Kangerooing

Give a car insufficient gas or raise the clutch a little jerkily and you’ll tend to lurch forward repeatedly. Instructors tend to call it kangerooing. That’s how I feel at the moment. More

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.

The Potato Blight

Actually I am being very facetious with my title. As my last post made clear, it cannot be certain what is causing my current malaise. What is clear is that I can’t concentrate, and that I am having a lot of reveries sat in front of a piece of paper trying to write a continuation of Nat’s story. My legs are restless too and I’m very antsy. 

As far as reveries go, I have been having discussions with students about being sexist, telling them (within earshot of certain people, as usual), that they will miss out on a hell of a lot in life if they exclude women, that yes (launching into one of my semi-manic comic monologues) women can take an utterly ordinary, insignificant event and turn it into a three or four hour conversation topic and do our heads in, but that on the flip side they can have far wider-ranging conversation; I have been cooking, filling in for the kitchen staff at work; I have been describing in one of the morning meetings a student’s problems with a subscription to an erotic website, jokily describing the website in such a way as makes clear my own familiarity with porn sites, but also arguing strongly that there should be no moral qualms about encouraging such a student to buy erotic magazines… And much more. 

Nothing remotely out of the ordinary, except that I could not simply shake my head and be rid of them. They were persistent and intrusive, which they have not been for a long while. 

There was not, as I wrote earlier, much potato in the curry I made. It was just hot. As far as testing goes it was really not ideal. Far too ambiguous. Perhaps I will have to stretch this one out beyond the few days I’ll be eating this curry. 

It is good though, after putting so much into the diet to see such a positive result, which presumeably will continue into tomorrow. I will have to watch too that it does, since it could be that today’s gym session was the problem. I shall have to watch out for the impact of demanding cardiovascular exercise on my symptoms. There may be some effect, and possibly a negative effect arising from the demand on the system made by toxins and the like. Mainly, though, I think there must be a problem with either starch or hot foods. (I did not in the end serve much rice at all with the curry either at lunch or dinner.) Nor did I eat more fruit than I have been on the diet. Indeed, less than most days with an apple after my millet porridge in the morning, and another after my dinner. 

Yes, these positive results will be a positive thing for me, I’m sure, after all the impatience with the constant demands of my time of my cooking and food shopping, even if I have to stick it all out a little longer. 

*** 

I should describe the reintroduction stage Here is the schedule: 

Tap Water       -  1-2 pints a day.Potatoes          -  Have 2 x 4oz portionsMilk                   -  1 pint a dayYeast                -  3 brewers yeast tablets or 2 teaspoons of fresh bakers yeast in water or fresh yeast spread on rice cakes. 

[Reverie of looking tired in a morning meeting and being told that I should go to bed earlier. Me responding that I did go to bed early, but that doesn’t much help when you don’t fall asleep until seven hours later. Describing my exclusion diet and how I had reintroduced yeast the night before, smashed up a cupboard, gone out for a walk and come upon some guys kicking a hedgehog around, and that I kicked hell out of them; then describing my condition and a similar situation to the girls in the kitchen; then, again, in a morning meeting.] 

Tea                    -  Drink at least 6 cups.Rye                    -  Test 5 Ryvita or 2 slices of Rye bread (check the bread is not a mixture of wheat and rye). Only test rye as bread if the yeast was negative.Beef                  -   2 x 3oz portions. 

[Popped to the toilet and to make some fruit tea. Reverie first of doing my usual rant against homeopathy, talking about water having not only to have a memory, but also be a discerning memory, to be essentially sentient [reverie about flow forms, something the people at work go mad about, and dismissing them, saying I can appreciate the beauty of water but rarely feel the need to verbalise it, etc etc., a whole other rant here] saying how is water supposed to diagnose the person it commes into contact with, and remember the specific molecules it was adjacent to at one point in its history, and discard all others, such as, for example, fish piss and, say, even homeopathic remedies for other individuals which have subsequently been passed out as urine and diluted several times in the water treatment works, something which should, if homeopathy’s logic is to be pursued, make it stronger… talking to the mother of one student I believe could be helped by a G/F C/F diet having shared my lunch with him for a couple of months (this because another student expressed an interest in my lunch today), describing to her the improvement in his condition. Oh, and the first, telling the managers at work that one of their light switches was arcing, being put down by one of them “yes, thank you, when we need you’re electrical advice we’ll ask for it” before challenging them…] 

