RouletteWeekend

It’s Wednesday and I woke up, took the trash and the recycling to the recycling center, stopped at the gas station, and found myself singing in the car on my way home.

Normally, this wouldn’t strike me as odd, but over the last two months or close to it, I’ve been physically miserable. I went to the ER twice. Once because I had chest pressure and this “full” feeling that after a bunch of upper testing (x-ray, ekg, bloodwork), they ruled out heart, kidney, lungs, thyroid and sent me on my merry way with a note to follow up with a “digestive doctor.”

The second time, it was because I was embarrassingly constipated. Not like a little bit, a LOT. Two weeks worth of constipation to be exact. That visit, they tested all the lower parts. CT scan of my lower half to see if it was appendicitis or something of the sort and they took my blood again, which was perfect. So they gave me a prescription of heavy duty laxative (the kind you get before a colonoscopy) and sent me on my way again with a note to follow up with digestive health.

I have an appointment for that on October 1st. That happened about 2 weeks ago. I knew I couldn’t live constipated. My anxiety that I was probably dying of colon or esophageal cancer was laid to rest (for the most part) so I decided that if I couldn’t live with the way I was feeling, I would have to do something about it.

For years, I’ve been a student of food and its effects on the body. Even though I know sugar is the devil and cheese, more tempting than the apple Eve ate, is terrible for your insides, my brain, whenever I get stressed or anxious forces my body to run to the candy aisle and the dairy section of the grocery store while making a pitstop in the middle at the potato chip aisle to grab “just a little salt.”

So this is where it got me. Turns out, a girl cannot live on cheese and chocolate and be healthy and happy. I can tell myself those things make me happy, but it’s kind of like shots of tequila. Sure, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but now that you are trying to hold your hair back with one hand and make the room stop spinning while you throw up in a strangers toilet with the other hand, you realize the error of your ways (no, just me?).

I decided that I had to put on my big girl pants and start taking better care of myself, for real. Not doing it for a day. Not pretending to do it in public while secretly binging out on a pint of Karmel Sutra Ben & Jerry’s and a family size bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, but actually start taking care of myself.

I’ve been following Dr. B (the gut health M.D.) for quite a while on socials. I have both of his books, I’m patiently awaiting the 3rd. I’ve taken two of his courses on whole food plant based “fiber-fueled” eating and I dream of the day when I can eat healthy all the time and not think about self-sabotage or all-you-can-eat pizza every time my anxiety rears its ugly head. I’m about to be fifty. I had a good run being irresponsible and not dying from it. From over-drinking, to over-one-night-standing (if that’s a term), to overeating, all in the name of what? Independence? Adulting? Defiance?

Maybe one day I’ll figure out what I was trying to prove, but in the meantime, I made a choice to not focus on perfection, but to just find a little more positive movement in the direction that I want to go in. This week, I started on my journey. I’ve been having a fruit and veggie smoothie for breakfast and dinner and a larger, heartier lunch. And I’m finding that I am starting to feel better. I haven’t quiet made it to Dr. B’s quota of 30 different plants per week. I don’t know if I’ve even hit my calorie target each day, but I’m overweight so I don’t think I’ll die from a small caloric deficit if my food is high in nutrients.

So back to today. I was singing and dancing absentmindedly in the car! A think I don’t think I’ve done in months. First because I was miserable at a job, and then because after quitting the job my system was so out of whack from holding all that stress inside I think it literally made me sick. But today, even though I don’t feel 100%. I still have a lump in my throat that I don’t think is really there. It’s hard for me to swallow. I’m still burpy and “full” feeling, but my headspace is seemingly going back to normal.

Dr. B says you can heal most things if you just eat more fiber and have variety in the plants you consume (and stay away from all the things I love in excess like chocolate, pizza, cheese dip, and Doritos), but if I’m going to live 50 more years, I think I have to start taking matters into my own hands.

I saw an Instagram post recently that was on a New York history page. It was a collection of pictures from 1969 and the one thing I noticed aside from how much I loved the fashion back then and would definitely wear their wardrobe today was that everyone was skinny. Obesity was the exception not the rule back then. Now it seems to be the opposite. And I don’t want to take a shot or have a surgery to feel better. That’s not the path I want to take. I don’t have any issue with that path for other people, because we all are walking our own way, but I don’t want that to be my way for so many reasons, including the fact that I don’t have health insurance. Too rich for state funded insurance, too poor to afford private insurance so I’m in healthcare purgatory where I have to decide what’s worth a medical bill and what I can fix on my own.

It seems taking control of what goes in my body is a good step in the right direction, and even if it doesn’t fix the health issues I’m currently having, well, what’s the worst thing that could happen? I could learn to cook whole food plant-based foods that taste delicious, and maybe I’ll lose a little weight and end up healthier than I’ve ever been, even if I do have esophageal cancer.