Fatigue
So, fall is upon us again. And guess where I am? Still in Wisconsin. I have accomplished almost nothing professionally this year so far. And my mental health is not improved on a consistent basis. I'm worse than ever in fact. My frustration with my self is incredibly high. I'm becoming desperate. I was saving money for a trip to china this fall, but I just spent much of it on a new effort to bring back my brain. I literally can't function normally anymore except for short stretches. Even writing this has taken several sessions because it's tiring to focus enough to write something worth reading.
There have been some pretty good days here and there. I can't usually figure out what causes the good feeling times, but a few things I've noticed that may go along with them are:
1.) Drinking grapefruit juice. I can't say that it's just grapefruit juice that does it though. I think I get the same mental clarity from drinking Pepsi too. It's probably just the sugar rush. Usually this works best in the afternoons.
2.) Getting excited about something. It seems that when I actually find myself excited about something, my mind lights up and starts working well. It's best when I wake up hopeful for the day. But even when I get a spark in the middle of the day it can be positive. This only lasts until whatever got me excited gets crushed under the weight of reality, or I get so mired in the boring little details of accomplishing the tasks necessary that I am back in the rut and unable to complete them.
3.) Sleeping less. When I have to get up early and force myself to move quickly in the morning, it seems I have more clarity for most of the day. The normal night of sleep includes a morning of waking a few hours before wake up time and rolling back over to rest more even if I feel like I've had enough. It's mostly that I don't care about anything I'm doing on those days. So dreams are more interesting.
4.) Exercise. Sometimes when I run in the morning, or do yoga at night I feel better and more clear. But sometimes I'm just more exhausted. The yoga does loosen me up. And the running does make my heart and lungs feel stronger generally. I don't get as easily winded or have heart palpitations when I run often.
5.) Neck stretches. A few weeks ago I read somewhere about the SCM muscle in the neck causing the majority of tension headaches and even restricting blood flow to the point of causing cloudy thought and potentially memory dysfunction. So I did some stretches for a couple days and I thought it was a miracle! I felt much better and was able to work well for two days. I continued the stretches for a week, but other than those two days, I didn't get any benefit in clarity. And my neck got sore.
In my desperation I decided to try a new diet. I know, I know, I should see a doctor. But like you hear from most everyone without health insurance, it's too expensive. By the time I paid for the doctor visit, got the blood tests and any other tests they wanted, I'd be out $1000 probably. And that's after the work of finding a doctor near this remote location who understands veganism. Besides I saw a doc about this almost 2 years ago and he did the tests and came back with normal ranges. So either I need more expert help like a nutritionist, of I have a disease and need a better diagnosis. Since I can't afford either, I'm trying a new diet.
Last week I got the book "Thrive. The Vegan Nutrition Guide to Optimal Performance in Sports and Life" after reading rave reviews about it. Normally I treat my vegetarianism as being for my sense of morality, not my health. I had been figuring that as long as I try to eat less processed foods, and cook most everything vegan, I'd be just fine. Throw in a few supplements for the standard B12 and Omegas and I'd be better than fine. Well, now I'm trying to figure out if my diet is to blame for my gradual mental decline into oblivion.
I read the book and it's mostly repetitive nonsense about how everything in modern life is a stressor. And every stress causes adrenal action. And constant stimulation of the adrenal system causes dysfunction and poor overall performance and all sorts of other problems. In concept I agree whole heartedly -don't get me wrong. But the author writes as though he is stating facts in the same way infomercials for bowel cleansing products seem to be the authority on all diseases that impact humanity. When really he's just pulling from anecdotal evidence for his "research" in so many ways. I think the advice is good. But the delivery is over the top and while he occasionally calls out to a study of some sort, the writing is not based in as much science as "I'm a triathlete and it works for me." Oh, and he sells line of nutritional supplements that he doesn't fail to mention.
So, being ready to try most anything, Saturday I spent $300+ on all sorts of strange grains, hemp protein powder and seeds, tons of fresh veggies and fruits, and a few new containers to keep all this stuff organized. It won't be that expensive all the time. But the first shop is so much new stuff you have to get. And it's all specialty stuff except the produce. So it's expensive. But as I often say, at a certain level it's easier to make more money than spend less. And in the case of food for health, that's certainly the case. I'm currently making far less money than I have in my adult life because I don't have the energy to accomplish anything useful. If I can fix the energy problem, I can get back on track and easily afford the expensive food. And it's not really much more that normal foods overall. It just seems like a lot when buying $30 jars coconut oil. Compared to healthy convenience food, it's cheap. Compared to eating out, it's cheap and healthy.
