CED: Clutter, endometriosis and diet

All change…

Regular visitors to this website will have noticed that, baring the last post on cycling, this is my first post for a good few weeks. We’ve been busy; life admin seems to have been getting in the way of basic tasks recently. But, also, things are changing. There are three things going on in our life recently that I haven’t fully mentioned. If I’m honest, I’ve had writer’s block slightly in working out how to include them. It’s not that any are overly embarrassing or uncomfortable to share; they just don’t fit particularly well with the allergy angle of the rest of the blog posts. However, I’ve decided that the best thing to do is just tackle them head-on. This site was always as much about being a father and part of a family as it was about harvesting a deep distrust of anyone who claims their sandwich spread meets our allergy requirements.

In no particular order, the three things are: clutter, endometriosis and diet – C.E.D. if you will…

Clutter is probably the easiest place to start. Our house is a tip.

Permanently.

I realise that this is not entirely uncommon for a family house with a toddler (Piglet will kill me for calling him that, he’s very clearly no longer a toddler and is now a pre-schooler if you were to ask him. It gives some context to how much he’s grown since I started this blog to put it like that). We have a smallish house and both me and my wife work. And so I don’t give ourselves too hard a time over it. I barely even apologise for the mess when guests/family members come round. It’s just how it is.

However, it’s much worse than it needs to be. Piglet is actually remarkably tidy. He loves to clean, dust and hoover and will very happily clear up after himself as long as there’s somewhere for his stuff to go. And that is the crux of the issue – we just don’t have homes for all the bits and bobs that are out on the surfaces. It’s much like one of those 90’s picture puzzles that you might have had on a key chain: to move one thing you first have to move something else.

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And so my wife found herself watching Marie Kondo on Netflix (the original ‘Japanese Organising Consultant’), got the idea to de-clutter and we both vowed to sort out all the mess. We’ve changed around a lot of our sitting room storage to efficiently file and store all our stuff.

It’s time-consuming (and surprisingly emotionally taxing) and we’ve only really managed to do the bedroom so far but I’m really pleased with the results. I got rid of about half of my clothes and now have all my belongings folded and organised such that I can easily pick out exactly what I want to wear at any point.

Although this leads fairly conveniently on to the next point which is around my diet. One of the stages of de-cluttering our bedroom was to dump every single item of clothing in a pile and then go through deciding what you actually want to keep. I had so many items that were just hanging on for no good reason. My shock came with the items that I wanted to keep; none of them really fitted me! I’m sure that many people will relate to the idea that there’s one shirt, dress, pair of trousers or giraffe onesie that they hold in high regard but know they can’t quite fit into. You hope to one day and therefore wouldn’t dream of getting rid of it. Well most of my nice shirts had fallen into that category.

I’ve never been made of a particularly enviable physique. I like exercise: I’ll happily play football or go mountain biking and I’ve run a half-marathon but I also like my food. For most of my life these have balanced out fairly organically with only slight stimulus when the balance gets out of kilter (and even then generally around doing more exercise rather than cutting down on what I eat). However, last October I partially tore a few muscles and a tendon in my leg. It wasn’t a major injury and I didn’t need surgery but it took me completely out of action for 3 months and then left me with limited strength for another 3. It’s been nearly 9 months now and the consultant suggested that it would take about this long to play football again. But, for some reason, I completely fell off the wagon of getting any exercise for much longer than the injury should have necessitated. Cycling to work (something I used to do rain or shine 5-days a week) suddenly didn’t seem very appealing on the back of driving for 3 months and caution prevented other perfectly acceptable activities.

I had also started eating less healthily, possibly a by-product of not exercising. I always find that my appetite and meal choices are more sensible when I’m fitter irrespective of whether that’s the aim of the exercise in the first place. In all honesty I’d stopped eating because I was hungry and started eating for satisfaction. Stupid habits like getting home from work and demolishing the latest loaf of bread with peanut butter and chocolate spread or opening, and then inadvertently finishing, a share-size pack of crisps. The other guilty habit was finishing Piglet’s portions. Some nights he eats everything on his plate but other nights I’m getting seconds for me and then almost thirds from him. It was so gradual I didn’t realise I’d become unhealthy.

Don’t get me wrong, I was far from being some sensational weight gain case study. No tabloid newspaper or superficial weekly magazine (or blog subscriber?) would have been remotely interested. I also don’t think I’d become compulsive about eating. I’ve lived with people with eating disorders; they’re a complex and powerful thing, but I think I was just being ill-disciplined. At no point was I being dishonest with my self.

Anyway, clearing out the clothes was a clear catalyst to do something about it. I started a food diary; initially to clock how often I was eating silly extras but that quickly became a sort of calorie tracking. I have no clearer plan than to just feel healthy again and fit back into some of my clothes. I don’t know my specific weight at the start and I’m certainly not aiming to hit a certain weight as an end goal. What it’s taught me so far is what’s in certain foods. Realising that demolishing a big back of crisps is pretty much the same as eating another portion of the breakfast that set me up for the day in the morning. Interestingly, based on the few weeks I’ve been doing it, my three meals of the day only give me about 1700-1800 kcal a day (as a family we have a pretty decent diet – cooking most things from scratch certainly helps that). But that’s a fair bit short of what a semi-active man should typically need so it makes sense to be topping it up with some snacks/seconds to maintain my weight. In short, I wasn’t doing the wrong things just in the wrong magnitude.

