Getting those filled was no picnic, I assure [...]]]> About six months ago I wrote here and at Well-Ordered about a very nasty shock I received at the dentist: a whopping SEVEN $#%^&@ING CAVITIES.  Twice as many cavities as I’d had in my adult life thus far.  All of them between my teeth.

Getting those filled was no picnic, I assure you.

The culprit, it turned out, was my Vyvanse.  ADHD drugs, like many anti-depressants, and many allergy meds, and many athsma medications, can dry out your mouth something serious. Without saliva, your mouth isn’t able to defend itself from teeth-eating bacteria.  Teeth-eating bacteria cause cavities.

My dentist assured me that he’d seen this kind of thing before, due to all types of medication, and if I followed his instructions — floss EVERY night, use a prescription-strength high-fluoride toothpaste, and chew high-strength xylitol gum and mints — my teeth would be fine.

And they are!  YAY!

If you’ve recently started a new medication, a trip to the dentist is in order.  Tell him or her that dry mouth is a side effect of your new med (whether or not you’re consciously aware of feeling dry mouth).  They can set you up so you won’t have to go through what I did.

I immediately felt better.  On the first day. I had more energy, less fatigued, and was not tempted to gorge [...]]]> Last week, I wrote about how I had “virtuously” cut my fat intake, with disastrous results.  My trainer/personal therapist told me to eat more fat, especially at lunch.  So I decided to give it a try.

I immediately felt better.  On the first day. I had more energy, less fatigued, and was not tempted to gorge on cookies in the evening, a bad habit which has bee creeping up on me in the last several weeks.  I’ve lost about half of the three or four pounds I gained.  Even my seasonal allergies are better, in spite of the evil trees outside my house continuing to bloom shamelessly.

Yesterday my husband rambled across a blog by a PhD named Stephen Guyenet who studies the neurobiology of body fat regulation, and sent me a link to an post on the health benefits of full-fat dairy products.  It seems that consuming your dairy products full-fat allows you to metabolize fat-soluble vitamins, such as K2, which protects against heart attack.

Wait, what?  Saturated fat PREVENTS heart attack?  That can’t be right, can it?  This needed further investigation.

And so, I spent a few hours on Whole Heath Source that should have been spent on my job search.   I write about what I learned here because of the constant allegations about ADHD, nutrition, and the “ideal” diet that can be used to “treat” or even “cure” ADD.

I’ll begin with fat.  The idea that there are good fats has been gaining credence in recent years.  We all know that unsaturated fat is good, and saturated fat is bad.  Right?  Well, not so much.  According to the Guyenet, whether the fat is saturated or unsaturated is less important than amount of omega-6 fatty acids.  Omega-6’s seem to be the real “bad fats”, whereas omega-3’s are good for your brain and stuff, which is why fish oil supplements have exploded onto the market.

Omega-6’s are present in plenty of vegetable oils, like corn oil, soybean oil, and canola oil, which are ubiquitous ingredients in American food.  They’re also found in animal products derived from animals that live on feed lots — turns out livestock feed has quite a bit of things like corn and soy.  The omega-6’s in the feed makes its way into the food these animals produce, whether we consume their flesh, their milk, or their eggs.  Animals that are pastured (like the laughing cow, pictured above!) eat a more natural diet, and the food that comes from them is much healthier — lower in those omega-6’s.

Guyenet’s take on carbs is also interesting.  We all know about the Demon Carb from the Atkins Craze a few years ago, and, anecdotally at least, many people with ADD have found their symptoms improved by a low-carb, high protein diet.  Guyenet believes that the problem is not carbs themselves, but the kind of carbs consumed by industrial cultures.  Sugar and refined flour are problems, of course — but so is any kind of wheat flour, and grains should be consumed sparingly and carefully.

Throughout most of our evolutionary history, we have not had access to grains, let alone the refined flour from which most Americans get their carbs these days.  Back in the day, we got our carbohydrates in the form of fruit and sometimes tubers.  When we did consume grain, it was fermented and processed in such a way as to break down the gluten, rendering it more useful to our digestive systems.  Apparently sourdough is sometimes a way to do this if the sourdough is “properly prepared”.  I wish I know what that meant.

Which gets me to the crazy-making part.

How is anyone, let alone anyone with ADD, supposed to keep track of nutrition research?  It’s a nightmare clusterf*ck of vested business interests, government subsidies, and tainted science.  And then, even if you do decide to experiment with your diet, it’s not always easy to track down grass-fed milk, eggs, and cheese.  If you can track it down, it’s damned expensive.