Butter         -  Test at least 2oz during the day.Onions      -  Have 2 x 1oz portions.Eggs          -  Have 2 during the day.Oats           -  Test as porridge oats, have two servings.Coffee       -   Test coffee beans and instant coffee - have at least 6 cups.Chocolate -  Plain or cocoa.Barley        -  Can be tested as pearl barley, 2 x 2oz portions (cooked weight) or barley flakes.Citrus Fruit  - Have at least 2 fruits or 2 glasses of fruit juice.White Wine - Have two glasses.Corn             - Test cornflour or corn on the cob.Yoghurt        - Ordinary yoghurt made with cow’s milk, test 2 small cartons.Wheat          -  Test as 5 slices of bread if yeast is okay, or wheat breakfast cereals or pasta.Saccharin   -  Test as saccharin tablets.Shellfish     -  Have 2 x 2oz portions.Nuts            -   Any kind, have 2 x 1oz portions.Preservatives  - Try fruit squashes, tinned foods, sausages, smoked fish etc. 

I have a couple of reservations, including that white wine is a strange choice being as it contains both yeast and alcohol, and would like to reintroduce a few extra things, including, as of today, also spicy foods on their own, mushrooms, sugar and vodka. On the whole though, I am glad I can see the end of this thing in sight, and that I soon might come to a time when just excluding gluten and dairy, say, may seem like a doddle, and it will be much easier mentally because of the consistency that should come from having conducted an exclusion diet and narrowed things down. We’ll see.

Tap water reintroduced

I started drinking tap water a couple of days back as the first stage of the various reintroductions I’ll be going through over the next few weeks. No effect. Still feel great from the diet. It’ll be potatoes from today, so I cooked up a curry last night with a couple of the now-sprouted potatoes I had been keeping hidden away underneath a tea towel away from the light in one of the kitchen cupboards. Most had gone a little soft so I just put a few in.

One of the things I find with ADD is that the saying “out of sight, out of mind” is completely accurate. I once left some potatoes in the celophane wrapper they had come in stowed away on an overflowing shelf in a flat I lived in for perhaps a year and a half in Prague. Eventually they spilled over and the rancid liquid that is produced when you leave potatoes for this long flooded all over the carpet, leaving my long-suffering housemate on her knees all day. The trouble was the kitchen was in the room of my other housemate, and he was one of these with whom I never got beyond the awkward stage and so I didn’t feel I could go in to his room - the door was most often closed - and cook. Of course this was a massive problem.

Anyway, my curry tastes fantastic. I’m getting back into making curry with all the usual spices, cardamon, cumin seed, mustard seed first into the hot oil, and then onions (though on this diet it has to be just finally chopped peppers). It was a base of coconut cream, then potatoes and parsnips, chicken and cabbage. It’s a little grey, and very hot, perhaps from all the spices I added which cooked in as the veg and chicken cooked in the sauce, but possibly also from the paprika which I added and which I suspect was a hot Hungarian Paprika or some such rather than the mildly flavoured spice the package suggested (I had been using a different container and also thought it was fairly old).

It’s not ideal to reintroduce something whilst also making such a hot curry which I’ll be having over the few days of potatoes - it’s said hot spices can exacerbate a problem with an excessively permeable intestinal lining. And I have brought in rice this time as well, as much for aesthetic purposes - so people don’t see me eating this aromatic but grey schlop - which also ups the carbs at a time when I am reintroducing starchy potatoes. Still, if I find there is a problem there is a second reintroduction stage when I can more carefully monitor these other factors.

I haven’t been very good at doing my food diary. I must keep on top of that.

On Playing Catch-up*

I went upstairs for a flourescent piss a little while back - the vitamin B6 is starting to come through having taken my usual Solgar supplement this morning, and shows up as a very bright yellow - and caught a glimpse of a scar above my left eyebrow in the mirror beside me. I got this a couple of days back when I managed to splash some oil into my face while tossing a few cubes of butternut squash into the baking tray in the oven. A goodly portion got into my eye, or at the very least just around it as well, all at around 220 or more degrees - the oven was set to max.

I don’t know why, but this set me to thinking about a programme I caught the other day, and which, unusually for me, I have now seen at least a couple of times. The Restaurant is one of countless programme about chefs and restaurants at the moment, but is peculiarly good. Raymond Blanc has selected a number of people, mostly couples, who have long dreamed of setting up a restaurant together. He has given each a restaurant, but each week, sets a challenge and closes another one down. This is one of those reality programmes it is actually interesting to watch as it shows not only the stresses of opening and managing a restaurant, but also the tensions between these various couples, or indeed the strengths of their relationships - one pair of twins seem particularly close.