My first recipe for "Wild Rice Yam Pancakes" was a total failure. Pancakes! They took 2 hours to prep (remember I can't focus at all and I waste a lot of time in everything) by cooking the rice and grains and other stuff, then blending it all. When I tried to fry the first one, I almost cried. The result was not a pancake. It was a thin fried skin of mush pudding that couldn't be flipped any more than soup on a plate. I got too frustrated to continue had to eat something else.
The next recipe was salad. It still took some prep work to make the dressing from scratch and chop the veggies and grind the sesame seed. But it was a salad. Kind of hard to ruin. And it turned out pretty well. So I've had a huge salad each day for the last 3. They are filling when they have 4 cups of greens, half an avocado, pine nuts and other stuff.
Last night I didn't feel ambitious enough to cook, so I made a big fatty frozen cheese pizza. Yoga was a bit harder with a pizza stuffed gut. But I also later baked some cereal for mornings. It's loaded with hemp protein and molasses, oats, almonds, flax, and about 5 other things. Not hard to make. But a lot harder than opening a box.
Brendan Brazier's core food philosophy is basically that you need to get as much nutrition as possible with as little digestive effort as possible. So, whole foods, preferably raw, all vegan, all organic, no common allergens like gluten, soy, corn etc. He has a concept he calls "Net-Gain" which just means the energy and building material left over after the work of digesting the food is done by the body. And the goal is to eat high net gain foods.
He also has strategies for when to eat certain foods. Mostly this is about what to eat before and after exercise. Remember that he's a professional athlete. His workouts are at least 2 hours a day and sometimes a lot more. Most of us don't enjoy exercise that much. And he gets that. He says often that it's important to spend your day doing what you enjoy. Because another one of his core messages is to-
Reduce Stress. The headaches I've been getting over the years have gotten really bad lately. In fact I wouldn't normally have called them headaches. But lately I can feel my whole head with a dull pain. I do yoga a few times a week lately and in that practice and occasional meditation, I've learned some relaxation techniques that make a huge difference in my tension. I can feel the different areas of my head relax when I focus on letting them. Unfortunately, it seems that when I relax like that my breathing gets constricted. And that's not very relaxing. I think the fat I'm carrying around is responsible for that. At 185lbs I'm about 30 lbs over ideal weight and carrying most of it in my waist.
The adrenal system is the main focus of this book mostly because of how the body reacts to stress with it. Thinking in terms of evolution, this system worked well to get us (and the many species we were before human) quickly focused and energetic for some difficult task like running from a predator, or winning a fight with a competitor. But in our modern lives, it's called on much more often by the internal threats that we create in our minds. We literally push the button for adrenal action for the smallest things all day long. We are not relaxed going about our days peacefully until a threat. The whole day is a minor threat. And the system responds by giving doses of stimulants to drive the body harder, and then other chemicals to clear out the stimulants. In the life before modern humanity, there would be occasional stress and long periods of calm to rebuild and perform normal bodily functions. Modern humans are often missing the true rest.
Part of the diet's goal is to reduce the stress from food inflicted on the body. All foods chosen are easily digested and cause no sensitivity or immune reaction from the body, while providing high quality energy and building materials.
Unfortunately I don't seem to have the will power to work all day each day cooking these recipes quite yet. The author says that he designed them to be quick to prepare. And on paper they do look that way. But there's quite a bit that go into some of them. Many recipes have 10 to 15 ingredients and many of them need their own preparation ahead of time like sprouting seeds or beans, or popping kernels, or grating veggies, or cooking and mashing yams. And when done, the finished product is no flavor explosion. You really have to appreciate the subtle flavors in most dishes. Unless you like garlic. Lots of garlic. He treats garlic more like a primary calorie food than a spice.
I wanted to write clearly about how I'm feeling at the start of this new diet so I can reflect later if it does make me feel better again. But it seems I've rambled on about details. To summarize, I'm still cloudy as hell. I can manage this stream of consciousness writing, but I had to rest overnight and go back and make it good today. Even today I've had to sit back and rest a few times to get through the fatigue. I can't hold much in the way of complex thought still. I'm breathing through my mouth partially much of the time. My tension in my shoulders and head is high. I did yoga last night for the first time in about 5 days, and have only run once this last week. Overall I think this diet could work very well. I've felt very good digestivly with these foods. My only real problems with the diet are a lack of desire to work the recipes, and a lack of will power to want to eat them instead of the better tasting and less work food.
