medicines, tools, and emotions

I just had stevia by itself for the first time ever today. Should have taken some sooner. I honestly forgot what it was called and somehow didn't try to figure it out and just stumbled upon the word this week while I was scrolling through Facebook. It's just a laxative to me. Works way better than others do, at least in my case. As such, I can get back to typing.

 I have ordered a new kind of medicine that I'm kind of excited about. It's a bunch of enzymes with particular minerals to allow those enzymes to do their job. It's 30 percent minerals and the rest of it is enzymes. It's been explained that the body's digestion system may slow down, a very common occurrence with women experiencing menopause, and the reason it can do this is from a lack of appropriate minerals, seemingly these women run out of minerals too fast so even when they take enzymes, it's not good enough. I don't know how veritable this all is, but it seems logical.

In my case, I've been digesting food, but this is not operating fast enough for me. I'm hoping this could be the product that will actually let me gain some weight. I might be hoping for too much here but considering that I'm seeing the value of the fasting logic in my current situation it stands to reason that if that fasting window is necessary to allow me to heal, I also need enough time during the non-fasting hours to digest food or else my body won't spend energy on repairs. I could simply OMAD my way into long fasting hours, but I think I need a stronger digestive system if I ever hope to achieve a healthier weight.

I don't want to err on the side of danger with regards to trying to gain weight of course, I feel like I've done it before including in recent times as I have strayed away from my previous OMAD/TMAD routines and now I'm back at the fasting strategy to cope with the backlash that snacking seems to have caused me. The principle that is brought up a lot is an eating window of 8 hours followed by a fasting window of 16 hours. I'm sure the exact numbers aren't incredibly important, it's probably more important to pay attention to what your body needs, but that's a decent starting point for anyone to work from.

The overall point is you get all your eating done within 1/3 of the day then don't eat for the remaining 2/3 of the day. A fast for those that don't know means not taking in any nutrients besides water. Sometimes people call it a water fast which is erroneous(as if it's called that because the only thing you're allowed is water, while drinking anything not water is decidedly disqualified from being a fast which is why the specification is invalid), as a water fast means literally not drinking water for a fixed amount of time. You can modify your fasting routine according to recommendations by doctors, perhaps they want you to take medicines or some special food, but these are minor details. The important thing to keep in mind is we're not trying to kick our bodies out of repair mode. I'm not going to try and research where the line is for such a thing, it's not incredibly important to me. Maybe I'll accidentally discover some of where it is later, but I'm unsure if I'll get to the point where such a thing would be risk-minimal and convenient.

Something people might not tell you is that the waste removal part of your body is part of the repair mode process. This is key to understanding why we might struggle with IBS. Perhaps we are not granting ourselves enough time to do the waste removal. I'm still learning this stuff and thinking heavily upon it, so there's a chance some of what I'm explaining here could be incorrect, but that has ever been the case with us humans, even if we are professionals.

Another thing I did that I regret in recent years/months was purchase the wrong shoes. The shoes I got were too small and so I stopped wearing them eventually. I believe the inappropriate shoe size contributed to my legs failing when they did. Don't ask me to explain how/why I got the wrong shoe size or to tell you the duration of wearing. I'm too embarrassed to share that at the moment. I'm going to be shopping around for shoes better than this older pair that are falling apart(not the ones that are too small, it's too dangerous for me to wear them).

I don't know how much I'm going to be using shoes compared to the past version of me that would walk everywhere I needed year by year with few exceptions. It's unclear to me what's safe and what isn't at this point when it comes to the idea of just walking to places that I would walk to previously without a thought to anything besides if I'm hydrated and/or starving. My legs seem to have undergone a lot of healing, but I believe they are due some more bed rest and another examination to see if all the bruising has gone away yet at the very least.

Dealing with my emotions is another thing I'm realizing now that I've been struggling with my whole life. To feel the things that I feel about my own body isn't always easy. For example, I think of times in TV shows when characters would recommend or make an order for other characters to stay under observation and continue resting and such things instead of going off and working, and I have noticed myself clinging to life(and others times rushing ahead out of a desire to do more like some dedicated personnel in a TV show), choosing not to end it all early. I've been through so much pain my life, and even more as I've become older. I know we all have our bad days and not so bad days... and I don't dare hope that 10/10 pain and suffering feelings will go away in my life, but so long as I'm not dead yet, I'll try to learn and see if I can give back to the world in whatever small way I can.

