This issue still perplexes me. Seriously. Can we discuss it?

Post Reply New Topic

Circumstances

Everyone does not have the same circumstances. The last 3 years of my life have been the worst for me diet-wise because I had a stressful job that caused me to be so exhausted when I got home that I just didn't have the energy to cook a healthy meal... I ate a lot of pizza. I changed jobs, but had to commute. Lower stress, but exhausted from the commuting. Still not eating right. Too tired. Vicious cycle, not eating the right foods = even more tired.

Finally, I have a less stressful job and a 10 minute commute. I have time to cook healthy meals. I even roasted a chicken and then used the carcass to make stock the other day.

I've been reading lots of blogs and watching videos on foods that are good for regaining hormonal balance and easing adrenal fatigue. When I was exhausted there was no way I could have taken that information in let alone be able to act on it.

It's only been 2 weeks and I've come down with a cold again, so nothing to report so far, but I am enjoying cooking. I've always enjoyed cooking, but the last few years I lost that joy because I was so exhausted.

Money
Buying healthy food can be very costly on a budget. It really is cheaper to eat rubbish. Also the peripherals. Say you want to make smoothies, you've got to buy a blender. If you can hardly afford to eat that week, you can't afford a blender.

Also, exercise on a budget in a cold wintery country. Pha! It's dark when you get up, it's dark when you get home from work. You can't go walks in the dark in the city by yourself, you don't feel safe. You have a low grade fever all the time and don't want to walk at lunch break because you'll come back to the office ringing with sweat and for the rest of the afternoon you just feel sticky and uncomfortable. Can't do aerobics videos online, you'll annoy your downstairs neighbours. Can't join a gym, got no money.

Taking courses costs money. I want to learn to snowboard, I can't afford it. I'd like to buy a skateboard, can't afford it. I'd like to take a Spanish class, can't afford it. I had to buy a fridge freezer instead, that was a need.

Past Experience
You've tried and tried and tried several different options. Some were offered to you as "hey this will cure you" but said thing did not cure you. The more things you try that don't work, things that you put your all in to, the more despondent you become. The more you wonder "what's the point?"

When someone new comes along with a "this will cure you!" remedy, you think, "oh great another snake oil salesmen" if they don't want money, "hey, look a deluded fool."

Depression
Depression is like living inside of hot fudge. Everything you do is an enormous effort. Even getting up and washing and getting dressed takes so much mental power that on non-work days you just can't face it.

You'd like to learn something new to just do something different, but you're brain is fogged, you can't take anything in. Nothing sticks.

You imagine everyone you know hates you. What's the point in trying to meet new people, all the people you've ever met can't stand you, why are the new people going to be any different? You start to get panic attacks when you plan on leaving the house and seeing people. You feel tearful and even when you force yourself out and about you are so drained that making conversation is pretty much impossible. You have nothing to say, you want to open your mouth and talk to this person, but you have no words, so you move on instead of wandering up to them and hanging around awkwardly.

Still you swim through hot fudge as people tell you just to pull yourself out of it and it'll be ok. You can't see a way out. As far up and down and left and right everything is muffled and distorted by this fudge.

You just let the warm numbness envelope you.

....
Anyway, I'm enjoying cooking at the moment, so at least there's that and eventually it might improve my health.

I believe you. I'm not making excuses I'm just providing the perspective of someone who is down at rock bottom.

It's just that everyone is different. What works for one person won't neccessarily work for another.

Even when I was skint I ate healthy food... I was still ill. Through a bit of research I've found that I may need to eat more of x,y and z, but it's way more expensive than my old healthy diet. My old diet was healthy, but my hormones seem to be out of whack and what I eat in my personal diet will probably do nothing much for a man. I'm buying stuff like shatavari supplements and drinking fennel tea, buying avocados instead of cheaper apples and coconut oil instead of cheaper vegetable oil and rye bread instead of cheaper regular bread in the blind hope that it will balance my hormones and I won't feel like a bloated, pained, half-dead thing for 2 weeks every month. It's worked for thousands. Will it work for me? Who knows? Maybe I'm burning money. And if it does work for me, it won't neccessarily work for others. No one can be dogmatic about this stuff.

Honestly there was one point where I was too ill to even think straight to plan meals for the week and make a batch of anything at the weekend. All I could do was sleep and stumble around in a daze in my waking moments.

