that cheerful Howdy! hasta stop

(copied from original post on #pinkyblog)

I have done my planning, my shopping, and yesterday initiated my original paleo / South Beach / Rosedale health plan combo diet. The only thing I purchased with Rosedale was the book (used, spent under $2), didn't buy anything else or take any supplements, and the rest I just studied online and did on my own.

Back around 2009 I had become desperate and bent my mind around putting together my own health care team. By 2011 I was cleaning off years of medications and lost 50 pounds in 4 months, but it took a lot of research on how diabetes actually works, how 'nutrition' is skewed into the wrong foods by big companies, how to survive without medications by actually paying attention to what I put into my own mouth. It's work paying attention and keeping track, but it's very easy with all the mandatory food labeling we have nowadays.

This is my public trail through healing.

pill phobia at its finest - coming out of the stupor of medication addictions, poor medication management, over prescribing

my problem with healthy food - challenging the healthy grains concept

Holidays With Diabetes- Easier than you think - An easy way to understand what the holidays do to diabetics

Diabetes and Steroid Meds - Surviving steroid treatment for other chronic illnesses and allergic reactions while maintaining control with diabetes

I've come a very long way since I wrote those articles. I've slipped off my own path a bit, regained a little weight, backslid into pain complications and medication problems, and now I'm very tired of 2017 dragging on like this. Time to get my control back.

Because I keep after continual physical therapies throughout the year, I am still not only maintaining function around my home, but keeping up with far more activity than I ever dreamed I could do. I still can't get on my knees at all without destroying them and have almost continual pain somewhere in my body during everything I do, including reclining and sitting, but it's manageable. However, I've lost my grip on that manageable part a few times this year, and I want it back. Part of losing that grip is because I'm slipping on my nutrition planning, and it doesn't take much for the diabetic headaches and slower healing and stomach problems and nerve pain to pop back in my door with a cheerful Howdy!

It's too easy to grab quick and starchy bites on the run because I have high energy young people in my house now. I must menu plan for MYSELF and stick to it. I work around food allergies, so I heavily depend on dairy for proteins, but some dairy has lactose and lately my glucose spiking is worse on lactose because of my new blood pressure pill. So, I bought an extra dozen eggs this week and boiled them up. One boiled egg a day will replace my second cup of coffee with creamer (canned milk).

I also bought bacon. Bacon gets a really bad rap when it's actually much better for you than cookies and cake and pie and spaghetti, especially when you're diabetic. It's easy to cook up a package of bacon and then keep it on hand in the fridge. When others grab a cupcake, I can grab a piece or two of bacon, and later I can use the bacon drippings to cook up a big load of pan roasted brussels sprouts, which are even more awesome with aged balsamic and grated parm.

Guys, I lost 50 pounds in 4 months one year without even trying just doing THAT and stopping when I reached 1500 calories. I could nibble all day and still dropped 5 bowling balls off. It never really hits home how much we carry around until you pick up a bowling ball and go wow, that was IN ME.

Anyway, I reached a point in 2011 where I felt like a skinny fat person, which was really fun for new clothes (got down to an 18), and I would really like to go past that now. I've been in size 20 jeans for awhile and if I'm going to be having difficulty with pain and possible falling (the klutz is becoming strong again), I'd like to be easier for others to help getting back up, knowhutImean? So I bought butter and bacon and eggs and cheese and brussels sprouts and broccoli and lettuce (I love lettuce wraps around chicken tenders!) and stuff like that, and let's see how the rest of the year goes.

I've been hovering just above 200 pounds for months, I wanna break through that. Can I do it? I've never lost weight on gabapentin before, plus I'm back on low dose xanax and still on daily zyrtec. In 2011 I was NOT on meds bossing my weight/water retention around, because I had spent 3 years cleaning off most of my meds and got into physical therapy. We'll see what happens. I do know that I gained weight this year on baclofen and higher doses of gabapentin, so the baclofen is gone and the gabapentin is back on very minimal pain control.

I. Want. This.

click for more fall gifs

wizard level unlocked

I haven't been very bloggy over here, have I? But I do have a few things that need to be noted.

natural red light from a heat lamp bulb, not edited

First off, still have hair, yay! Went through a month over the summer where I lost a bit again, have a couple of kinda bare patches, but I think those were the roots resting and now there is new growth coming in there again. I just can't believe it's this long. I don't think it's been this long in over ten years. Again, diet change. Cannot express enough what a difference dropping carbs and adding more protein and some healthy fats has made. No other special anything at all because I'm allergic to everything- can't use product, no special vitamins or natural treatments. Growth starts on the inside.

That is also my real skin. too. No makeup at all (except penciled eyebrows, stopped growing eyebrows years ago), never mask or exfoliate, no cover ups of any kind, just the barest bit of Johnson's baby lotion because, again, I'm allergic to everything. Several years ago I had to be crashed off birth control (and then crashed off my thyroid med for a couple of months), and after I went through all that, a gyno specialist told me I'd start to see some aging now. I was on birth control for about 25 years, and controlled hormones have a lot to do with skin anti-aging or something. He's right, I've seen a little aging since then, but other people can't tell because I'm supposed to look older than this. I'm the only one in my family who's been able to tolerate birth control (we're all PCOS), but it wreaked havoc with my blood pressure and we finally just couldn't control it any more with meds. HOWEVER. My skin did not look this good until the last couple of years. It looked very unhealthy and gross because my overall health wasn't good, which leads to the next paragraph.

My diabetes is more controlled than it's ever been because I've become so used to naturally watching what I eat. (Remember, a doctor pulled me off meds because I'm so med intolerant.) My fasting glucose regularly ranges from 84-96 without even trying, but I still spike real bad if I eat the wrong stuff, so I can't just munch out willy nilly. Because my blood sugar stays in the normal range throughout the day (rarely goes over 140 on a snacky day, usually 130 tops after eating, and I know this because I test), I continue to have a much easier time with headaches, joint pains, and whatever viruses are going around than I used to in the old days when I was more miserable all the time. Also, I've noted on this blog what a huge difference keeping my blood sugar down has made on my anxiety, which in the past has been noted many times as "severe". All these things being so positively impacted by diet control means I can handle getting through every day with far less medication nowadays, which is awesome, despite what I'm about to write in the next paragraph.

My fibromyalgia has always been documented as "severe", but over this last year, several assessments during therapy programs have noted a strong fibrotic response (scarring throughout my tissues) that will probably need to be maintained regularly (deep tissue work to keep it microfissured as my muscles harden), several areas down both arms that had developed nerve entrapment (requiring deep soft tissue work), and "moderate" to "significant" localized arthritis in my spine (requiring more core strength and flexibility training). So far nothing terrible or immediately worrisome (although hella painful), but definitely will cripple me back up if I don't stay on it. When I first started therapies about 4 years ago and saw improvement, I thought each improvement would be another solid step up, but I'm finding out that reconditioning and healing aren't permanent unless they are regularly maintained. If I don't want to be crippled again, like I was from summer 2007 to summer 2014 (yes, that's how long I was descending and fighting my way back out of complete immobility), it's up to me to stay on top of being able to keep moving for the rest of my life. I know from hard experience that not a single one of the handfuls of meds they had me on for years stopped any of that, and I wound up having to get off all that stuff just to become functional again. I'm happy to say this last year has been my most functional ever since 2004.

Bringing up 2004 opens the door for cognitive assessment, because that was the year I went through brain fail and finally had to quit work and could barely handle going back to college for one semester afterward. I went from brainiac to ignoramous in a few short weeks, thanks to a viral infection that hit my nervous system and affected brain function. I lived with severe brain fog and memory problems for years afterward, but over this last year have started seeing remarkable improvement in capability and function. I still go through some brain fog and short term memory deficit when I'm tired, but considering how difficult it was to string sentences together into paragraphs and make a single blog post around this time 3 years ago (I really like that post, I'm glad I wrote it, took hours), I feel like I'm in the fast lane now, even though I haven't yet gotten back to what I was capable of before 2004. What I'm saying is, the sentences fly out on their own now. I don't have to think about it any more. I still make loads of typos, but after several paragraphs fly out of my fingers, I just laugh now.