The world seems content to serve nothing but harsh lessons and suffering. The result of a reign by a spirit that doesn't love us. I heard an interesting point in a YT video this week. They were talking about teaching others or focusing on healing for yourself. They said there isn't necessarily a right path to take. But does this have to be a path? I think not. Perhaps from circumstance to circumstance or from conversation to conversation, we can make the decision, rather than to continuously pursue just healing or just teaching. I think that's what Jesus would want us to do. Pick our battles, not just choose to always fight or always not fight. Make our blows so as not to be striking the air as the apostle Paul said.

I'll try to minimize wasted effort. We're all going to make mistakes, but we should try and learn from them and improve ourselves, to be as perfect as we can. We can't make the mark, but it's still important to try for it. Not to flaunt our own skills, power, etcetera, but simply to be better able to benefit ourselves and those seeking the same thing.

Food and medicine shuffling

 The hips above the heart posture has been very helpful as has the new cane that I got. The new package I got of Colostrum has been helpful too, the pure colostrum means it's easy to get a decent amount of the stuff inside my body when I need to take it. The Serenoa whatever(forget the second word but this is a name of the main character in Triangle Strategy, a video game) stuff is working great. It isn't really solving all my problems but combined with everything else I've been taking? It's been fantastic. Its default name is Saw Palmetto which is a really weird name IMO, so I'm just going to call it Serenoa from now on instead. 

I've been shuffling around my diet quite a bit lately. I'm not really having an issue with eating dairy in moderation, even many varieties of dairy, the main thing I watch out for is to make sure whatever kind it is, it's low in sugar or has no sugar in it.

Today, I ate cottage cheese for the first time in a very long time. The plan is to eat it once after waking and again before going to sleep. It's one of a few different recommended cheeses. Back when my digestive system was still a mess I remember eating what I think was some 'French parmesan cheese', forgot how it's spelled, but at the time I think I 'binged' the cheese which was not helpful. Whatever the case, as I have some in my fridge now I plan to try it again, this time without the binging. If the cheese turns out to not really be to my liking, then I can just stick to eating Swiss Cheese I suppose as a source of the protein type that this cheese provides. I already tried some of the recommended Ricotta stuff and I think this is the kind that is supposed to be cooked, so I'm going to try something else with it than what I just did which was taste it, be grossed out a bit, and then mix it with natto, only to later decide I've had enough of it and throw it in the trash when I was done eating what else was in the bowl.

I have a new idea for a meal using buckwheat flour, and I plan to add some ricotta to that. I may try adding some pumpkin butter as well. May end up doing some research the day of to help decide how to prepare it.

It's too early to get excited about being free from IBS but as it is right now, the current results are encouraging and indicating that I may actually be IBS free by the time winter comes around which was my goal. I'll be hoping it stays in remission until winter is over.

new medicines, new meals

 I had some medicine lying around that I wasn't sure if I wanted to take again but I decided to try using it again, I used a much smaller dose than I would have used in the past. I'm not entirely sure if it's even gone through my system yet, but there is the hope that it will make the new medicine do its job better. I probably won't be taking the old medicine as often as the new medicine, but in any case, my CVI condition seems to be improving with lots of strategized bed rest.

And that in turn is helping my IBS. In fact, one of the strategies for the CVI condition may be accidentally helping out my IBS. To put it one way, have you ever had a door that has been closed for a while not want to open? And the way to open it is actually to pull it back before pushing it forward for opening? In other words, getting some momentum first. I'm also seeing this when I move the office chair around, I might get stuck on a ground barrier from one type of floor to the next, but if I back up a bit, it's easier to roll over it.

I can suspect that it's to a lesser degree, but either way I'm doing something similar with my digestive system with my lying down posture before standing up with the cane. I would love for these spasms around my hip area to go away but for now it seems I'm stuck with them, here's hoping I can get rid of them before winter comes, because the cold will just make that so much worse.

