Health

I am seeing two really great doctors right now- one is a holistic nutritionist, and one is a therapist with a really different, great approach. I really like both of these women, and I feel like they are helping me a lot.

The nutritionist is cool because she is doing a lot more for me than just saying "Eat right and exercise." She understands that having insulin resistance is a real problem and that it's serious. She is actually teaching me how to eat, and I am learning this for the first time in my life. She told me I need to keep my blood sugar steady, so I need to eat all day long. She drew a little circle on a paper and said, "Ok, this is your plate." Then she put 2 V's and 1 P. "Your plate needs to have two servings of veggies and one serving of protein. Eat like that, and you'll be ok." In between meals, I eat fruit and nuts and maybe a hard-boiled egg. For breakfast I make smoothies of a banana and some frozen fruit, mixed with Greek yogurt or some protein powder. Basically, I am full all day, and I am losing weight. She also made me give up my pot-a-day coffee addiction, because it was too hard on my body. That part was brutal, but now I understand that the coffee didn't really make me feel good at all.

I told her that I feel like an old hunter-gatherer person, with all my nuts and berries. She got really excited, and she said, "Exactly! That is the point!" And then she explained to me that to be healthy, we need to eat foods with really simple ingredients. It's only been for the last 150 years or so that people have been eating these really complex, industrialized foods, and so we can't digest them very well. She told me, "For you, if the food didn't exist 300 years ago, don't eat it!" Now I look over my food log, searching to see if the foods existed 300 years ago. Pretty good so far. (It also kind of reinforces my primitivism fantasies.)

My therapist has also been really good and interesting for me. She listened to me talk about having all these mentally ill family members, and it was like she knew exactly what my life had been like and how I am. She said, "I've had a lot of clients like you, I can really help you." We talk a lot about being caretakers for our families and about having really poor boundaries when it comes to other people's emotions. She told me that my family members are really sick and I need to accept that. They can't process things the way I want them to, so I really need to lay off them. I also can't let what they say get to me, because they can't always control themselves- they are operating at such a sick level. I don't know why this has always been so hard for me to accept, but I am really going to try.