Last week he set a challenge to a number of couples who, I think, were selected for their poor performance in their previous contests. They were to run a historically themed evening with dishes made of local seasonal produce.

Each challenge has seemed so far to completely phase one or other of the chefs, or one or other of the front house staff. This time it was the turn of one of the chefs, who admitted he had no idea at all of what was seasonal, and even had the gall to defend himself in front of the star chamber of Blanc and his steely cold triumvirate of inspectors, by claiming that there wasn’t really any seasonal veg at that time of year.

Blanc, he said, had grown up with locally-grown seasonal vegetables and produce all around him. His father grew veg. He saw it all around him,. He had grown up with it. He grew up, too, in a culture of food.

In Britain, this is rarely the case. There was very little seasonal variation in the food I ate as a kid, and certainly no sense in growing up in a food culture. Mum learnt a few recipes on a cookery course one time, and has pretty much stuck to those ever since, broadening out to cook rice and ready made sauces in the last few years, with tortilla too from a packet from time to time.

My attempts at cooking are very much attempts to catch up, picking up what I can from books and TV programmes and occasionally attempting something which may be a little beyond me. Trying to get up to speed, I might occasionally make some basic mistake, like in splashing myself with oil the other day trying to rush everthing.

Judging by this spate of television programmes, there must be a whole lot of people out there who feel the same. Our food culture and connection to the produce and native food of our land is in a depressingly poor state and it is understandable if we make these desperate attempts to move forward.

Sores Gone*

The sores on the corners of my mouth have heeled up some time during my exclusion diet. Over the last couple of weeks I have supplemented friendly bacteria, even over the last few days, going so far as to make fermented cabbage juice which I have read contains beneficial bacteria. This is cabbage liquidised up with filtered or distilled water and left for a few days for the bacteria naturally present in the cabbage leaves to proliferate. It makes for pretty bad breath, and noticeably cabbagey farts but apparently does some good. I don’t know whether this, with my supplementation of caprylic acid every day has made a difference - I did once supplement with this for a period about six months ago and did experience both the “die-off reactions” that some writers speak about, and also soe benefits, so this may be connected. Whatever it is, it does demonstrate yet again that my problems must be linked to some nutritional deficiencies. My pharmacist in the village down the road from Black Herd Mews - who has apparently upped and left overnight since - told me that these sores were evidence of a lack of vitamin B. I bought some from him which I never then took because it did not say it did not contain yeast, but supplementation of vitamin B on its own never made a difference, something that would not surprise Patrick Halford and others at the Institute of Optimum Nutrition who highlight the interdependency of all vitamin systems, and the necessity of looking at any such deficits as a whole rather than singularly, but only now can I see how true it is that some of us may have imbalances which demonstrate an impaired ability to take on certain vitamins.

Insomnia: intelligence failures*

It was likely in 2001 when I was studying a module entitled The Vigilent State as part of my politics degree. “Spooks and Nukes” was what a different professor called it. It centered around the intelligence apparatus of the state. I still have a pile of books I would like to read from this module. One of the theories we looked at concerned the idea that intelligence failures are inevitable. It was, of course, a very topical theme, and so I thought about it a lot. It was also one of those hypotheses which fundamentally accorded with my own views. I was at the time constantly self-monitoring for signs of mania or depression, subjecting all my thoughts, observations and opinions to rigorous, distrusting scrutiny. It was no doubt in part for this reason that I believed that intelligence is inevitably flawed, either with too much weighting given to recent experience or with filters and skews, inclinations of interpretation always leaving open some blind side, some lacunae.

Take for instance the US intelligence service. We should (whilst holding it in our memory) set aside the more obvious facts such as that the politicisation of the service into a “consumer-led” institution will lead to errors of processing and interpretation if objectivity is what we are ultimately to judge it by and analyse not the recent, most conspicuous past of the intelligence apparatus but instead such things as the history of the service’s filters and biases not solely with regard to external threats, but also to the men and women who form the service. Ultimately we will see not only that the US has consistently chosen [] allies (I do not of course claim it is alone in this) but that it has also consistently found it necessary to enlist unsavoury characters for intelligence work - when one considers the type of work involved, and the necessity of maintaining an elaborate lie to family and friends, it becomes clear why this is so. The difficulty of choosing the right unsavoury charaters ie. those who are unsavoury in predictable, quantifiable, tolerable ways, untrustworthy only to those not involved in affairs of state, is perhaps the fundamental problem of intelligence to which much else will follow. I remember, just vaguely, how one character who had shown traits of cruelty to animals in his youth (or was it indeed bestiality?) had otherwise a seemingly clean sheet and was later recruited to the intelligence services, served in the Cold War and then defected. Of course, after this, signs of such cruelty (or bestiality, whichever it may have been) were taken as evidence of Communist tendencies and untrustworthiness. At other times (I here speculate entirely), it may have been homosexuality, a jewish background, affiliation to certain educational establishments, and so on and so forth. I would imagine that at precisely no time did the array of filters and biases reflect the array of factors which related at that time to that supremely incalculable human quality of untrustworthiness (which could scarcely be considered as a quality in the philosophical sense at all so little might each instance resemble another).