The next bit is my favorite. I haven't gone autoimmune all year. I even got permission from my doctor to try to go autoimmune, really push myself and see if I could flare up, and even though I hit a few hard walls, it just never happened. I still have to be careful about autoimmune hyper response around things that trigger allergic reactions, but so far so good, best year I've had in a very long time. I have to wonder if a lot of that is keeping my diabetes controlled. My body is healthier, so it's not falling all over itself over responding to stress and fatigue.

The reason I started this particular blog was because I needed some place to write the truth about the person behind the other blogs, where I do way more fun and distracting writing. I needed a place to practice learning how to say the hard stuff without being a drag. Over time it became a blog of hope. You guys really would not believe how crippled and ugly I got for several years. It was so terribly depressing, and I really did believe I was going to die soon. You know what? I decided I'm not dying yet. I'm not DONE yet. I have more to do, more to say, more to see and hear and know. I'm very lucky that we have internet nowadays to help me find information and figure out how to apply it to my own life.

I know it's hard. I know you might not believe me. But I also know there's hope. If you are not willing to give up what's killing you, that's your business and your choice. It's not a sin to die naturally from old age and illness and just getting worn out. But in case you aren't done yet, go back through this blog and follow me out of your hell. If you want this, you can do this. You've gotta want it more than anything. You'll have very hard days (but when do we not?) and feel discouraged (we feel that anyway) and sometimes you'll backslide (that part is really eye opening for seeing how far you've really come), but one day you'll wake up and go Wo, how. did. I. get. here???  I can breathe again, I can bend again, I can smile at people again. I can THINK again. There are some wonderful moments waiting for you down the hard road.

We can do this, guys.

middle of the night chronic spoonie lurker jackpot

Pix click out to other sites and sources. Some amusingly have nothing to do with what we're talking about.

I was very ill for about a year before I finally felt desperate enough to seek out medical help. I'd lost 75 pounds and hurt profusely all over, and felt like my spine was being microwaved, as if the spinal cord must have a fever. My first doctor was an ancient country doctor on the brink of retirement. My bloodwork inspired him to let me know I would be in a nursing home by 40, and that there was nothing that could be done. Then he prescribed the biggest jar of aspirin I ever saw in my life and told me to take it every day. About a couple of weeks into the aspirin I went through a full week of hallucinating and 'visions' and should probably have been in a hospital. I never went back to that doctor, and stopped the aspirin. I was in my mid 20s.

A few months after that I dragged myself into a city clinic and saw a real rheumatologist. He asked why I was there. I told him I thought I might have lupus. He asked me ten questions, and I said yes to all ten, including losing my hair, which was noticeable to my family. Without ordering a single blood test, he laughed and told me I don't look sick, and said I was skipping down a rosy little path to a psychiatric illness. I dragged back out to my car and sat there crying for almost an hour. Note- several years later, a doctor sent me back to that same rheumatologist who was now in an even bigger clinic, and after touching my rock hard shoulders exclaimed that I had the worst fibromayalgia he'd ever seen and demanded to know why I wasn't being treated for it.

I was too devastated to try again for another year, until I finally couldn't take it any more. It was a horrible time for single parents on medicaid, no clinic I called would take me. I finally drove back to the city to a clinic I hadn't called yet and dragged from office to office asking if someone could please see me. Finally, on the third floor, one doctor said yes and saw me that day.

From Fibromyalgia- University of Maryland Medical Center
"Fibromyalgia can be difficult to diagnose. It can take 5 years for the average person with the condition to finally get a diagnosis. As many as three out of every four people with fibromyalgia remain undiagnosed."
I was fast tracked to rheum and diagnosed within a week.

From Do I have lupus or fibromyalgia?- Fibromyalgia Information Foundation
"As many of the symptoms of fibromyalgia are similar to those experienced by lupus patients, there is a natural concern that the symptoms of a fibromyalgia flare could be the underlying lupus picking up steam. Ultimately, the treating physician has to make a call on these increased symptoms. In general, lupus patients who are undergoing a flare have other findings; such as evidence of true arthritis (usually with joint swelling), skin rashes, sores in their mouth, fever, hair fall or evidence of specific organ disease such as pleurisy or microscopic amounts of blood and protein in the urine. Furthermore, in active lupus, blood tests such as the sedimentation rate often become elevated, the white count (particularly the lymphocyte subset) becomes depressed and there is often an increase in the level of anti-DNA antibodies. None of these findings are a feature of fibromyalgia -- thus the distinction between a flare of fibromyalgia and a flare of lupus should not be too difficult if the problem is approached systematically."
I was also dx'd simultaneously and treated immediately for lupus based on positive ANA and high SEDs which refused to come down for several years even on meds. Medicaid wasn't paying for a new drug called Ansaid, so my doctor kept me on samples for five months. I credit him with saving my life. He also dx'd me with Hashimoto's (autoimmune thyroid) about a year later, based on radioactive iodine uptake.

My SEDs hovered between 75 and 100 for several years. I felt like my bones had been crushed and nothing touched the pain, but the Ansaid kept me functioning enough to work on my college degree.

In the years since, photosensitivity called polymorphic light eruption (PLE) was confirmed by a dermatologist, a liver condition called NASH was confirmed by an endocrinologist, and I underwent heart surgery at 38 to correct a rhythm problem that started in high school after I had measles, which I just lived with until it became unbearable. During my worst year I went through nerve fail which caused such severe dry eye (I still make only 3% moisture in one eye, confirmed by an opthamolagist) and dry mouth that I developed cavities all over my mouth. My dentist was thrilled when the moisture finally came back on, and I have had only one cavity in the years since.

I'm also positive for lyme, esptein-barr, bartonella, and CMV, plus I had the measles in high school. What doesn't kill you doesn't always make you stronger. Sometimes it makes you a puny sickie.

Why am I saying all this? Because I still have doctors asking Are you sure it's lupus? (Yeah, they're asking me.) I've never been hospitalized and managed to fake my way through 15 months on a desk job (my last job after years of more laborious jobs) without missing a day before I finally fell apart because when I was growing up, we never went to doctors. I grew up on a farm working like a dog since I was very young, pushing animals 4-8 times my size around regularly, and using my hands so hard that I'd developed carpal tunnel by the time I was in high school (recently confirmed as 'severe' by a neurologist). Then I went on to survive being thrown out of a car crash without any pain meds at all. After living with nasty trigeminal pain from damage for years, a neurologist finally dx'd me with trigeminal neuralgia.

I've come through a whole lot of thick and thin, have been through several epic health crashes, but what started turning it all around was 1- finally being dx'd with diabetes and changing my diet, and 2- slowly weaning off the handfuls of meds that kept me 'drunk' for years. AFTER THESE TWO THINGS, my liver tests finally went back into a normal range. I had elevated liver enzymes for two decades until I changed those two things. One year my liver was so sick that my doctor wanted to test me for autoimmune liver disease, but I felt too rotten to go through a long needle penetration. I still get symptoms once in awhile, so maybe I do, but it sucks so I avoid flaring it as much as possible.

Ever since I made these changes, which have taken several years (four years since the diet changes, seven years since I first started weaning off meds one by one under doctor supervision), my health has slowly but steadily improved. I have come back from being convinced death was close (using a cane and sometimes a transport chair and daily advair just to be able to breathe, and needing help dressing and bathing), to living a pretty normal life in my own home now. I still have mini flares, I still get SED spikes once in awhile, but for the most part nearly everything in my body is improving as I age after years of immobility and misery.

