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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.
