should she and her peers repeal this nonsense of compulsory “medication” by a medication less proven than any other in the history of medicine (proven medicines are in any case almost invariably proven in a dose-specific manner which makes me more cynical about the reasoning for fluoridation), I will stop this nonsense of buying bottled water. Should they not, I will see this as yet another example of Milton’s “They who put out the people’s eyes reproach them of their blindness.”

Crunch time

I’m angry, restless, irritable. I picked up M____ in the car some time back and driving there I was thinking the end has to come soon. I have been so aware of being around her unable to think of anything to say, and today cleaning my room and counting down the time until I would have to pick her up I was so angry at the time I am wasting to her being around. Driving back too, she told me it would be a hard week because I would have to drop her off most mornings, including tomorrow, though she normally lets me off weekends (she is ill), and I thought about how that means that she won’t be working in the evenings and I will feel compelled to be with her, saying nothing and aware of my own failings, and that I will be unable to get down to anything productive.

Maybe it’s the Capryllic acid I’m taking at the moment. Maybe its ‘die off reactions’ but I feel awful, and can’t cope with this. I need my life back. This relationship is giving me so little compares to what it seems to take away. I have nothing to say to M____ and all I’m doing is forcing myself to be sociable so much. I can’t deal with it. I don’t want to let her down, but it shouldn’t be such a big deal. It’s only because she can’t cope on her own that I feel so guilty about thinking this.

But it’s late, and I have to be up in the morning!

Black day

I have been reintroducing vodka over the last couple of days. I have been trying to race through the reintroductions and get through the confirmation reintroductions. Of course, I had to pick up M_____ last night at 22:30 and so I had to start drinking fairly late. I dispatched M_____ fairly early what with a display of pretty outright negligence - she has been feeling more and more of late that I have been giving her little attention, and that she is not intelligent enough for me, and my reveries have only been confirming this view of things - she got back and I was irritated by her complaints about people and practices at work. With things so unsteady in my own life, I find I have little time for her problems, and little patience. I told her at one point to stop complaining, and she went to bed soon after that. More

I’ve got the Baboon Butt Blues

I’ve had an itchy arse over the last few days and also an itch around my crotch. I took a look in the mirror last night and found that, as suspected, I had a fungal infection around my anus. It isn’t the first time. Indeed, I have had recurrent fungal infections for over a decade. One time when it was worst, I was having the worst problems I have ever had with mood and concentration. More