Away again for a week - more coping mechanisms, or not, to report on...
Met an EX CANDIDA SUFFERER at a bonfire party - she also did it her way. Talked too much and picked up important info about keeping calcium levels topped up. More later.
Have at last done something I've been promising myself I'll do for a long time - have a whole day where the foods I eat have no sugar in them at all. Briefly, meat, fish, kelp (a seaweed), quinoa (good stuff, but not so attractive solo), and spelt, an old fashioned grain which I've never cooked before. All of these foodstuffs are listed as containing no sugar. Whatsoever. It's so stringent, and not at all fun. I could never quite bring myself to do it.
The reason is because, to put it delicately, my tummy growls a lot. Like having a little dog sitting on my knee. Not. But as noisy as. This has been happening to me over the last five years or so, and I've been politely ignoring the racket, hoping it would go away, pretending it was normal... I don't care whether it's a sign of old age or not, I don't like it, it's noisy and obtrusive. When I checked out the candida symptoms, there it was, along with bloating, gripey pains, etc., etc., and I was also beginning to get the gripey little pains. No further details will be published. If it's happening to you, you know enough and you want to get rid. If it's not happening to you, you don't want to know.
Now, although many of my candida symptoms have disappeared since I started this treatment, many of them are still present, simply lessened; the growly tummy, for instance, has become a remote gurgle (I should get out more - or maybe not). I've been making allowances for this - this is a two year treatment, after all, but decided in August I would have a go at a complete starvation day - for the Candida, that is, not for me. I bought in stocks of Spelt, Quinoa and Kelp (unfortunately, I could only obtain powder), and planned to do this for one whole day. Starting with Spelt porage for breakfast. I even wrote up dates on the calender, when I'd be at home all day. Somehow, on those days, the prospect of cooking up a lumpy little grain for breakfast never appealed. Neither did fishy green kelp powder to sprinkle over it. So, I kept cancelling them.
In the end, it happened almost by accident. Week away (of which more later), followed by weekend with friend, when we ate roast dinner with five vegetables, lamb steaks, cooked breakfast (scrambled eggs for me), and I invented a new fried rice dish (probably been eaten in the Orient for thousands of years, but there you go). She packed me up with a picnic for the way back - hummous, rice, sesame seeds, yoghurt, with celery sticks to use as edible spoons. My journey got longer and longer, with many detours. I had to stop at a motorway service. To use the cafes would be a waste of money. I carried on driving til I reached the oasis known as M&S SIMPLY FOOD. It is indeed just that. I bought plain poached salmon, and a packet of prawns in oil and spices, no sugar or vinegar. I ate them in the car. There was a packet of prawns and a slice of salmon left over by the time I got home. And, at my friend's, I'd found instructions for cooking spelt grain - just boil in salted water for 20 minutes.
More importantly, when I arrived home, I realised the fish supper had been a no-sugar one - and I wasn't hungry. So I decided to start counting the hours from just after lunch time on Monday. When I got up on Tuesday, I was approx 19 hours away from having eaten food with sugar in it. Simple! all I had to do was another 5 hours. In the end, I ate Spelt Porage with yoghurt, followed by late lunch with more salmon and prawns, followed by a dish of yoghurt later on, and a hot sardine supper. The kelp got sprinkled onto the yoghurt. Very late Breakfast next day was porage, by which time I'd done nearly 48 hours of eating foods with absolutely no sugar in them. I could have eaten anything - steak, chicken, different fish, lamb, don't let my heavy diet of fish put you off!
My stomach has calmed down. A lot. I'm back on my normal diet now, because the above regime is lacking in vitamins, minerals and variety. It makes my normal diet feel luxurious, and a privilege to be eating. I'm seriously considering making the non-sugar event a regular feature in the calendar, though - as again, I feel better for it.
THIS WEEK, I HAS MOSTLY BEEN THINKING ABOUT... how unfair it was to spring my diet on the cook less than a fortnight away from the week away... with a bunch of other people who I knew would also be on strange diets...
RECIPE - FRIED RICE SUPPER
Heat Olive / sesame oil in frying pan: add left over cooked rice, make it crispy.
Add chopped celery, cloves garlic and ground cinnamon. Add egg, and a good shake of sesame seeds, salt & pepper. Stir in the egg as it cooks.
Before serving, add chopped parsley. And yoghurt, if you like. You can make this for two - all the anti-candida stuff, serve it up, leave some rice in for the next person and add all the sugary items...
We got back around ten, my friend ate oatcakes and cheese & tomato, I made egg fried rice, it was good! No pic... so here's someone else on a very weird kind of low-fat dairy-only diet...
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