Food and exercise

I am borderline hypoglycemic.  In practical terms, this means that my body doesn't know how to store up energy from food and dole it out gradually (like everyone else's does).  I'm like a wind-up toy: eating "winds me up" and gives me energy...

...and then as I digest my food, I "wind down" until finally I am both extremely hungry and pretty much unable to function as a human being.

I have to "recharge" myself with frequent meals.*


Also, I have to be careful of sugar because it hits me all at once.  Apparently, eating a popsicle or cookie gives "normal" people a bit of a buzz for a few hours as their pancreas(?) rations out the sugar a bit at a time; I get high as a freaking kite for 20 minutes**. 

It's actually pretty fun...until the inevitable crash.

I bring this up because I'm going to the gym today for the first time in years and I'm nervous as hell.  I love(d) weight training, but it's always so hard to time it right...you know, to contrive to be at the gym during that fifteen minutes between when I feel "too full" and "too hungry" to lift weights.  I do have some pills that help even out my blood sugar, but I went off them for a while and just started up again yesterday so probably they haven't kicked in yet (they're called Multi Glyco, if you're wondering. The brand name is Genestra).  But I did make sure to eat frequent, balanced, low-carb meals yesterday and today in preparation, so that's something.

I've got a friend going with me to the gym, by the way.  I've never had a "gym buddy" before, and I'm totally psyched - the social aspect of the workouts will give me something to look forward to no matter now I'm feeling, plus I'm way less likely to weasel out of working out if there's someone to hold me accountable.  Still...I'm afraid I'll have an energy crash today and not be able to do much of anything, and I'll feel like a loser.  Plus, I think at this point I've surpassed "out of shape" and gone straight into "seriously atrophied" so even if my energy holds up, my performance will be...embarrassing.  To me, anyway.

I seriously do turn this red when I exert myself.  Other gym-goers have stopped to ask me if I'm okay.

Wish me luck.


*At my old job, they once took us to lunch at an all-you-can-eat Chinese restaurant.  Later that day, a coworker saw me eating a salad at my desk and said, "How can you be eating?!  We had such a huge lunch!" and I replied, "Dude, that was like two hours ago!" and she looked at me like I was weird.

**Even a piece of fruit can give me a buzz and a crash if I eat it on its own, without some protein to help absorb the natural sugars.  Yes, my life sucks.

My latest little obsession.

I love painting food.  Partly, I love the challenge: not only am I trying to create the illusion of depth and texture on a flat surface, I'm also trying to create the illusion of deliciousness.  The other big reason I love painting food is that I loooove food - not in a gourmet, "foodie" kind of way, but in the pure and uncomplicated manner of a six-year-old - and in recent years I've discovered a bunch of food sensitivities that prevent me from eating most of my favourite things.

One thing I miss?  Sugar cereal.  Hell, I even miss "healthy" cereals.  I'd pretty much shiv a baby in the head for a big bowl of raisin bran right now, you don't even know.  I also miss canned pasta a lot (I told you I have the appetite of a 6-year-old).

How am I grieving my losses, you ask?  By painting the things I can't have.  I'm not sure why it makes me feel better, but it kind of does.

The rightmost paintings are probably my favourites because they're true: I did used to love when my cereal made the milk change colour, and I did used to save the marshmallows in marshmallowy cereal for last (by which time the milk would have partially dissolved them into a sweet, chewy foam...*droooool...*).  As for the bottom-left painting, well, I can't say that bran cereal ever made a noticeable difference in my pooping habits, but other people tell me it works for them so I took a leap of faith with that one.

Tangent: all of a sudden, I've become surprisingly good at lettering.  I'm not sure when that happened.  My writing on paintings has always tended to get bigger and bigger as the sentence went on and I'd have to redo it, but these all came out pretty awesome on the first try.  Disclaimer: I'm not coming up with the different writing styles out of my head or anything; I type each phrases in Word first, put it in a fancy font, and copy that.  But the fact remains that I'm doing it freehand, just by eyeballing the computer screen and then eyeballing the canvas.  And I'm proud of my work.

Sometime soon I'll have to do a painting of Kraft Dinner with cut-up hot dogs and ketchup all over it.  I'm salivating a bit at the very thought.

Note to Self: Moderation is Key

I keep having to remind myself to eat well.  I like vegetables, but that's a relatively recent revelation for me;  also, I like cheese, mayonnaise, eggs, etc. more.  So, unless I watch myself really closely, I tend to default to a diet of all protein and fat, all the time.

Today, I realized I'd been letting my eating habits slip again so I made myself a great big salad to get me back on track.  And, as always, I was amazed by how fantastic all those veggies made me feel.  You'd think vitamins would have to actually digest before a person could reap their benefits, but apparently not - I felt like I was in a video game and the salad filled up my energy-meter thing to the top!

...Until I finished the salad, whose size exceeded the comfortable capacity of my stomach by approximately 25%.

So...full.............must...lie down..............can't...stop...talking like Shatner..........

*belch*

Seriously, though, I'm not what the kids call a "foodie" but this salad was so colourful and pretty and, well, healthy-looking that I actually took a picture (yes, I set my plate on the floor for this; every other flat surface in the apartment is covered in paintbrushes, paint tubes, paintings, bottles of varnish, artificial bacon strips and fake fried eggs.  These days I eat on the couch with the plate balanced on my boobs).

Spinach,  mushrooms, old cheddar, red and yellow peppers, strawberries, and tuna salad.  Next time I'll use half the can of tuna instead of the entire thing.