cjsmith | Some days are like that

Current Mood: craptastic

Some days are like that

Happy Hour in the office today is nachos and beer. In terms of progress, my day so far has pretty much been like yesterday, and things aren't exactly speeding up while I listen to everybody else party. Did I mention that the music is loud?

I realize I have really turned into a whiner lately. I do not like being a whiner. There must be things I can do to improve this situation. So far, I can think of three dramatic changes I might be able to make, any one of which would help in the short term:
1) Get off this diet
2) Get off this project
3) Find a job at a less food-oriented company, or at least one that isn't militantly carbohydrate-only

Maybe other things would help too. It is now my job to think of them.

But damn, it sure would be nice to be like everybody else once in a while. I took years to accept the fact that I would never again be fully able-bodied. I thought I was done with this "suck it up, everyone around you can enjoy things you will never enjoy again, get used to it and learn to shut up" kind of mental adjustment crap. Now I have the relentless tyranny of food in addition to being a gimp.

Some days just suck.

And now I need to think of ways I could make life suck less.

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Any chance that you can ask them to have something that you can eat once in a while, too?

Oh, I could, but honestly, I don't know what to suggest. What snack foods aren't carb-rich? Carrots are out. I've already had all the nuts I can stomach today. Cheese would be good, I guess. That's a thought.

I'm reluctantly coming to the conclusion that I may just have to get out of here -- sooner rather than later. That is not a conclusion I particularly like, but I definitely need to keep it in mind.

Man, it's getting louder. The beer has reached their bloodstreams.

I was going to suggest cheese. Cold cuts, if you like them? With a little bit of money and research one can find dry sausages intended to be sliced and eaten without further cooking (sojouk comes to mind). Is fruit okay, or too carby? Dried fruit? (Trader Joe's Dried Berry Medley, so addictive holy crap.) Jerky? Yogurt (maybe the Greek style)? Oh what about smoked salmon?

Cheese, yes. Some cold cuts, if they're not sugar-cured; ditto sausage. No fruit or dried fruit; no jerky; yogurt is good as long as it's not sweetened.

I definitely need to branch out. I haven't had yogurt in ages, because I haven't bothered to go find a non-sweetened non-artificially-sweetened kind. (Most artificial sweeteners taste bitter to me. It's a weirdness of mine.) So I could go get some good plain yogurt. Celery sticks with unsweetened peanut butter or almond butter on them; those would be great. I need to go get this kind of thing and have it on hand.

Plain yogurt - allows you to mix in permitted fruits (berries, maybe?) as you wish. You will want to get Pavel's or Stonyfield, or some of the other brands. The hippy brands will likely be good, and the other brands that will work will be ethnic brands. Either of these gives you a lot more choices.

Cheese it totally do-able, as are sausages. Jerky is good for a keep in the desk snack, if it is not too salty for you. Almonds, peanuts, whatever nuts are permitted. Roasted chickpeas can be made at home and are tasty and crunchy if beanz are allowed?

As for your company and food, perhaps ask around to see who else might be willing to work with you on food. Your restrictions are pretty severe, but folks who are low carbing, doing South Beach, or something like that may also want to do the same kinds of food as you - that way, a group of you can brainstorm and bring ideas up to the folks who are doing the food buying and bringing. That may make it more effective to get more you can have. You're not the only one with food restrictions, and if you get others on board, you may improve things for everyone. The people without restrictions aren't used to thinking about this, but you can bring it up best with a group.

Beans are allowed "in moderation". What's roasted chickpeas? Is that a step in the process of making hummus? (I have never worked with chickpeas, can you tell?)

I've got one coworker who claims to be on a yeast control diet but who ate the nachos. So he doesn't count. This is a stunning blood sugar control diet, so diabetic people might be interested, but the diabetic coworker who helped me with my first self-injection has recently left the company. I think I'm on my own on this one. The company is small; we don't have too many outliers around.

I need to snag some snacky cheese, sausages (summer sausage, if that doesn't have sugar), and other munchies. Main dishes, while kind of blah when I'm the cook, are mostly doable. Snacks and treats are where I'm floundering.

Roasted chickpeas are just that.

Take chickpeas (be lazy, buy a can, and rinse those suckers like craaaazy.) Then drain em, toss em in olive oil till they are wet but not dripping. Bake in single layer on a cookie sheet at 375 till they are roasted. Soooo good.

