When Hypoglycemia, Security Issues, and IBS Collide

A couple of things have been going on with my body lately.

For the last three weeks or so, I have been fighting the urge to eat constantly. I want to eat immediately after a nice filling meal. I want to eat an hour later. I want to eat before dinner and during dinner and in the middle of the night. I know full well that I’m not actually hungry during all of these times, only some of them, but the urge is there all the time.

Because of the viscerally terrible feeling that a hypoglycemic attack brings, the Pavlovian response for me is to eat the moment I know I’m hungry. Not just the little rumblings you get a few hours before a meal, but the sharp feeling in the tummy that means actual hunger. If I don’t act on it right away, I risk an attack.

But lately my body has been confusing the hell out of me, telling me it’s hungry in that way all the damn time, even when logically it’s impossible. This is not terribly helpful.

I choose to interpret this in a hippieish way. Food is associated with the root chakra and grounding, and hence my body’s telling me that I’m having security issues right now. This is a big duh, since I was, you know, laid off. But it’s getting annoying, and a little expensive, that my brain can’t get through to my stomach that things are okay for now.

So I’m learning to deafen to my body’s requests for the moment. It took a lot of effort to train my inner ear for when I need to eat, or have a glass of water, or go for a walk, so I’m frustrated that I have to turn off all that training in order not to gain 80 pounds in a week. But it seems to be the only thing I can do until I get my feet under me again. Metaphysically, that is.

The other thing is that for almost the last week straight I have been having digestive issues. Last weekend, BF and I went to our favorite Mexican restaurant, and I had my favorite burrito, but the onions were not cooked through as they usually are. They were almost raw. I ate them anyway, even though I know that raw onions don’t agree with me, and boy did I ever pay the price. I was in pain so severe that our plans for the evening were totally preempted, and I ended up lying on the couch watching Labyrinth, prostrate with dehydration and pain, getting up occasionally to suffer through another episode on the porcelain throne. It wasn’t good.

Since then I’ve had mild pain on and off throughout the day, every day. It’s been a lot like monthly cramps. The output has been more or less normal, but the pain is not. Generally after I have an incident like the one I described, my system is cooperative and healthy for a good month or so – no matter the pain, I have to admit that a thing like that surely is a good cleanout – but this time the effects have lingered.

So I’ve tried to be a lot more conscious and careful about what’s going in the piehole lately. Partly because I seem to want to be filling it all the time, and partly because I’ve had to be a lot more sensitive to what I’m filling it with.