My Very First WIAW!

I’ve always been fascinated with food and what other people are eating, so I’ve loved reading What I Ate Wednesday posts – but never been able to participate because what I eat.. well what do I eat? Nothing worth sharing, and what I do eat is often so bizarre I’d never want to put it out there.

However I do have some better, more on track moments. I thought that I would share a few favourites from the past week with you. There isn’t much green in here – I could say the capsicum in the salad and the splash of lime juice count, as well as the green grapes!

Favourite Lunch - 

grainy bread with beetroot, corn, spanish onion, crumbled tofu and mustard pickles; cheese flavoured sunrice crackers; home-grown passionfruit and grapes.

I’m loving the tanginess of this sandwich filling. Another variation that I often eat uses tinned tuna instead of tofu.  I also love to add chopped beetroot, corn and onion to hummus.

Favourite salad -

Tofu salad with beetroot, corn, red and green capsicum, tomato, spanish onion, mustard pickles.

Favourite treat – Home-made Ice-cream! Please do not snark at my ‘mixing bowl’. I have a VERY basic kitchen and this was bigger than my real mixing bowl! How appropriate to make ice cream in an old ice cream container lol.

Condensed milk, cream, mashed banana and a splash of lime juice - so simple. So rich and creamy!

It worked!

Ice cream is a huge fear food for me, as are cream and condensed milk so this was a huge but worthwhile challenge. I’m definitely going to do it again, and experiment with flavours – maybe coffee, maybe mango.. It could have used a splash of vanilla essence – but I didn’t have any.

Favourite chill out -

Coffee and the local paper while watching Shalimar in the garden.

Coffee never lasts very long with me. Someone needs to make a heat-resistant hydration back pack so I can sip coffee every minute of the day, hands free.

Shalimar is back on her lead – after 1. being very naughty and running away! and 2. A neighbour telling me to keep her out of the communal gardens in case she ‘hurts the flowers’… really? She’s a cat, and she’s snuffled those flowers for almost three months and caused no harm. So sad – but I’m in the process of organising an enclosure to be built outside the front of my unit, around her favourite snuffle-place and under the window where her cat-door conveniently happens to be. Hopefully soon she will have access to HER area whenever she wishes, and no save-the-flowers neighbours will be able to ruin the fun.

Poor Shalimar. I really feel like the fun police. So not right.

And I was so chuffed that I had to include my favourite compliment - 

Victoria Beckham? Oh really? Nah.

My helper from HACC (Home and Community Care – helps me with everyday things that being ill means I need help with – shopping, cleaning, transport etc) said that I looked like I was channelling Victoria Beckham yesterday. She cracked me up! I am missing the sky-high heeled shoes and the utter cool, stylishness she exudes. And the extreme skinniness.

I bought this dress from an Op Shop and really like it – the photo (and myself) do not do it justice. It’s a warm, heavy wool dress by Cue, perhaps a bit large, but I really liked the shape of it.   I’m stuck wearing my utterly UNcool shoes because of my very sore feet and legs! If I don’t have to walk far, I can wear ballet flats, but heels are out forever sadly.

Well I hope you all enjoyed my post and were not too grossed out at the food I ate!!! Happy Wednesday.  And Shalimar says hello… Really, she’s clawing at me because she is jealous at all the attention the computer gets. Time to go play with her

I survived Christmas!

Christmas was wonderful – truly one of the best ever. I spent it at a small, riverside park, with a very close friend. Both of us are survivors, so there was no pressure, no  expectations, just the desire to spend time with each other and make the day special.

We had a BBQ lunch – chopped up onion, eggplant, zucchini, mushrooms, firm tofu, all cooked on the BBQ hotplate with soy and tamari, garlic, chilli, and spread with tahini. We had them  with chicken sausages, and a leafy spinach/carrot/ cherry tomato/spanish onion/mushroom  and fetta salad on the side.

They are yummier than they look. NO we did NOT eat FOOT - though I am an expert at inserting foot into mouth a bit too often.

The miracle here? Two years ago, eating in public, and eating anything and keeping that down – was impossible. Eating a Christmas meal – especially a BBQ – with a friend in the park? Truly a Christmas Miracle!