I still look around for tips and advice from other spoonies on rough weeks, and what I call my rough weeks are still spectacularly rough compared to non-spoonies, but to me now, they're a vast improvement over rough years.

I wrote this down in one place to give other people hope. There really is hope.

If you are a very sick and puny person and are still drinking soda pop and smoking cigarettes, you cannot get better until you stop that.

If you are a fatigued scatterbrain who enjoys a little too much pasta and dessert, you cannot get more energy until you stop that.

If you are overworked and eating salads and and torturing yourself to 'be healthy', you cannot feel healthy until you stop that. Get some real rest and more protein in your diet.

If you are buying extra makeup and putting more chemicals in your hair trying not to look bad, stop that and take a step back- do a real self assessment, prioritize some goals, make a PLAN, and spend the next 2-5 years implementing. It took you years to go to pot, it'll take a few years to come back from that.

I am a workaholic. I'm also an alcoholic (20 years dry now), a very heavy smoker (3 packs a day, 25 years off now), a codeine-benzo-caffeine addict (never cold turkey off benzos, guys, it sucks and it's dangerous, and guess how I know that), a chocoholic (a severe nut allergy popping up cures that real quick, read a few labels and laugh with me about how most of the chocolate in the world is processed in facilities also processing nuts), a sweets junkie (I'm an artist with decadent baking), ok you get the point. All that stuff piles up. And once you've overloaded, it takes years to undo damage to your immune system, your liver and kidneys, your eyes, even your brain. You can't take ginseng and improve your brain power and still do all this stuff.

There are people out there who do everything right and don't get better. Hugs to you guys, I've watched a few friends go down and I know it's really hard. There are other people out there who do everything wrong and live long lives without ever getting sick or cancer. High five on you guys, good on your magic DNA. Trade me bodies sometime. And don't gloat or feel better than other people because we all know it was the luck of the draw, and it's not like you got to pick your body before you were born.

It's not your fault. Yes, we have science and medicine now, yes, you know better than to be ingesting things and not exercising and whatnot, but just because we know this stuff doesn't mean it's your fault. 300 years ago, people died all the time and no one knew why (unless it was murder or some crazy accident). Now we know why, and basically it really is the luck of the draw- you are stuck with the DNA you were born with. Some people are prone to cancers, some prone to diabetes, some prone to autoimmune problems, whatever. You were born that way.

True story. My husband's granny lived to 102 with full blown diabetes. She avoided stuff that spiked her blood sugar. Her daughter (my husband's mother) eats bags of candy and to this day in her 80s remains completely free of diabetes. Eating sugar doesn't cause diabetes, but it will make you very sick if you have diabetes. My husband has been hovering on the brink of 'pre-diabetes' (that's such a joke, just call it what it is) for years because he's a hard worker and manages to keep his fasting glucose low enough to keep the doctor hesitating, even though he carb loads like crazy sometimes. When he does that, his heart races, and we know there is some damage going on at the cellular level, but he thinks he can get away with cheating. He's never yet been treated and he doesn't count carbs, he just works really hard.

On the other hand, I come from everyone going diabetic on my mom's side, lots of strokes and vascular disease kind of stuff, and she didn't make it to 70. I watched diabetes destroy her. She suddenly started wasting away and I thought she had cancer. She said she never felt better in her life. I don't know if that was true, because I also know her feet started going numb, and it took her months to recover properly after a simple gall bladder surgery.

I was going down way faster than my mom. Way faster. Now I'm doing much better at this age than she did. Way better.

I just want to let you guys know there really is hope, but you are the one who has to decide whether to make it possible. Whatever your diagnosis, whether they're missing something or not, even if it feels dire, you can make decisions that change how you feel down the road. Where do you want to be in five years? Make a list. Fewer headaches, maybe. Heartburn gone for good. Bladder control. Less brain fog. A little more energy. You might surprise yourself if you make a decision and stick to it. Just 5 years ago I was using a motor cart to buy groceries. Now I trot all over Walmart.

Little steps over several years add up to really big changes.

mean is how I show my love

There's a new policy agreement I had to sign before my physical therapy assessment this time. They have so many no-shows and cancellations that they're losing a substantial amount of money flow, and THAT, my friends, is why insurance is so stupidly high. Don't blame it all on poor people and ERs. Blame the people who have insurance and medicare who are purposely noncompliant with care plans.

Physical therapy is hard work. It's not for the faint of heart. I've been there- in and out of wheelchairs, using a cane, needing a driver and assistance in and out of the shower, and help getting dressed. I know exactly what it feels like to be a burden and spiral down a black hole of hopelessness. I'm such a good friend with pain that I actually miss it when it's gone, because I almost get high off of it, even without meds.

It's so easy to take the whiny way out. I hurt. Yeah, join the club. I have a headache. My worst headache lasted 6 weeks and I got at most ten minutes of sleep at a time that entire time, because it was so bad I couldn't even lay down, so I hear ya. It's hard. So is having babies, and that's not stopping anybody. I can't do it. Then curl up and die, you big baby.

That's me talking to my head. I have said all the things everyone else has said. And then I kicked my butt and slammed my head into a wall and GOT TO WORK. I got pissed off enough to get up and do something about my whining.

It was hard believing I could do this. Every morning I had to actually literally SAY "I can do this." Sometimes it was just a whisper in my mind while I cried. Sometimes it was a hopeless defiant shout in the dark. But many times I really did say it out loud on my way in to physical therapy.

Yesterday was hard. I'm in a better place than I've been in years, but it was still hard getting through another assessment and core review. I'm not out of the woods. I can't just flop my body into a chair and pop pain pills when I sit too long. I can't be lazy without backsliding into more pain and disability and eventually major surgery. Yes, I can ask them to turn the pain off and risk paralysis and sepsis and a whole list of other possibilities in a 50/50 gamble, because that's what surgical pain management is. It doesn't fix anything. It actually harms the body even more so you just can't feel it. There's no guarantee how long it'll last, and once it's done you can't go back and undo it. I know too many people this has backfired on. It's way too easy to skip ahead to the last resort and then hear the horror stories- multiple procedures melting down into meth addiction trying to handle pain that simply can't be killed off. Procedures that went well but then catastrophic fail happened after a blood clot in the spine, making the disability so much worse than it was before. Pain being replaced with maddening numbness. Asking someone to cauterize a nerve is such a leap of faith, I can't imagine doing that unless I was ready to commit suicide anyway. My psychologist told me a few times I'm a cynic. That's putting it mildly. I look at it like this- if a surgeon tells me he won't do pain control on me even in radiology with a needle because my history contraindicates success (nice of him to be honest), then I'm going to find another way to live like this.

There is this wonderful program in place to help people who are sinking into quagmires of pain and disability. It's called physical therapy. It's there for just about everyone- medicare is very supportive, and most insurance plans will take the brunt of the cost. All it takes is a person telling their doctor they'd like some help with a specific pain- how to move correctly, how to strengthen that area, how to become more functional around the house. I can say from experience that it's like working miracles, but it takes participation. You can get a whole team of people in on it, and they'll all tell you the same thing- pain shots, PT, and even surgery all work better with regular stretching and exercise, and good nutrition and hydration. You wanna heal? Cut the crap. You don't make a car run better pouring sugar in the gas tank. You don't stick a cigarette in your dog's mouth. You don't give babies beer bottles. You don't pick a fantasy football player who doesn't make the workouts. The logic is sound. All we have to do is apply it.

Several years ago I made a decision. Do I want to LIVE? If I don't save myself, no one else has to. Get out there and GET TO WORK. It made differences nothing else ever did.

I went through a little backsliding the last 8 months, so I'm back in GET TO WORK mode. I'm slapping myself to get up and MOVE, I'm plugging my ears and singing lalalalala when my head whines that this is too hard, I'm gritting my teeth and psyching up and telling myself that actors and professional athletes are where they are because they were willing to work for it. There is nothing in this world saying a writer doesn't need that kind of one on one physical training, as well. Sitting in a chair writing words isn't easy. Anyone who thinks it's easy is an idiot.