Hummus is different. Basic hummus recipie is chickpeas, some kind of oil, lemon juice, and salt. After that, one starts adding things and tweaking things and it is best to either purchase or find a recipie. You can add olives, red peppers, chili, paprika, tahini (tahini is my best friend. It is a ground up sesame paste that adds flavor, smokieness, and body to foodz.), some folks add eggplant, I don't. Hummus is a good base recipie.

Another fun one is olivada. The simplest version is take olives, chop them hella fine, or run through the food processor till it is a smooth happy paste. Then eat on lettuce roll ups, or on celery or whatever.

You can do a chunky olivada with sun dried tomatoes if that is allowed.

Tahini is a great thing to have around the house anyways. You can mix it with a little bit of lemon and make a fantastic sauce for a light fish too.

My hummus is simply chickpeas, tahini, garlic (very important!), lemon, and salt. Salsa and hummus is also a lovely combination of flavors. I make them seperately and serve them together (ie, put a layer of salsa on top of the hummus and serve with chips).

How long is "till they are roasted"? Should they turn a darker color, become crunchy, ...?

I totally want to learn to make -- Never mind, I'm lying. What I want is to EAT hummus. I can buy hummus, in fact a particular favorite of mine is stocked regularly at TJ's, and I'm allowed to have it "in moderation", so now I just need to figure out what to scoop it up with. A spoon seems a little boring. :-)

My cousin's hummus recipe:

1 can chickpeas.
1 big tablespoon tahini.
1 or 2 cloves minced garlic.
2 tbsp. olive oil.
Juice of 1 or 1/2 lemon.

Blend with hand blender, add water till texture is appealing.

Simple, tasty. I add extra tahini.

now I just need to figure out what to scoop it up with

Celery, lettuce, raw spinach. Hm, carrots are out; are red bell peppers okay? They make lovely scooping sticks. Cucumber slices, raw zucchini in sticks or slices. You don't like broccoli, so that's out; how do you feel about cauliflower? Lightly steamed might be tastier than raw, in which case I would thin the hummus out with lemon juice or olive oil or in a pinch water and use it as a dressing instead of a dip.

Or a spoon! If you are going to use a spoon, I say cover it in chopped fresh herbs (parsley comes to mind) and maybe olives and paprika first. Mmmm. Not boring at all.

Foofy stores like trader joes will sometimes carry ready made roasted fava beans. They're tasty, and spookily similar to pretzels in my opinion.

I will try to think of more things. I love food and I love finding things for people to enjoy.

Best yogurt EVAR (http://stbenoit.com/)! Or maybe it's just me? This stuff is awesome too (http://www.fraicheyogurt.com/)... but you gotta come to palo alto for it :) Of course my favorite is the frozen stuff, which is sweetened... but I am told they have excellent greek yogurt too.

Grill some steak or bring in roaster chickens and hold your own party... Create a taco bar and you just fill up your plate with the meat, cheese, beans, and some greens... while everyone else takes the tortillas, too.

Some businesses have parking lot BBQs. Maybe this is something you can suggest so you at least have an option? Find out who coordinates these things and put a bug in their ear.

One thing I'd do is just being in my own food and party. A dark chocolate molé sauce sounds good right about now...

Anyway, I don't know where you can work where there aren't coffee, donuts, and high-carb snack foods everywhere. But I swear you can't be the only person who has dietary issues, and some people on the South Beach Diet, people who are diabetic, people who are on meds where they can't drink alcohol (incl antibiotics), would be GRATEFUL if you offered them an alternative, too.

Yes, a taco bar party or a grill party would be good; I could pick and choose the stuff that works for me. We haven't had one of those in a while. I should volunteer to take on one of the happy hours and give everybody celery sticks with unsweetened peanut butter on them. ;-) ;-)

You're right that just about any workplace has massively-glycemic snacks all over it. And many social situations have alcohol as a fundamental presumption. Like it or lump it, this is one of those things where I'm going to have to learn ways to adapt.

I get really bitchy when I realise just how much yummy food at potlucks I go to is NOT gluten-free. Same as in workplaces like yours. Everyone eats donuts and pizza takeout and sourdough bread sandwiches and cookies and cake... the list is practically endless.

I sympathise.