The park is just beautiful. The company was the best. We just lay around and chilled out, felt the breeze, the sunshine, watched people fish and fall into the river when showing off, stole each other’s phones and updated each other’s facebooks – I now have statuses that say I ate whale, and that I have noodles in my backside eek.. that embarrassing sort of stuff. And we talked.. And talked.. And talked.

It was all in all, the best Christmas I’ve had in a long time. Maybe ever. Christmas is usually fraught and full of bad memories – so it was a breath of fresh air. Literally

I have agonised over showing my face on this blog… lets see if I can show the following without hiding my face…. here goes…

Yes this is me. Ignore me! Look at the PARK!!! Isn't it beautiful!

Well, Christmas is done and dusted for another whole year. I really need this shirt

However, they seem to have forgotten there is still New Year's Eve to live through!

I’m so so so glad to be alive! Haha.

It is a gift, a blessing, to be alive. A very close friend’s whole family were involved in a serious car accident last night, on their drive home from Christmas with their family. Their car was totalled. Out of the blue – you never know what might happen. You never know when this minute might be your last minute – and we can’t afford to take a single moment for granted. It’s so essential to cherish every moment with your loved ones. We might not ever see them again! And then it’s too late.

I am so thankful for the wonderful friends who have made my life worth living. They have shown me that there are good people in life – more good people than not so good. They have shown me that I am actually loveable – something I didn’t used to believe. They have proven to me that sticking it out through the hellish times is WORTH it because life DOES get better at the other side – and that it’s POSSIBLE TO RECOVER – COMPLETELY. Because some of them have, themselves. Been through utter hell, never gave up, lived to tell the tale – not only that, but are REALLY LIVING.

I am just, overwhelmingly, grateful. Thank you God. Thank you Life. Thank you Friends. Thank you Shalimar – for keeping me going and loving me unconditionally.

Now I just need a few months of rest to get over Christmas and all the thinking, fretting, stressing… Oh wait.. I can’t – I have to move in a week and two days!!!!

This is me -

Cannot manage another step..

I hope you all had a much better Christmas than some of you expected – that you all survived (well you did – you are reading this! You survived!! It’s over!!)

I hope you experienced love, thankfulness, peacefulness, magic… I know I did.

In the last week of this year, I’m going to be thinking very hard about how I can make the coming year the best I can. I’m not going to waste another year of my life being sick, being miserable – letting life just pass me by. I’m fighting. I’m going to LIVE in 2012.

Any hopes and dreams for the coming year? Resolutions? Regrets about the time that’s passed? Please share!

A Good Friend, the Park, Zombies, and Chinese.

It’s been far too long since I have hung out with my friend M.

Not long after being discharged from my last hospital admission almost a year and a half ago now, M was determined not to let me slip through the cracks again (where do I find these wonderful people – or, how and why do they find me?).

What followed were almost weekly meals out, catching up, having drinks, eating – I must have cost her a bomb since I can’t afford this and she was so determined we would do it, she would pay for my meal too.

It was always absolutely terrifying for me – but worth it. Much as I loathed having to put so many calories and fat and sugar and stuff into my body with no chance of purging it – I loved the time spent with my friend and loved tasting new things I’d never tried before. I tried sushi for the first time (awesome stuff!) Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Italian, we had BBQ’s… basically we ate and enjoyed.

Then at Easter time this year my friend M had a breakdown. Things were hard for us, and for a while there it looked like I was going to lose her – she has come a long way through a long hard battle herself, and is one of the most inspirational people in my life. She’s conquered so much to be where she is today – and for a while there it looked like all of it was going to be lost. She was slipping away.

I tried, and when she was admitted into hospital after a spate of overdoses, I was there for her constantly, trying to be there as best I could. But it was too much for me and she needed to pull away from me, and I was scared that things were going towards the territory of  ”Do this for me, or I will overdose again” and I can’t cope with that.

Today we met up again for the first time in months. I’ve missed her so much! She explained why she pulled away – needing time to get herself together – and told me it wasn’t my fault (I was so scared that it was.)