The new medicine in case you're wondering is Colostrum and the old is Psyllium. I'm also considering other medicines to help with my circulatory system. One in particular that seems to be very hyped up is Natto K something... it is from a food I've had before and I enjoyed the experience, so this would likely be a good medicine for me, it's supposed to be good for the arteries which are linked to the veins(because of my chronic veinous insufficiency) so theoretically this could be very healthy for me; trouble is there are so many different brands of the stuff I don't know whose product to buy.

My arthritis seems to have improved slightly because of the CVI problems being less enormous. My right leg still can't move properly, but much more range of motion has been achieved. I can only imagine I would suffer more damage in general again if I tried walking without my cane, but having more than that 10 degrees or so of movement is very much welcome as a change.

In other news, I've recently taken to combining Guacamole with various dairy ingredients. I've been making my own yogurt and I use that, but I've also returned to consuming my favorite kind of cheese from when I was a boy(swiss cheese) as well as something else that I didn't think much of at the time called sour cream. Now cream in dairy has historically been a confusing thing for me. My parents were fond of something called cream cheese which is more accurately described as sugar cheese or something like that. The flavor in such products had me just assuming I knew what something like half and half tasted like, and the odd labeling of sour cream also had me confused about what cream is or isn't supposed to be like. From what I can tell, cream is a blend, mostly fat, but a little bit of sugar and protein as well. That's about it. And half and half is product that is half cream and half milk. Which means it's not pure milk, but also not pure cream. As such, although I don't usually consume it directly, it apparently makes a great base ingredient for yogurt.

Anyway, the point is that my body has enjoyed eating my own yogurt, which is why I felt it may not be a bad idea to mess around with old favorite dairy options instead of just whatever other people are eating. Sour Cream and Guacamole is a standard combination, but Yogurt and Guacamole is not, you see what I mean? Trying to think outside of the box of what's normal, and find my own foods that fit my needs. Swiss Cheese is an infusion of protein compared to the various other dairy foods I'm consuming, and at least for me, is helpful in cleaning my teeth. Anyway, this is treated as a sort of a snack that has a good amount of protein, fat, and even fiber thanks to the guacamole in there, and the strength it's given me over this time period has been noteworthy.

I have not been eating all that much buck recently, I had quite a bit of it maybe half a week ago and have been putting small amounts of it in my soup. I know this herb has a decent amount of carbohydrates(although a much better ratio of protein and fat to carbs than many other flours) in it, and as such I'm just unsure how well my body is handling carbohydrates in general. Which is why I've been consuming dairy(but not the kinds with lots of carbs in it) more lately and buck less. I suppose you could say my CVI is connected to my type 1 diabetes, which has had me very concerned about where the sugar I'm consuming is coming from. My IBS condition was so desperate that I even tried out prunes again to find some relief, but it didn't seem to help my condition at all unfortunately. It may have made my CVI struggles worse.

I may need to slowly reformulate my bread ideas and consider what role such products like buck or teff would play in them. In any case, chives have been welcome addition to the broccoli soup that I've been eating daily in recent times. I don't always add the chives, but they seem more fitting for soup than they do bread.

Health update: leg feels dead to me

 In a surprising turn of events, I don't know if it's from my attempts at eating sweat potato powder and cabbage powder, or simply consuming too much 'organ meat' in the form of cod liver, but whatever the case, I have seen a return of ulcers to my legs which is the most obvious visual sign that something's wrong with them.

More importantly, there are some rather alarming developments. My right leg in particular has a lot of yellow on it. It's hard to see unless the lighting is bright enough, but normal power sunlight(haha we live in Washington State) should be enough to illuminate it. I haven't really noticed any yellow on my left leg. I'm going to guess that perhaps without my noticing it, walking around caused my leg to bruise all over and that bruising turned to yellow. I can't see through my own pants, so this is just a theory. In any case, I have some bruising that hasn't turned yellow, it still seems very fresh, and it's high up on my thighs and in the back where I normally can't see it, unless I use a mirror or some other sort of device, like a camera with my hand putting it into position.

The bruising is so massive that I'm surprised that I haven't been able to notice it sooner. Why wouldn't I check there you may ask? I simply wasn't being thorough. I wasn't feeling any pain there, so I had no reason to check. Or if I was feeling pain, it was a low enough amount that it was going ignored.