However, those of us with ADD are a population that suffers disproportionately from overweight and related metabolic syndrome.  While I do not reduce a complex syndrome like ADHD to a “food allergy” that can be “cured” with diet, the fact is that nutrition plays a huge role in controlling my own symptoms.

Sadly, finding decent information about nutrition is extremely difficult — and that’s why I was happy to find Stephen Guyenet’s site.  Guyenet’s posts are rigorous while remaining accessible to the layperson.  He supports his points with hard data.  When he comes across a flawed study, he takes its authors to task for everything from methodological flaws, to cherry-picking data, to sloppy language (what exactly was in that “high fat diet” that you studied?).

If you’re considering amending your diet to treat your AD/HD, Whole Health Source is absolutely worth perusing.

Now comes the difficult part.

After two virtually structureless weeks, weeks in which I could go wherever my whimsy took me, weeks in which someone else cleaned my room [...]]]>
Well, I’m back from France. It was awesome for all kinds of reasons. The food, the art, the food, the history, the architecture, the food …

Now comes the difficult part.

After two virtually structureless weeks, weeks in which I could go wherever my whimsy took me, weeks in which someone else cleaned my room and cooked my food, I have to return to my normal routine. But before I even do that, I have to recover from jetlag. At the moment my body has no idea what day or what time it is, and my mind has no clue about where it should be directing itself. I haven’t felt truly hydrated since getting off the plane Saturday night.

Overseas travel is a challenge to anyone, but for adults with attention deficit disorder, it presents unique challenges. We’re more sensitive than others to disruptions in our normal routine (as much as we may struggle against the very idea of routine). This is particularly true when the disruptions are physical. Changes to our diet, our sleep, our intake of water, alcohol, or caffeine — all of these can wreak havoc on our ADHD symptoms. And all of these are an inevitable part of travel.

I’m trying to give myself some slack as I recover from this trip. Of course, I feel like I should be hitting the ground running; but this isn’t fair. I’ve been trying to think in French for two weeks. I’ve been eating a lot more fat and carbs than usual. I’ve had more caffeine and more wine than I normally do (because you just can’t have pain au chocolat without coffee, dammit, even if it is decaf!). And my body clock has had to abruptly re-set itself by nine hours twice in the last two weeks.

Yesterday I gave my brain the day off, and spent the whole day watching tv. Today I worked out, which has already helped, and made sure to drink an electrolyte beverage afterward. That seems to be helping with the hydration issue. And I’m working in my studio, with all its daylight spectrum lighting, and letting the light work its magic.

I say this in spite of having suffered from depressive and anxiety disorders for years.  These disorders are bona fide mental illnesses, and between that and a traumatic childhood, I spent several years in therapy sorting myself out.  I have always been and always will be triggered [...]]]> I don’t consider myself to be a neurotic person.

I say this in spite of having suffered from depressive and anxiety disorders for years.  These disorders are bona fide mental illnesses, and between that and a traumatic childhood, I spent several years in therapy sorting myself out.  I have always been and always will be triggered by things that other people aren’t.  I go through periods where I am absolutely unable to watch the news, because I know it will put me in an emotional hole I won’t be able to climb out of.  I have to avoid certain situations, like shopping malls, because the crowds and the various competing stimuli induce panic.  Casinos, I once discovered on a trip to Reno, are even worse.
I don’t feel that those things make me “neurotic”.  I know that because of my brain chemistry and my background, I react to certain situations in certain ways that other people don’t.  I know emotions are simply not subject to conscious control. I have learned to control my exposure to things that I know will trigger me, and I’m much happier and healthier as a result.  I feel pretty good about that.

Last night, though, I felt neurotic.  I say “neurotic” because it was a feeling that went beyond anxiety to a weird sort of unease, and one in which I my mind was telling me things that were clearly irrational, and that I knew were irrational, but that I was unable to banish.

For various reasons, it was 3 am by the time I went to bed last night.  I was already feeling vaguely uneasy for no good reason, and the minute I went upstairs the storm that’s been buffeting California all week intensified.  The rain pounded the roof and the wind picked up.  I could hear the gutters overflowing, and I swear I heard the wind wuthering. Since my bedroom is in a loft right under the roof, this was all pretty loud, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that the storm was consciously trying to get into the house. I felt as if I was the only human being in the world, and the storm resented this, and was trying to destroy my house out of vengeance and hatred for all things warm-blooded.

