Needles and funny movies

I went back to acupuncture today.  It's been a while.  Not only did I reach my limit with my insurance last year, but I also was freaked out about doing much of anything during my first trimester.  Plus, it was kind of crazy, between Christmas, New Year's, then I got a cold, then the Great Spotting Incident happened; it's only been within the past few weeks that I've started settling (if you could say that) into this pregnancy.

I'm such a baby when it comes to needles.  Seriously, my acupuncturist just laughs at me as she takes out the needles that she uses on toddlers.  Toddlers, I tell you.  And they even freak me out.  I'm getting a bit better since I've had so much blood drawn lately, but there's still something ridiculously unsettling about looking down and seeing needles sticking out of your knee, feet, and wrists.  And if you accidentally try to scratch your head, and you hit a needle there, it's just weird.

But I do think there's something to this acupuncture.  Last May, acupuncture alone increased my luteal phase from 10 days to 14.  I can only imagine it was the acupuncture since it was the only thing I was doing differently.  Later on when I was taking progesterone during the IUI's my luteal phase got longer as well, so for those I can't chalk it all up to the needles, but for that cycle in May, it's the only thing that had changed.

Here's something else.  When I ask my Western Doctors what they think about acupuncture, half of them just kind of snicker.  "Well it won't hurt," one said, "because it doesn't do anything."  So then when we did the first IUI I asked him whether it was ok to keep doing it during that cycle, and he says, "well, yes, but make sure they know you're doing fertility, because there are spots they will want to avoid."

Now here's the thing.  If it doesn't do anything, then why would there be spots they would want to avoid, and why would that matter?

It doesn't take a Sherlock to figure out that there's more to this story than these MD's are letting on.

Anyway, it's been over three and a half years of trying to get pregnant - and sustain a pregnancy - and I'm pretty much convinced that doctors are stabbing in the dark.  Oh, don't get me wrong, I still go to them.  I still listen to what my OB says, and I ask her about everything under the sun (like, is Neosporin safe?) but I also think that there's an awful lot they don't know.

So the short story is, I got needles in my wrist, knee, feet and head today.

Also, I've been feeling a lot better lately.  The whole second-trimester thing is rocking.  I'm exercising regularly, even though it's winter (which is a challenge, because I also hate being cold) and I'm meditating, and spending a lot of time reading books (because I figure that my reading will be kind of curtailed here in under six months).  So after acupuncture I went to Panera.  I could eat every meal at Panera, but J isn't as much of a fan.  Whenever we go out, I always ask for Panera, and he usually just rolls his eyes.  Sometimes he indulges me.  But I was on my own today, so Panera it was.  I ordered the Fuji Apple Chicken Salad without even thinking about it (no chicken because I'm still a veggie, extra apple) and then when I saw it, I realized there were blue cheese crumbles.  Soft cheeses are on the (very long) list of things I'm not supposed to eat during pregnancy, and I immediately started thinking about what to do.  Do I ask them to make me another one, without the cheese?  But the queue for lunch is really long.  Do I try to pick them off?

[Sidebar:  These are the dilemmas with which I am faced every day, which is why I insist that actually raising a child will be cake compared to this act of trying to conceive and carry one.  My mother in law just laughs at me when I say this, though my stepmom gets it.  Here's my thinking:  I can do everything perfectly, but I have no ultimate control over how it will turn out.  Yes, that applies to parenting, obviously, but it's not your own freaking body.  Plus, with a kid, you can look at them and see that they are ok.  With a fetus, you can't.  I could eat the blue cheese, and it could cause some terrible birth defect, and I wouldn't know about it.  For the final two weeks with Baby T I was blissfully going along thinking everything was going ok, starting a google doc of my favorite names, and it turns out that my body was rejecting him, and I didn't even know it until the last day.  I'm sorry, but with the exception of your kid getting really sick, I don't think there's anything in parenting like that.  Your own freaking body rejecting your baby, without you even knowing it, so that while you're just hanging out doing the laundry and sticking a chicken in the oven for dinner, your body is preparing to expel him (after 7 hours of active labor, of course).   You can't tell me that letting go and letting another human being just do their own thing and become their own person and make their own mistakes can be as hard as that.  Maybe I'll find out that I'm wrong, but I am pretty much convinced that 40 weeks of pregnancy (God willing) will be the hardest thing I have ever done by the time it's over.]

So, do I eat the blue cheese or do I not eat the blue cheese?  I decide to be reckless.  I pick out the really big chunks, but for the little crumbs that are left in the dressing (which also, I might add, freaks me out because there might be raw eggs in it, who the fuck knows, this is why I don't eat out much) I figure that it can't hurt.

I'm hoping I was right, but of course, as I just stated above, I have no idea whether I'm right or not.

If you think too much about this stuff, you can drive yourself crazy.  I mean, really crazy.   But for thirty seconds at Panera before the blue cheese, I was really having fun, and feeling like my old self again.

Tonight we watched a movie called Hard Times which is the silliest movie I've seen in a long time. It's set in a little village in Ireland where there are few opportunities and lots of time to come up with crazy plans to make money.  Four of the least brainiest among the village decide to hijack a Pfizer truck and steal the viagra, take it to Amsterdam and sell it, and make lots of money.  The truck-jacking scene itself was priceless.  In a fit of fear when the three American Hummer-driving security guards show up, they dump the drugs down the well.  And the drugs get into everyone's water supply.  And the entire village is suddenly feeling the effects of viagra.  It's on netflix instant-watch if a silly Irish movie about a horny little town harboring stupid criminals appeals to you.

