29/08/07

I came back today a little knackered having ridden around all day on M____’s bike - I dropped off my car this morning with my Dad to give it the once over before having it MOTed. It was on then to a day servicing one of the old wagons with Colin. I had been enjoying this kind of work as a break from the old routine up until not long ago, but it is really beginning to drag now having become a routine itself and with my increasing realisation I am doing a job which wastes my intellect and in many ways doesn’t play on my strengths at all. And which, of course, pays abysmally. At almost thirty I’m still unfamiliar with the world, and even my own country, and should really be having far more experiences. A little extra cash would also go a long way. I am starting to feel the need to move on again. More

Exclusion diet, day in the life

I came back today a little knackered having ridden around all day on M____’s bike - I dropped off my car this morning with my Dad to give it the once over before having it MOTed. It was on then to a day servicing one of the old wagons with Colin. I had been enjoying this kind of work as a break from the old routine up until not long ago, but it is really beginning to drag now having become a routine itself and with my increasing realisation I am doing a job which wastes my intellect and in many ways doesn’t play on my strengths at all. And which, of course, pays abysmally. At almost thirty I’m still unfamiliar with the world, and even my own country, and should really be having far more experiences. A little extra cash would also go a long way. I am starting to feel the need to move on again.

Immediately I cut up an apple into a bowl, spooned on some soya yoghurt and crashed on the sofa. Of course, I turned on the TV! I ate up quickly, enjoying every spoonful, and then of course convinced myself that I could watch just the start of Ready Steady Cook just to get a few more ideas.

Unusually, there was a guest with a few allergies, to wheat and cow’s milk, as well as having a strong disliking for tomato sauce, and so I watched a little longer. She, the woman from the Clothes Show, had brought along a bag containing prawns, spring onions, coconut cream and a mango. I sat glued to the TV for those twenty minutes and managed to take little in. The show is entertaining, but often time passes in a whirl of interviews and very rushed explanations of what is being made and how and so at times only an already proficient chef could really take it all in.

Anyway, the first section finished I got up, a little disgusted with myself for having wasted so much time (perhaps more so than usual having read the introduction of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything at work in which he states that the average human life consists of something like 650,000 hours, something which when written like that seems so short*) and went into the kitchen. When I had first got back I had realised that I hadn’t taken out any meat from the freezer and so I had taken out a pork chop. Of course it wasn’t defrosted, and wouldn’t be defrosted for a long time yet. And I don’t like nuking food from frozen. So, with my new exclusion diet it was a case of opening and slamming doors all over the kitchen in search of inspiration. I found some gluten-free, dairy-free pesto I’d got on the reduced trolley at Asdas the other day and so took that out, finely chopped some peppers (the remainder of a green I had had for lunch, half an orange and half a red), albeit on a chopping board I had bashed some chicken into at lunch time and left out rather than the one I had set out, and started lightly frying them in a saucepan with some finely chopped broccoli. I had some spinach on standby to throw in and give it all a little substance, though I was wondering how it would affect the taste. I then realised that pesto contains pine nuts (actually cashews in the recipe list!), and that my exclusion diet forbids them. I was rationalising this to myself semi-consciously (more or less as subconsciously as a hunter with a duck on his head is submerged, if that makes it any clearer), telling myself that I could right it down and explain it as that I had already started cooking before realising that the jar contained nuts, put I pulled myself back with a reflection of a passage of a book I had been reading the night before.