In any case, it seems clear that I should stop attempting to do things how i was doing them before. Current research suggests I am dealing with such things as Chronic Veinous Insufficiency and also Deep Vein Thrombosis. I have attempted to adjust my posture throughout the day but it seems to provide little comfort. It feels like my last days are finally upon me. It was not a fun 4 decades, and if i make it to 5 decades old, I am imagining that nothing new and interesting will happen in my life. So now I resonate more fully with Gustave from Expedition 33 "For those who come after" the man went on a mission determined to succeed but taking precautions so that even if he fails, others can learn/benefit from his experience. It was a simple sentiment, to live for others. And it looks like that is all that's left for me now.

I have been putting off writing a book for ages. My health is so bad I'm not even sure how practical it is for me to attempt something like that. But to not attempt to do so would be disrespectful to all who live I suppose. I feel a lot of pressure, and I don't think I can bear it alone.

Health update (new fat nutrition source highlight)

So I have been experiencing some changes to my diet that are influencing my body and mind for what seems to be the better. There may still be some issues with knowing what I can or can't eat, but it's much more minor than it's ever been before.

The biggest change in the diet might be the addition of cod liver as a daily or nearly daily insert into my meals. I get cans of the stuff and just pour it into the frying pan and sooner or later I end up eating it with a bunch of other ingredients. The recipe probably isn't important to the story.

I've been finding that my digestive system still has issues, compared to when I was much younger, but I think that maybe I have had more realistic dreams recently than I have ever had in my whole life. I don't know why exactly, but I'm assuming there's a medical explanation for this and that this is not simply spirits messing with my head. Because they are just ordinary dreams from what I can tell, apart from how indistinguishable they have become from reality compared to before.

In any case, I'm reminded of a phenomenon that I refer to as sensory playback. When I was living in Seattle, my brain would keep recordings of sounds happening while I was sleeping so that noises wouldn't wake me up while sleeping. It would then playback the sounds for me after I woke up. It was a daily occurrence after I fully 'got used to the loudness of the city'. In any case, for unrelated reasons regarding sleep I had to leave the city, and I haven't been back since except to visit but even then, not often. Another example that many more may be able to relate to is simply having a song stuck in your head.

I think what's going on here is when sleep is less disturbed, then dreams are stronger. I guess I have had some bad nights of sleep in the past and if there were signs that were noticeable or not, one of them that popped up was something I wasn't recognizing for what I now believe it to be. Back to the topic of music, if you've ever heard some sort of song remixing, it's some sort of idea someone came up with, what I believe caused this to happen is their own sensory playback. songs were 'stuck in their head' if you want to call it that, or rather playing in their head as accurately as if they were hearing the songs with their live ears. 

Although that detail is less important. The more crucial detail is that they were sort of using their brains to redesign whole new songs based on what they already knew. It is similar to how AI programs function in that regard from what I've noticed. AI has some various quirks that are a result of bugs in programming or at the very least faults with hardware, but that's hardly to be unexpected considering the difference between our brains and something we built.

I have also had this happen to me with vision too, it's not just limited to sound or even touch ( yes, I get that as well). And naturally that plays a big role in my dreams to make them seem more realistic when they do. It occurs to me that I maybe have went on living in this world 4 decades without knowing what having fancy dreams is really like. Sure, they're not anything special, but if a lot more people are having these on the regular, it could explain some things, and even if not, it's still an interesting thing for me to be experiencing and I look forward to it continuing to happen if I keep up my daily routine as it is.

In any case lately I have felt more normal than previously, and I wonder if this whole dream thing is another little sign that I'm headed in the right direction when it comes to my health.

Summer is here and chives are back!

It's taken me some time but I've remembered things that I forgot about. Such as remembering that my favorite free bread that I got from a bakery that was offering samples was called Tomato Chive. After I decided to quit all nicotine foods(including potatoes and tomatoes but also cauliflower), I managed to remember that bread...how could I like that the most?... when there were a lot of other very good breads that they made, really fancy stuff, I don't remember near to them all, but there were a lot of tasty ones that I enjoyed. And it was all so many years ago. So I realized that I need to try chives again to find out if they'll be good for my body, and I ordered them and they've been great so far. I've also been trying other ingredients, like basil and dill weed. I don't really like dill weed, but basil is nice. I've been grinding up chives with sunflower kernels and putting it into the water for some dough. I've been so much healthier lately.

