St. Patrick's Day, NYC, Upper East Side

Prime end-of-parade view from the Met's stairs

Posers

Dapper

Riding that hipster line

Not everything is green

Escaping into the Park

Red, white, blue, and green

Watchers on the Wall (heh) / Winter is... going, actually

Birth Control: You're Talking About It Wrong

I know this is yesterday's news (literally), but.... how do some people not understand how the Pill and its non-oral counterparts work?

Not just their mechanics. No matter how little or much sex you have, you take the same number of Pill doses, insert the same number of Rings, stick on the same number of Patches, get stuck with the same number of Shots within the same amount of time.

No, NOT just the mechanics, though confusion over that boggles the mind.

The pricing.  How do people not understand the pricing of hormonal birth control, and still dare to chime in on this "debate"? (Scare quotes because it's actually a FARCE.)

If my insurance didn't cover my birth control pill, that would be every month of the year I'm spending $92 for birth control, rather than just the first two or three months of the year.  (My Rx deductible is $300, so if I'm taking other medication at the time, obviously the deductible is met by February instead of March-and-then-some-in-April.)

$92 x 12 months = $1,104.  Voilà.  Over $1,000.  And my Pill, while not a generic, isn't one of the most expensive ones.  It's not Alesse, for instance.

How anyone can not know the above and still have the temerity to contribute their verbal diarrhea to any discussion of birth control is just...  I almost want them to keep going because they're digging the anti-woman side's grave so very effectively.

But you know what?  All that is beside the point.  I wish that the people on "my side," debating right back at the idjits who think I pop three Ortho Tri-Cyclen Lo every time I get busy with the husband, would quit it with the "but PCOS and acne and PMS assistance and dysmenorrhea, oh my!"  I honestly wish they would stop.

Most women who use hormonal birth control?  Use it as birth control.  

Sure, the reason I didn't stick with a generic was that it didn't provide the same off-label benefit of skin clearing up, and I went, as the kids say, cray-cray with PMS symptoms like I'd never had.  This is despite every doctor I've ever spoken to swearing up and down that generics are identical.  (Most of the pharmacists I've asked and my own experience tell me that those doctors are full of shit.) (Also some other doctors think so, apparently.)

I love me some off-label benefits to my birth control.

I know many women who have taken or now take the Pill because of cysts, anemia, PMDD.  I, with my history, know women who take the Pill simply so they get periods, because their BMI's are so low.  (This protects your bone mass.)

That's all the beauty of modern medicine, and thank Big Pharma that the Pill can help all those things.  It's wonderful.

But talking about birth control:  you're doin' it (w)rong if you seem publicly afraid of acknowledging it as what it is.  BIRTH. CONTROL.

So as much as the one side needs to Get A Freaking Clue, Like Whoa about the pricing and mechanics of being a sexually active woman in the modern world, I feel so much right now like my own side needs pony up and quit being scared of calling BIRTH CONTROL, not just treatment-of-medical-problems, a good thing.

Eating Disorders: Magical Realism

I am really, super tired of feeling like I want to scratch off my own skin.  I haven't even been feeling that way that long, really only about 48 hours.  But it's here.  The mental piece of knowing I'm consuming more nutritive things is no longer alone.  Now it's being slowly but surely joined by the feeling of body parts filling out, just ever so slightly.

The husband has been asking me how I'm feeling.  Tuesday I told him that I was still mostly feeling fine, that perhaps this wasn't going to be as uncomfortable as the formal weight gain I've gone through in the past.  Those programs (partially because of insurance limits) tend to focus on high calorie meals all the time, as much weight gain as quick as is physically healthy.

Realistically speaking you have to expend serious effort to gain any more than about 2 pounds of fat/muscle (as opposed to water) in a week.  (The same is true for losing fat/muscle as oppose to water.)  Realistically speaking the things that recoup "padding" first are things like organs (ever seen a healthy heart in autopsy photos? it has some fat on it).  

When the husband asks how I'm feeling and I share that there are moments of discomfort, he reminds me that the discomfort isn't based in reality.  And that's true, of course.  It's not.  But simply knowing a feeling isn't based in reality is, of course, not enough to just stop feeling it.

My fear is now, as it has been before, that I will continue to gain weight (which I will) but that I will not get used to it.  That I will hit my body's natural set point, and just never feel comfortable there.

Realistically speaking, there are a lot worse ways to feel trapped in your own body and mind.  Magically, that reality does not make me feel any better.

Eating Disorder Recovery: What Do You Want to Eat?

When you first start trying to eat like a "normal" person again, there's usually a period when you feel just obsessed by food.

Now, eating disorders are of course functionally obsessed with food anyway - what you are eating, what you aren't eating, how much you're eating, how little you're eating, what you're going to eat and keep, what you're going to eat and "get rid of."

But in early recovery, the feeling of obsession takes on a different quality.  Since it's been however many weeks/months/years since you were "allowed" to eat what you want, suddenly you have to... you know... figure out what it is you want.  At every. single. meal.

Going from not thinking about what you want because there are only certain things you eat in your disordered routine, to having the option of deciding what you actively want to eat, at least three times a day, is an unexpectedly major adjustment.

I mean, we're talking about, there is a lot of food to choose from, setting aside things like money and assuming you're not working around allergies/sensitivities.  Bagel or toast?  With egg or cream cheese?  Any cheese on that egg?  Any tomato on that?  Or will it be oatmeal or granola and yogurt or yogurt?  What about the fruit on that - strawberries or banana or other berries or mango or kiwi or what? 

Or what if you want to be really brave and eat something everyone else calls "bad"?  I mean, those are all fairly "healthy" foods I just rattled off.

And that's just breakfast. 

And we're still not at the "actually gaining perceptible weight" bit yet.  Oh, no.  That comes later.

No, early on the challenge is all around, "It's okay to want to eat that," but even more so around, "It's okay to have to think about what you want to eat."  Allow me to get cheesy for a sec and extrapolate from there:  "It's okay to think about what you want."

Oh, lord.  Well, I've had my cheese quota for today, then.

Recovery Redux (Redux)

Basically every day over the about two and a half years it took for my weight to reach bottom, almost every day, I said to myself, "It's going to suck putting this weight back on and eating healthily again.  It's going to suck royally."

And it does.  It does, in fact, suck royally.  Imperially, even.

I haven't actually begun to even gain weight yet, but rather have just been getting more nutrients and calories into my body.

And yet.  It sucks.  Royally.  Imperially.

I'm distracting myself a lot with work, or sudoku, or rereading The Lord of the Rings.

I'm thinking happily about all the summer clothes I have, and love, that are too big right now.  I'm taking deliberate time to appreciate the physical energy I have.  

I'm breathing through anxiety.  I'm going through nutritionist litanies in my head, about how feelings are like waves, they have peaks and they never last forever.

I'm surviving, so far, but it sucks.  It sucks royally.

You guys, it hasn't even been one. week.


This sucks.