One of the key changes this has meant is preparing lunches each day to take into work. My work actually has a pretty good canteen with fairly good allergy info and a range of light salads to hearty meals. The problem is I’d often go for the ‘something and chips’ option. In fact, the killer, is the very cheap breakfast options that filled that awkward gap between my first breakfast and elevenses! Taking my own lunches means a much more satisfying lunch experience but it takes time and cuts significantly into my evenings – pretty exclusively cutting into my blog writing windows…These windows had already been getting cut into though. And through making lunches, just not mine…

I’ve mentioned in a few blog posts that we’ve started cutting out gluten. I think I’ve even dangled the carrot of explaining why but I’ve never done it. Well the truth is that on top of the sacrifices she makes for her son in not eating cow’s milk or soya, so that she can breastfeed dear Piglet, she’s now decided to cut out gluten for her own health. You have to remember that until 3 years ago, the only thing my wife couldn’t eat was fruit salad and that was only because all the fruits were mixed up!

I find the gluten thing difficult to articulate my thoughts on. Partly because it’s not my thing and therefore I feel slightly disingenuous giving a view on it. But also because I don’t even know whether its going to help. Compared to our allergies, for which I’m now reasonably well informed and aware of some of the science etc…, this feels like a very grey area. As such, I feel it complicates my narrative in talking about my consumer (and just basic health) rights in eating out in a restaurant. Allergies give a clear weight in making dietary requests, even in our case when they aren’t life threatening. But saying you can’t eat something (even something that for some people needs to be managed as seriously as an allergen) because you’re trying to work out whether it’s exacerbating a health issue feels much more nuanced. I’ve told myself time and time again that it’s really no different. But I’m struggling to fully buy into that narrative and therefore even more so to ask you to.

The reason that my wife has stopped eating gluten is because we think she has endometriosis. For obvious reasons, this is not my area of expertise but endometriosis is a female health issue where the tissue that normally lines the inside of the womb starts growing on the organs and tissue around the womb in isolated locations. This can be very painful as the womb will shed its lining during a period and these organs or tissue effectively shed in the same way without there being an outlet as there is for the womb.

We don’t know that my wife has it for certain. She has always struggled with period pain and I’ve known enough women to know that some women just get it worse than others. However, in multiple year cycles hers can get so bad that it’s really quite debilitating. Going as white as a sheet and needing to lie on the ground over breakfast is difficult to explain to a toddler (pre-schooler!), while trying to decide whether you’re still in a fit state to teach a lesson (my wife is a secondary school teacher) because you’re genuinely in danger of fainting is quite clearly problematic.

We’re in the middle of trying to get a diagnosis – either for this or to work out what is wrong if not. But in the meantime one of the suggested areas that can help is to change your diet. There’s no guaranteed ‘this’ll fix it’ solution but there seems to be some agreement that removing milk (already done), gluten, processed foods and/or sugar can limit the symptoms. Interestingly the first year or so of periods that my wife had after childbirth (they didn’t start immediately) were much more mild than pre-childbirth and we wonder whether that could have been to do with having cut out milk for Piglet’s benefit at that point.

Talking about childbirth, that was one of the turning points in realising that there was a problem. I can personally vouch that my wife was in pain during childbirth. I remember it clearly between the gaps in my crying out of exhaustion and uselessness (in equal measure) during Piglets home-birth. However, she managed the full 4-5 hour delivery without gas and air and as much composure as is possible in that situation. It was when the periods that followed (it took a good few months for this to happen) were so bad that she was going to faint that it started to put it in context.

We also expect that this is linked to fertility issues. I mentioned at the beginning of the year that I’d given up coffee (for this as well as other reasons). Well even if gluten doesn’t immediately resolve the discomfort issues for my wife, there is always a chance that it could help in this area too. Similarly my weight, and overall fitness, are likely to contribute as I get fitter.

We’ve been removing gluten for a few months now and there hasn’t been an instant fix to my wife’s pain levels but we do think it could have tempered them somewhat. Also gluten takes a long time to fully leave the system and so we’re not sure exactly how much of a change we would expect to have seen by now even if it is working. What it does mean, however, is a much more careful planning of meals and, in particular, lunches. Bread was always tough with soya flour but remove gluten and it’s obviously much harder (more to find nice stuff than just suitable stuff). Similarly pasta and couscous need direct or indirect replacements. Add to that that my wife is already incredibly fussy about lunches and you’ve got a beautiful combination.

What this means is that both of us are now busy in the kitchen in the evenings not only preparing main meals but also lunches. As if in almost a perfect full circle – it probably explains a long way to why we’ve got so little time to keep the house tidy…

I’ll continue to write about each of these aspects. Obviously gluten-free diets are a big thing and there is much to be written about the products and services around this. But I’ll also touch on how both of our diet changes (for different reasons respectively) are going and whether they seem to be achieving their objective purposes. I hope this is useful, even if not quite the same angle as the allergy management.