We sat in a park for a few hours just talking – time spent together in such a lovely way, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, watching for zombies.

What???

Oh yeah, today was the Brisbane Zombie Walk. Except it didn’t really happen. The park we were so casually stretched out in was supposed to be where the walk was headed. We saw a few blood-spattered try-hards pass by, but where the heck was this zombie walk?

And on zombie costumes – a bit of face paint, a torn sheet, and lashings of red blood (paint) do not a zombie make. I was rather let down.

Eventually we gave up on the zombies and wandered down to Chinatown for an early Chinese dinner. Steamed dumplings, sizzling prawns, hot and sour fish fillets with vegetables, special fried rice, and China tea. Delicious! Terrifying but so delicious. I didn’t cope very well with it in my head, but I have to admit I enjoyed every single morsel.

Finally we pushed back from the table, bellies groaning, and peered out at the mall to see -

Zombies, everywhere!

Of course zombies aren’t going to hang around a park when they could be chowing down on Macca’s, KFC, Subway, and Chinese!

Chinatown and the Brunswick Street Mall were quite bizarre. Passing by Maccas and seeing a line of blood spattered, missing limbed, gashed zombies chowing down on a big mac and fries… that’s gold. Even if they were half rate zombies, it was still a sight to see!

I am, however, so thankful that both M and myself are n0 longer living zombies ourselves, as we were when we were both so unwell.

Does your eating disorder stop you from social outings? How do you cope when close friends become unwell? And what sort of bizarre reminders have you gotten of the illness you are leaving behind? 

My Food History – Part One

One of my facebook friends was asked to do a ‘Food History’ the other day. I’d only heard of food diaries – filling out every morsel that goes in your mouth, when, and often how you felt, whether it was purged etc. A food diary can be an invaluable tool for many purposes including – identifying triggers for binges/purges/restricting, identifying foods that don’t agree with you, identifying what situations are helpful and non helpful when it comes to meal times… etc.

But Food History? It hadn’t come across my radar before.

A quick google, and I understand that a Food History seems to be pretty much that – your whole life with food. From as early as you can remember anything about food/eating/weight/exercise/dieting on your radar – and how it affected your life, your body, your health. Reading some of the examples google led me to were quite interesting and i think it could help many of us start to understand where and how our attitudes to food and our bodies developed over time.

I have to say here – I still do NOT think that eating disorders come about solely from dieting, media exposure, body image pressure etc. Those things are but triggers. The real problems are deeper.

Anyway I thought I’d have a go at my own Food History – and here we go.

I can remember being very very young and my dad handing me vegemite toast (the crusts) and also bringing back jelly beans when he went to the shop. Even now, vegemite toast and jelly beans are up the top of my comfort food list.

I remember loving silverbeet (we then called it spinach) and loving my vegies – weird for a kid!

At about four years old, struggling to eat. Loving the food, being hungry, but spooning the food on to other family members plates when they left the table for some reason.

By that age I had pretty rigid eating habits! I had to always eat green first. Then red/orange/yellow. Then white/starches. Meat had to always be last. No matter what. I still am stuck firmly with this ordering today! Also I had to have a certain tiny spoon, a certain fork, and at one stage I found a baby’s bottle and wouldn’t drink without it. Things also had to be frozen if possible. Many rigid rules have persevered through life – the bottle, (thankfully) being replaced by straws. Which is okay except when you get so rigid you are trying to drink soup through a straw, and embarrassing to your companions when you are slurping tea and coffee through one at cafes.

About the same age, my mother having to press glucose based rehydration drinks and home made frozen condensed milk treats onto me as I wouldn’t drink enough to stay hydrated and needed more energy. WhenI began year one, so four going on five, I was being given IV infusions every single week at our local GP before school. I questioned mum at different times – one answer was that it was ‘vitamin C’ which seems a bit over the top for a young child – and the other answer was “Oh you just wouldn’t drink enough”..

Weekly IVs for such a young child seem pretty extreme to me?

