I kept putting this post off because I keep hoping for a positive OPK, so I can jump on and give some good news. But still no positives, and still no temperature rise. However, my boobs have been pretty sore for the past few days, and I feel like I have a large follicle or two ready to burst. So, like I said, I keep expecting that dark second line every day. I will actually be pretty impressed with my body if I get it tomorrow day 35, as that's exactly when I got a positive on my last natural cycle.
I did have another lovely appointment with my darling acupuncturist Katy on Saturday--despite the fact that I was never able to really relax on the table for some reason. She was also a bit surprised that I hadn't ovulated yet, but she said that perhaps this could be my body's normal cycle. What will be more telling, in my opinion, is whether I get a normal-length luteal phase this round. My very first cycle after the pill (which was, like, a 150-day cycle or something insane like that), my LP was 9 days. I've been on progesterone suppositories every cycle since then, since my progesterone keeps measuring low. But Katy wants me to go all natural this time and see what my body will do with all Yang-warming herbs and needles. I'm a little nervous about that--I mean, what if an egg gets fertilized but then gets sloughed off too early because my period comes too soon? But I'm inclined to do what she says. Maybe, just maybe, my luteal phase will do what it's supposed to. Is that too much to ask?
I have to keep reminding myself that chinese medicine is not an instantaneous fix. It takes several months to really work for most people who get pregnant with it. My body has been off-kilter for a long time, so it only makes sense that it will take a while for it to get...um, on-kilter. I'm choosing this route because I'm young and really have no objective reason to be as anxious as I am to get pregnant. And besides the fact that an RE would be astronomically expensive for us, which would interfere with all that we have planned for ourselves in the coming years, I also don't mind the idea of being able to avoid the insanity of medical fertility treatments.
But I do mind the idea of waiting longer to join the pregnancy club. More on that is coming soon...
Showing posts with label Chinese medicine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chinese medicine. Show all posts
Monday, April 26, 2010
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Nutritional Revelation of the Day: White Rice Is Okay
Ever since I was 19 years old and lost 30 pounds through dieting and exercise (and, incidentally, first launched my poor body into no-GNRH land), I've been really interested in nutrition. I spent countless hours that summer making use of my parents' newly acquired high-speed internet and researching how to lose weight. I'm not sure if I was even using Google yet. Nutrition science is one of only two scientific fields that I believe I could actually endure studying (the other being food science--Alton Brown style).
My understanding of healthy eating has significantly evolved since that time, fortunately for me and for everyone who eats the food I cook. At 19, when I weighed in at 140 pounds (I'm 5'4") and decided some of that needed to go, my only point of reference for "healthy eating" was the low-fat craze of the 90s. The sudden will to lose weight coincided with a sudden desire I felt to learn how to cook, and my mom just happened to own Moosewood Restaurant's Low-Fat Cookbook. And so this was the first cookbook I ever really cooked out of, as my mother was more than willing to let me experiment on the family (especially since I quickly proved that I had a knack for cooking). For most of that summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college, I consumed almost zero fat. Seriously. I had no problem with sugar--I would still drink the occasional soda and fat-free dessert--but fats of all kinds were banned from my lips. If you want to lose fat, then stop eating it, right? (On a side note, I am very thankful that the Atkins diet hadn't really gained steam yet. I don't know if I would have survived that one, and my family would not have been nearly such good sports if they were served hamburgers with lettuce instead of buns.)
By the end of the summer, when I hadn't had a period in four months, I realized my eating might be a little out of balance. I had also lost more weight than I had even planned--I was down to 110 and still losing. In an effort to add a little more balance to my life, and as a result of a little more internet research, I decided to focus on calories instead of fats. My mother insisted that women need to eat some fat, so I figured that focusing on calories would allow me to eat a little of every food group and still keep it all under control. (If you haven't gotten this already, you should know that control is a key word for me.) Fat just happens to contain a lot of calories. So I started counting calories. The first day I counted, I got to the end of the day and realized I had only eaten about 800 calories all day. Can you say sub-clinical eating disorder? No wonder my body had stopped ovulating.
