Well, I did it. I made it through the first week of eating anti-inflammatorily. (I made up a new phrase.)
I also figured out what to do about chocolate cravings. One ounce of semi-sweet chocolate chips (about 60 chips) has a -80 IF rating, but I can either eat them with 1 ounce of mixed nuts, which has a +49 rating, so long as I eat 3 Brussels sprouts (12 points each) beforehand, or I can skip the nuts and have just the chocolate chips if I eat 7 Brussels sprouts first. It’s a pre-pay system. I won’t allow myself to say “I’ll make up for it later,” because I won’t.
I tried it last night, with the two ounces of nuts. I didn’t eat the three Brussels sprouts first, though, because it was right after dinner and I’d had my “spinach scramble” for dinner (approximately 500 points – sauteed onion and mushrooms with spinach and parmasan cheese, cooked with enough egg substitute to make it hold together like scrambled eggs). It went well, and the chocolate tasted so much more amazing than it did before.
The thing with the Brussels sprouts is that I really don’t like Brussels sprouts. I never did, although I can force myself to eat them if I have a good enough motivation. They’re an easily countable anti-inflammatory food, and so it works for me to weigh negative-rating foods against Brussels sprouts to decide whether they’re worth it or not. For example, a 2 ounce Snickers bar would cost 14.17 Brussels sprouts.
My jaw is still a bit sore when I open my mouth very far, but it gets better by night time each day and doesn’t hurt at all anymore to bite down. Knees are still hurting a little, but the pain isn’t distracting like it had become. My back is only hurting right now because it’s PMDD time and even that is tolerable, considering. All in all, still feeling very good results.
I also haven’t had the palpitations after eating that I’d been having. Huh. Go figure. (Seriously, most of that seems to have been from eating too much at a time, and a good bit of it was from eating specific foods that I evidently shouldn’t eat. My GP doctor agreed with the findings of the cardiologist when I saw him in May. He said I don’t have MVP either. So now I can be comfortable that the palpitations were food related.)
Now if only I hadn’t screwed up my sleep schedule again and stayed up in the middle of the night last night. I’m sooo sleepy. I’m off work tomorrow, though, so I can get it straightened out again.