I got into bed, but I didn’t want to turn out the light; I got out of bed and wandered around for awhile; I went back upstairs; I got out of bed again; I felt lonely; I desperately wished my partner were home just to have another human being around.  I felt a sense of dread that I just couldn’t shake.  It was like I was channeling Edgar Allen Poe, and all his characters with their morbid imaginations and “morbidly acute” senses.  It wasn’t the anxiety that had me telling myself that I was being neurotic, it was the paranoia, the attribution of malevolent, conscious intent to something that I know is just about warm and cold air masses.

This isn’t usually like me.  I haven’t been afraid of the dark since I was a small child.  My husband travels a lot, and while I miss him, I’m never afraid to be alone. Like Mrs Whatsit in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time, “wild nights are my glory”; I usually love storms, blizzards, and all sorts of severe weather, and I’m puzzled by people who are afraid of thunder.  I grew up in the Midwest, where thunderstorms are frequent, and kids are told from the time they’re born that “thunder is just noise, it can’t hurt you”.  Likewise, you’re safe in the basement during severe weather.  You’re safe in a blizzard if you stay inside.  Unless you live in a flood zone or a trailer park, weather won’t hurt you if you take precautions and use common sense.  Weather is something I can usually handle.

I don’t know what it was about last night that had me so worked up.  Ultimately, I was extremely grateful for my cat Piglet, a sweet and compliant Maine Coon mix who’s always willing to take care of me.  I went down stairs and picked her up, carried her upstairs, and got into bed.  She stayed where I put her, purring, half on my chest and half on my arm.  When my arm fell asleep (she’s a 16.5 lb cat, after all) she shifted obligingly, staying close and purring.  My other cat, CC, came up soon afterward and settled onto my legs.  I already felt easier.  But I didn’t fall asleep until I heard a fire struck lumber past, assuring me that there was at least one other person out there, awake like me, and ready to come to my defense if the storm tried to get me.

What is my New Year’s Resolution, you ask? Well, in 2010, I resolved to improve my proprioception.

My what?

Let me explain.

I learned the word “proprioception” from a friend I visited over the holidays. He’s a piano teacher, he’s studied technique extensively, and [...]]]> 18 days into the New Year, and I broke my New Year’s resolution.

What is my New Year’s Resolution, you ask? Well, in 2010, I resolved to improve my proprioception.

My what?

Let me explain.

I learned the word “proprioception” from a friend I visited over the holidays. He’s a piano teacher, he’s studied technique extensively, and I met with him to try and improve my own technique at the keyboard. He told me that good technique is all about proprioception — the sense of where your body is in space.

Also called “kinesthetic awareness”, proprioception is the sense that allows you, for example, to know that you’re wiggling your fingers even if you can’t see them, even if they aren’t touching anything, even though they don’t make any sound.

My awareness of my body has always sucked. Meeting with my friend made me realize how much I cut my body out of everything I do. When playing music, for example, I think about the expressive qualities I want to convey, and I listen to hear if I’m achieving them, but what I don’t do is think at all about what I’m doing with my hands and arms, either to help or hinder the effect I want.

That’s pretty much the same with everything I do. Like a lot of people with dyscalculia, I’m clumsy, completely unaware of where my body is in space. I tend to get a lot of mysterious bruises because I walk into things without even realizing I’m doing it. I also tend to injure my hands, elbows, shoulders, and neck.

Sometimes this is because I’ve been typing, or playing music, or painting but this time it’s just because I was sitting on the couch sick for a week. I was leaning on my right arm in a weird way. Every time I got off the couch, I would notice my right shoulder was tight, and I’d tell myself not to sit like that again, and every time I sat back down I sat in exactly the same way. Now my neck and shoulder are both killing me.

I made my New Year’s resolution because I do this so damn often. Last year one of my goals was to get in shape, and I’ve done so. I’ve pretty much fixed the tendinitis in my elbows that I developed at 15 (from bad piano technique, I might add) that I thought I would live with for the rest of my life. The knee that was sore? All better. The stiffness in my back? Better. The plantar fasciitis from my stupid flat feet? Even that’s much improved.

But I keep doing this to my neck and shoulder. It’s always the same, every single time; something in my neck and shoulder blade tightens up, and before I’m exactly aware of it it’s killing me.  Despite being in excellent shape, despite the fact that I can push my body harder than I ever have, despite the fact that I haven’t pulled a muscle in over a year — despite all that, my shoulder and neck are in a class by themselves.

This whole adventure has kicked my ass into remembering why I made my resolution in the first place.  I saw a physical therapist today, got some brutal massage, and took some advil.  Now, to honor my resolution, I’m going to stop frickin’ typing already.  Peace out.