Thankfully, I did ease up on myself a little over the next six years. I maintained my weight (106 pounds), but allowed myself to consume the occasional piece of pizza or cookie. Basically, my diet focused on veggies, whole grains, and healthy meats and dairy. Fats were a necessary evil and a waste of my daily allotment of calories, but I consumed a few. A little 1% milk here, a tablespoon of olive oil in my salad dressing there. I thought I was balanced enough, and since my OB had gifted me with unlimited prescriptions for the pill to force my body into having periods, I had no clue how my hormones were doing. I decided to believe they had figured themselves out after I had settled into my new lifestyle.
Fast-forward to last summer, when I went off the pill and realized I still had lots of work to do. Through much angst and soul-searching (and, of course, googling), I finally admitted that my body was still starved for fat. So I loathsomely reintroduced full-fat dairy, cream, butter, cheese, 80% ground beef, etc to my lips. After I got over my long-held fear of fat, it was actually quite liberating. And I was surprised to discover that after gaining 10 pounds at the beginning and getting my cycles back (reluctant as they are), I've maintained my weight fairly easily without feeling like I'm restricting myself.
So now I have all my eating rules all reconfigured properly, right? Veggies of all kinds? Good. Whole grains? Good. Healthy fats? Good. Meats? Good (a rule for which my husband is eternally grateful). Any kind of white, refined carbs? Bad. So no white breads or pastas or white rice. These have become my biggest no-no now. Heck, I even grind my own wheat and make my own bread (sometimes) in order to get as much nutrition as I can out of my sandwiches.
But this latter point, about the white rice, has always bugged me. I religiously substitute brown rice for white when cooking at home, and I usually ask if brown rice is available at Asian restaurants when we go out. But I've been to China twice, and never have I seen a grain of brown rice there. The Chinese live on and swear by their white rice. And the Chinese way of eating overall seems brimming with wisdom and health. They have 4,000 years of uninterrupted history behind them, so I guess they've figured out how to eat well. So why are they stuck on white rice, when we in the West have figured out that brown rice is clearly better?
I found my answer today as I was sitting in my acupuncturist's office, waiting for my bring-on-the-ovulation session, and picked up a book called The Asian Diet. I read through the first chapter quickly and got to the second: "Grains." The second paragraph began with this: "Of the grains, white rice is the best." I nearly fainted into the couch at that point. White rice better than brown? How can this be? Is one of my food rules being threatened yet again?
The author went on to explain that we in the West have mistakenly lumped white rice in with white breads, white sugar, and white pasta as food "devoid of value." It's true that whole foods and whole grains are definitely more nutritionally valuable than their refined counterparts, but white rice should apparently still be considered a whole food. Brown rice kernels come in their outer germ layer, which we think is better because it contains more nutrition and fiber. But this author argues that our bodies can get just as much, if not more, nutrition out of white rice than brown. Because the germ layer is so high in fiber, it actually sweeps the food through our bodies for us to be able to effectively digest all the nutrition in the rice kernel. At least that's my understanding of his explanation. Might I remind you that I was an English major, not a nutrition science major. Please don't judge the poor author's science based on my explanation.
The argument only makes sense in light of what he has put forth in the first chapter--that the Asian diet works because it gets our bodies to digest food properly. The average Chinese apparently consumes 25-40% more calories a day than the average American (which seems hard to believe), but they obviously weigh less on average. They simply eat a more appropriately balanced diet, which helps their bodies to digest food more efficiently and maintain a healthy weight and overall well-being.
I'm not totally sure if I buy all those claims. I need to check the book out for myself and read the rest of it. In any case, his claims about white rice answer a lot of questions for me. Maybe next time I make jambalaya, I won't go to all the extra work of converting the recipe to work with brown rice instead of white. And I'm thrilled with the idea that I could eat risotto without feeling guilty and angry that brown arborio rice doesn't exist.
