disordered eating

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

somnilogical:

ive been having fun calculating food costs per kcal

—

huel 4.24 μ$/kcal

soylent 3.8 μ$/kcal

eggs 3.2 μ$/kcal

rice 1.6 μ$/kcal

ramen 1.11 μ$/kcal

lentils 1.0 μ$/kcal

—

humans consume ~2*10^3 kcal/day

1 μ$/kcal foods let you live for 2 $/day

humans consume 6*10^4 kcal in a month

there are 8.1*10^4 kcal in a human

—

i like getting a sense of things

I do this too! Since my post-2012 appetite is pretty good at adjusting for the calorie density of my food, the intuitive unit for “how *big* is this food relative to other foods” is the kcal. (Which runs into problems when I’m trying to figure out relative food prices *in general*, because Mom’s intuitive appetite unit is the “serving” (whatever *that* means) and Dad’s is the “millilitre”, so we sometimes can’t even agree on whether one piece of food is bigger than another. But as long as I focus on only my own eating I can get a good sense of it.)

A lot of things turn out to be cheaper than they look because of high calorie-density. I was especially surprised by peanut butter: I figured it would be *somewhat* on the cheap side, but it’s as cheap as ramen. (In my own circumstances, that is; I notice your figure for ramen is higher than mine, if I moved the decimal places right (I work with “cents to two decimal places”). Both peanut butter and ramen were 0.06 cents/kcal.)

Tags:

#food #adventures in human capitalism #reply via reblog #disordered eating #(I’m okay but I expect people blocking that tag do not want to read this)

Anonymous asked: How are you managing to be underweight in a country where obesity is correlated with poverty?

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

sinesalvatorem:

Poor people in the US are overweight because they substitute higher-quality expensive food for lower-quality cheap food. I’m underweight because I substitute eating for… Not doing that.

Preparing food costs me a huge number of spoons, I have almost no ability to transport myself to places that sell cheaply prepared food, and food delivery is never cheap. Given these options, not actually eating usually makes perfect sense.

(food cw, disordered eating cw)

(I’ve heard rumours the first-degree ask bug might have been fixed. Let’s find out.)

>>I have almost no ability to transport myself to places that sell cheaply prepared food<<

How are you defining “prepared”?

When you make/attempt spoon-consuming homemade food, where are you getting the ingredients from? Stores that sell ingredients usually also sell granola bars, peanut butter, crackers, I was going to say apples but then I remembered your sensory issues. Bananas if you can take them sensory-wise and reliably eat them during the ~3-day window between underripe and overripe. If you have the spoons to reliably handle refrigerators, orange juice (consume within 1.5 – 2 weeks of opening), and if you’ve the lactose tolerance for it, cheddar (only buy it if it’s on sale) and milk (American milk lasts longer than Canadian milk, 1 – 2 weeks instead of 3 – 5 days).

These suggestions might not work for you, but if they don’t, I’d be interested to know why. You’re not the first person I’ve seen jump straight from homemade food to takeout when they ran out of spoons, without passing through granola bars first*, which makes me wonder if there’s reasons I’m missing.

*Which I find are less effort than takeout, making it all the more confusing to me.

Okay, ask bug not fixed. Please see above post.

Tags:

#(copied tags:) #lately I’ve been crunching the price-per-calorie numbers on the foods I eat regularly #and I am frequently surprised by how *cheap* food is #I can feed myself for a day for like 5 – 7 dollars *without even actively trying to save money* #less if I’m trying #(though part of that’s low metabolism) #(and I don’t know how the prices differ around San Francisco) #reply via reblog #food #disordered eating

Anonymous asked: How are you managing to be underweight in a country where obesity is correlated with poverty?

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

sinesalvatorem:

Poor people in the US are overweight because they substitute higher-quality expensive food for lower-quality cheap food. I’m underweight because I substitute eating for… Not doing that.

Preparing food costs me a huge number of spoons, I have almost no ability to transport myself to places that sell cheaply prepared food, and food delivery is never cheap. Given these options, not actually eating usually makes perfect sense.

(food cw, disordered eating cw)

(I’ve heard rumours the first-degree ask bug might have been fixed. Let’s find out.)

>>I have almost no ability to transport myself to places that sell cheaply prepared food<<

How are you defining “prepared”?

When you make/attempt spoon-consuming homemade food, where are you getting the ingredients from? Stores that sell ingredients usually also sell granola bars, peanut butter, crackers, I was going to say apples but then I remembered your sensory issues. Bananas if you can take them sensory-wise and reliably eat them during the ~3-day window between underripe and overripe. If you have the spoons to reliably handle refrigerators, orange juice (consume within 1.5 – 2 weeks of opening), and if you’ve the lactose tolerance for it, cheddar (only buy it if it’s on sale) and milk (American milk lasts longer than Canadian milk, 1 – 2 weeks instead of 3 – 5 days).