Last Xmas M______ bought me a Polish book that could be translated as We Children of Zoo Station. It is a non-fiction account of the lives of a number of young people but particularly a young girl who in her early teens wound up selling herself at Zoo Station on the Berlin underground to fund her addiction to Heroin. I have been reading it on and off, as my priorities waxed and waned as they always do, ever since. Yesterday I was reading it aloud, as I often do when reading Polish, trying to improve my pronunciation, when M_____ rang from upstairs having gone to bed. She told me the telly was on too loud and she couldn’t sleep. It was me, declaiming the drugs experiences of a young girl, in Polish. This particular passage concerned Christiana when just before her fifteenth birthday she wound up in a Scientology detox unit and when, having gone cold turkey for a few days and starting to see off the worst of the effects (which she knew well having gone cold turkey twice before, both times seeing it out apparently until the end of the physical dependence), she found herself a punter in an unfamiliar part of town, and scored some heroin. Having put some heroin on her dying cat’s food, and the needle hovering over her arm, she realised what she was doing. This was one of the points I lost the plot, my Polish not quite up to the question of whether she had actually managed to stop herself in time or merely thought about the significance of the act, unable to summon the will power when she had the ability to defeat any bad feelings; and this is a book where the reader is so powerfully empathising with the protagonist, angry with her, crying out to influence her though they know they can’t. She did go on to inject, and once again on entering the unit. I had cried at her thoughout the book, and yet I continue to eat foods I know to be bad for me, from flapjacks to chocolate, to coffee, and even to smoke. And now, on the exclusion diet I could defeat all excuses for me to do so, by demolishing, more or less, the doubt that surrounds the types of food which are bad for me. For a while I was unrepentant, determined to use the Pesto sauce, to have something differant from the roast veg I have been having, but then I pulled myself back. I added some paprika and basil leaves to the sauce, throwing some vegetable pasta into the veg stock left from where I steamed some broccoli, beans and carrots at lunchtime, seasoned, and then thickened it up with rice flour. The reason I used riceflour, incidentally, was because on Ready Steady Cook they had been talking about arrowroot, which is something I have picked up on the programme in the last week or so. One chef had used it because of the woman with an allergy towards wheat, and this they emphasised a couple of times, you can use arrowroot if you have an allergy to wheat and cannot use cornflour. That sent me out to my cupboards and got me thinking, since I had always used cornflour assuming it be flour from corn, but then there is buckwheat which has nothing in common with wheat, and cornflour could conceivably be from wheat could it not. I checked the box: “ingredients: cornflour. Allergy information: contains sulfites[].” I was rather puzzled by this. Now I’m sure it must be ok. Aside from my exclusion diet of course. Indeed, I just saw the sheet for the reintroduction phase of the diet and can see “Corn: test cornflour or corn on the cob.” but it is so easy to get so confused over things like this, becoming suspect of all kinds of foods.

In any case, the news flash. I served up the dish with a little canned tuna - organic, dolphin-friendly. It tasted great and I really enjoyed it. I can now barely move. It was a massive rush of high GI food for the system perhaps, but it did restore my faith on being able to make something edible, even enjoyable, from the least promising ingredients on the most restrictive diet. It also restored my faith in my own cooking, which has been seriously knocked of late. Most importantly perhaps, there were none of these g/f d/f concoctions of imitation foods. No dairy-free soya-based parmasan.

 *This was a fact which once led me, in Venice, into an almost classically Aspergic argument with an ex of mine. Something I really should write about elsewhere.

Attack of the zombies

I have several years’ experience of taking slow-release vitamin B supplements and I have come to observe numerous times that if I take it late at night, I don’t sleep, and indeed have a very similar experience to when I have caffeine, and similar to those times I don’t sleep after beer. This was in the back of my mind yesterday when I took such a slow-release multi-vitamin with vitamin B late yesterday. Worse, perhaps, I swilled it down with Spirulina, which I have not been taking recently but which I found to have a real beneficial effect when I first tried it around the same time as I started taking vitamin B those years ago.

I had been sleeping well in my new bed. With no students around I was at home all the time, of course, and the double bed  they had left was an improvement on the fold-out sofa bed we had been sleeping on at my folks. In fact, in however many weeks we have been there - two, I think - this was my first poor night’s sleep.

I was spiked, like I am after coffee, that is, alert, and yet very tired. My thoughts weren’t racing, and I drifted in and out of sleep, but it was shallow sleep.

Often in this condition I remember my dreams better than usual. This time I did so as much from getting up to go to the toilet as anything else, but my sleeping pattern was definitely disrupted, and I have been feeling the effects since around three o’clock when I’ve been feeling zombified.

I suspect it is a kind of lucid dreaming. I have felt that many times, that I am aware of myself dreaming. This time I was in a recording studio listening to the producer, who I could not see through the widow, talking to the black hip hop-style performer as I was setting up equipment or some such. They were talking about children, family, a fairly deep, mature conversation, and then a little more polite perhaps, the singer talking about how he didn’t know so many producers in America since there are so few of them, more in Britain. I don’t now remember it well.

It was years ago I first started taking vitamin B and though it made my piss resemble a cantonese duck marinade, and abslutely stink (I am pretty paranoid about the smell, which is what I imagine urine might smell like were you to reduce it in a pan for a while, wiping my old man countless times while at home, and shaking and squeezing the fella at urinals), it seemed to make me concentrate better. At least, I felt so at the time - it gave me extra confidence.