My husband was as thrilled to hear about the white-rice-is-okay revelation as he was to hear the more-fat-is-good revelation. He loves his white rice, and even though I've gotten really good at making brown rice that is just as sticky and fluffy, he insists it just isn't the same. Now he's hoping I find an article or book somewhere that argues that white flour is actually just as good as whole wheat flour.
My understanding of healthy eating has significantly evolved since that time, fortunately for me and for everyone who eats the food I cook. At 19, when I weighed in at 140 pounds (I'm 5'4") and decided some of that needed to go, my only point of reference for "healthy eating" was the low-fat craze of the 90s. The sudden will to lose weight coincided with a sudden desire I felt to learn how to cook, and my mom just happened to own Moosewood Restaurant's Low-Fat Cookbook. And so this was the first cookbook I ever really cooked out of, as my mother was more than willing to let me experiment on the family (especially since I quickly proved that I had a knack for cooking). For most of that summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college, I consumed almost zero fat. Seriously. I had no problem with sugar--I would still drink the occasional soda and fat-free dessert--but fats of all kinds were banned from my lips. If you want to lose fat, then stop eating it, right? (On a side note, I am very thankful that the Atkins diet hadn't really gained steam yet. I don't know if I would have survived that one, and my family would not have been nearly such good sports if they were served hamburgers with lettuce instead of buns.)
By the end of the summer, when I hadn't had a period in four months, I realized my eating might be a little out of balance. I had also lost more weight than I had even planned--I was down to 110 and still losing. In an effort to add a little more balance to my life, and as a result of a little more internet research, I decided to focus on calories instead of fats. My mother insisted that women need to eat some fat, so I figured that focusing on calories would allow me to eat a little of every food group and still keep it all under control. (If you haven't gotten this already, you should know that control is a key word for me.) Fat just happens to contain a lot of calories. So I started counting calories. The first day I counted, I got to the end of the day and realized I had only eaten about 800 calories all day. Can you say sub-clinical eating disorder? No wonder my body had stopped ovulating.
Thankfully, I did ease up on myself a little over the next six years. I maintained my weight (106 pounds), but allowed myself to consume the occasional piece of pizza or cookie. Basically, my diet focused on veggies, whole grains, and healthy meats and dairy. Fats were a necessary evil and a waste of my daily allotment of calories, but I consumed a few. A little 1% milk here, a tablespoon of olive oil in my salad dressing there. I thought I was balanced enough, and since my OB had gifted me with unlimited prescriptions for the pill to force my body into having periods, I had no clue how my hormones were doing. I decided to believe they had figured themselves out after I had settled into my new lifestyle.
Fast-forward to last summer, when I went off the pill and realized I still had lots of work to do. Through much angst and soul-searching (and, of course, googling), I finally admitted that my body was still starved for fat. So I loathsomely reintroduced full-fat dairy, cream, butter, cheese, 80% ground beef, etc to my lips. After I got over my long-held fear of fat, it was actually quite liberating. And I was surprised to discover that after gaining 10 pounds at the beginning and getting my cycles back (reluctant as they are), I've maintained my weight fairly easily without feeling like I'm restricting myself.
So now I have all my eating rules all reconfigured properly, right? Veggies of all kinds? Good. Whole grains? Good. Healthy fats? Good. Meats? Good (a rule for which my husband is eternally grateful). Any kind of white, refined carbs? Bad. So no white breads or pastas or white rice. These have become my biggest no-no now. Heck, I even grind my own wheat and make my own bread (sometimes) in order to get as much nutrition as I can out of my sandwiches.