I know I sound mean. Sometimes you gotta get mean if you wanna stick around longer for your family. Whining my way to an early grave is unacceptable to me. I've got things to do, people to meet, a world to change...

things that have dramatically impacted my depression and anxiety levels

I know this is going to sound crazy, but I'm a long-time depression survivor, and this is trew.

1- The sudden wheat allergy last year that had me in clinic and 2 ER visits and put me on prednisone for 17 days was a godsend. There's a rumor going around that wheat might be a big culprit in depression. After being completely wheat free for nearly a year now, I can totally vouch for that. I have no idea if it's related to the big Monsanto GMO wheat monopoly thing, but there seems to be some science developing behind it. The severe brain fog I lived with for years is mostly gone, although I still hit walls and have glitchy moments, my memory is getting better again, and my ability to deal with spontaneity and change (I have Aspergers) is getting better again. I don't seem to need as much shutdown time, and I seem more able to steer it now instead of caving to it. I'm not saying the original brain fail was caused by wheat, just that nerve healing (the brain is nerve central) seems to be going a lot faster without it.

2- Regular zyrtec is making it possible for me to drive without delayed PTSD Tourette's behaviors, like tapping my steering wheel because I'm afraid to touch it, or not being able to stop blinking while I drive. I've discussed these anxiety behaviors with a psychologist, because they go back years. I've been rolling down all the windows in the coldest winters over severe claustrophobia while I'm driving, to the point of even pulling out of heavy traffic so I can exit my car before I have a meltdown. I've tried all kinds of meds (highway patrol has driven me home 'drunk' on meds in years past), and all kinds of behavior modification techniques, as you can imagine. (I trigger easily, thanks to being thrown out of a violently flipping vehicle, so it's amazing I drive at all, especially with the pain levels I've had through the years.) Last year I was COMMANDED to stay on zyrtec since my food reactions were going ridiculously more out of control, and I discovered that zyrtec crosses the brain barrier differently than other antihistamines and a regular dose has a very calming effect on me without making me sleepy. I've been able to drive like a normal person and have gotten through a whole winter and a very rainy spring and summer without having to emergency call family to talk me through driving home or constantly send update pix of where I am to facebook or twitter. After seeing such a huge change, I have to wonder how much of my severe anxiety had more to do with a continual overwhelming barrage of histamine reactions than anything. This is not true for everyone.
Cetirizine: actions on neurotransmitter receptors
The Zyrtec Effect
But this may be why it works for me. That's right, they're discovering anxiety (in some people) might be related to histamine over reaction.
Fibromyalgia Trial Shows Promise…For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome? Mast Cells and Ketiotifen in FM and ME/CFS

3- ASTYM treatments in physical therapy coupled with regular chiropractic adjustments have lowered the screaming pain levels on my nervous system more than anything else I've tried in years (and I've tried everything but surgery) and considering I've actually asked a dentist to do root canals on healthy teeth and sometimes think it would be lovely if someone would just severe my spinal cord in at least two places and put me in a wheelchair, my whole life turned around over this very simple technique. Lowering the pain levels dramatically lowered the stress on my nervous system, and that has made dealing with anxiety and depression much easier. There is nothing lovelier than physical therapy where you get one on one personal touch through massage and strength training, which has done me so much more good than medications. At first it was hard because I can't bear to be touched (super aspie + pain syndrome), but over time it became a real life saver. To give you context, it took four years to break through the nasty pain just under my skull because the scar tissue had grown so thick and was creating so much pressure and swelling around my cervical nerves that I couldn't even look up at the stars for years without nearly passing out. The scar tissue was the key- microfissure and slowly rebuild new more elastic tissues, and it works best with regular stretches and exercise. I'm actually sleeping nearly through the night now, after many years of not sleeping more than 2-4 hours through the night, even heavily medicated. More sleep and less pain eases anxiety levels.

I actually owned one of these.

4- I've noticed letting my glucose levels slip up (I'm diabetic) has an almost immediate effect on whether I go into a depression plunge, which is easily masked with meds and distractions that keep me from connecting those dots. Since I don't control with meds (my doctor pulled me off over med intolerance), I must be vigilant and aware of exactly what I'm eating all the time. Since I'm no longer on head meds, I've been able to see how immediate and drastic something as simple as snacking on a couple of cookies is when I haven't had any other food in several hours. My worst anxiety attacks used to come on mid-morning, and after I found out I'm diabetic, it was easy to see the pattern after a typical carby breakfast of cereal, pancakes, french toast, etc. If I don't want to blow the rest of my day on a sugar spike induced anxiety attack and then down a depression hole as my brain and body fold up trying to deal with that, I steer widely clear of anything carby before noon, and only sparingly the rest of the day. I wrote a post a few years ago, Holidays with Diabetes- Easier than You Think, in which I show how a person can still continue to have sweets all day in very small amounts as long as they avoid carb loading, but I've noticed since then that eating like that is like teasing depression all day long until it blows up into anxiety, so I've stopped doing it. If all you had to do to control your anxiety and depression was stop drinking soda and eating donuts and cake and french fries, would you do it? I've lost a sweet amount of weight over it, so I really don't miss 'comfort food' any more.

5- And that leads to small meals. Over time as I've fine tuned my metabolic and chemical default states, I've noticed that even when I watch the carbs, I feel much better through the night when I don't fill up on snacks in general before I go to bed. I've spent years waking up to full blown anxiety out of a dead sleep, and that lately seems to have gotten better all by itself just by not eating after 6 p.m. They say don't eat for a few hours before bed to avoid heartburn and GERD, but it also works for other problems, too. I've been through severe GERD, which can be dulled by continually eating or even just drinking milk, but when you add diabetes to that mix, you can get full blown heart racing in the middle of the night, and then doctors increase your blood pressure meds and put you on more anxiety pills, and as time goes on and on, you become high risk for sleep apnea and dying in your sleep from medication overdosing.
Anti-anxiety drugs, sleeping pills linked to risk of death
Popular sleep medications associated with increased risk of death
Anxiety attacks in your sleep are your body kicking in keeping you alive. If you are having anxiety attacks in your sleep, the fastest and most drastic change you can make is to stop eating before bed.

There are a lot of people on the webs describing their lives with some pretty nasty sounding anxiety and scary depression. I've been there. Years and years of it. I've been a pharmaceutical guinea pig, I know the walk in clinics and ERs like I know my own house, and my family is so good at automatically watching out for my triggers that I feel like I've really dragged their lives down sometimes. My body has become so over sensitive and hyper aware of every little bitty change inside and out that I only feel safe in my own home, and living like this is ridiculous. This has nothing to do with will power and mental illness, but living in a body that can't calm down because I've trained it for so many years to stay in fight or flight response. Well, it's starting to calm down now, and I'm loving it.

I discovered all these things accidentally. I don't think doctors have a big picture yet, but they're working on it. I grew up on homeopathy, and guys, it doesn't work. It's just training your nervous self to compulsively pop more pills or whatever. Discovering I'm allergic to chamomile tea was an eye opener, most people don't even think of that. Anyway, if you want to feel better, get better, have more control over the pain and depression and anxiety blowing up and shutting down your lives, do these things-

-Get a glucose meter and use it religiously if you are diabetic.
-Find a good chiropractor, AND talk to your doctor about physical therapy for the pains that ail you.
-Take advantage of your medicare (it pays for PT) and insurance (they pay, too, somewhat grudgingly, but beats having surgery, which should always be a last resort unless it's a medical emergency).
-Stop lying to yourself about it's ok if you have this bag of chips or that pint of ice cream.
-Reconsider using meds to slap bandaids over what you can be fixing yourself. I don't know about other diabetics, but I get nasty headaches when my high blood sugar comes down too fast, and since I'm allergic to tylenol, I monitor my carbs instead of popping pills.

