Fasting

I’ve been thinking about fasting– not in the sense of “considering whether I should do it,” just thinking about the topic– and I think I can now (months after I started thinking about it, yeah) explain why the idea fills me with Nope.

So. Eating, actual meals, regularly, is something I struggle with executive-function-wise. In fact, it’s one of the few situations in which I actually feel… vulnerable / helpless / not-able-to-cope re: being autistic, is when I’ve gotten hungry enough that it impedes my ability to get myself food.

Why does hunger impede my ability to get food.

• physical fatigue/weakness
  • on top of executive dysfunction, makes getting up & doing things even harder

• executive function goes down
  • makes it harder to stop doing other things & start looking for food
  • makes it harder to follow a long series of instructions to get / make food

• sensory issues / need for familiar things goes up
  • limits my choices for foods I can eat
  • makes it harder to get / make food (going to a noisy store, touching unpleasant textures)

• general emotional fragility
  • makes managing my phobia harder
  • which may further limit my food choices and may also make cooking & eating take longer
  • makes me start fucking crying instead of just going “ew!” when I touch an unpleasant texture, which is not fun

I didn’t used to have as extreme a reaction to low blood sugar as I do now, I think, but… I do now. It affects my mood pretty dramatically, and it also makes me physically weak, a lot faster than I think it should at least.

tl;dr I associate not-eating with meltdowns.

Thank you Sparkly

Sparkly has been doing a lot more to help around the house since we moved, and I really really appreciate it. Ey has basically taken over dealing with the dishwasher and taking out the trash. And ey says ey wants to do more laundry, too.

My body really hates laundry because it involves a lot of turning around in circles and standing up/bending over repeatedly, and also temperature changes, so it tends to make me dizzy. I will GLADLY deal with the litterbox in exchange.

Also the freezer is very well stocked with frozen homemade food right now and it makes me so happy. I’ve got this garden vegetable lasagna and this soup and probably tomorrow or the next day I’ll make some more black bean quesadillas.

Conversation I just had with myself

Me: What should I do? Should I do some more work? Should I reply to this message? Should I keep reading that story? Should I do the clerical stuff for my work? What should I do?

Me: Ok stop, what you should do is eat dinner, you’re not going to be able to think until you eat. What do you want for dinner?

Me: Oh right, I wanted penne pasta, because it sounds good and I need to use up the marinara sauce.

Me: Right. Now, what do you need to do to make dinner? You need to get up, get the pot– it’s already clean– put water on to boil…

(This is a really positive outcome because I only stayed in my hungry indecisive state for like 20 minutes, and then I snapped out of it all at once, and now I’m eating.)

I hadn’t realized this was a thing for me

but it kind of is: Familiar food.

Not that I need to eat The Same thing all the time, but sometimes I want to at least eat something I have eaten before?

Sparkly is really excited about trying out all the new restaurants around here, and sometimes I’m just like… “But the thing I ate two days ago was so good! Can’t I just eat that again?”

I settle for reading the menu online, so I can figure out what I want to get before I agree to go. That works pretty well.

I guess it didn’t help that in the past week or so we had a couple of disappointing food experiences. So I also just don’t want that to happen again.

I cooked food today and it was fine.

I ate food today and it was fine.

I washed dishes today and it was fine.

I cooked more food in the aforementioned dishes and it was fine.

I made this sort-of shawarma today and it’s slightly more anxiety-inducing for me than other foods (because it involves cooking with raw meat, and also raw ingredients that go straight into the final dish, and also eating wth my hands) but it’s so good, I keep forgetting how good it is. It smells amazing and now that I’ve bowed to the inevitable and stopped trying to make my own flatbread every time, it doesn’t take very long either.

I cook some onions in the same pan as the chicken and it’s so good. I need to make this more often.

Happy Food Things slash State of the Anxiety

I ate a handful of grated cheddar cheese today, because it looked good and I wanted to eat it, and it was good. I am having positive feelings about cheese. (And, semi-relatedly, about The Most Awesome Quesadillas Ever. I made a double batch today. My freezer is full of delicious things and I’m so happy.)

Everything about this lentil soup is fine– the flavor is actually really nice– except that the lentils have the hulls on and they’re a weird texture.

I’m pretty sure I bought them because they were the only kind at that store, though, so I’m going to have to look somewhere else next time.

Also, instead of doing one giant batch of soup, I’m going to divide my next bag of lentils into half Indian lentil soup with ginger and turmeric, and half western lentil soup with carrots etc. (LEEKS I get to buy LEEKS. Maybe.)

My sense of hunger has been a little weird lately, and I’m not sure why. I think I’ve been eating an okay amount? But I’ve still been getting the ambiguous “I should be ready to eat but I don’t exactly feel hungry” feeling.

(I should thank Sparkly for encouraging me to get really delicious food today.)

WHY are the kitchen counter, and the bag of bread, WET?

Unexpectedly getting something on my hands and not knowing what it is = worst thing ever.

An interesting food-related thing happened to me yesterday.

Responsible Roommate introduced me to the magic that is adding coconut milk to curry sauces, so yesterday I found myself looking at a can of coconut milk in our kitchen.  And I noticed it had two versions of the nutrition information.  I think the purpose was to have one using metric measurements and one using imperial, but.  The metric one, instead of listing a number of “calories” (even though the unit of measurement is still calories) said ENERGY. 

.

.

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(“Calories are what give you energy and keep you alive” is something I have been known to harp on, and I think the negative connotations that the word calories has for a lot of people is a very bad thing and an example of how fucked up our culture is about food.)

And then Responsible Roommate came in and saw me gaping in joy at the coconut milk, which was somewhat awkward.