nerfherder
Active Member
So back in the 80's, I was dating a guy in college who sold coke for textbook-buying money. He was pre-medication, it was the 80's, punk was stomping the Disco beat into a bloody heap in the dirt. 
Anyway, unlike most of my friends who weren't too attached to it as anything but a party substance, I realized really quick that this hit my brain in that Rat Will Starve Itself For More kind of feeling. I was enough of a control freak, and recently having lost a favorite relative to a heroin overdose, that once I felt like I was on the edge of treating it like coffee I stopped. Completely. Never touched it again, if friends or peers had it out at parties I would leave 'cause I am a control freak and will NOT let something like that run my life. I very nearly had the same problem with Ritalin 15 years later, and after a brush with Ritalin toxicity I took the bottle, burned it and its contents wrapped in the paper prescription form, and never touched it again.
So I'm familiar with what the run-up to an addiction, both behavioral and chemical, can feel like. I'm also aware that I have the strength of will to walk away from that.
(yes, I'm a fairly heavy coffee drinker, will stop that occasionally just to detox once a year or so. But you'll pry the half-melted chocolate from my sticky, dead hands so don't go there.
)
Right now, after years of not having eaten anything grain-based, I find I'm having lots and lots of cravings. I used to be a breakfast pastry baker, I made all my girls' cakes, gluten-based or gluten-free, and Kiddo is low-carb so she gets an almond flour/coconut flour based cake thing on her birthday and that's it. Her big sister the Gothish Princess figured out that she's got some kind of gluten problem too because I'd always peg her on it when she was in her teens - I could tell 'cause (like me) she'd retain fluid, and I'd see it immediately in her cheeks and neck. "Pizza busted!" I'd say.
Partly it's the smell of that big box of stale breads and biscuits a friend gave me from her lodge's commercial kitchen cleanout (treats for the chickens, goats and bunnies), partly it's all the stuff showing up in ads and in food places, and partly I think it's a desire to self-medicate due to stress, emotions, hormones - I just got my "dot" after four months of hoping "Hey, maybe it's gone for good!" And the smell of sugar and lemon and orange - we're making _pounds_ of candied citrus peel for barter/sale before Easter, it's cooking away in the kitchen as I type.
So lots of this going on, and I am SO GLAD that I know what happens - I retain fluid and get asthma attacks for real if I'm eating wheat at all. But it's really sucking on my psyche to know that like with cocaine, like with Ritalin, and the conflict of the wheat products being an accepted part of everyone's background noise, the craving is there forever and I just can't go there.
Please don't suggest this, that or the other gluten-free treat. I just don't want to go there! The carbs in those are even worse than regular wheat and do not make me feel better.
Just sort of venting is all. Lunch was good - chicken breast, carrot, coffee of course. But I sure wish I could eat whatever I wanted without the consequences. I can't, though.
Anyway, unlike most of my friends who weren't too attached to it as anything but a party substance, I realized really quick that this hit my brain in that Rat Will Starve Itself For More kind of feeling. I was enough of a control freak, and recently having lost a favorite relative to a heroin overdose, that once I felt like I was on the edge of treating it like coffee I stopped. Completely. Never touched it again, if friends or peers had it out at parties I would leave 'cause I am a control freak and will NOT let something like that run my life. I very nearly had the same problem with Ritalin 15 years later, and after a brush with Ritalin toxicity I took the bottle, burned it and its contents wrapped in the paper prescription form, and never touched it again.
So I'm familiar with what the run-up to an addiction, both behavioral and chemical, can feel like. I'm also aware that I have the strength of will to walk away from that.
(yes, I'm a fairly heavy coffee drinker, will stop that occasionally just to detox once a year or so. But you'll pry the half-melted chocolate from my sticky, dead hands so don't go there.
)Right now, after years of not having eaten anything grain-based, I find I'm having lots and lots of cravings. I used to be a breakfast pastry baker, I made all my girls' cakes, gluten-based or gluten-free, and Kiddo is low-carb so she gets an almond flour/coconut flour based cake thing on her birthday and that's it. Her big sister the Gothish Princess figured out that she's got some kind of gluten problem too because I'd always peg her on it when she was in her teens - I could tell 'cause (like me) she'd retain fluid, and I'd see it immediately in her cheeks and neck. "Pizza busted!" I'd say.
Partly it's the smell of that big box of stale breads and biscuits a friend gave me from her lodge's commercial kitchen cleanout (treats for the chickens, goats and bunnies), partly it's all the stuff showing up in ads and in food places, and partly I think it's a desire to self-medicate due to stress, emotions, hormones - I just got my "dot" after four months of hoping "Hey, maybe it's gone for good!" And the smell of sugar and lemon and orange - we're making _pounds_ of candied citrus peel for barter/sale before Easter, it's cooking away in the kitchen as I type.
So lots of this going on, and I am SO GLAD that I know what happens - I retain fluid and get asthma attacks for real if I'm eating wheat at all. But it's really sucking on my psyche to know that like with cocaine, like with Ritalin, and the conflict of the wheat products being an accepted part of everyone's background noise, the craving is there forever and I just can't go there.
Please don't suggest this, that or the other gluten-free treat. I just don't want to go there! The carbs in those are even worse than regular wheat and do not make me feel better.
Just sort of venting is all. Lunch was good - chicken breast, carrot, coffee of course.
But I sure wish I could eat whatever I wanted without the consequences. I can't, though.
iness attack later that morning. I wasn't sure if it was a carb crash, or something in oats using up all my body fluids and dehydrating me, or what. Which stinks as I love oatmeal and oats in general. 