And the biggest part of making a new Plan is
-TELL SOMEONE. Get other people in on the changes you're trying to make. You don't have a safety net if you don't tell anyone what you're doing. Or keep a journal, write it down, blog it, vlog it, share your experiments, then look back a year later and see if anything has improved.

There is no such thing as instant success. My brain crash was in 2004, my body crashed in 2007 between a slipped disc and a nasty CMV infection on top of undiagnosed diabetes. I made a PLAN in 2008-2009 because I honestly felt like I was dying and nothing was helping, and my life really started turning around in 2011. I finally broke free last year, healthiest I've been in over a decade, able to take care of myself and do my own shopping, control my own problems, but it took a plan with a set of long range goals, a team that included doctors, chiropractor, and psychologist, and my determination that I didn't want to die yet. I was so miserable and my life sucked so bad, and now it's all a nightmare I woke up from.

I was there. Fat, crippled, ugly, and a really scattered mess. Don't blow off what I'm saying.

If you knew you could save your life and be boinging around feeling good ten years down the road, would you do it?

Stop eating that crap. Decide what you want. Make a Plan. Write it down. Set goals. Tell someone. Create a team. Start a new habit of living better one small step at a time. In ten years you will feel better and look better and be glad you're still alive. Even if you still live with depression and anxiety, you might find it easing up because your body is doing better.

Most of all, stop kicking yourself. Doesn't matter over what. Self defeat is the fastest way to sink.

If you are also struggling with alcoholism, I wrote this.

controlled crash- holiday spoonie

It's been years since I've gotten through the Christmas season without being in some level of flare up. I usually get validation in the form of a speckled ANA and 80-90 SED in January or February and wind up on prednisone for a week to knock it back down. I've been doing this so long that I can feel about where I'm at day to day, and in order to avoid an ER trip at Christmas over a solid face plant from doing way too much, I have learned to readjust my days accordingly, slowing down more or letting go of something on the list, until I'm nearly down to a crawl, but still functioning.

I've spent a few Christmases completely nonfunctional and unable to even smile and get dressed without being a huge drag on everyone, so it was easier to hide in my house and cry and try to sleep through everything I was missing. I felt too ill to get into a car to go lay on someone else's couch, and I couldn't be nice on the phone if someone was handing me a million dollars. It's very hard to juggle all the extra social expectations on top of the extra demanding physical expectations the holidays bring. Yes, I've done it all- parent president of high school marching band, a variety of fundraisers, as much school support as I could handle while still working, and eventually had to bail on this and that until I was finally just missing everything. I followed all my doctors' instructions, including handfuls of pills, but nothing replaces rest, nutrition, and common sense. During holidays, all three of those fly right out the window.

Most of surviving holidays in flare up is about balance. People think they have to fulfill social obligations. I realized over time that other people would be shocked if they were asked to be supportive of social obligations if it meant risking their lives. Every time I go into flare up, I am risking my life when I do too much and start crashing. I have lived for years with flare ups, and they don't necessarily kill a person outright, but they do cause harm in the form of wear and tear on tissues, and a person must spend quality time rebuilding that shredded tissue if they want to live a good life. Inflammation from a flare up is hard on blood vessels, the lymph system, major organs (especially kidneys and eyes), and can affect the brain to the point of making terrible mistakes in traffic, and we all know how immediately life threatening that is.

Several big things happen in our bodies to keep our balance. Hormones regulate everything 24/7, special organs continually assess chemical and nutrient levels and send reports to the brain, and the constant feedback is how we stay in a good rhythm every day. We sleep, get up, eat, get busy, eat some more, enjoy something, and go back to sleep. When we get out of rhythm we don't feel well and get jet lagged and cranky. People who live with chronic illness of any kind get bumped out of rhythm very easily, the reports to the brain get a little frantic, the brain reacts with attempts to adjust this and adjust that, but when something isn't working very well to begin with, all kinds readjustment attempts can bump into each other, cascade into a mess, and then snowball out of control. Hormones and chemical levels on blood work look more like a first year programmer failing an exam than an experienced machine that evolved over millennia.

Someone with lupus and diabetes, like me, might feel really good one day. It's the holidays! This is fun! We go on an extra shopping trip, miss a meal, grab food on the fly, stay up late with friends, don't sleep well, feel gross and eat all wrong the next day, push ourselves to keep up, shove extra coffee into our systems, take extra pain pills, and before you know it, a couple of weeks of mistakes have crescendoed into the nasty realization that we are way off course and the only way to fix what's happening in our bodies is to stop everything right now and get back on track, or even get emergency medical intervention. Being exposed to flu or strep on top of all this can result in hospitalization for some spoonies. What a dismal way to spend Christmas.

I have learned to do a 'controlled burn' and a 'controlled crash'.

A controlled burn is like knowing you're going to wreck your day, so you pack for contingencies. I take a lunch box with my own food when I go shopping. I limit myself to only so many hours of activity and then GO HOME. I've noticed 4 hours is about my max, and assume the rest of the day is screwed, I don't try to cook or clean after I get home. If I'm stuck in and out of a car longer than 6 hours, I know I'm going to crash hard so I pre-plan my medication safety net. The key to pills is knowing they do not fix anything and don't give me super powers. They are a bandaid meant to transport me more comfortably to the end of my day, they are not meant to 'cure' or make my problems nonexistent. I have dearly paid for abusing medication to keep stubbornly plowing through life, and I'm on full disability now. I would have been smarter to let go of a few things on my list.

A controlled crash is more of a long-term plan. My holiday stress starts in November and goes for at least 8 weeks through New Year's. After that I'm pretty much in crisis and need intervention. If there were no holidays, the changing weather alone would still impact my life, so I can't just blame holidays. But because there are holidays, I know I'm going to destroy myself, and I know it could get really expensive and depressing to clean all the mess up with doctors and then being stuck at home. So since I know this, I can control just how messy it gets. I can keep plowing stubbornly through, or I can map out a plan with contingencies and loop counters for smaller fails. I can let go of lots of little things and make executive decisions to control my blood sugar and my fatigue level, or I can cast my cares to the wind and spelunk straight into hellish misery and subsequent regret.

We hear people addressing depression and self harm in the form of cutting and whatnot, but we don't hear a lot about depression and freaking ourselves out with blood sugar spikes in the 300s when we reach for the comfort food other people take for granted. And then, if we have autoimmune responses, the inflammation that a glucose spike causes can trigger a flare up, and here it comes, the joint pain, the aching all over, the nasty headache, the difficulty moving around and sleeping and keeping up. And then comes the regret or self pity while our brain chemicals freak out and depression knocks us flat. And then comes over medicating or drinking, waking up with either way too high or way too low glucose levels but we're too depressed and late for work to check, and then comes a nasty morning traffic accident. I know of two morning traffic deaths in the last year directly related to blood sugar levels, both of which left orphaned kids behind. That was NOT a controlled crash. Yeah, now you see what I mean by controlled crash.

Everybody's got something at Christmas. Some people have cancer, some have funerals to go to, some are homeless, whatever. It's normal to go through depression at holidays and feel bad, but we must realize that sooner or later, everyone goes through a really bad Christmas. Or several. My mom was airlifted to a hospital on Christmas day one year. One of my children was in a hospital several hundred miles away on another Christmas having emergency surgery. Other Christmases I've been too ill to shop or wrap presents. So before we start our controlled crash and burn plans, the first thing we must embrace is that part of the PLAN is to plan on depression. Allow time outs for depression.