Where there's a will there is a way, yes, but where does one find the will when everything you've ever tried has failed? Some rando on the internet telling you to do a certain thing isn't enough. Why bother? Could be a load of effort and energy that you don't have thrown into yet another black hole waste of time in a life where your time and energy is already stretched to breaking point. Where you are constantly never good enough no matter how hard you strive and no matter what you do. And some stranger on the internet is one more voice shouting that you aren't trying hard enough and wants you to try yet one more thing. One more thing is the straw that broke the camels back.

Thousands of people are promoting their thing that helped them for free. They can't all be right. You're not the only voice in the crowd.

I'm glad what worked for you did, but everyone is different.

I'm new so haven't seen many of your posts, so this isn't about them specifically, just my general thoughts on why people find it hard to get better.

If you've grown up incredibly stressed it's not that surprising that your coping mechanism is likely to be stress avoidance. Although you desperately want the end goal of being happy, the path you take to get there can be very stressful, which goes against what life has taught you. It's very very hard to change something that is ingrained so deeply in you, and to willingly cause yourself short-term pain for long-term good.

When suicidal, your thought process is not "well I might as well try this thing that may or may not work, got nothing to lose" it is more "there is no point to that or anything else, I don't want to get better, I want to leave". Also, if stressful things cause you to feel suicidal thoughts, you are naturally going to want to avoid them at all costs.

I think some people are comfortable with moaning about their lives, you think it is them reaching out for help but it may actually just be their way of coping, to try and keep their head above water.

I don't think I moan here a lot... I hope not. I don't moan to people in general in life but although I desperately want to be happy, I feel like there's a massive chasm between me and where I want to be. I'm very mindful that causing myself stress makes me incredibly unhappy and often suicidal so I often feel paralysed when it comes to making changes. It's like walking on eggshells. If you've never experienced that you are very lucky, this is no fun at all.

I think it's important to keep in mind that all people are different and have learnt to react to things in different ways. We all have different life experiences and none of us know what anybody else's life has felt like to live or what the repurcussions feel like now.

I understand why you would be frustrated/confused though if you are trying to help people and they are just not letting you.

To an extent, I think there is a circular problem here. Eating better is actually a goal that I do have for myself, if only for my general health; improvements to my autistic traits would be welcome, though, and I have an open mind about whether or not this is possible.

However, making that change has a "cost", because I first need to find solutions to the "meta-problems" that make taking the advice difficult.

- Overcoming EF problems so that I am in more command of what and when I eat.
- Overcoming social anxiety because I would have to shop in different places, and involving additional journeys on public transport or having delivery people come to my home.
- Changing habitual behaviours that I might regress to inadvertently.
- etc.

But I have to do those things before the advice can be fully realised - i.e. without already having the potential benefits claimed for the advice.

So maybe part of the problem is that, though the advice may be good, to many of us it might seem like too big a mouthful to swallow all in one go, and something of a chicken and egg situation. People have pointed out various reasons here why they might find such advice hard to take on board. Each time, you have simply re-iterated that you faced similar hurdles yourself, and how much your dietary change has benefited you - but without addressing how you overcame that hurdle so that you could make the advice work for you. Rather than reiterating the dietary advice itself, it might be more useful for people to know how you actually went about making the change.

I’ve shared exactly how I made each change, step by step, bit by bit as I made new discoveries.

First I completely eliminated salycilate acids when I realized they were making my brain go haywire. Then I figured out how to detox them via Epsom salts on my skin. Doing this all but eliminated the worst depression and anxiety of my life that had persisted for 5+ months. Keeping food acids from building up/detoxing them improved my executive functioning so that I could do the next step and the next and so on. Feel free to go reread the old thread I linked for a refresher - it’s all there. I’ve refined my protocol slightly and have learned/confirmed a few things via coincidence and observation over the last few years but about the biggest addition has been adding vitamin D combined with uv light this winter. Otherwise not a whole lot has changed since I wrote that post years ago, in terms of treatment. My life, otoh, had changed dramatically for the better.

_________________
No for supporting trump. Because doing so is deplorable.

In the United States, "organic" foods are, invariably, considerably more expensive than "regular" foods. And they are not as widely available. They're usually sold either in "farmers markets" or in large supermarkets. They are not, normally, sold in little "green-grocer," or "convenience store" type places. Most people have to have a car and be able to drive in order to get to these "farmers markets" and large supermarkets.

"Organic" bananas are at least 30 cents a pound more than "regular" bananas. And that's probably something where the cost doesn't differ all that much.