Gosh, where does the time go? I was aiming to post every five days or so, and it's been weeks. Rest assured that the blog is not the only thing suffering though, I went to update my food diary the other day to discover I had to remember over a week's worth of meals and snacks.
On Saturday I am going on an adventure. A pharmaceutical company has invited me and some of my fellow sufferers to a meeting to discuss, well, everything, I think. I will be flying to London and staying over one night, without husband or children. I am really much more excited than is reasonable. Funnily enough, I decided to go on this diet stint just before I received the invitation. It couldn't have come at a better time, as I now have some detailed information and theories to share with them all.
I can't help but feel a bit of a fraud sometimes, as I really don't seem to 'suffer' in the same way as many of these lovely people I am going to meet. Did you know that there actually exists a gene therapy for our condition? It is, however, quite expensive to administer and therefore only available to those who find themselves frequently hospitalised by pancreatitis. Not me then. The last time I ended up in hospital with a LPLD related problem, other than after a miscarriage a few years ago, was when I was two and they were still working out what I had wrong. I gradually fell further and further away from the diet limits until I ate no differently to a regular person. Admittedly a health conscious fat avoiding on a vague scale person, but put it this way, I never ticked the 'special dietary requirements' box on any invites.
I was discussing this with my girlfriends this week over a tosta. I had been very good the day before and again the next day, so I splashed out on a toasted ham and cheese sandwich for my lunch out with friends. One friend exclaims at the amount of butter that the bread has on it. Why, she wants to know, have I not just asked for it without? I explain that I would rather eat cardboard than a dry toasted sandwich, as it would be cheaper and pretty much the same in taste. I also point out that just by eating the ham (2g of fat) the bread (2g of fat) and the cheese (6g of fat) I have reached half of my daily allowance and have limited myself to a fat free option for dinner, so I might as well add the 8 odd grams of fat that the butter has and actually enjoy one meal in the day. When your daily allowance is 70g, the low fat option is still usually more than my daily allowance. No-one seems to be able to grasp the LOW low fat concept. I find it easier to just order the lowest fat thing I can find and only eat half if it comes to it.
I have noticed in this last month of dieting, graphs, data entry and occasional relapses, that I do have more symptoms than I had realised. In the same way that you don't notice the weight of your long hair until you get it all cut off, I hadn't realised that I was just in the middle of all the symptoms all the time. The tiredness, which was the key factor in my decision to diet, has more or less gone. I will never be able to stay up until midnight every night, it's just not who I am, but after about a week or so, I haven't had to take a nap during the day. And I am a lot less familiar with the bathroom. This in itself has probably helped the tiredness, as I used to be up multiple times in the night for a bathroom visit.
I fell off the wagon spectacularly last week at a friend's birthday party. We were at a traditional Portuguese local haunt, not a tourist salad in sight and I knew there was nothing I could eat on the menu. On that basis, I ordered my favourite thing, belly pork. It took 24 hours, but I then paid for that meal for three days. When I came to put it in my graphs I calculated I had eaten around 150g of fat that day. Right, I thought, I need to never go that far over in one go again! I guess, because I had so much at once, it just went straight through. Monday was my birthday and there was cake. I won't bore you with the details, but it added up to about 60 g of fat. That, apparently, does not exact a bathroom related price, but for the next couple of days I was so tired I had to nap again. I guess when I overdo it, but not by so much, my body actually attempts to do something with it, resulting in a traffic jam and a general shut down of systems until the streets are cleared again.
I can't wait to talk to the other 'sufferers'. I want to know how they get around the energy intake thing. I want to know if they have any good recipes around the 10g fat mark. I want to know if they take supplements and what they eat for snacks. I want to know if any of them are as terrified of getting diabetes as I am. And how they eat on a budget. The company have given us some questions to think about, most of which I have been covering in this blog. The one that has caught my eye is to write a letter to my LPLD telling it everything I want to say. Well, that should give me something to do on the 'plane. I wonder how that will turn out.......
Stay tuned.
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