feeling a little grumpy - food and addiction behavior

nerfherder

Active Member
So back in the 80's, I was dating a guy in college who sold coke for textbook-buying money. He was pre-medication, it was the 80's, punk was stomping the Disco beat into a bloody heap in the dirt. :)

Anyway, unlike most of my friends who weren't too attached to it as anything but a party substance, I realized really quick that this hit my brain in that Rat Will Starve Itself For More kind of feeling. I was enough of a control freak, and recently having lost a favorite relative to a heroin overdose, that once I felt like I was on the edge of treating it like coffee I stopped. Completely. Never touched it again, if friends or peers had it out at parties I would leave 'cause I am a control freak and will NOT let something like that run my life. I very nearly had the same problem with Ritalin 15 years later, and after a brush with Ritalin toxicity I took the bottle, burned it and its contents wrapped in the paper prescription form, and never touched it again.

So I'm familiar with what the run-up to an addiction, both behavioral and chemical, can feel like. I'm also aware that I have the strength of will to walk away from that.

(yes, I'm a fairly heavy coffee drinker, will stop that occasionally just to detox once a year or so. But you'll pry the half-melted chocolate from my sticky, dead hands so don't go there. :kickedoutsmile:)

Right now, after years of not having eaten anything grain-based, I find I'm having lots and lots of cravings. I used to be a breakfast pastry baker, I made all my girls' cakes, gluten-based or gluten-free, and Kiddo is low-carb so she gets an almond flour/coconut flour based cake thing on her birthday and that's it. Her big sister the Gothish Princess figured out that she's got some kind of gluten problem too because I'd always peg her on it when she was in her teens - I could tell 'cause (like me) she'd retain fluid, and I'd see it immediately in her cheeks and neck. "Pizza busted!" I'd say. :)

Partly it's the smell of that big box of stale breads and biscuits a friend gave me from her lodge's commercial kitchen cleanout (treats for the chickens, goats and bunnies), partly it's all the stuff showing up in ads and in food places, and partly I think it's a desire to self-medicate due to stress, emotions, hormones - I just got my "dot" after four months of hoping "Hey, maybe it's gone for good!" And the smell of sugar and lemon and orange - we're making _pounds_ of candied citrus peel for barter/sale before Easter, it's cooking away in the kitchen as I type.

So lots of this going on, and I am SO GLAD that I know what happens - I retain fluid and get asthma attacks for real if I'm eating wheat at all. But it's really sucking on my psyche to know that like with cocaine, like with Ritalin, and the conflict of the wheat products being an accepted part of everyone's background noise, the craving is there forever and I just can't go there.

Please don't suggest this, that or the other gluten-free treat. I just don't want to go there! The carbs in those are even worse than regular wheat and do not make me feel better. :)

Just sort of venting is all. Lunch was good - chicken breast, carrot, coffee of course. :) But I sure wish I could eat whatever I wanted without the consequences. I can't, though.
 

InsaneCdn

Well-Known Member
OK, Ms no-wheat.

I'm on the no-cow-milk track and... Got any idea how hard it is to avoid the cheese in the fridge that every body else in the family can have? and the whipped cream and the home-cooked puddings and the ice cream (home made, besides).

I don't know what it is about stuff that messes us up, but... cravings? OH YA.

Curious, though...
I'm no-cow-milk - but I can sneak a bit of goat milk (when I can afford it...)
Is yours just wheat? or is it all forms of gluten?
 

nerfherder

Active Member
Oh yeah. I've heard that the minor (or less minor) physical irritants cause an endorphin release, don't know that there's been any concrete studies into this idea. But anyone who's felt a "Runner's High" or other similar physical flow state knows how awesome endorphins can feel. :)

Far as wheat vs. all glutens, I'm not sure. I know when I would eat oatmeal for breakfast, I'd have a major :censored2:iness attack later that morning. I wasn't sure if it was a carb crash, or something in oats using up all my body fluids and dehydrating me, or what. Which stinks as I love oatmeal and oats in general.

It's safest for me to just not eat any grains. I'm pretty sure the wheat is an actual allergy, not bad enough to be epi-pen level but bad enough to cause fluid retention and asthma attacks. And when I cut out all wheat from my diet, my running went from "30+ paces and I have to stop and walk" to "hey I just ran a quarter mile!" Also my regular annual winter bronchitis went away. Gone. Wish I'd known about that when I was a kid, I might have been a lot healthier. :)

Far as cheese goes, I avoid cow's milk much as I can. Blacksmith feels that it affects _my_ moods and behavior, but once I got here and got a closer look and more exposure to the realities of cow's milk production, it's not that hard for me to avoid it. Killing an animal for food? Once and done. Raising a milk cow? Well, you have to decide what to do with the calf. Sell to a veal facility? Sell to a neighbor? Bottle raise, castrate and butcher? (If a heifer, obviously castration's not an issue.) Plus after the baby has the colostrum from the cow, it's weaning time - and while the cows are still getting milked, you can tell from the yelling (that you can hear a mile or more away) that the cows miss the calfs.

With goats, it's possible to let the kid nurse and still milk the doe once a day. I doubt most production farms go that far, but I know it's possible. :) Plus, if I really want goat's milk, well, I've got 7 does in milk about 50 feet away. :)

And so, blah blah blah. That's my deal. FINALLY finished with the lemon peels, they're in the dehydrator. And there's a gallon and a half of lemon juice The Eldest Baby Viking juiced in the fridge, and the two quarts of lemon syrup left from candying the peels. But we still have more than half a bushel of the navels left, I'll probably be doing Way Too Much orange marmalade in the next few days. Urgh.
 
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