Normal up and down depression is nature's way of telling us we need to slow down because we're doing too much and then kicking ourselves for not keeping up. Stop that! Plan out a picnic for your depression. Make it a regular date thing. Don't shove it off and pop a pain pill when you've got time to waste a couple of hours. Let go of the world and crash on your couch. A lot of little crashes beats a nasty big one every single time. I have noticed over a couple of years that allowing for normal depression swings has a very positive impact on my more severe clinical depression. Depression, for me, is a lifestyle, so I include that in my self care plan. The key to this working is to let go of all guilt. Guilt is a control mechanism that people and society use to force behaviors. I would never dream of making someone feel guilty if they didn't play the Christmas game right, because I can imagine them crying later if I ran over their feelings and forced mine on them. We see it happen all the time. We also think Christmas day is THE DAY to be with family. What about the other 364 days? Doi. That kind of thinking isn't worth your health, capiche? We love each other every day all year long. Let go of that silly guilt. Enjoy a couple of hours of down time.

-*-*-Side note to caretakers- I know you don't get down time. I was DPA for years for my disabled mother, and my sister raised a terminal child. Find a way to do nice things for yourself. It's ok to ask other people to help you do a controlled crash and burn once in awhile.-*-*-

The next thing to embrace in a controlled crash and burn is forgiveness. If you think something has to be perfect, imagine falling and getting a concussion and not being able to finish making something perfect. Was it worth it? I'm here to tell you nothing brings reality home like a good set of stitches with lots of blood soaking everything. If you think something can't get done without you, imagine this is the year you shock all your friends being the youngest person they know having a heart attack. The world won't stop just because you do. Stuff gets done whether it's you doing it or not. Want to be around to see it get done? TAKE A BREAK. And eat something healthy with magnesium in it. Magnesium deficiency is one of the first things they check for when they do ER tests for possible heart attack. Ask me how I know this. Forgive yourself for not being superman or superwoman, forgive others for not reaching your expectations, and chillax. Just because you didn't die yesterday stressing out doesn't mean you won't have a stroke today over the very same thing. My mom had hundreds of TIAs before the big strokes started. She was right side deficit for years from stress and uncontrolled diabetes.

The next thing to embrace for controlled crash and burn is limits. Set reasonable time limits, glucose level limits, activity limits, and stick to them. I don't know about you guys, but I find it really embarrassing to wind up in an ER on holidays. I feel like I'm ruining other people's Christmas and stressing them out more and I really don't like the extra attention. That alone is usually motivation enough for me to stay on track well enough not to super crash. I've never been hospitalized, even with all my stuff, which seems to amaze a few people. I grew up very independent, raised by a father who still doesn't believe in doctors, and people who see me going to doctors all the time without knowing my history don't have a clue how difficult it is for me to get out of my house and keep trying to find ways to solve my problems with medical intervention. I feel like a guinea pig, I've hated all the tests I've had to go through, I loathe the fear (I usually have to be sedated for a simple MRI), BUT I am very very good at living with autoimmune flare ups and diabetes because I know how everything in my body works. I've known too many people who shrugged odd pain or feelings off and found out later they were in advanced stages of cancer or having severe diabetes complications or suddenly having heart attacks that nearly killed them.

One of the best inventions on the planet is a little tiny flip spiral. You can buy those in packs. Every day I flip to a clean page, put the date at the top, and then write the time when I do glucose or blood pressure checks and every pill I take. Make it a habit. It very quickly becomes second nature, and then you start noticing things. Maybe those two pills shouldn't be taken together. Maybe glucose readings are better at certain times of day. Maybe that headache or anxiety attack or cranky feeling you get starts showing up about the same time every day, and you notice it seems to be happening within so long of certain meals or activities. Or every single weekend. Once you notice a pattern, you can control the pattern. It's very liberating not feeling hostage to chaotic cosmic whim, life going out of control again, freaking out in the wee hours over something. It's very empowering to experiment with data and results over time.

Hence, a huge part of my controlled crash is data entry in a tiny flip spiral. I can tell you that I've missed taking my thyroid pill two days in a row only twice in so many years and both times I was extremely miserable. That alone snowballed several days into a ridiculous debacle, because thyroid has huge impacts on sex hormones, blood pressure, and diabetes. The headaches were out of this world, my heart thumped real hard, and the fatigue crash was pretty scary, not even going to mention menopause symptoms going off the rails. Yeah, two days was all it took for me. And I know this definitively because if a pill is missing in the spiral, I didn't take it. This has been a crucial strategy for me because I had significant brain fail for several years and my short term memory was a joke. I could have caused myself serious harm taking my pills wrong, and many people do. Medical mistakes are more common than you think. Not all prescription pill deaths are Hollywood actors overdosing. Click this if you think I'm being too dramatic. Prescription Drug Overdose in the United States Yeah, don't want that kind of crash and burn, either. You're seeing more and more why I'm calling my way a 'controlled' crash and burn.

I use my little spiral to help me set limits. If I can see cause and consequence patterns, I can control outcomes. If I can see that my fasting blood sugar is over 100, I know better than to eat sweets for breakfast, which starts the cascade for a really bad day with a nasty headache later and feeling sluggish through the afternoon, grabbing more junk and coffee, and then not being able to sleep, which in turn starts the next day off negatively before I even get started. If I have several rough days in a row going off track, I know it'll take a couple more days to get control back, and if I feel a flare up coming on, I know I need to rearrange my schedule for the week or wind up going out of control and calling my doctor. I can glance back through my little spirals and easily spot the days and weeks that went out of control.

I live on this edge in my body every single day, where things can go out of control real fast. I plan my life meticulously. That sounds like a drag, but it's actually pretty easy when I follow a few little guidelines I've made for myself. Take breaks, set limits, forgive myself, and pay attention to what I'm doing to myself. The easiest way I have found to control the cascade is to count my carbs in the first place, faithfully take my thyroid pill, and assume I'll need breaks even if I think I'm feeling fantastic. For the most part this has worked really well, but I still make some pretty big mistakes.

So a couple of days ago I made eggnog. I know I have to stop at 1/2 a cup and no more for at least an hour, preferably two hours. I wasn't feeling well because I had overdone, my brain fell out, and without even thinking I drank 2 cups of eggnog within an hour and popped my one pain pill for the day (doctor ordered anti inflammatory), then fell asleep on the couch. An hour later I woke up in crisis, disoriented, brutishly nasty headache, blood pressure spiking 187/112, weird things happening like one of my arms being ice cold with nasty spiky nerve pain shooting out my blanched white fingertips while the other arm was hot and my hand was bright red like I had been badly sunburned. My pulse was fine and my arms worked fine, so this was more like a nervous system reaction to something, but it clearly didn't seem to be any kind of allergic reaction. I finally thought to check my blood sugar and couldn't believe how high it still was fours hours after the eggnog (I usually go back into the 90s within 2 hours, so I must've gone really high),so I didn't eat the rest of the day. I'm guessing the glucose spike triggered an autoimmune reaction in my nervous system. This is not a new thing with me. Two days of severe headache and other nerve pain later, I'm kind of feeling ok again but dragging like I ran a marathon. All because I drank some eggnog two days ago.

The rest of my Christmas holiday absolutely must be revised now to a more tightly controlled crash. I feel like I'm in flare up now, my energy level is almost nonexistent, and it's up to me to get my team (family) in on not letting me hit the wall now before Christmas. No extra surprise favors from gramma on top of what I've already mapped out, no more exciting hustle and bustle, the plan now is to coast and stay on track with small meals and lots of rest. NO GUILT.

It's easy to forget all this when I'm feeling pretty good. It's easy for my family to forget all this when they see me feeling pretty good. But I've been kinda cranky lately, which is my typical warning sign that epic fail is ahead. I have to remove myself from the game board immediately. I did pretty good this year getting stuff done up to this point, and I'm going to focus on that and not moan about what I didn't get done. Getting 'done' with stuff before holidays isn't worth risking our lives. Capiche?