My primary goal with vegan food has always been to enjoy what I eat. It's going to take some recalibration on my part to enjoy these foods. And I might be making some new recipes as I go along. But in the mean time I'm making my primary goal to eat to regain my health.
I'm really looking forward to Day 4's lunch. Sunflower Seed Beet Pizza. ;-(
There have been some pretty good days here and there. I can't usually figure out what causes the good feeling times, but a few things I've noticed that may go along with them are:
1.) Drinking grapefruit juice. I can't say that it's just grapefruit juice that does it though. I think I get the same mental clarity from drinking Pepsi too. It's probably just the sugar rush. Usually this works best in the afternoons.
2.) Getting excited about something. It seems that when I actually find myself excited about something, my mind lights up and starts working well. It's best when I wake up hopeful for the day. But even when I get a spark in the middle of the day it can be positive. This only lasts until whatever got me excited gets crushed under the weight of reality, or I get so mired in the boring little details of accomplishing the tasks necessary that I am back in the rut and unable to complete them.
3.) Sleeping less. When I have to get up early and force myself to move quickly in the morning, it seems I have more clarity for most of the day. The normal night of sleep includes a morning of waking a few hours before wake up time and rolling back over to rest more even if I feel like I've had enough. It's mostly that I don't care about anything I'm doing on those days. So dreams are more interesting.
4.) Exercise. Sometimes when I run in the morning, or do yoga at night I feel better and more clear. But sometimes I'm just more exhausted. The yoga does loosen me up. And the running does make my heart and lungs feel stronger generally. I don't get as easily winded or have heart palpitations when I run often.
5.) Neck stretches. A few weeks ago I read somewhere about the SCM muscle in the neck causing the majority of tension headaches and even restricting blood flow to the point of causing cloudy thought and potentially memory dysfunction. So I did some stretches for a couple days and I thought it was a miracle! I felt much better and was able to work well for two days. I continued the stretches for a week, but other than those two days, I didn't get any benefit in clarity. And my neck got sore.
In my desperation I decided to try a new diet. I know, I know, I should see a doctor. But like you hear from most everyone without health insurance, it's too expensive. By the time I paid for the doctor visit, got the blood tests and any other tests they wanted, I'd be out $1000 probably. And that's after the work of finding a doctor near this remote location who understands veganism. Besides I saw a doc about this almost 2 years ago and he did the tests and came back with normal ranges. So either I need more expert help like a nutritionist, of I have a disease and need a better diagnosis. Since I can't afford either, I'm trying a new diet.
Last week I got the book "Thrive. The Vegan Nutrition Guide to Optimal Performance in Sports and Life" after reading rave reviews about it. Normally I treat my vegetarianism as being for my sense of morality, not my health. I had been figuring that as long as I try to eat less processed foods, and cook most everything vegan, I'd be just fine. Throw in a few supplements for the standard B12 and Omegas and I'd be better than fine. Well, now I'm trying to figure out if my diet is to blame for my gradual mental decline into oblivion.
I read the book and it's mostly repetitive nonsense about how everything in modern life is a stressor. And every stress causes adrenal action. And constant stimulation of the adrenal system causes dysfunction and poor overall performance and all sorts of other problems. In concept I agree whole heartedly -don't get me wrong. But the author writes as though he is stating facts in the same way infomercials for bowel cleansing products seem to be the authority on all diseases that impact humanity. When really he's just pulling from anecdotal evidence for his "research" in so many ways. I think the advice is good. But the delivery is over the top and while he occasionally calls out to a study of some sort, the writing is not based in as much science as "I'm a triathlete and it works for me." Oh, and he sells line of nutritional supplements that he doesn't fail to mention.
So, being ready to try most anything, Saturday I spent $300+ on all sorts of strange grains, hemp protein powder and seeds, tons of fresh veggies and fruits, and a few new containers to keep all this stuff organized. It won't be that expensive all the time. But the first shop is so much new stuff you have to get. And it's all specialty stuff except the produce. So it's expensive. But as I often say, at a certain level it's easier to make more money than spend less. And in the case of food for health, that's certainly the case. I'm currently making far less money than I have in my adult life because I don't have the energy to accomplish anything useful. If I can fix the energy problem, I can get back on track and easily afford the expensive food. And it's not really much more that normal foods overall. It just seems like a lot when buying $30 jars coconut oil. Compared to healthy convenience food, it's cheap. Compared to eating out, it's cheap and healthy.
