On July 25th, I went to a baseball game.
I had some wine.
Then I had some more wine.
At this point my judgement was impaired, and I started drinking beer and eating popcorn.
Then I really ruined my day by eating a brownie.
Now for any old person this would be bad enough. But for me, wheat gluten is poison. So, add up the alcohol and the gluten and the sugar and everything else, and you get a whole lot of poison ingested in one day. Let the record show that it took until TODAY, August 4th (10 days) plus a round of laxatives over the weekend for my bowels to return to their normal level of functionality. Last week my belly was so swollen that I actually thought about buying a pregnancy test. The fact that it was the week before my "special woman time" may have also contributed to the bloating, but I don't typically have very serious pre-menstrual symptoms.
Overall, I'm not sure whether I should say 10 days is fast or slow. When you think about what my body does when it comes across gluten, it actually seems pretty fast. My immune system starts attacking my intestines and literally breaking them down, or so I'm led to believe. I'm not sure if this recovery timeframe lends more evidence to the Celiac theory or the gluten intolerant theory (I never really found out which I am) but either way - safe to say that I should stay away from it unless I want to sacrifice over a week of my life to feeling like a bag of cement. When you think of it in those terms - and add in the fact that those 10 days were some of the nicest summer days that Seattle has ever seen - it seems like a very long time indeed.
In other news, I have been tweaking the timing of my Perfectly Produce meal plans in order to accomodate my evening gym sessions. What seems to be working for me right now is a small protein-laden snack first thing in the morning, then "Brunch" at 11:00 AM which is typically whatever the breakfast recipe was. At 4:00 PM I have my regular lunch, and then I have dinner quite late, after the gym, at 8:30 or 9:00.
I've had a bad habit in the past of "saving" all my calories up for the evenings in order to indulge in a fairly large pig-out session before bedtime. I always figured if I "budgeted" enough calories for this time, it would be ok to eat more then. I recently learned, though, that it's not just about calories in / calories out. It's about your blood sugar and all your body has to do to process what you eat, which is why the timing of the Perfectly Produce meal plans is so important. I always thought that yeah, it was probably not a good thing to go to bed with a stomach full of God-knows-what just because it would sit there all night, but that's actually not what happens. It doesn't sit there all night, your body has to digest it. So if you eat a lot right before you go to sleep, your body will spend all night digesting it, and it will never get a chance to do all the things it's supposed to be doing while you're asleep - like oh I dunno, rebuilding itself? Repairing your body at a cellular level? So next time you eat a big meal and go to bed, don't wonder what happened when you wake up looking and feeling like crap. You might as well have stayed up all night.
My parents used to do this thing on Christmas Eve where they'd leave all their gift wrapping until that night - and stay up until 2 AM or some other weird hour of the morning to get everything done. Thus, I imagine, putting a damper on their enjoyment of Christmas Day itself. I never understood that, so why should I do the same thing to my body? It might be a weird analogy, but don't make your body stay up all night digesting when you have a whole day ahead of you the next morning. You won't be able to enjoy it.
I've never been able to sleep if I'm hungry, but again, once you start evenly distributing what you eat and regulating how much you eat to a reasonable portion size, you can eat dinner a couple hours before you hit the sack and not feel hungry. If I - the notorious 900 calorie dinner late night binger - can do it, so can you. I went to bed entirely satisfied last night.