These suggestions might not work for you, but if they don’t, I’d be interested to know why. You’re not the first person I’ve seen jump straight from homemade food to takeout when they ran out of spoons, without passing through granola bars first*, which makes me wonder if there’s reasons I’m missing.

*Which I find are less effort than takeout, making it all the more confusing to me.

Tags:

#lately I’ve been crunching the price-per-calorie numbers on the foods I eat regularly #and I am frequently surprised by how *cheap* food is #I can feed myself for a day for like 5 – 7 dollars *without even actively trying to save money* #less if I’m trying #(though part of that’s low metabolism) #(and I don’t know how the prices differ around San Francisco) #food #disordered eating

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

This cold is weirdly accelerated. The symptoms are more severe, and have rather longer periods of overlap (normally one symptom fades out as the next fades in), but overall it seems to be going by faster.

At first, this seemed like a good deal. Yeah, Day 2 in particular was pretty miserable, but on Day 3 I already felt like I’d turned the corner. It’s Day 4 now, and I feel the way I normally would around Day 6. My appetite isn’t up to par, but my body generally isn’t resisting me anymore when I try to get it to eat, and occasionally I even feel hungry. My sense of taste is still a bit distorted, but I can mostly taste things now. My normal level of executive function has more or less returned. The tiredness still feels mostly hollow, and I certainly don’t feel the way I ought to feel after getting ~4 – 5 hours of sleep the night before, but it isn’t completely hollow.

Turns out there’s an additional price I didn’t foresee, though it’s sort of mentioned in that list:

If your coughing is accelerated such that you are having 1 – 4 bouts of coughing per 2 minutes, you cannot sleep. Every time you start to even sort of settle in, another cough wakes you up. I spent three straight hours (3 – 6 AM) lying in bed, trying to find stimuli that would distract me from the urge to cough but not distract me from sleeping. (I considered taking dimenhydrinate, but given that I was already on pseudoephedrine and dextromethorphan*, I didn’t want to add another drug into the mix without having a chance to look into their interactions. Maybe tonight.)

(In the end, I don’t think anything I did worked: the coughing just sort of stopped for a while around 6 AM, enough that I was able to get another ~3 hours of sleep in.)

Given the choice of this symptom profile or the normal one, I might still go with this one, but it’s less obvious a choice than it was yesterday.

*I thought “reduces the urge to cough” meant “reduces frequency of urge to cough”, but last night’s experience was actually “reduces severity of urge to cough, such that it’s easier to ignore if you have things to take your mind off it”.

Tags:

#”get well soon” indeed #oh look an original post #Brin talks about herself for no particular reason #illness tw #disordered eating?

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

sdhs-rationalist:

rusalkii:

ambivalencerelations:

rusalkii:

Does anyone know of any reason why someone shouldn’t eat exclusively bananas, apple sauce, those round red cheese ball things, and sugar cubes for lunch for three weeks? Uh, asking for a friend.

I would like to meet this… friend.

*waves* Apparently I was too subtle. Look, I didn’t choose the Anxiety Diet, it’s just that going out to buy food at work is stressful, and packing anything but snacks at my aunt and uncle’s is also stressful, and work has bananas and sugar cubes. Hence, my question.

c.f. why my intake of snacks has drastically increased

What’s wrong with fruit and cheese? Totally legit lunch. Surviving exclusively on them for three weeks might run into some difficulties, but if it’s just for lunch that doesn’t seem like a big deal to me.

(Speaking as someone whose non-dinner diet is mostly pretty…I don’t know if “atomised” is quite the right word here. Things that are individual food units in themselves, like “banana” or “peanut butter” or “yogurt”, rather than mixing lots of ingredients together into something meal. My food-unit selection is also fairly limited: there are the basic food groups, “fruit”, “dairy”, “nuts”, “protein” (usually mixed into the dinner meal), “chocolate”, “starch”, with usually ~2 – 3 possible foods in each category (not always the same 2 – 3 over time) and making some effort to cover as many categories as possible on any given day. My nutrition seems to be doing fine.)

Tags:

#food #reply via reblog #disordered eating?

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

justice-turtle:

Anyone else get hiccups from low blood sugar / hungry tummy? It is not a thing I hear about happening in general, but it happens to me every goddamn time I skip meals.

Not me (that I’ve noticed, anyway). Any followers know?

Tags:

#disordered eating #signal boost

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

inquisitivefeminist:

Me: *has emotions*

Me: time to deal with this in a Positive and Healthy manner

Me: *stuffs myself so full of mashed potatoes there is no room for the emotions anymore*

Mashed potatoes are the Platonic ideal of childhood-nostalgia comfort food. I actually feel nostalgic when I eat them even though I never ate mashed potatoes growing up.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #disordered eating

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I’m Sick

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sinesalvatorem:

I probably have the cold now. Ugh. This sucks. Damn Canada with it’s inhuman temperatures and its long-as-fuck commutes that expose me to said temperature.

