Diane Shipley writes about her experiences as an ill person in a well person’s world...
How sweet it is...
Once I'd done some research into the causes of M.E it became apparent that my staple diet of tuna sandwiches and M&Ms was going to have to go. I was going to have to base my diet (let's face it, my life - I live to eat!) around fresh vegetables, lean protein and wholemeal grains. Worst of all, I was going to have to give up sugar. Nectar. Sweet, sweet juice. Depending on your love of junk foods and chocolate (some members of my family can't compare, but you might be a savoury type) giving up sugar in all its forms (bye, bananas! sayonara satsumas!) either sounds like no big deal, a mild inconvenience or the end of life as we know it.
Guess which camp I fall into?
As I wrote on my blog last week, Marian Keyes says giving up sugar is harder than going cold turkey from the hard stuff - and she's a recovering alcoholic! Worse than the cravings, the mood swings and.. (okay not worse, nothing's worse than suicidal feelings induced by giving up bleedin' sugar f'christsake! - but almost as bad...) is the social side of giving up the white stuff. Or rather, the antisocial side...
My Dad in particular seemed to enjoy tucking into huge slabs of chocolate fudge cake whilst saying "You don't mind if I eat this, do you?" with no sense of irony. "I've never felt this bad... and not eaten chocolate" was my constant refrain. My rare meals out, once the only pleasure in my life, became another source of boredom : jacket potato, no filling, just butter, salad on the side, no dressing. Once they brought dressing by mistake and I wept all over my dry potato. And I couldn't even drown my sorrows - except maybe with a nice chamomile tea, unsweetened of course...
Inevitably after such deprivation, the diet didn't last: I split up with my boyfriend of five years and used the excuse to stuff my face with... well, everything really, but KitKat Kubes were a revelation.
I haven't had any discipline since, and that was more time ago than I'd like to admit... But I know that if I want to get the nasty digestive troubles of my M.E under serious control, I'm going to have to move from the energy fluctuations and mood swings of satisfying my sugar cravings to the misery and lethargy of a life without the good stuff.
A medically-induced coma to see me through the withdrawal stage seems like the safest answer to me...
Diane co-edits Shiny Media’s fabulous women’s fiction blog, Trashionista and contributes to TV Scoop and Catwalk Queen, as well as writing a personal blog, What Do You Do? Her love of blogging is second only to her love of sugar.
