eating healthy

It seems to be a trend that people with emetophobia are not the healthiest eaters. Which is funny, since we spend so much time and effort trying to avoid getting sick and thinking about how we can stay healthy.

But really, it does make sense. If you are anxious about food and want to find the "safest" thing, the thing that will be least likely to impact your stomach or digestive system in any way, the thing that you feel is the least dirty, germy, or unusual - you usually won't go for fruits and vegetables. Those apples that you have to examine before buying and wash before eating are going to seem like the worse choice compared to some sterile standardized package of chips or crackers. Especially when you want something that won't make you feel anything in your stomach. Healthy foods tend to have fiber, which usually will make you feel something, even more so if you're not used to consuming it on a regular basis.

Of course, we all know it's best to eat those fruits and vegetables and that having a diet consisting almost entirely of bland carbs is a bad idea. We should feel our stomachs sometimes! We can't always have them be "turned off" and quiet like we want, or it's likely we will run into health issues later on.

I have always been such an unhealthy eater, and this has been a hard habit to change. Every single year I have made the new year's resolution to eat healthier, or eat more fruits/vegetables, or eat less junk food, or some other variation of that. And every year I would make it about a month before giving up on my resolution.

Until this year when I have actually stuck with my resolution so far, and it has been over four months! A major accomplishment for me, so I thought I'd share how I accomplished it in case it was helpful to anyone else who is having trouble in this area.

First of all, I aimed lower than I usually do. I always want to fix things all at once, immediately, but that really never works out. Most change has to happen slowly, with little steps. So I did not make the usual attempt to eat as healthy as I should be (in other words, to have several servings of fruits/vegetables every day). My goal for this year was to eat one serving of fruit/vegetables each day. Just one serving. And I have stuck with it so far. Which may not seem like much of an achievement, really, but it is the best I have ever done consistently. It is finally a sign of moving in the right direction.

Second, I tried to make the goal more fun by assigning a fruit/vegetable or group of fruits/vegetables to each month that I would focus on eating above all others. Right around the time I start to get sick of one, a new month starts and I am pepped up by the new fruit/vegetable of the month and feel dedicated to my goal again. I'm including my list below. I tried to arrange it based on what is best/freshest in my area around that time.

It's been working out really well, even if I don't eat the fruit/vegetable of the month that often. For example, last month, I didn't feel like cooking brussels sprouts most of the time, so I continued to eat bananas. But just the idea of the brussels sprouts being spot-lighted - the idea that I could try out different brussels sprouts recipes if I wanted to, figure out several different ways to make them delicious - kept me motivated.

• January - lettuce and salad mixes
• February - bananas
• March - brussels sprouts
• April - broccoli, peppers, and onions
• May - "mix it up" month (a chance to eat the fruits/vegetables that aren't represented in the rest of the list because they're not my favorites - carrots, cauliflower, grapes, oranges)
• June - plums, squash
• July - berries
• August - nectarines, peaches, and apricots
• September - tomatoes, avocadoes, and cucumbers
• October - apples
• November - spinach
• December - clementines             

loop-de-loop

I love poetry. Really really love it. It's unusual if a week passes without me reading some.

At some point during my bad anxiety period, I was reading The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (which is a fantastic collection) and came across this poem "A Math Grad" by Daniel Brown. I wouldn't have expected from the title (or the first few lines) that it would impact me as much as it did. But it immediately went into my internal file of things to think about when everything felt hopeless and it seemed like I would never get any better than I was at the time.

Because it is possible that things will never get that bad again. And on top of that hope, the poem also makes me feel better about even having this dark period as part of my past. There were times that I felt defective or weak or like I would always be branded as mentally unstable because this had happened to me, and because it was so difficult to come back from it. But the breakdown in the poem is only a blip on an otherwise happy path. It's only a "loop-de-loop." And even better, the word "beauty" is used to describe it - which could just mean a pronounced example (like "that black eye is a beauty"), but I like to think it's implying that the breakdown itself was beautiful in a way, because it was part of the function or part of the path that had to happen in order for the function to be complete.

But that's enough babbling. I'm super happy it finally got posted online so I could link to it.

avoidance behavior

I've been avoiding leaving the house a little more than usual because I keep hearing about people I know having stomach viruses. I hate that I'm doing this. I know it's bad for my anxiety, and it's not protecting me the way I imagine or hope it is.

First of all, most of these people live in other states. They are posting about being sick on Facebook, and even though they are hundreds of miles away, I'm still worried. So of course I know logically that makes no sense.

Second, I don't live alone. Any excessive germ-avoidance behavior I engage in doesn't really matter, because my wife is normal and still behaving in her normal way. One of my most important rules, if not the most important, is that I don't allow myself to control her behavior or suggest that she do things the irrational way that I do them. Because it's just wrong. Wrong to try to control someone in general, wrong also to try to encourage someone to engage in unhealthy behavior. But I can't even say I've been doing a good job with this rule lately, because I asked her the other day if she was being careful at work about avoiding sick people.

Third, even though it appears to me that stomach viruses are everywhere right now and then magically will go away with the warm weather, that's not true. They are always around, year-round. They are always around whether I hear about them or not, whether people I know have them or not. There is no reason to take any extra precautions right now.

