Changing My Diet - On the Metabolically Broken

I have Hyperprolactinemia and Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) one of the many problems with this condition is that it's horribly under diagnosed. The other is that this is not a problem rooted in the ovaries, but it is a pituitary gland disease. For this particular disease the pituitary gland swells and it secretes excess prolactin. Since I'm not a doctor, I suggest you use Google from someone qualified to get more information.

My main point is that I have this disease. It went undiagnosed for so long that it ended up breaking my endocrine system, but now that my hormones are managed I'm feeling better.

However, my body is still pretty broken in that my triglycerides are off the charts and if I don't get them down my endocrine nurse is going to have her own heart attack. I also have tragic blood sugar issues. The disease also caused me to gain weight, which I now need to/want to lose.

But right now my body is pretty messed up metabolically and along with the disease  the root of this is....dum dum dum...in my childhood. I know, you're shocked.

So when I was 9 I was told by my mother that I was fat. Because she is just a kind and loving mom like that.When I look back on photos I realize I wasn't fat, but reality and my childhood were not really in agreement anyway.

She kept telling my I was fat, which was super helpful to me in both the development of my sense of self as well as wondering what in the hell I was supposed to do about it. She was the person who fed me. I was 9. It wasn't like I had the wherewithal to go do some research on body development and nutrition.

My mom decided to take me to a doctor that  "helped" overweight children and he put me on the tragic 1,000 calorie, low fat, high carb diet that helped make my body the trainwreck it is today.

I was on this diet of horrors until I was in my 20s and my lovely husband helped me to get a grip on reality. Unfortunately the damage had already been done and this along with my disease left me confused and lost.

In my quest to get healthy while I was sick I did lots of research on nutrition, micro-nutrients, alternative diets, etc. My family and friends had the poor pleasure of living with me through the many trends of no sugar baking, putting kale in everything and a whole lot of other nutrition ploys I tried in an attempt to stop feeling like I'd been run over by a car.

So now my body is healing, but I'm still not healthy. I need to change the way I eat so I can get the triglycerides down, manage the blood sugar and lose the weight.

So I'm on Atkins. Which sucks. Atkins is a low carb diet that should include veggies and starts at 20 grams of carbs a day. I have found that I need to stick to less then 12 grams of carbs a day or my body goes off ketosis, which is how you can measure weather Atkins is working or not.

So my body is so metabolically broken that it freaks out if I have really any carbs at all. I think that is so weird. It also means that I eat meat and eggs. That's pretty much it. I dream of brussel sprouts, but if I try to eat one, my body goes of ketosis.

This means that my body is SOOOO sensitive to what I eat that it is like dealing with a twitch control on a video game. One little push and my avatar falls off a cliff.

For a woman raised that veggies are better than anything, fat's the devil and carbs are great. This is a huge shift for me. I keep trying to sneak veggies into my diet, but then my body freaks out. It's so weird!

So I now have a list on my fridge of what I can eat so I stop trying to add in veggies and I'm stuck on this for probably a year. That seems to be how long it should take for my body to reset and stop flipping out.

I am not happy about this. So when you eat your brussels sprouts and your beets think of me kindly.

Chosing My Own Name

When I got married to my wonderful husband I really didn't want to take his last name. As a die hard feminist it just seemed wrong for lots of reasons. But the problem was that I needed to get rid of my maiden name. 

While my mother is a train wreck, my father is just as bad, perhaps even worse (the jury's still out on that). So there was no way in hell I was keeping that last name any longer than humanly possible.

I got married fairly young because you can't schedule when you meet your soul mate and when that happens it makes sense to marry them eventually. So I hadn't really had an opportunity to change my name beforehand.

I was just going to change my name randomly to whatever struck my fancy when my fiancée pointed out that it was kind of insulting of me to choose any name but his. So he had the idea that I take his name until I came up with one that I wanted. It was a good plan, so I agreed.

I took his last name for 4 years before I finally figured out the one that I would want. I over think everything and the name I would have for the rest of my life and share with my children was no different.

I spent the four years learning about myself and doing research on all sorts of things I found interesting. My heritage is Swedish and I love the Nordic Folklore so I started to focus on that. I really like the stories of the Mother-Goddess Freyja where she leads the Valkyries and drives a chariot driven by cats really sealed the deal.  I love thinking about swooping down to the fields after a battle with the winged Valkyries in my wake swooping up the dead warriors and carrying them off to Valhalla.

I wasn't going to take the name Freyja as my last name because that just seemed pretentious and I wanted something that would actually be a last name. I was reading about Leif Erikson and saw that his sister's last name was Freydis and Frey being another Norse god I got the idea that Freyjadis would be a potential last name for me.

Being the complete loon that I am I had to do even more research and when I felt like I'd exhausted the research I could do on my own I called an Ancient Norse Language Scholar at Stanford to ask him some questions. This must have been the weirdest conversation this man had ever had that was tangentially related to his scholarly work.

He was very kind and answered my questions about what the -dis attached to a god or goddesses name meant and why one would do that. It turns out that it means 'follower of' but that had transitioned over time to simply being a last name. Freyja had meant Lady in medieval times and Frey had meant Lord so the terms were kind of normal-ish.

He confirmed that it was an unusual name, but nothing that would be insulting or off-putting.

I wanted to make sure that my new last name wouldn't be weird if I went to Sweden. I didn't want the Swedes to think I'd lost my mind simply by seeing my last name. I would let them get to know me first.

So that was it. Since I had used my husband's last name for so long I started out by hyphenating his last name with my new last name and I had my name legally changed. When my kids were born they were given both last names and my husband has honored my changing my name to my new made up name and never batted an eye.

I like that my name honors my Viking heritage even if they let me down in the parenting department.

Scottish Love

My favorite place on this earth is Edinburgh, Scotland.

The reason for this is that Scotland was a place of many firsts for me. I went to Edinburgh the first time with my friend who I visited during her semester abroad in the UK. It was my favorite part of the trip.

It was the first time I drank Dramboie, which is my favorite liquor. It's whiskey and honey and comes from the Isle of Skye, which makes it even more magical. It tastes like home to me.

It was the first time boys that didn't know me smiled at me on the street. This may seem weird, but I tended to walk around looking like I wanted to stab someone, so the fact that these cute boys smiled at me and flirted was a real win and showed that they weren't easily cowed.

It was the first time I realized how silly it was to drive to so many places in Los Angeles, when we could just walk. Of course, I didn't have a car when I visited and I walked the entire town. This really highlighted to me the over dependence on cars in Los Angeles.

It was also the first time I visited a place where the people were universally sweet to me. The shop keepers were kind, the B&B folks amenable, the strangers in the street smiled. After living with my crazy ass parents and growing up in LA, I had no idea that this type of magical place even existed. It gave me hope for the future.

It was the first time I saw guys in kilts and let me tell you, there is nothing better. If I ruled the world men would all wear kilts because they are the cutest, sexiest, handsomest piece of clothing a man can wear. I wanted to have my husband wear a kilt when we got married. I couldn't get him to agree, but he now owns two utilikilts so I'm a winner in the end.

I would love to live in Scotland, but I don't know if that's in my future. I will always honor the magical land that taught me so much about the good things in the world.