Back then I was working in a hardware store, and doing a pretty cackhanded job of it, invariably forgetting several items of a short list of jobs to do given by the infinitely genial and forgiving boss everyday. Often, in giving me verbal instructions, he would report that I had assumed my glassy-eyed look. This was a look that came over me involuntarily when I wasn’t interested, and however much I wanted this time to just see out those few instructions, it wouldn’t happen. Fortunately, there was another guy there who was similarly afflicted, who would himself muddle up the simplest things, and we became a right double act. He wasn’t ADD, though he was dyslexic and says this affected his memory, but he was the kind of character who can really make a place worthwhile, and when I had come back to the Black Country after uni, when I had gone to uni to escape this place, he was somebody who helped me cope with the place. He was the first person, really, I opened up to about my writing when before, it had been a guilty secret tangled up with my illness.

For a while I had been worried about the exclusion diet and whether I would be able to continue taking multivitamins, before from the leaflet I was given it wasn’t all too clear. I don’t want to be quite so laissez faire with fruit as it says, since I do think fruit can be a trigger itself - the amount of bananas I have eaten over the years has always been excessive, for a start, and then there’s the smoothies and dried fruits and the rest of it. It may be that I would not get enough vitamins and minerals on the diet to compensate for a deficiency in my processing of vitamins - one that the sores in the corners of my mouth, for instance, would seem to indicate. If this were the case, then presumeably, I wouldn’t necessarily see any benefit in symptoms from the exclusion and the diet would not be as useful as it should be. But from fretting about the vitamins, I begain to wonder whether the supplementation regimen I have settled upon bares any relation to what I need. How would I know? I mean, presumeably, it is possible that I might feel some extra security from these pills, and gain some confidence as I did those years ago, without actually seeing any real benefit. I decided for that reason to cease some of the supplements yesterday. I didn’t take anything in the morning, and certainly didn’t feel bad for it, indeed I found I could concentrate better than I often can (though it is always difficult to judge, and it is true that I was listening to audiobooks rather than trying to read for most of the morning, and this may make a difference). But I didn’t hold my nerve. Later, I started to drift a little. I wasn’t concentrating and it was my last day off, and my last day without interruption and without M____, so that’s when I took a multivitamin and washed it down with spirulina.

I some kind of a build up in my head. Now, I was working on a pretty tough passage, trying to introduce Darren, and I was getting into real philosophy, with Godwin’s Treatise on Political Justice in front of me, but this was something other than mental strain. It was a kind of build up I had to wait to pass.

So the question is still unsettled. I will have to exclude vitamin supplements sometime, but there is as much a problem in weaning myself off them than there is even with alcohol and cheese because of the security blanket phenomenon. It’s clear that vitamins can have their negative effects, stopping me from sleeping and the positive effects are more or less presumed for much of the time.

That’s something I will have to tackle some more before further taking on this diet. Once I have had a good night’s sleep, of course.

Oh, and the first real slip since the transition phase of this new diet ( though the only real thing now I haven’t excluded to be on the diet for real is lemon juice): I had a cup of black decaf coffee around three o’clock, because that can’t hurt, can it!

Sprouts and veg

I’m very much playing catch up with my experiences over the past few weeks having been busy moving house and the like. One new development has been my attempts to grow sprouts. More

Being listened to

I was getting increasingly stressed and had the feeling I wasn’t coping at all in the weeks before I saw a dietician for the first time on the 6th of August. I was going in to work telling myself I must see the nurse, even making notes to self in my phone to do so and not getting round to it. I was having reveries of telling my boss to fuck off and stick his job and they seemed to be becoming increasingly regular or increasingly intrusive. I was angry all the time, and increasingly aware that I wasn’t taken seriously at work nor respected, and that things weren’t going so well outside of work. We had moved house, and I was doing all the cooking and trying to wort a few things out, buy things for the place and kit it out, and I wasn’t having time for writing at all. I was snappy and didn’t want to be around people.

It was a terrible bloody day.  I had been keeping a food diary for a couple of weeks, on paper, because we haven’t had the internet installed yet and my dietician would need a paper copy which I wouldn’t have got round to if I had first written it down on paper or onto my blog, and I had been counting up the days I hadn’t drank any alcohol, nor caffeine, and so on. Doing so made it very clear how important these things are for me, not drinking caffeine, and avoiding alcohol. I had slipped a couple of times with caffeine, and once with alcohol, having a pint at lunchtime at work with some people I rarely see, and both times it had really knocked me about for a couple of days. Suffice to say I hadn’t really drank much alcohol for a good few weeks, just a pint or a half here and there. And then we had a barbecue. It was my turn to be host - and it must be said that as anti-social as I am, I enjoy being a host, not exactly being the centre of attention but kind of setting the pace and keeping myself busy, especially with a barbecue. Predictably, I didn’t manage to stay off the alcohol, and convinced myself, once again, that vodka would be ok. In a way it was for a good while, until once everyone had gone (at least, I think I lasted that long) and it really all hit me at once.