But this latter point, about the white rice, has always bugged me. I religiously substitute brown rice for white when cooking at home, and I usually ask if brown rice is available at Asian restaurants when we go out. But I've been to China twice, and never have I seen a grain of brown rice there. The Chinese live on and swear by their white rice. And the Chinese way of eating overall seems brimming with wisdom and health. They have 4,000 years of uninterrupted history behind them, so I guess they've figured out how to eat well. So why are they stuck on white rice, when we in the West have figured out that brown rice is clearly better?
I found my answer today as I was sitting in my acupuncturist's office, waiting for my bring-on-the-ovulation session, and picked up a book called The Asian Diet. I read through the first chapter quickly and got to the second: "Grains." The second paragraph began with this: "Of the grains, white rice is the best." I nearly fainted into the couch at that point. White rice better than brown? How can this be? Is one of my food rules being threatened yet again?
The author went on to explain that we in the West have mistakenly lumped white rice in with white breads, white sugar, and white pasta as food "devoid of value." It's true that whole foods and whole grains are definitely more nutritionally valuable than their refined counterparts, but white rice should apparently still be considered a whole food. Brown rice kernels come in their outer germ layer, which we think is better because it contains more nutrition and fiber. But this author argues that our bodies can get just as much, if not more, nutrition out of white rice than brown. Because the germ layer is so high in fiber, it actually sweeps the food through our bodies for us to be able to effectively digest all the nutrition in the rice kernel. At least that's my understanding of his explanation. Might I remind you that I was an English major, not a nutrition science major. Please don't judge the poor author's science based on my explanation.
The argument only makes sense in light of what he has put forth in the first chapter--that the Asian diet works because it gets our bodies to digest food properly. The average Chinese apparently consumes 25-40% more calories a day than the average American (which seems hard to believe), but they obviously weigh less on average. They simply eat a more appropriately balanced diet, which helps their bodies to digest food more efficiently and maintain a healthy weight and overall well-being.
I'm not totally sure if I buy all those claims. I need to check the book out for myself and read the rest of it. In any case, his claims about white rice answer a lot of questions for me. Maybe next time I make jambalaya, I won't go to all the extra work of converting the recipe to work with brown rice instead of white. And I'm thrilled with the idea that I could eat risotto without feeling guilty and angry that brown arborio rice doesn't exist.
My husband was as thrilled to hear about the white-rice-is-okay revelation as he was to hear the more-fat-is-good revelation. He loves his white rice, and even though I've gotten really good at making brown rice that is just as sticky and fluffy, he insists it just isn't the same. Now he's hoping I find an article or book somewhere that argues that white flour is actually just as good as whole wheat flour.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Maybe the Needles Will Help
I just had my first acupuncture session yesterday. It's really kind of random that I'm even trying acupuncture. I get regular emails from a site called Groupon that offer me amazing discounts on all kinds of things in the area where I live. My husband makes sure I don't take too many of the offers. But one came through a couple of weeks ago for an acupuncture treatment and initial consultation for only $29--regularly $120. I've always wanted to try acupuncture, and now I actually have a really good reason. So of course I went for it.
I should preface this by saying that as frustrated as I have been about not being able to see an RE, a very small part of me is thankful that I'm not undergoing the craziness of regular ultrasounds, injections, or whatever else an RE might put me on. In fact, I have been rather disillusioned with modern medicine overall through this experience of infertility. I long to trust that my doctor knows everything. But really? She only has a tiny bit more of a clue than I do after reading scientific papers. And with hypothalamic amenorrhea, it seems that many doctors have less of a clue than I do. And I'm very turned off by the piecemeal, fragmented approach of modern medicine. They treat whatever small complaint you have as a separate issue, usually by throwing some drug at you. You know what? I don't want a drug. I want to know what is causing the problem.
On the other hand, I've always been skeptical about so-called alternative medicine. Probably because my husband is an extremely skeptical scientist. Also, being brought up in American schools, we're bred not to believe in anything that science doesn't understand. But you know what? I believe 100% in God, and science doesn't understand him at all. Not that medicine and religion are on any sort of level playing field, but could it be that science doesn't understand everything about medicine yet? Gasp.