All of which brings us, tangentially, to Ginkgo Biloba, one of the few substances left to through me while I remain on this exclusion diet, and which I bought having written off Ginseng for keeping me awake, and have somehow allowed to slip into place as a latest magic potion to keep faux pas at work to a supportable minimum.

I had noted before that this stuff keeps me awake if I have it too late, as it has done today when I really needed to get some shut eye after getting up this morning to take M____ to work (and being locked out of the house as she left her keys in the door on the inside so I couldn’t get my keys out), and having promised to drop her off tomorrow. This is a problem, and contributes to my constant debate about the relationship as one week getting up just that little bit earlier had me too tired for days to do any writing, taking me back to the days of working at a hardware store and being constantly too tired to do anything, smoking and the rest of it.

My filters and biases have got better and better. I really shouldn’t beat myself up about the failures. I know better than that, and besides, such an exercise does little that is constructive and a great deal that is corrosive of those things which are working well - look at the BBC now! I have had so few slips, and when I get round to writing the entry on The Payoff, which is to come before this, I shall explain how the diet has been working for me, confirming the ideas I had for so so long but was unable to live by for lack of steadfastness.

The mental side, in any case, becomes in this struggle something like a reflection of the immune system’s battle with foreign bodies, making its own mistakes, being overzealous at times and failing in others. Mistakes are a part of life, and can be learnt from, and even often times enjoyed (we can laugh at them sometimes almost more than anything else) and we ignore this fact at our peril.

Homeopathy, my experiences/ATA*

 

I can’t recall if I ever wrote about my experiences with the Study Support Unit at my university, but this is certainly relevant to my experiences since with homeopathy. More

03:36

Shallow sleep again. Constant mental flotsam and jetsam, from sexual fantasies to invidious snatches of songs heard throughout the day. For dinner I warmed up the very sharp remains of the curry I made on Friday with a little quinoa. I have read before that food that has been left out for a while becomes perfuse with yeast. Now this was left in the car over the weekend and then out yesterday on a sunny day. This is presumeably what comes of just warming something like that up. The curry was made with a coconut milk and tomato base, and I should try to avoid tomato on my exclusion diet, but I have never noticed a reaction before. (Whether I would have noticed such a reaction when not looking for one is a moot point, given as for a long time only a year or so ago I didn’t even write down cheese in my food diaries since I unconsciously regarded it as a neutral filler to keep hunger at bay!) More

03:36 am

Shallow sleep again. Constant mental flotsam and jetsam, from sexual fantasies to invidious snatches of songs heard throughout the day. For dinner I warmed up the very sharp remains of the curry I made on Friday with a little quinoa. I have read before that food that has been left out for a while becomes perfuse with yeast. Now this was left in the car over the weekend and then out yesterday on a sunny day. This is presumeably what comes of just warming something like that up. The curry was made with a coconut milk and tomato base, and I should try to avoid tomato on my exclusion diet, but I have never noticed a reaction before. (Whether I would have noticed such a reaction when not looking for one is a moot point, given as for a long time only a year or so ago I didn’t even write down cheese in my food diaries since I unconsciously regarded it as a neutral filler to keep hunger at bay!)

I did take a couple of capryllic acid tablets last night. Something I will probably be wary of revealing on my food diary, if I get to fill it in at all, since this would seem to write me off as someone trying to perform his own nutritional therapy rather than awaiting expert help.

The only other possible factor is hunger. I do remember going to bed with the subjective feeling of hunger. The curry was a thin veggie affair after all.

Anyway, the insomnia, at least is something I have avoided for the majority of the time I have been living here. M____ has observed over and over that I sleep like a log.

Most of the curry was left in the pressure cooker from Friday. I was cursing and swearing to open it and find it mouldy. Such a waste of time and food.