They're begging me not to do it. I'm so tempted to start starving myself again. Eating the bare minimum of what my carb load requirements has dropped my A1C from 12 three years ago to 6.4 as of my last appointment. Stress has been making my fasting blood sugars creep up, aggravated by the 'dawn phenomenon' where people have their body producing more blood sugar to wake them up in the morning. I feel like I can't eat a proper meal anymore. Breakfast is a small cup of yogurt and a 1/4 cup of granola. Lunch was sandwiches and salads. But as I find my brain getting bad again, I've turned to nutritional bars that hit that bare minimum threshold of carb requirements.
I'm not doing the keto diet. But I am devolving back into disordered eating. I am struggling to make myself eat in front of people. Those nutritional bars allows me to wolf down food before I have to put together food for the kids. It's the knot in the rope I'm holding on to so I don't fall back into that hole. In the last three months, my weight dropped by five lbs. It's not because of miraculous activity. It's because I realize that I've been doing this thing for the last three months.
I just am so tempted to just go back to eating the bare minimum I need to stay alive. Diabetes has cut so many foods out of my life. All my comfort foods are gone. All of the replacements for those comfort foods are gone now too because my texture/flavor sensitive family can't handle them. I'm sick of fighting to get the kids to eat. They're underweight because of their medication. I have tried a diverse number of foods and they keep resisting them.
So, after a family meeting, the menu is now hamburgers on Monday, tacos on Tuesday, meatloaf and potatoes on Wednesday, rotisserie chicken on Thursday with potatoes, and fish sticks on Fridays. Saturdays are 'cheat' days where fast food is acquired. Sundays are family dinners at the in-laws which tend to be defined by my father-in-law's pickiness about food being too spicy, looking weird, or has too many vegetables. And he's vocal about his pickiness to the point that he's bitched about my cooking to my face. I was good and I didn't flip the table over. I seriously thought about it. His comfort foods just happens to look a lot like what the menu that's been assembled for the week. So, I can't escape it.
Very little on this menu is diabetic friendly. So, I am only going to eat small portions. I can't help it because if I eat a 'normal' portion, my blood sugar spikes. I am just going to have to learn to ignore hunger again. Freyr is just about in tears over this because he's deeply worried that it's going to have catastrophic effects on my health. Loki is toweringly angry with me for not saying anything during the family meeting about my dietary needs.
But, I can't do this business of cooking multiple meals every day at a given meal time. I tried. It didn't work out. I can't apparently make food that would theoretically hit everybody's dietary needs (because the kids need high carb and high protein diets to gain weight) because what I make is disgusting to the rest of the family. Beloved said, "Let's do a family meeting and get the input from the kids on what they'll actually eat." So we did that. As it went on, I realized, nothing I could say or do was going to change the outcome.
I used to love cooking once I got past the emotional trauma of being psychologically abused over my skills as a housekeeper and cook by my parents. Now, I dread it. Nothing I made was good enough in my parents house. If something went wrong, it was my fault, even if the error was a misprint in the recipe. For twenty years, I was told that I was a terrible cook and all of that is coming back up now with my kids being like they are about the food. And with my husband's tendency to pick up fast food because what I made for dinner doesn't appeal to him, and then I find the bags in the garbage with the leftovers of what I cooked.
I gave up on leftovers as something to eat the next day. Because I was the only one who would eat them. And when 90% of what you cooked is left, it's depressing. Things are just getting worse on this front every day. I'm sitting here incredibly hungry because I skipped my afternoon snack so that I didn't eat too many carbs. Lunch is just about always peanut butter spread across diet flat-bread when it isn't one of those nutrition bars. Either case, my dietician would say that it's not ideal.
Which is really fucking funny because she's the one who got me started back on this bullshit. When my old glucometer bit the dust, she was telling me to restrict my meals and eliminate snacks to get better numbers on my 3 year old meter. Never did it occur to her that the problem was the meter. I went in for my regular appointment with the doctor, just about in tears, explaining that I was a recovered person with an eating disorder that's threatening to come back because of what the dietician was directing me to do. It was the doctor who asked me how old my meter was. He was astonished and horrified when I told him and immediately prescribed a new meter and accoutrements. My readings now are half of what the old meter was reading.
But, I can't get that woman saying that I need to have a fasting blood sugar of 90 out of my head. When I have a fasting blood sugar over 120, I eat less than 30 carbs for breakfast in an effort to force that number lower when the medication kicks in. On a given day, my total carbs now is around 150. When I stress eat, it's cheese or meat. I've given up on fruit, even as part of a meal, with the exception of the dried apricots which I calculated is 3 carb per apricot. I allow myself 4 at most as a snack, that's 12 carbs when according to the prescribed diet my range is 10 to 15 carbs for a snack. My total carbs for a meal is 30 to 45. If you're doing the math, my total carbs are pretty low.
I can't talk to Beloved about this. I get so upset that I just start blubbering. I'm humiliated. I am defeated by this. Loki keeps telling me to tell Beloved that this is going on. I can't though. He's carrying the weight of supporting the family on his shoulders. He's working at a job that's barely afloat, primarily because of his efforts. I can't add this to that. I just have to figure out a work-around. But I can't seem to think of anything because the damn eating disorder and all that disgust with myself that was literally beaten into me for eating by my parents gets in the way.
The last three months have been real hard. I haven't been sleeping well for about a year now. It's gotten real bad over the last three months to the point that my psych has put me on a second antipsychotic because of its sedative effect (I'm on one for my bipolar II with psychotic features, which is working and at about the highest dose they give.) With the sleep problems, I am more prone to c-ptsd problems. With the c-ptsd problems, I am more prone to eating disorder problems.
I'm a fucking mess. I'm posting this on the blog that only two of you read. I'm not going to do something stupid. I'm just struggling and venting. I know that if I put this on any of my other blogs, there'll be drama somewhere. I'm going to try, again, tonight to talk to Beloved about my eating issues. I really don't want to find out what Loki would do to inform Beloved that I'm back on that bullshit again. And I don't want Freyr to cry over me. It hurts. And I know that Loki's anger at the situation is covering up his pain and concern. Because, that's what he does with me in the dynamic that we've got.
So, that's what's on my mind and why I haven't posted shit in forever. My brain is in a bad place. I'm not depressed but I'm not well for so many reasons. That, however, is something for another day.
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