One of the things I think emetophobics forget a lot of the time is that we have immune systems. We rarely factor that in when we're trying to figure out how "at risk" we think we are. In all likelihood, we're exposed to stomach viruses and other illnesses much more than even we could imagine, and our bodies fight them off. That's what is supposed to happen, and it happens most when we're taking care of ourselves. Eating healthy, getting enough sleep, exercising are all important, of course, but aside from those, it's important to lower stress as much as possible. Stress affects the immune system. In other words, working to fight anxiety related to this phobia, working to stay as calm as possible, is protection itself from physical illness.

So that is my thought for the week. Trust the immune system! It knows what it's doing. It's working hard for me, and that takes some of the pressure off. I don't have to work as hard or worry as much as I do.

I did have a very successful day yesterday. I was supposed to go somewhere in the morning. I woke up feeling "sick" and almost backed out of it. I wasn't even feeling as "sick" as I have on other days when I've still gone places. I have just been overreacting because of the references to stomach viruses I have seen. Anyway, I made myself go, and I started to feel better and ended up having a great time. I am sure if I had backed out of it, I would have ended the day feeling moody, knowing I had missed out on something fun because of anxiety, and instead I got to end the day feeling happy and reflecting on the memories of the fun I had.

Emetophobia shmemetophobia!

forums

I haven't had another panic attack since that one at the grocery store last month, but my anxiety levels have still been all over the place. Some days have been perfectly fine, others not so good. I have been meditating and doing deep-breathing exercises more. I have been looking through my affirmation flashcards. Hopefully this is helping me even out, but I haven't noticed a significant change yet. That might be because I am still not doing these relaxation exercises consistently enough. I should be doing them every night, but right now it's more like twice a week.

Another change I made that I do think is really helping me is that I stopped going to emetophobia forums. Up until maybe a year or two ago, I never went to these forums. I mean, I can remember popping into them a handful of times during my teen years, but they bored me. I really had no interest in putting more effort into handling my phobia then. I felt like I did well enough. But when things got worse, I started visiting them, thinking they might be helpful.

It's been just the opposite for me. I feel like they have made me worse. And they were somewhat addicting too. I couldn't stop logging in for a while, reading everything, leaving comments with advice occasionally. I tried to avoid threads that looked like they might contain information I didn't want to have in my head. For example, I try not to read anything anyone posts anywhere ever about norovirus. I don't care if it's facts about it, helpful tips on avoiding it, how it's spread, good news about it, whatever. I know I have the potential to get so unbelievably obsessive about it. The information gets stuck in my head, and I find myself changing my behavior.

But it wasn't always easy to tell what might be in a thread, and I still kept coming across this negative information. I remember one night I had just eaten Pizza Hut for dinner. Then I logged into one of the forums, and the very first thing I saw was a thread titled something like "Pizza Hut food poisoning" or something like that. So I didn't even have to click on that one for it to make me anxious!

That is what annoys me so much about groups of people with emetophobia getting together. Inevitably, 90% of what is discussed will be things like that. People asking which foods or restaurants are best to avoid. People posting in a panic asking for someone to give them a safe/benign reason why they feel sick. I wish there was more discussion of how to deal with the anxiety/phobia itself. But I notice that when people bring up this point on the forums, they usually end up getting attacked by people who are "anti-recovery" I guess, that stress they would rather it be a "support" group than a "recovery" group. I find it odd. I think the best support is encouraging someone to recover. If someone had encouraged me to work on recovery when I was younger, I'm sure I would have ignored them, so yes, I agree that no one can/will recover before they're ready. But at the same time, during those years that I was technically "anti-recovery" I wasn't "pro-support" or at least not that kind of support that seems like a merry-go-round of scaring each other. I don't see how that helps anyone.

I have become very afraid of eating out at restaurants during the winter, and I know that is a direct consequence of hanging out on these forums and seeing other people constantly post about being worried about this. It's something I never thought about before. I have eaten out at restaurants year round my entire life, and I have never gotten sick from doing so. My method of eating out whenever I wanted to did no damage, and there was no need for anything to change. But I have changed and am now extremely reluctant to eat out anywhere until it's spring/summer again.

I feel frustrated with myself for letting myself be influenced like this. It seems I can't read the fears of other emetophobics on a regular basis without being affected by them. So I have stopped going to these forums, and now I'm hoping that as time passes these extra thoughts/fears I've acquired will drift out of my head again.

It's a little disappointing, because, first of all, it is exhilarating to be in contact with so many people who understand the way you think. And also, every so often, I would come across something that was uplifting or helpful. But it was so rare, and it's just not worth digging through all that negativity for those few positive gems. 

I think I'm much better off sticking with blogs. I've always found they tend to be more recovery-focused and positive, since they are more about sharing information than getting support. I've never seen a blogger post while having a panic attack and expect someone to immediately show up to talk them through it (maybe because bloggers know they're addressing a smaller audience). I really like that. I'm looking for less agitation in my life and more understanding of the fact that anxiety is really something you have to handle on your own. Not that I don't sometimes rely on my wife to calm me down, but I like to see those times as times where I have failed myself. Any time I can fix a situation on my own, I know I've just done something that is so much better for me in the long run.