I've had years of practice. It never gets easier. It never stops being scary. But at least it's not hopeless any more. It's no longer a crazy scary scream ride that I'm clinging wild eyed through. It's more like a merry go round I can step off of and watch from the sides. I don't have to feel sad about it, because I've learned I can still enjoy it while I take a break. I don't have to be involved to enjoy the holiday. I can be glad I'm still here to see it happen.

That, my friends, is a controlled crash and burn. It is my Christmas gift to you if it's still a big crazy ride for you and you are alone screaming through the night on the internet looking for answers and feeling like your Christmas is spiraling in flames. Take a deep breath and put 'tiny flip spiral' on your shopping list. You're about to change your life.

If you're still in the mood to keep reading, I found this forum convo very helpful.

Is Having Blood Sugar in the 400's Dangerous?

This one is more techy.

Lupus and Diabetes
"People with lupus or diabetes – or both – can improve overall health and relieve a number of symptoms just by making healthy choices. A plant-based diet with lots of vegetables, legumes, and plant oils is critical. Adequate rest is also important. And exercise is crucial, both to control weight and insulin levels and to increase energy and improve mood. A healthy diet and a commitment to a treatment plan will strengthen the body and help the immune system return to a state of balance – and will make the treatment plan itself more effective."

One more thing- I can't repeat enough what a difference getting more protein in my diet has done for my overall physical and emotional health. Your tissues cannot heal properly without adequate protein and you will always feel 'off'. Pills can't fix that.

Get that spiral!!! Good luck.

Why isn't my weight loss program working?

This will take a month to read, so grab a sandwich. If you are needing moral support with a weight loss plan because it sucks plugging in numbers, here you go. I'm your tour guide through what went wrong (for me, that is).

Last month I started a loseit account. I have spent the last 41 days figuring out how to make it work (better phrase- how to correctly use it) and I think I have finally got the numbers set right. One good thing came out of it even though my net loss this morning is only 1 pound- I haven't gained any new weight, yay!

I originally lost 50 pounds in 2011 very simply by stopping at 1500 calories every day and avoiding everything bread, rice, and potatoes, like my doctor told me. Back then I had lots of incentive- I was so disabled I could barely walk across my own house. let alone get  out and do anything on my own. You might get the idea from this that I was absolutely huge, but not so, just simply so ketoned up from diabetes that my fibromyalgia locked up like cement and pain and meds finished me off. All it took was cutting the carbs way down and stopping at 1500 calories to change my life. People hate hearing "changed my life" from enthusiastic newly emerged butterflies, but when it's your turn to hover close to death, let me know how it goes with hating everything instead of fighting to survive.

My problem with a weight loss plan is numbers, forms, and way too much information. You guys have heard me mention my glitchy brain, well, it was so bad last week that I had to call an 800 number for help filling out simple personal info for a billing problem. I explained that part of my disability is cognitive and that I am easily confused with forms and manage to answer the simplest questions wrong. I know that's hard to believe given how I never stop typing, but it's true. I've even written about how the publishing forms for the book I still haven't submitted yet freak me out to no end, which is hellishly ironic.

Ketones have a way of stacking up so that your body can't take out the trash very well, as it were. Diabetics who don't or can't control well always have ketones in the way of everything they do. One of my doctors made a note about my ketone level in 2008 but waved off a diabetes diagnosis. Another doctor in 2011 turned my life around with a diagnosis, but by then my brain fog was so bad that I was a goofball. Even though my blood sugars were never officially caught above 200, I'd already had the breathlessness and fruity breath for a couple of years, to the point of needing a daily inhaler just to breathe, so I personally don't think a low level ketone problem isn't diagnostically assumable to not affect whole body function. The doctor who waved me off just kept throwing prescriptions at me while I felt mired and sinking in tar.

Brains function on glucose. How does the brain use food as energy? Counterintuitively, this doesn't mean that the more sugary soda pop you drink, the smarter you get, as we read in that article.

The brain is an energy-hungry organ. Despite comprising only 2 percent of the body’s weight, the brain gobbles up more than 20 percent of daily energy intake. Because the brain demands such high amounts of energy, the foods we consume greatly affect brain function, including everything from learning and memory to emotions.

Just like other cells in the body, brain cells use a form of sugar called glucose to fuel cellular activities. This energy comes from the foods we consume daily and is regularly delivered to brain cells (called neurons) through the blood. Studies suggest the quality of the foods consumed over the lifetime affects the structure and function of the brain. For instance, the consumption of omega-3 fatty acids found in fish provides structural material to maintain neurons. Studies also suggest omega-3 fatty acids are essential for the transmission of information between brain cells. In contrast, foods that are rich in sugars and saturated fats have been found to promote oxidative stress, which leads to damage of cell membranes.

The food you eat also affects molecules in the brain that support cognition. Some foods, such as those with turmeric, support cognition by helping to maintain molecular events related to energy metabolism. Recent studies suggest lifestyle choices that affect the metabolism of nerve cells, such as diet and exercise, may in some cases provide a noninvasive and effective strategy to counteract neurological and cognitive disorders.

Brain fog is a real thing, and although not medically diagnostic, has crept into a number of medical observation articles related to chronic illnesses. A diabetes diagnosis carries more weight than chronic illness. Is Diabetes Treated as an Acute or Chronic Illness in Community Family Practice? Some of you with diabetes might not be aware that a rapid very high spike or very low drop in your blood sugar is life threatening. It is sensible to assume that diabetics live with some pretty hefty brain fog and have difficulty managing their lives. I know I sure did. Even when we have a healthy day or week  and are able to fool the world and pass for normal, we can experience 'brain fail' in the middle of being our brilliant selves, suddenly our thoughts wink out and we stumble over what we were saying, we must follow a list, and once in awhile wonder how in the world we didn't just have a nasty traffic accident. Diabetes is a big deal on a daily basis because a crippled metabolic process logically cripples a brain completely reliant on smooth metabolic processing.

That's a lot of stuff I've just written to explain this- Plugging numbers into weight loss plans on the internet is hard. Looking up every jot and tittle for calories and carbs is hard. Forcing eyes to work that much harder, doing simple math, keeping track of what we were thinking and doing while we work on the end goal of plugging in a variable IS HARD.

I aced my way through a college algebra class on my first try. If I say using an online weight loss program is hard because of chronic illness brain fog, it's hard.

The people who need help the most must work the hardest to achieve what other people take for granted. It's not fair, no. It sucks, yes. Is it worth it? I can say honestly that any blinking in the light is definitely worth it.

Here's the thing. My first mistake was feeling frustrated with the built in calorie counter and guesstimating my caloric intake because it was easier and faster on my eyes and my brain. My second mistake was feeling frustrated with the built in exercise calculator and, again, guesstimating. My third mistake was assuming I was getting enough nutrients every day and I doubled my original workout schedule. I had originally been walking 30 minutes every other day with occasional stretchy band and other core strength maintenance. When I joined loseit, I started exercising every day.

I lost 2 pounds. Then I went up one pound. Then down one pound. Then back up one pound. Then down 2 pounds, Then up one pound.... I basically got caught in a loop, and nothing I did changed it. After 4 weeks of laughing about being caught in the same 3 pound revolving door I got a little angry and started snooping around the groups yapping and even contacted a moderator. He told me to adjust my calorie calculator and linked me to a BMR calculator. I adjusted. No change. By the end of 4 weeks everything stopped and I laid in bed for 3 days.

I was lucky. As I laid there I realized 1- this didn't feel like the old depression from several years ago where all function stopped and I took to my bed for weeks, 2- my brain is working even better than ever, what is going on???, and 3- it's making me cranky to lay here and I don't seem to be sick, so something must actually be going on. I have many years of experience with chronic illness, and this didn't feel like that. What did it feel like? After some thought I decided it felt like I had very simply just run out of energy.