M____’s mum was over. It was a barbecue for her, but also a housewarming. Only her Polish friends hadn’t come over, letting her down despite knowing a month in advance that her mum would be over.

In any case, the next day I had the worst possible hangover, and was barely able to move. I did little but look at page3.com and drive my boss about a couple of times all day. Except that lunchtime dietician’s appointment.

I turned up in the carpark, my car smelling of partly composted grass from the load of bags full of the stuff I had offered to take to the tip, and worried that I recognised the car in the corner as belonging to one of the women at work who I’ve had a few reveries about and had bitched about that day as being both condescending and hypersensitive - she, after all, has a number of food intolerances. It was one of these complexes with several anonymous buildings fenced off and notes on doors saying to use other door, door round corner etc.

I finally found the place and sat down trying to hold back the reveries about seeing supercilious medicos and finding they don’t listen at all, getting angry and walking out and the like. I picked Bleak House out of my bag but of course couldn’t read more than a sentence or two.

Finally, she called me through.

She listened. I introduced myself and said that, though I have not been diagnosed, I consider that I satisfy all the diagnostic criteria of both ADD and Asperger’s syndrome. And she agreed with me that my psychiatrist is wrong to say that if I was ADD I would have been diagnosed at school.

I found I was talking quickly, just like I always do sat in front of my shrink.

She then talked me through an exclusion diet. I would be excluding a lot of things of course to confirm first of all that food affects my symptoms. It would be a restricted diet that could not in any way be recommended as a permanent solution. Following this, foods would be reintroduced one after another for a three day period in order to check whether they triggered any symptoms. If they did they would be rechecked after all the others had been checked or eliminated.

In addition to being gluten free and dairy free, I would not be allowed onions, potatoes, beans and pulses, nuts and corn.

I wondered about a couple of things. First of all the fact that I would be allowed any quantity of any kind of fresh fruit seemed to exclude this being a diet which could check for candida. Secondly, I had read that there are food families, and that should, say, potato be excluded then aubergine should as well.

Nonetheless, it seemed a positive thing. I would have a structured diet, and an incentive to follow it for a set period of time. I hoped, and I hope, that this will help me to better conform to those aspect of the diet that I was already trying, mainly unsuccessfully, to follow, and to those additional aspects of it.

Thus far I have not began the diet. I have indeed conformed to the no alcohol, no caffeine, no gluten nor dairy part of the deal, but in using up some old frozen meals and making a couple of things I had bought ingredients for, and indeed in conforming to this part of the diet to a fuller extent in transition to the exclusion diet, but have figured that I need a little more preparation yet to make the full switch.

Over the last few days, on my own in the new house with M____ flying back to Poland with her Mum, I have worried that though diet is a large contributory factor to my problems, however well I eat it will be no panacea. I have been eating pretty well, with perhaps medium-high GI dishes (lovely vegetable curries with gram flour pancakes, for example) but still finding that I’m having pretty intrusive and often angry reveries. More than once I have needed to go and do some vigorous exercise, some shadow boxing and the like to try and get it out of my system. In fact today or yesterday I started to worry, comparing myself to J D Salinger who I have always believed to have a temperament very similar to my own (granted every adolescent believes this, but I do tend to feel that carefull exegesis of certain passages in Catcher and elsewhere in his oevre demonstrates a tendency towards ADD and perhaps Asperger’s to a degree little less than the evidence Kay Redfield Jamison amasses in Touched with Fire demonstrates the bipolarity of the personalities she discusses). Salinger is of course a famous recluse, and in articles I will soon post elsewhere, I will discuss my own tendencies in this regard. He also is prone, according to some reports, to be attracted to many and varied methods of healing, many of which it is safe to say, have not been submitted to peer review. I have always been subject to crises of confidence regarding my diets, mainly perhaps due to the blank faces, scepticism and suspicion I meet when I describe my problems those few times I trust people enough to bother to do so at all, and this was one such.

Still, it is fantastic to have somebody simply listen.

On leaving, she even told me about a friend of hers who has been diagnosed as Aspergic in his late thirties. This guy had been very academic, getting a clutch of A-levels and the like and going into computers. Only his employers referred him to a counsellor for problems he was having at work. Bingo.

We chatted for a little while in fact before I left. All in all it was a good day. M____ rang to ask how it had went. I thnk she was glad finally to hear something positive, that something had gone well.

So, fingers crossed!