I've dared to drink lime juice again, and I'm even eating a little yogurt(I have to be really careful with this one because of sugar content, and ultimately I'm not sure if this is worth continuing to eat at this moment in time). I may stop eating cacao butter soon because I seem to have found a worthy replacement for it. Shea butter doesn't really smell better than it, but it is softer when not melted and is therefore a little easier to cook with. And it seems like my body is digesting it better. I'm not eating much meat. Every time I try it, I find it hard to eat only a little bit, and then I end up getting diarrhea. I think my pancreas(and who knows what else) is having a hard time handing all that. I am prepared to try and see if some medicine at the same time I take meat helps(such as lipase and protease).

My singing is getting back to normal, I can hear myself being able to sing at a good volume and clearly. It seems as though my dietary routine has been helpful in that regard. I haven't weighed myself lately but I wouldn't be surprised if I gained a couple pounds. I'm not in unheard of shape, but it's a reasonable level of health to be at considering my age and all that's happened before. I also got some ghee in case my body didn't like the shea butter, so I haven't tried it yet.

Fage is a brand of yogurt that I like because they have simpler style of yogurt making than other brands but I found it annoying to have to add lactase. Well now they have a lactose free version of their yogurt. It seems pretty good and my body isn't freaking out eating it but we are talking about more sugar than what I'm getting from lime juice or buck/hemp so I need to be careful how quickly I go through that. What I started doing is just putting it into a smaller container with a lid when I plan to eat it. This allows me to easily restrict my portion so I don't overeat it. I tried to do something like that with meat, but the method was a little off and my self-control wasn't there.

I'm not sure if it makes sense to keep eating yogurt or meat but if I am to eat these things I know it has to be in moderation. In any case, I have been enjoying my teff and/or buck herbal bread made from dough that I mix fresh every day and my body has been very thankful for this regular meal plan. There are a wide variety of ingredients I can put in, and I will cycle through different ones, depending on my discernment and guesswork and willingness to experiment. I want to eventually come up with some recipes so others can copy my food, but I'm not very disciplined with such a concept. I'm pleased that at least the shea butter has been very easy to cook with, so that might contribute a lot to my confidence in a recipe to be made.

Also wondering if I should maybe have 3 different recipes, one for teff flour, one for buck flour, and a third for both of them mixed together. That might be a good plan. But then I'd have to figure out what the various supporting ingredients should be. Might not be so easy to figure out. Even just cooking using different ingredients makes such a difference. For example, when I don't have buck in the dough, when I'm frying it all up, it all tends to break apart more quickly as I try to flip it, which leads to a lot of awkward flip-stirring that I normally don't have to do. Not sure what to do about that, there are some potential solutions, although I am not sure what they all are.

I've been drinking aloe vera juice daily as a way to make sure my digestive system has what it needs in case anything goes wrong, and it seems to help keep my skin in decent shape when everything's fine with the digestive system. I've cut back on the salt intake lately. I think I've realized that there's a chance that part of my fat absorption problem could be attributed to too much salt in my water IOW if I want to have water that's not diluting the salt very effectively then I need to make sure it's not around meal time, and that should in theory improve my fat absorption. That's the plan moving forward anyway. And over the past however many days it's been with me trying this, it seems like it might be making a good difference. It's hard to tell what's doing what with me taking in yogurt too, so I'm going to refrain from immediately rebuying yogurt when that's gone and see if anything changes for the better or for the worse after that.

The shilajit has been cheaper in recent months than it had been in the past, which is nice. I think it has helped me keep going in general. I don't know how much help the green tablets have been (chlorella and something else I forgot what) but I repurchased the reishi mushroom powder and it seems just as snack worthy as before. Believe it or not, I didn't finish the last bag because I lost it, but the other day after I already started to eat out of the new bag, I found the old one. I don't know if I'd call that a coincidence. Is this stuff helping me feel more energized or motivated? Maybe...