What the hell CAN I Eat - Fake Food Edition

We all know I'm on a Noble Quest to Eat Better, right?  One of the biggest things I'm noticing on my Journey is how little Actual Food there is in the grocery store.  I read Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food when it first came out a few years ago (his axiom for health: Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants) and I thought, "yeah, that makes sense, we don't really eat a lot of real food."

But see, I thought that meant stuff like Dorito's or macaroni and cheese.  I figured that, you know, yogurt, for example, was a real food.

I'm learning that I've been way off in jumping to that conclusion.

I've become an obsessive label-reader, and here's what I'm learning:

All those yummy General Foods International instant coffee that I love to mix with cold milk in a blender to make a pseudo-frappuccino?  Not really food.

I was reading the label of my Hill's Brothers mocha mix, and I noticed that it's loaded to the brim with phosphates.  Whereas my Starbucks Via instant coffee is simply coffee, cane sugar, and dried milk.  I put on my Sherlock Holmes hat and asked myself, "what are these phosphates, and are they bad for me?"

It doesn't seem very cut and dry.  The International Food Additives Council publishes a list of phosphates used in food, and why they're there.  They're in loads of foods.  Everything from cake mixes to soy milk.  Apparently they are often used to prevent clumping (like in my instant coffee or the aforementioned cake mix).

The FDA lists them as "Generally Recognized as Safe."  And they're approved for use in the EU.  So it looks like they're ok, except possibly for people with kidney problems.

But still, here's the thing.  So much of what we're eating isn't actually food.  It's edible food-like substances that are engineered by food scientists.  The plus side of this is that we get a lot of great food, very easily.  Just add water, and you've got creamy coffee.  They allow us to have an enormous range of food in our refrigerator that we don't even really need to cook ourselves.  I'm sure it's made food less expensive.  But the downside is that I'm loading my body up with chemicals.  Coffee is not supposed to have a non-caking agent in it.

Is this sustainable?

Take my Fiber One bars.  They're touted as being pretty healthy, right?  They taste like granola and chocolate, and they have 11 grams of fiber.  But they have Yellow Number 6 in them, which can cause tumors on the kidney, can mess with your chromosomes, and is banned in Norway.

Yellow Number 6 is approved in the US.  Maybe Norway is overreacting.  Or maybe not.  Cigarettes are still legal, after all.  Maybe in fifty years we'll all be aghast at the amount of food chemicals that we put into our bodies.

And I ask you, why the hell does a granola bar need to have Yellow Number 6 in it in the first place?

So the next phase of my Eating Better Quest is to get rid of as many of these chemicals as I can.  Tomorrow I'm going to make my own potato chips, and I might even start making my own bread, because seriously, why is there high fructose corn syrup in bread?  Of all the stupid things...

I'm gonna take this "no additives and chemicals" thing to the next level.  For thousands of years people ate without this kind of crap in their food, and honestly, I think it's still too early to call it safe.  So I'm out.  I'm getting off the chemical train.

I'm glad I'm finding all this out now, before I get pregnant again.  Because it takes time and effort to make your own bread and it's good to get in the habit now.  Dammit, I'm committed to having a kitchen with real food in it, and not something that was created in a laboratory.    

I shall report back on the chips, as well as other chemicals I'm finding in my new obsessive-label-reading experiment.

What the hell CAN I Eat?

I'm going to start a new segment on my blog, called What the hell CAN I Eat? because there is seriously, like, nothing that is edible in the grocery store.

I've long been a proponent of shopping on the perimeter of the grocery store, even when I wasn't actively trying to lose weight and be healthy.  The stuff down the middle aisles, aside from some of the baking ingredients, and the occasional bit of rice or pasta, is largely chemical-filled junk.

But I'm paying even more attention now because we're getting ready to start trying to get me pregnant again, and as I get healthier, I realize how much further I have to go, and how much more feeling-awesome there is waiting for me.   I've started using agave in my tea instead of sugar.  I switched to the "natural" coffee creamer (milk, sugar, cream, and vanilla).  I eat a lot of veggies.  I'm doing the whole oil-pulling thing.

I am trying desperately to get off of diet coke right now.  I've read enough about aspartame to know that it's no good.  It can screw up your fertility, make you gain weight, probably causes cancer, and lots of other bad stuff.  I've been drinking it for nearly 20 years.  I did quit at one point, for Lent a few years ago, but I went back to it after we lost Baby T, and have been off the wagon since.

So I think it's probably ok to give up diet soda, and I won't have to worry about aspartame, right?  I go to Whole Foods, see they have stevia-sweetened soda, order a 24 pack on Amazon and sign up to have it delivered every month.  I think I'm doing good, right?  I'm gonna get rid of aspartame, and be super-healthy.

Now, I enjoy snacking on yogurt.  And I'll admit, I'm a sucker for those Yoplait ads that show the lady talking on the phone about how she's eating red velvet cake and still losing weight while her hubby goes foraging through the fridge and only sees yogurt.

Plus, they're usually the cheapest yogurts at the store.  10 for $6.  It's a deal.

They look innocuous enough.  Pretty innocent. It's just yogurt, right?

Till you look on the back, and not only does it have Yellow #6, which is a carcinogen (and has been banned in several European countries), but it also has aspartame.   What the hell CAN I eat???

Looks like after I finish this batch, I'll just be getting the all-natural stuff.  Which really sucks because I like the raspberry cheesecake flavor a lot.  But, you know, not enough to stay addicted to aspartame for.

Stay tuned for my next installment, where I find out that my fiber bars will also give me cancer!  Who knew the grocery store was such a frigging death trap.