When I’m sick* I forget how hunger and it doesn’t even occur to me to eat food. So I just had breakfast at quarter to four. Why am I so non-functional argh.

(*Ever since I had the Evil Mosquito Illness. Before that, my response to illness was to eat more. This change is probably part of the reason why I still haven’t put back on all the weight I lost to that disease. It has been almost two year and I’ve only regained ten pounds fuck.)

I got sick all the time when I was new to Canada too. I think it’s because the microbial milieu is different here than back home, with a different set of commonly-encountered cold variants. You have to catch up.

(also, :( )

Tags:

#reply via reblog #our home and cherished land #illness tw #disordered eating

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

flourishandblottsstories:

A discreet Portkey was set up for him once a year.  It was usually an empty bottle brought up from the kitchen, except for the time Fred Weasley managed to enchant all the bottles to hide themselves around the castle and explode into different colored confetti any time a prefect walked by.  That year, he had to make do with a biscuit tin.

Anthony often thought that he’d just skip it.   He was usually only just digging into his classes for the year, and there was always at least three essays he would have to finish when he got back.  He sometimes started to write the letter to his mum telling her he’d be staying at Hogwarts before the guilt would overwhelm him.

The truth was, he wasn’t sure he believed in any of it any more.  He lived in a world where bushes really did catch fire without flame, where water could be made to spurt from a stone.  Those wonderful, terrifying tales he grew up with could really be true- and that made him question his faith.

But he went.  Every year.

Every year, he felt the jerk under his navel, landed dizzily in the field behind his house.  Every year he entered the warm kitchen, smelling of freshly baked challah and sweet apples.  Every year he helped his mother clean up after dinner, licking the honey off the spoon she offered him as a treat.

Every year he recited the same prayers, sung the same melodies, told the same lies to the friends and neighbors he saw at shul.  Every year, he felt the slight dizziness and unreality that came with fasting.  Every year, he watched as tears rolled down his mother’s cheek as she recited the Yizkor for his father.

Every year, he cried too.

And every year, when the kugel had been eaten and the kitchen was in a state of controlled disaster, Anthony Goldstein would kiss his mother on the cheek, gather up the leftovers she had neatly wrapped for him, and walk out to find the empty bottle in the middle of the field.

And returned to the real world.

(Source: thejdc.convio.net)

L’shanah tovah, lovely followers!  May your new year be sweet and full of joy.

Tags:

#Harry Potter #Judaism #fanfic #storytime #(…you felt a slight dizziness and unreality after a *one-day* fast?) #(I don’t remember that) #(maybe the thirst does that to you?) #(I always skip the part about not drinking anything) #(it seems unfair) #(I need about a gallon of water per day to thrive) #(which I figure means a one-day water fast for me would be like 2 – 4 days for a normal person) #(and that’s going too far) #anyway Happy New Year everybody #(…hey wait a minute!) #(we forgot to put a birthday candle in the apple cake and have the wind blow it out!) #(oh well) #(maybe we can do that tonight) #(we still have cake left) #tag rambles

Starvation Symptoms – The Effects Of Starvation On Behavior: Implications for Eating Disorders

Link ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

{{Title link: https://web.archive.org/web/20050828195845/http://river-centre.org/StarvSympt.html }}

clatterbane:

clatterbane:

I thought I would go ahead and share this separately,  because it’s really interesting, based on the Minnesota Starvation Experiment.

Finding this stuff out has helped me understand and deal with some ongoing ED triggers. Just not getting enough to eat (or probably a good enough variety of nutrients)  for a while will predictably trigger the kinds of thoughts and behaviors associated with eating disorders. No convoluted psychological explanations required; just starving your brain will do this.

Recognizing the pattern has helped me keep things at the disturbing thoughts level, and take that as an indication that I need to get more to eat. Rather than get triggered into actual disordered eating behavior. :-| (In my case, I stay hungry a lot from diabetes, with higher energy requirements there—and then also have trouble with remembering to eat enough and just standing up to cook, for other disability-related reasons.)

I first ran across this in the context of crash and yo-yo dieting, but it would apply equally well if you are having trouble consistently eating enough or enough variety for disability-related reasons. That can really foul you up in a lot of ways. And I would also not be surprised to see higher rates of clinical eating disorders among people who do have these disability problems with staying adequately fed, just from the complicated physiological responses there.

Reblogging again because I was reminded of it, and this is important stuff.

Tags:

#eating disorders #the more you know #interesting #disturbing