My beginning plan with loseit was for around 1200 calories. That is what their calculator gave me when I plugged in my height and weight and how quickly I wanted to lose X amount of pounds. I was obviously way under the 1500 calorie plan my doctor gave me in 2011, and this time I was exercising. A lot. Way more than I used to, which I find thrilling after so many years of being a super wimp. Anyway, obviously something was way off if I wasn't losing weight.

I found a better BMR calculator. I noticed that it linked to a really good BMI calculator. And that led to this-

Once you know the number of calories needed to maintain your weight, you can easily calculate the number of calories you need to eat in order to gain or lose weight:
Calorie intake to gain weight
Calorie intake to lose weight

AND the number of calories we need to eat doing all that exercise without killing ourselves...

Do all of those in the same order that I linked them. After I discovered I needed more than 1200 calories just to sit around and watch TV all day, I also ran into articles that talked about how when we don't eat enough, our bodies get really good at hanging onto every shred of stuff it gets, so I'm pretty amazed that 3 1/2 weeks of double my workout on way too few calories didn't budge my weight down more than 3 pounds the whole time. That means my body is incredibly efficient. Our bodies are wondrous things, even when we're chronic.

So I went back to loseit and adjusted my plan again, and I noticed this time there there was a tiny embedded link (squint squint) that lets you set your own daily calorie budget after you've set your time schedule, assuming you know your BMR requirements. The inbuilt calculator then automatically adjusts your daily log and from there...

Ug. From there, the only way the calculator can work correctly is if I stop guesstimating. Especially when I find atrocious mistakes in their calorie catalog. Don't know who input this particular data, but evaporated milk does NOT have 150 calories in 2 T, good grief. Time to pull my brain out of my pocket and read labels and create my own calorie catalog, which loseit allows, thank goodness. That actually makes it easier later because it keeps track of the foods you like to eat, and if you eat the same things over and over, just point and click once you've got the numbers set correctly.

But that wasn't enough. Loseit also calculates nutrients, and you can pick and choose which ones you'd like to keep track of. Like protein. It occurred to me that 3+ weeks of heavier exercise on fewer calories probably put me in a severe protein deficit, and I was right. I found an awesome protein calculator and found out I needed way more than I thought, so I started changing some of the things I was eating. Reaching a protein goal without going over a calorie goal is harder than you think, and I learned real fast that even as an aware carb counting diabetic, I was still eating way too many carbs and sacrificing other nutrients at the calorie line. My old habits had snuck back in. Carb calories are harder to lose than any other kind, which is why the South Beach diet is such a success.

So on top of counting my own carbs and calories, now I had to start counting my protein. It's really hard to create your own calorie catalog when the weight loss plan's built in calorie catalog isn't very helpful, but I found this super awesome nutrient catalog site that makes it way easier.

I'm only a couple of days into all this new more correct stuff, but I've already got my energy back. I've been eating my calorie budget and my body is so relieved to be getting more food, especially now that I've added more protein. All systems are going back to normal, my nerves are calming down, and I feel more capable of handling the holidays coming up.

One question- if I was so worn out from a calorie deficit, why was my brain working well enough to puzzle this stuff out when I hit my lowest point? I was very surprised by this. I'm going to guess it's because I had managed to get my ketones down lower than I've had them in a very long time between restricting calories and extra exercise, which made what glucose I did eat go straight to my brain. Ok, truth- I don't know. I've lived with brain fog so long, I'm just really surprised I was able to plug my brain in and think my way through this jam. And now I'm sharing it because I know some of you need a more step by step moral support to stay plugged into a program that isn't making any sense, right?

It's possible to do a weight loss program all wrong and actually hurt yourself, like I was doing. I was getting warning signs galore, like anxiety attacks out of nowhere, blood pressure surges, skippy heartbeats, and weird charley horses moving around all over my body. If I'd gone to a doctor for that stuff I'd have been handed more pills, which would've only masked them without solving anything. I'm lucky my body finally just said stop and I laid in bed for 3 days resting. If your body is STOPPING, that's a pretty big sign that you need to stop doing something you're doing or that something else is going on that needs attention, like illness.

I know people say drinking more water helps prevent charley horses or working out more keeps you from getting sick so much, but these things don't help if you're not getting enough protein to stay healthy or enough calories to even be a couch potato. If you are diabetic and feeling frustrated with an online weight loss program, take a break and spend some time digging a little deeper. If 'normal' people are also frustrated and inputting data wrong, you know it's going to be even harder for us. It's ok. Main thing is that we're all still learning and you're not alone feeling frustrated!

that rug really tied the room together

Some mornings you feel like The Dude just looking for his rug.

All I wanna do is plug in 'coffee, 2 creams, 1/2 sugar' into LoseIt and right away I'm stymied by technology that won't allow for variation in a long list of generic specifics. I finally stumble onto a customize window but now I have to figure my own calories. The whole point to getting on this site is so I don't have to count the calories myself because I obviously have a hole in my head and can't count right.

I keep cycling through this existential 'why am I even on this page' crap, and I keep remembering it's because I thought I kept it at or under 1500 calories yesterday and somehow still put on a pound while I slept. Which could partly be due to the pred rebound OR, as my faulty memory strangely illuminated without any problem whatsoever at 2 a.m. in the dark, I forgot to write down the bowl of cereal that I ate and possibly even the cheese. Which would bump me over 1700 calories, and no wonder the scale went backward. Dang it.

The nutritionist I saw last month suggested LoseIt.com, so this morning bright and early I'm wrestling with the controls and feeling cranky. I have to do math. At 6 a.m. With a glitchy brain. Math used to be such a breeze for me. Bleah. But then I remember I really wanna lose the rest of this weight (I think I've remembered that 3 times already) and I get back to it.

Ok, so coffee the way I make it is 130 calories a cup. Since this chart says I can have only 1183 calories a day on the plan I chose (I'm a free plan person), I can tell already I'll be cutting out the second cup of coffee tomorrow.

I'd keep whining, but I'm recalling that I used to have a whole lot more to whine about, so I'm slapping myself and yelling GET A GRIP YOU BIG BABY and slamming myself against the wall. Maybe that's Walter. If you haven't seen the movie, spoiler alert, he's a big softie with PTSD. I like Walter.

See, prednisone really screws up the way your body metabolizes stuff, even after it's over and done. I've run into this in so many searches. I find a rare guy here or there that remains a stick without trying and says the rest of us are being silly, but it's a real thing, lotta fluid gets moved out and then more packs on, fat storage winds up going to all the wrong places (this is medically documented), and if you're diabetic and hypothyroid, oh well sux for you, just shudup and eat a cookie and buy a moomoo.

I've discovered that a person really can make it through steroids without any weight gain by strictly monitoring carbs while the pred is spiking blood glucose, but once the pred is over, your body will do everything in its power to keep that new artificial glucose default going, and the carb cravings get pretty bizarre even a couple of weeks after the prednisone is over. This is something you don't find medical professionals writing about because they stupidly don't know, most of them not having gone through long rounds of steroids or maybe not as intensely observant of themselves on it, like I am. My body got real used to my blood sugar being 180 through the day, even when I had no carbs at all, thanks to the prednisone, so now that I'm off, my brain/body feedback loop is screaming for restitution and trying its hardest to fight recovery in its own very faulty way. If I weren't diabetic, this probably wouldn't be a problem.

So I have to retrain all over again. I have to give my body time to readjust back to having blood sugar levels below 120 all day, preferably in the 90's, and exercise regularly to let my body know I want to USE the food I eat, NOT store it. It's a contest of wills, my conscious self over my unconscious automatic faulty programming. Who will last the longest?

This is my rug. Gotta go walk that second cup of coffee off now.

:edit: I've made my LoseIt profile public, in case anyone wants to join me or check on how badly I'm falling on my face, lol. You may need a community account before you can see it, sorry.