'Apples and Appetite,' 'Never be Afraid of your Hunger,' and High-Grading versus Slippery Slopes

'Apples and Appetite'

That is the koan the naturopath left me with yesterday. He's asked me to eat an apple a day for a little while, because in his opinion all the yeast cleansing I've been doing so far isn't going to deal with the yeast imbalance until I've gotten the last of the mercury out (which will be next week, yay!) This means that after almost three months of strict no-sugar eating, I'll have another three months of the same to look forward to when we start tackling the yeast post-mercury. 

Meanwhile, he says that a few apples aren't going to impact the yeast situation, and when I protested that I prefer not to eat apples because they tend to make me hungrier, he said that that should be a good reason to eat them! While we try to address the emotional components of my food restriction and lack of appetite, there's a major physical component too (deficiencies in certain things lead to loss of appetite, which then leads to further deficiency…) and he wants me to connect to my appetite as a good thing, not a fearsome thing, a sign of good health.

'Never be Afraid of Your Hunger'

Has anyone read 'Olive Kitteridge' by Elizabeth Strout? A beautifully written and enjoyable read, with exquisitely loving attention to the minutiae of life of the denizens of a small Maine village, centered around the redoubtable Olive. There are a couple chapters featuring a girl with an eating disorder, though, and I thought those were very poorly done: they were extremely triggering and yet far-fetched (ruined my day and night when I read them, for sure). But leaving that aside, in one of the storylines, the only role that Olive plays is to be quoted by a teenager, whose Math teacher she is, as having said, 'Never be afraid of your hunger. Otherwise, you'll just end up like all the other idiots.' 

That really stuck in my head. Occasionally I use it as a stick to beat myself: I am pathologically afraid of my hunger, so I must have ended up 'like all the other idiots;' more usefully, I use it metaphorically, as a measure of the far reaches of my curiosity (which are far indeed). And often it is just striking to me how very afraid I am of my literal hunger and how fearless in the more metaphorical realms.

How does that advice resonate for you?

'High-Grading' versus Slippery Slopes

When I first gravitated back toward eating just raw foods and cut out all sugars, Phil was concerned that it was yet more restrictive behavior and self-deprivation, and I insisted that to the contrary, I was 'high-grading.' At this point, there's an integrity gap. It's true that having that accident knocked the stuffing out of me and made things worse, but it's also true that I'd gradually been eating less and less before that. This week I detachedly realized that I'd been buying produce and making coconut kefir (both of which are mostly 'my' foods although he does eat them too) on the same schedule as usual, but hadn't been eating them. 

Part of 'high-grading' was giving myself permission to buy avocados. Well, this week we had a whole pile of uneaten ripe avocados! (I blended up a bunch of them with mint, 'chia-sweet,' cacao, maca, protein powder, coconut oil, and froze). And the coconut kefir is piling up too.

The last three days we have been planting our garden in the mornings and today Phil needed my help transplanting a 10ft tall spruce tree. The kind of thing he does all the time, and we did it lots last year. But it's so heavy and exhausting, and underscores how much weaker I am now. He's feeling upset with me for allowing myself to get that way, and bear-hunting, hiking and all the springtime activities are calling louder and louder. And he feels like I've betrayed his trust - which I can understand, thinking back to the whole 'high-grading' discussion. 

It's going to be difficult, there's a huge self-sabotage demon in here and not much motivation to eat more when doing so makes one feel sick. But the ND has given me some supplements to help support my crashed adrenals and I'm going through all kinds of motions toward trying to feel better, so I need to keep looking at this little issue of integrity.

Why do we go on? Especially when I'm at rock bottom, or having a resurgence of old anorexia demons that I thought I'd wrested my life free of and feeling hopeless and incorrigible, I cannot answer that question to my satisfaction. I'd love to hear some other answers.