Oh my goodness. It has come to my attention that some of the tiredness I've been suffering from lately may have been due to the beginnings of a simple iron deficiency. Thank you, random Tumblr post that had nothing to do with me whatsoever and that I got very close to not even seeing. D: I don't think I would have figured this out by myself! If it's true, that is. But it makes sense - I had noticed that something about it felt slightly different than usual.

Here's how I believe it happened:

- I realised that I could eat dairy and grains again.
- I ate a lot of dairy and found that I didn't seem to need meat anymore.
- I stopped eating meat altogether.
- Because I didn't need beans and chickpeas for protein anymore (cheaper than meat; what little meat I used to eat was probably in response to beans and chickpeas lacking fat), I kind of forgot about those a bit. Same with tofu, although I never bought that regularly in the first place (not cheaper than meat).

I've been reading up on iron-rich foods, and what did I find out? Dairy not only doesn't contain much iron, it even makes it harder for the body to absorb the stuff. Meat is obviously the best source of iron, and iron from other sources is harder to absorb in general. Vitamin C helps with that, but I probably haven't been consuming enough vitamin C, either. Both beans and tofu contain decent amounts of iron. Need I say more?? The timing fits, too.

Now, I know you're supposed to get deficiencies confirmed by a doctor before you start taking supplements, but I'm not really up to that sort of thing at the moment. I'll just try to keep an eye on the iron in my diet and drink a lot of orange juice during meals. Maybe if I can find a comparatively weak iron supplement somewhere, I'll also take that. I don't think it's easy to get an overdose while being vegetarian.

( 'By the way, about that ...' - in which I go off on a tangent on what's up with the sudden vegetarianism )

Change of plans. I decided to spend some time getting stuff done instead of going to bed ridiculously early. It was probably a bad idea, but then again ... I hardly did a thing during the last two days, so there was catching up to do. I'm not sure I would have been able to handle that tomorrow, if my past reactions to sleeping "normally" are anything to go by. It always seems to make me feel like crap in the physical sense, to be honest. I can think more clearly and have less trouble writing, but don't ask me to get up from my chair! Ugh.

I'll just ... stay awake again and continue as planned tomorrow? Hopefully this time I won't fall asleep on my chair. How do I even do that all the time?! It's not exactly comfortable ...

One of the things that I did was to buy a lot of food. I decided that it was time to move on from being all tentative about gluten-containing stuff by now, even though I still wouldn't say I'm convinced that I can eat it. What if the whole dilemma with the debilitating stomach cramps and you don't want to know what else suddenly does start up again? What if it takes a month for that to happen? It's not impossible, so I remain skeptical. But for now I am going to eat normally and thus I found myself faced with an abundance of ~OPTIONS~ at the supermarket. It was so hard not to buy everything at once! Dairy, too. I mostly walked around with a kind of dazed smile on my face, staring at the shelves in amazement but unable to decide what to reacquaint myself with first. XD I guess I did all right in the end. There will be spagetti later!!

Something funny happened when I walked past the ice cream section. I didn't intend to buy any, but had a look anyway. I spotted a brand that I remembered to be relatively cheap but delicious, and suddenly I found myself missing Daniel a whole lot. o.O I guess we used to ... sort of bond over food? I secretly loved it when he unexpectedly brought home something unnecessary but awesome like ice cream, even though I wished he did it less often because of the money. I actually did the same thing myself when I was the one to do the shopping, though usually with cheaper items and not as many at a time. And then if we were lucky enough to get the chance, we'd sit down with our "special" food and watch a movie or something. It was quite nice.

Not that we couldn't still do this, especially now that my dietary restrictions are seemingly gone. We simply need to remember to meet up for such evenings from time to time. :) He's looking for a new place though; I hope he finds one in this town and doesn't have to move away ...

I have now officially consumed

- a moderate amount of butter
- quite a lot of nutella
- a small cup of yogurt

without complications. Wow. I still can't believe this is happening. There's another cup of yogurt in my fridge, but I forgot to check the list of ingredients when I bought it and have since discovered that it "may contain traces of gluten", so I won't eat that one until I've moved on to the gluten stage of my experiments.

I also have some chocolate, however. CHOCOLATE. Freaking Toblerone, even. I can't wait to try it, but I'd better eat something reasonable first so that I don't upset my stomach independently of lactose content.

In other news, I was awake for more than 40 hours and then only slept for seven, so uh ... I'm starting to feel a little dazed here. Better start cooking right this second or I'll never manage it.

Guys this is hilarious.

No I mean seriously this is the funniest shit ever.

I am not lactose-intolerant.

...

.....

