katharsis

A fairly good month, at least according to my Mooda app.

My attempt at journaling every morning has not been successful, as I have been having trouble sleeping early and thus have been getting off bed rather late as well. If there’s anything I desperately want right now (other than to get pregnant), it’s to be able to sleep longer than six hours. Honestly. Why is my body refusing to sleep past six goddamn hours?

What I have done quite successfully so far is track my expenses as well as manage the household finances. Rather than simply logging every financial activity on a tracking app, I decided to go old school and bought a six-hole binder from a 100 yen shop, filled it with zip envelopes and assigned each one an expense category. Groceries. Medical and Dental. Husband’s allowance. Savings. Food and drink. Extra cash on hand.

It’s working pretty well and I just realized I’ve terribly underestimated just how much money my husband and I really spend in supermarkets. We still have two weeks until my next payday and we’ve already spent ¾ of our grocery budget for the month. Insane.

Oh. Something fun happened in January. I got sick.

One weekend, I made kare-kare for dinner with an inexpensive block of angus beef I got at my regular discount supermarket. It was great. What wasn’t was the aftermath. Shortly after showering that night, I began to feel nauseated. Just a couple of weeks or so prior, I woke up in the middle of night, queasy, and had to run downstairs to the toilet to throw up. I tried to ignore it and went to bed, tried to sleep while feeling sick.

I couldn’t, of course. No matter how desperately I tried. Not even Endel could knock me out. So I went and got it over with. I hate throwing up. It’s disgusting and it feels horrible.

It hasn’t happened again since, but after that incident, I realized I often felt bloated at night, even before I had dinner. My stomach made weird, whiny sounds, and I experienced some level of discomfort regularly. So I thought, ah, it must be my good old friend, GERD.

I’ve been on Metformin (to help with PCOS, but honestly, it’s not doing anything?) since December, so I’ve also been avoiding alcohol. Every time my husband and I went out, I had orange juice instead. I guess that didn’t sit well with my digestive system.

So I stopped drinking orange juice. I also lay off soda and coffee. Instead of cow’s milk, I had almond milk. I got a bag of whole grain oats because the fiber is supposed to help alleviate the symptoms. Then I went to the doctor because one night, it felt more painful than simply uncomfortable, and she put me on meds for five days.

Today is the last day and the meds really helped.

Wait. The doctor’s visit was already in February!

Regardless, I got sick, but it’s actually a blessing in disguise almost, because now I can’t eat too much, or I’ll feel sick. It’s almost as if my body decided by itself that it’s had enough of the junk binges and is refusing to take any more shit.

So now I have to be mindful of what I eat too.

I’m getting rid of high carb food as soon as I finish the bag of oatmeal I bought. Metformin isn’t working. Eating less (than usual) isn’t helping me lose weight. There’s really no way around insulin resistance other than going low carb and fasting intermittently.

Which is fine. It’s not like I can’t have the occasional slice of cake.

But I know what I want. And I want to do it right this year. January was a good start. Weird. Unexpected. But good anyhow.