Also at around this age, I started ballet! I’d been found to be deaf at 3 years old, when the kindy teachers realised that I only responded to them when I could see them. That started a whirlwind of activity to teach me to read, write, speak, and balance – I could hardly stand upright. Gymnastics didn’t take off, but ballet, it was like I’d been born dancing. I did start to become more aware of my body, but not in a negative way. I was aware of what it could DO. I also noticed that the best dancer in the class was a bouncy ‘larger’ girl, and the worst were the skinny sticky girls who just never looked right. So for me, larger seemed better at that stage.

At around this age my mother, who had been cooking amazing food – pretty much stopped. My dad had also left. Often us kids chipped in to make the meal. Somehow I’d be running up and down the stairs – “What now, Mummy?” “Four potatoes, peel and wash” which I would do. Then up the stairs again for the next instruction. So while I was able to cook a pretty good meal, I never actually learned to cook myself – it was just doing steps as mum dictated. Or maybe I can cook – I just never really had a chance to do it as an adult – never had any kind of ‘normal’ food habits in which to do it. YET.

I started noticing my mother always had little tablets in her tea and coffee, and that she was always jumping on and off the scale and weighing us too. Food rules at home became more rigid too – if you had sugar in something, it had to be a level teaspoon – more and you got in trouble. A rounded teaspoon isn’t that much different from a level one. Different family members began being given different foods too – my brother had to eat bananas, I had to eat oranges for example – despite what we ourselves might prefer.

It gets harder to talk about the food from here on… there are some weird times, some bad times, some good times… I think I will continue that in Food History Part Two.

What are your earliest food memories?

Anti-Shoplifting tactics.

I’m so annoyed.

I’ve been really challenging the shoplifting – and to do that, it means staying out of most shops. It’s been really hard to do because I have to get used to suddenly going without food that I really craved and ‘needed’, and not being able to afford protein or anything more than bland basics (being sick for so long has really drained my finances – I am BROKE.)

It means suddenly breaking a LOT of rituals to do with numbers, sizes, times, colours, brands… sometimes I think I have a bit of OCD, things get so tangled up in rituals for me. It helps keep the anxiety to a manageable level.

But then again, the anxiety and self loathing and self-punishment that arises from shoplifting – even up to a year after stopping doing it – is just not worth it – it’s worse than any other anxiety in my life.

So it’s also taken a lot of planning – to make sure I have what I need to keep my weight and health at an even keel without the need to ‘pop into the supermarket’ – because just popping into any supermarket is dangerous for me.  Local stores – my fruit and vegie market where I’ve been a regular for almost 20 years now – are fine. But big supermarkets – are NOT fine.

When I go in them, surrounded by food and numbers – the anxiety just skyrockets. And the desperate ‘need’ to get food, as much food as I can – because I’m starving and I might not have food in the future – it’s just so strong too. So compelling that I have shoplifted in full view of a store detective KNOWING That he was  a store detective and KNOWING that he was watching me and would nab me the moment I left the store. Knowing I would be charged – and not able to not do it even so.

That’s scary.

Anyway – key is making sure that when I go to the supermarket with my HACC worker M (Home And Community Care – they have helped me so much with social outings, shopping, cleaning..  and they are just awesome people all around) I get EVERYTHING I need for the entire week. Despite the shame of buying ‘so much’ and weird stuff (my eating has never been anywhere near normal.. it’s been outright bizarre and there’s another blog idea right there..) it’s important – because I can’t go to a supermarket for another week.

So guess who forgot the spaghetti.

A staple of my diet – I did get spaghetti – I just didn’t get enough for the whole week. And now I’m stuck, having made a sauce to go on it, opening the cupboard to get some spaghetti to cook for dinner and finding none there at all…

Normal people would cook something else.

Normal people aren’t bound by rituals that if they break them, the world feels like it’s ending, the sky falling, disaster imminent, and aren’t already freaking out from such drastic changes to their whole week’s eating…

What to do? I’m stuck. I have spaghetti sauce for dinner… I have bread, I have my usual vegies and fruits and supplement drinks… but without the spaghetti, I feel like I’m about to tumble off the edge of the cliff and all those feelings of desperately needing food because I’m never gonna have it again are back…

And it’s too late to go to the shops to remedy the situation, either.

What do you do when you are caught short at meal times?