....... O___O

And I only got it tested for confirmation. To have official proof. I never ever ever even considered the option that I might have drawn the wrong conclusion, aside from this morning when I jokingly suggested it to A (who was driving me) like "Haha, wouldn't it be funny if I got a negative result on this test, too? But nawww, this is a pretty straight-forward matter." LOL RIGHT.

And it still doesn't make any fucking sense. Last year I drank a glass of chocolate milk and five minutes later I was running to the bathroom. Several times, until I made the connection and stopped. These days I drink lactose-free chocolate milk on a regular basis and nothing happens. Okay then! Screw logic! The test says I should be able to drink milk, so I must have imagined all that digestive trouble! o_O

I ... I have to admit I was too shocked to ask the doctor about the validity of my earlier gluten test in light of this. I did mention that I once ate noodles and suffered unpleasant consequences throughout the entire next day, though. He suggested that I try a gastroscopy next. Fucking great, that's just what I've always wanted. :|

I'm honestly starting to feel a little like a really delusional hypochondriac here. Being declared healthy by doctors in spite of experiencing symptoms is something that's been happening to me for all my life, hence why I have reached a point where it seems funny. I mean, funny in a sort of cynical "lol why did I even expect anything else" manner, which is not very funny at all actually. :| I could understand it happening a few isolated times, that's pretty normal, but nearly always?! It's just as common a theme in my life as plans that I am inexplicably optimistic about being thwarted by a completely unforeseeable event. Like suddenly developing fake intolerances, haha hehe blah bluh blub.

3x FACEPALM COMBO

Okay I am sorry about talking like this but my head feels fried, apparently being out in the cold without breakfast really screwed me up for the rest of the day. I have literally not done anything useful since I got home because I just couldn't. Ugh.

I saw this nice-looking "Christmas tree" candle holder today that was relatively big and not that expensive - why didn't I buy it?! I've wanted something like that for years because I am kind of against killing trees just to decorate your living room with them temporarily. Okay, technically what I had in mind was still a bit bigger, but you have to take what you can get, right? Silly me, deciding to be reasonable and save money even with something like that in front of my nose.

Anyway, this morning was a bit weird because for a while it was basically an exact reenactment of Friday morning. Both times I'd deliberately stayed awake two nights before, both times I'd gone to bed in the afternoon and nearly overslept regardless, both times I practically jumped out of bed and straight into the shower instead of eating breakfast first as I usually do ... and so on. Then A picked me up to drive me to the ALDI market in another town; ours is currently being rebuilt and therefore closed. Which is impractical because I normally buy a lot of things there.

So she helped me out with that and afterwards I quickly popped inside the store directly next to it as well, which incidentally happens to be the one I always went to during my hospital stay; the one selling all of those amazing, lactose-free and gluten-free things. I finally caved and bought some bread. BREAD. BREEEAADD. *___* (Also incidentally, and this is funny, I ended up there on Friday, too - that time I just didn't have enough money for gluten-free bread with me. I had no idea I'd remain such a regular customer even after going back home!)

Come to think of it, it's kind of ironic that I resisted a thing I'd wanted for years only to buy some expensive freaking food. -_-

Today has been one of the nicest birthdays I've had in several years. Not too exciting, but really nice. :) And not a single bad thing happened, unless you count the fact that I didn't get much sleep. It hardly made a difference.

Before I even went to bed, I already had some fun because I was still online after midnight, and so were dollrock, zanzando and chasingthunder (for whom it wasn't midnight yet). Between Twitter and here, I talked to all three of you at the same time once, which was awesome because for some reason I hardly ever manage to be online at the right moment to have ongoing conversations like that with one person, never mind three. It was excellent timing.

I was also pleasantly surprised just by how many people wished me a happy birthday. I doubt all of them truly cared (nor did I care whether some of them cared, if you get my meaning), but it was still nice to see an email notification pop up every few minutes.

We'll skip the part where I slept badly and then spent what little was left of the morning doing boring stuff. Moving on. I needed to go grocery shopping, so of course I reasoned that since it was my birthday, I was allowed to spend a little more money than usual. That's why I am now surrounded by luxuries - ahem - such as pomegranate-flavoured iced tea and two types of lactose-free chocolate. I'm pretty sure I deserve that much after two months of (mostly) sticking to the basics.

Then Daniel came over, who proudly announced that even though he didn't have a present for me yet, he at least knew what to get me already. Heh. As we waited for my family to show up, I got a phone call from the social worker known here as A, who asked if she could quickly stop by to drop off my present. Which she then did. I'd given her a list of several CDs to choose from and was quite delighted to discover that the one she'd actually bought me was my current favourite, Biffy Clyro's Infinity Land. :D She also gave me a mug (always useful) and some more chocolate.