So, as my ramblings are probably evidencing, I was quite excited about my acupuncture consultation and treatment. I have no idea how all those tiny needles up and down my spine could possibly help me get pregnant. But my acupuncturist assured me that her treatments could get me back on a regular cycle in 3-6 months! I didn't think a regular cycle was even possible for me. And with no weird chemicals? She also informed me that my pulse was a little weak, whatever that means, and that she would want to see it get a bit stronger before my body tried to support a baby. I think she was implying that we should stop even trying before I get 3 months of treatments under my belt. Well, that's not going to happen. There's no way DH is going to be donning any kind of rubber apparatus in bed any time soon. And yes, next time I ovulate, we will BMS it up. If I get pregnant and my pulse isn't quite as strong as she would like...well, I'll just have to do some jumping jacks to get it stronger.
Beyond the more natural and holistic perspective, the cost of acupuncture is also very attractive. If we started going to an RE, we would probably rack up anywhere between $2000 and $20,000 in costs within the first month. Regular acupuncture with this particular woman would probably cost about $700 in six months, and that's including any special herbs she might recommend. Awesome.
I think my hubby would still like to at least wait this cycle out before starting anything new. That makes sense to me. It is my first try with clomid, so chances are somewhat favorable. However, I'm on day 20 today with no ovulation yet. Sigh. My body is just so stinkin' slow.
I should preface this by saying that as frustrated as I have been about not being able to see an RE, a very small part of me is thankful that I'm not undergoing the craziness of regular ultrasounds, injections, or whatever else an RE might put me on. In fact, I have been rather disillusioned with modern medicine overall through this experience of infertility. I long to trust that my doctor knows everything. But really? She only has a tiny bit more of a clue than I do after reading scientific papers. And with hypothalamic amenorrhea, it seems that many doctors have less of a clue than I do. And I'm very turned off by the piecemeal, fragmented approach of modern medicine. They treat whatever small complaint you have as a separate issue, usually by throwing some drug at you. You know what? I don't want a drug. I want to know what is causing the problem.
On the other hand, I've always been skeptical about so-called alternative medicine. Probably because my husband is an extremely skeptical scientist. Also, being brought up in American schools, we're bred not to believe in anything that science doesn't understand. But you know what? I believe 100% in God, and science doesn't understand him at all. Not that medicine and religion are on any sort of level playing field, but could it be that science doesn't understand everything about medicine yet? Gasp.
So, as my ramblings are probably evidencing, I was quite excited about my acupuncture consultation and treatment. I have no idea how all those tiny needles up and down my spine could possibly help me get pregnant. But my acupuncturist assured me that her treatments could get me back on a regular cycle in 3-6 months! I didn't think a regular cycle was even possible for me. And with no weird chemicals? She also informed me that my pulse was a little weak, whatever that means, and that she would want to see it get a bit stronger before my body tried to support a baby. I think she was implying that we should stop even trying before I get 3 months of treatments under my belt. Well, that's not going to happen. There's no way DH is going to be donning any kind of rubber apparatus in bed any time soon. And yes, next time I ovulate, we will BMS it up. If I get pregnant and my pulse isn't quite as strong as she would like...well, I'll just have to do some jumping jacks to get it stronger.
Beyond the more natural and holistic perspective, the cost of acupuncture is also very attractive. If we started going to an RE, we would probably rack up anywhere between $2000 and $20,000 in costs within the first month. Regular acupuncture with this particular woman would probably cost about $700 in six months, and that's including any special herbs she might recommend. Awesome.
I think my hubby would still like to at least wait this cycle out before starting anything new. That makes sense to me. It is my first try with clomid, so chances are somewhat favorable. However, I'm on day 20 today with no ovulation yet. Sigh. My body is just so stinkin' slow.
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