My first recipe for "Wild Rice Yam Pancakes" was a total failure. Pancakes! They took 2 hours to prep (remember I can't focus at all and I waste a lot of time in everything) by cooking the rice and grains and other stuff, then blending it all. When I tried to fry the first one, I almost cried. The result was not a pancake. It was a thin fried skin of mush pudding that couldn't be flipped any more than soup on a plate. I got too frustrated to continue had to eat something else.
The next recipe was salad. It still took some prep work to make the dressing from scratch and chop the veggies and grind the sesame seed. But it was a salad. Kind of hard to ruin. And it turned out pretty well. So I've had a huge salad each day for the last 3. They are filling when they have 4 cups of greens, half an avocado, pine nuts and other stuff.
Last night I didn't feel ambitious enough to cook, so I made a big fatty frozen cheese pizza. Yoga was a bit harder with a pizza stuffed gut. But I also later baked some cereal for mornings. It's loaded with hemp protein and molasses, oats, almonds, flax, and about 5 other things. Not hard to make. But a lot harder than opening a box.
Brendan Brazier's core food philosophy is basically that you need to get as much nutrition as possible with as little digestive effort as possible. So, whole foods, preferably raw, all vegan, all organic, no common allergens like gluten, soy, corn etc. He has a concept he calls "Net-Gain" which just means the energy and building material left over after the work of digesting the food is done by the body. And the goal is to eat high net gain foods.
He also has strategies for when to eat certain foods. Mostly this is about what to eat before and after exercise. Remember that he's a professional athlete. His workouts are at least 2 hours a day and sometimes a lot more. Most of us don't enjoy exercise that much. And he gets that. He says often that it's important to spend your day doing what you enjoy. Because another one of his core messages is to-
Reduce Stress. The headaches I've been getting over the years have gotten really bad lately. In fact I wouldn't normally have called them headaches. But lately I can feel my whole head with a dull pain. I do yoga a few times a week lately and in that practice and occasional meditation, I've learned some relaxation techniques that make a huge difference in my tension. I can feel the different areas of my head relax when I focus on letting them. Unfortunately, it seems that when I relax like that my breathing gets constricted. And that's not very relaxing. I think the fat I'm carrying around is responsible for that. At 185lbs I'm about 30 lbs over ideal weight and carrying most of it in my waist.
The adrenal system is the main focus of this book mostly because of how the body reacts to stress with it. Thinking in terms of evolution, this system worked well to get us (and the many species we were before human) quickly focused and energetic for some difficult task like running from a predator, or winning a fight with a competitor. But in our modern lives, it's called on much more often by the internal threats that we create in our minds. We literally push the button for adrenal action for the smallest things all day long. We are not relaxed going about our days peacefully until a threat. The whole day is a minor threat. And the system responds by giving doses of stimulants to drive the body harder, and then other chemicals to clear out the stimulants. In the life before modern humanity, there would be occasional stress and long periods of calm to rebuild and perform normal bodily functions. Modern humans are often missing the true rest.
Part of the diet's goal is to reduce the stress from food inflicted on the body. All foods chosen are easily digested and cause no sensitivity or immune reaction from the body, while providing high quality energy and building materials.
Unfortunately I don't seem to have the will power to work all day each day cooking these recipes quite yet. The author says that he designed them to be quick to prepare. And on paper they do look that way. But there's quite a bit that go into some of them. Many recipes have 10 to 15 ingredients and many of them need their own preparation ahead of time like sprouting seeds or beans, or popping kernels, or grating veggies, or cooking and mashing yams. And when done, the finished product is no flavor explosion. You really have to appreciate the subtle flavors in most dishes. Unless you like garlic. Lots of garlic. He treats garlic more like a primary calorie food than a spice.
I wanted to write clearly about how I'm feeling at the start of this new diet so I can reflect later if it does make me feel better again. But it seems I've rambled on about details. To summarize, I'm still cloudy as hell. I can manage this stream of consciousness writing, but I had to rest overnight and go back and make it good today. Even today I've had to sit back and rest a few times to get through the fatigue. I can't hold much in the way of complex thought still. I'm breathing through my mouth partially much of the time. My tension in my shoulders and head is high. I did yoga last night for the first time in about 5 days, and have only run once this last week. Overall I think this diet could work very well. I've felt very good digestivly with these foods. My only real problems with the diet are a lack of desire to work the recipes, and a lack of will power to want to eat them instead of the better tasting and less work food.
My primary goal with vegan food has always been to enjoy what I eat. It's going to take some recalibration on my part to enjoy these foods. And I might be making some new recipes as I go along. But in the mean time I'm making my primary goal to eat to regain my health.
I'm really looking forward to Day 4's lunch. Sunflower Seed Beet Pizza. ;-(