My mother and my sisters arrived while she was still there, so now they've met. My brother stayed home, which turned out to be oddly convenient because we wanted to go to the lake and this way Daniel fit into the car, too.

The first thing we did once we got there was to try out the recently overhauled restaurant by the water - I hadn't had the time to eat a proper lunch. For a moment we were all decidedly baffled by the menu, especially me since I needed to figure out which of the items on it I could eat without endangering my health, and none of us even knew what half of them were. Fortunately, a very friendly and patient waitress soon came to our rescue. She not only answered all of our questions, but even picked up on the nature of my particular problem without being prompted and asked me what it was that I couldn't eat so that she could have the cook put something unique together. It was such a relief; I'm not used to people being helpful anymore!

In the end, I think most of us were happy with what we found on our plates.

After that we just walked around for some time, talking and enjoying the scenery. Also, this happened:



In case you're wondering, nobody fell into the water. Daniel pwned us all by casually walking over the thing as if it were no big deal. :D I considered giving it a go myself, but seeing as I was suffering from moderate dizziness at the time, I decided that it would be a Very Bad Idea.

My mother's present is that she will take me to IKEA in two weeks or so and pay for one or two of the bigger things I'll pick. This makes me happy on several levels. (I know I mentioned on Twitter that I was postponing my IKEA trip to August, but I'm relatively certain I've discovered a way to do the shopping now and pay later, so that's not necessary anymore.)

Last but not least, they brought me my old keyboard. I'd left it at their place when I moved out because I didn't have the space for it and knew that my mother wished she could keep it, but recently I found myself missing it. When I mentioned this to her, she said she didn't need it anymore and of course it was still mine anyway, so I could have it back. I just hadn't been expecting to see it today, at all. That was another pleasant surprise.

On the whole, not a bad way to celebrate having survived a quarter of a century.

I think the waitress assumed I was underage. XD

Oh gods what is wrong with my stomach. Was it the eggs? The ketchup? The oat milk? The caffeine in my iced tea? Something else in my iced tea? Please, please not the eggs. Anything but the eggs. Owww.

Can I just ... stop eating forever? No? AUGH. Blasted human bodies.

At least I have this dairy-free carrot cake to look forward to. I am so trying that. No idea what almond meal is, but it does say I can use flour instead. Carrots are yet another item on the list of things I can't eat raw, so I always appreciate an opportunity to do something unusual with them.

Then again, there are eggs in that recipe. Anything but the eggs, please. D:

So as you may have noticed, I have not been magically relieved of all my ills lately. Looks like my mother's acquaintance (this is starting to sound like a secret codename) simply got extremely lucky. You're supposed to feel significantly better after only a few days, but I didn't notice even the tiniest difference after more than a week. I still tried to keep on taking the stuff for a while, but gave up when I started to repeatedly lose track of when my last "breakfast" had been due to insomnia.

There's still enough left that I could give it another go when I'm back to a halfway stable sleeping pattern, but if I do that, it'll mostly be to avoid wasting it.

I just remembered something that I've been meaning to write about for weeks. There is this thing I like to say that people often don't get: "I kind of put fruits and vegetables in the same category as sweets - I only eat them for the taste, pretty much, and not because I expect them to make me less hungry." A common reaction to this statement is to stare at me as if I'd just grown another head and ask, "Uhhh ... but what about vitamins?!"

Sadly, the last time this happened, I got confused and couldn't think of a good reply. Which is a shame because I have one. :)

Sure, fruits and vegetables contain vitamins. Duh. So do other foods - almost everything that you can eat aside from pure white sugar is bound to contain something other than just fat, protein and/or carbs. What I tend to forget is that most people aren't fully aware of the fact that this is why we like them. Do you have orange juice around? I can almost promise you that if you were to smell it now and didn't feel like drinking any, it would mean that you've already consumed enough vitamin C today (or there's enough left in your body from yesterday).

Normally this works with macronutrients, too. In my case it does. If you place a bowl of sweets in front of me and I've already had enough sugar for the day and/or am not hungry at the moment, I won't be at all tempted to eat them. I mean, ewww. D: Unfortunately the same isn't true for everyone, thanks to upbringing, habits, diets etc. - it took a while for my instincts to return, too.

So when I say that I eat fruits and vegetables for their taste, I am only putting them in opposition to things like bread or meat that I mostly eat to reduce hunger. I am operating under the assumption that - unless a newly acquired allergy or food intolerance is currently screwing with me, ahem* - I do not need to consciously remind myself to eat specific nutrients because if left alone, I will. What I am saying is that most fruits and vegetables are just not filling ... but freaking tasty. :D

*I haven't made as much progress as I'd like. Most days I still end up going "BUT WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO EAT" at some point. Oddly enough, fat is more of a problem than protein - I've discovered lentils. Heh.