About the nicotine thing, in case I didn't mention it already, I was a big fan of corn chips and salsa for a long time. I also liked lots of different potato dish ideas, and I was even messing around with various potato soup ideas myself. I was the kind of person that would eat an entire pizza and back before I knew that gluten was bad for me, it was something that was very problematic. And yet I felt like I wasn't appreciating the long-term health effects of the wonderful potato soups that I would make. And I didn't really know why. I think it's because I went through withdrawal symptoms with them(Yeah, if you get headaches then isn't something wrong? So why would you feel worse after having amazing soup?). If I wasn't constantly eating these kinds of foods, then my body would freak out. Consider this, after I had quit eating potatoes for some time(maybe I was careful because they have small amounts of sugar in them) I was not getting headaches, but relatively soon after I would eat something with potatoes in it, I would get headaches. It was consistent. It even happened when I tried this sour cream alternative product that was really fancy that had a little bit of potato in it(to be fair it was so tasty I went through most of the container quite quickly) and it even happened with that! After that I knew, it was definitely a withdrawal reaction. So, even though I don't think I was getting that kind of withdrawal symptom from cauliflower, I decided to stop eating it anyway just in case! 

And so eventually I figured my foods needed a little something to replace the cauliflower, something vegetable-like and eventually I came up with the idea of trying chives. I don't know why I didn't buy chives sooner, they've been great for me. They smell so good, they remind me of onions(they are both alliums), and they help make crushing the sunflower kernels easier(they less frequently try to jump out of the grinding bowl) when I'm trying to grind them while the kernels likewise help to slice up the chives into smaller pieces. It's funny how Amazon stopped selling sunflower powder wasn't so bad a thing to happen to me since now I can just cut up chives at the same time I'm grinding the sunflower into a powder(granted it's not as fine as it probably should be, but generally good enough, especially as I get better at it and have enough patience for it).

I am currently trying to do this thing where I eat meals twice a day now. I'm hoping it will work out and who knows? Perhaps in the future I could make the meals grow in size if I think my body can handle that change and that could lead to me gaining some weight. I am not an expert at gaining weight and I've heard a lot of ideas for how you could do that but obviously not everyone is going to find such a thing easy and what works for other people may not work for a large percentage of people. In any case, I'm trying to listen to what my body wants and try to work in harmony with it, rather than trying to mold ideas from impressive people into my routine when I can instead help my body do better by appreciating its differences.

News - I previewed 2 games this winter and also...

 I was a playtester for Stormgate and a new game based on Faeria. If you are not familiar with either of those, Stormgate is a RTS game based loosely off of StarCraft 2 + Diablo + Warcraft 3 and a variety of other non-Blizzard games, and Faeria is a turn based strategy game that uses a dual player constructed board and cards. The new Faeria game is meant to be a 4Ex(a genre of game based off the 4 step process of exploring, expanding, exploiting, and exterminating) version of Faeria and looks quite interesting but it is a long way off from being completed so I can't really tell details. I don't really like any game in the genre yet(unless you count old Civilization 1&2 and Master of Orion 1&2), but this game may be the first.

 In any case, being able to see the early progress of such games is great and helps me to further identify with my new title of Spy. I am not about to do anything illegal like talk about details of games that I'm not authorized to talk about of course. In the meantime, I'm continuing to review games that I play and I thought now and here would be a good place to mention a new website.

 I'm going through and updating my games played listing to include links to reviews from me(whether on Steam or through some other means) and if you're wondering where this games played listing is it, it's a website called 'rankone' that was linked to me from a peer and here's the link to my profile. I don't know how long it'll take me but I think this site has a nice presentation and as long as they aren't censoring my 'thoughts about the game' sections then it should be fine.

 Moving forward, the latest game which I finished was Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth and I have an overall positive feeling about the game. But I'm not ready to review it yet. Please be patient while I prepare something. In the meantime, if you want a spoiler video, you can check out a new YT video that I shipped recently. If you want to watch something a lot shorter and with more action, feel free to check out my successful attempts through GreenOne's vertical LeveLHead course.

 In case I didn't link it from here before, the 'advertisement' for my Super Mario 3D Ray World has been the channel trailer for my YouTube channel and I might replace it as the channel trailer soon, so I might as well make sure it gets 'shouted out' because it's a fine one of many examples of my creativity in recent years.

 If any of these news paragraphs intrigue you, feel free to comment on them or ask questions about them on my Twitch channel where I broadcast some of my game playing and sometimes non-game related stuff as well.