I also go out and make and buy gluten-free food, and sometimes I offer some if I make a lot. And sometimes... sometimes I just let everyone else pig out on their stuff while I eat mine.

One thing that makes my diet a nightmare is if anyone wants to schedule an interview that partially includes sharing a meal.

So many times I wonder what to do around that. There's nothing like eating up a lot before I go and ordering a drink and something light and hoping the cross-contamination isn't present or just ordering a drink and nothing else and explaining the issue to them (which I hate when they insist I should eat something).

Letting everyone else pig out on their stuff while I pig out on mine would be a good approach, I think. What I should probably do next is widen the variety of snacks I eat regularly. So far, I eat peanuts and I eat dark chocolate. At the end of the day, I could pick those up from my desk and carry them over to where the party is, but it wouldn't really feel like much of a party. If I had some variety available, though, it would. And that's something I can tackle.

YES, it is something you can tackle! My thoughts were:
1. have food that YOU like with you and around you and stashed in so many places that there is always some (and, as you said, various kinds)
2. bring in food to share. Actually getting the company to buy food you can eat is even better.

I'm vegetarian (almost vegan) and have been for around 20 years. I realize what you are doing is much more restrictive (as well as being new to you). I bring fruit in to work to share with co-workers every once in a while. It's good share food. I have my one sandwich I order at Togo's. Yours may be harder, but you CAN have food, abundant and yummy food, around you. You can even do it almost easily -- once you get it figured out.

Maybe also think about drinkable things to bring over to the party?

As for the feeling resentful and grumpy-- I don't see how anyone in your shoes would not feel this way, more or less, at least some of the time. I'm pretty sure that if you had a friend who was doing the stuff you are doing you'd think listening to some complaints would be the least you could do, and very very reasonable on their part -- no? Perhaps "whining" is practice for letting people know, nicely, that you need to have a few changes made. This will also clue them in if/when you quit or start screaming etc....

I've gotten started, a bit, with my latest run to Trader Joe's. This probably sounds horrific to a vegan, but I've got a big pile of cheeses and salame, and those can be my new snacks! They need refrigeration, so that's not ideal -- stuff has a way of vanishing from the communal work fridge -- but it's a darned good start.

You're probably right about the resentful and grumpy. It's just that I feel I *finally* got somewhat sane and re-balanced after the whole foot thing, having spent the better part of five years resentful and grumpy, and oh look, here I go again! *sigh* I want to make more conscious choices about my attitudes, because I don't want to turn into an eighty-year-old prune pit some day.

Actually the cheese and salame are not at all horrific to me. Not that I want to EAT them (I don't) but um I guess I'm more just into food and the whole finding choices thing.... so YEAH for that!

Regarding the 5 years: exactly.
Regarding choices of attitudes: can you please teach me how to do this? --I'm well on the way to being a bitter old person.

Re: communal fridge: Do you put labels on packages with your name on it? This has worked well for me in company fridges and freezers (although I do use MY name rather than yours....) I also try to put my stuff in out-of-the-way drawers or take over ONE shelf in the door with stuff with my name (so at least it is not all over the place.) One company I worked for had an almost empty freezer -- which I made use of by "stocking up" on frozen stuff (and labelling it as mine).

Oh. You are so -not- a whiner.

I know you might feel you are, but trust me... you don't even rate on the whiner scale. You're fine.

I feel like I'm whining about food stuff a LOT. I went back and counted the last week or so of public posts, and some of the food ones weren't *really* whining, and there was a work-project-grumble in there, and there were a coupla positive things. So maybe by the numbers it hasn't been as bad as I'm thinking it's been.

But man, I'm WORKING at that positivity. Maybe that's what I'm noticing: I'm whining mentally, whining to myself, all the effing time. No wonder I'm tired of it. If I were my friend I'd buy me a steak just to shut me up. Ha! So I should buy myself a steak! That's not a bad answer, actually. :-)

Ya know...

I see that you are writing about food issues and what you can and can't do. And about how it is a real PITA. Pain in the... you know, not the flour kind.

But, here's what I -like- about your posts. You are writing about where you are, what you are trying, and what works and doesn't work. You're making more progress and doing more work on Food than most people I know do in years. I know some people who wouldn't do this much in a lifetime, but would rather sit and whine about how terrible it is, without doing anything about it at all.

You are working on this, you are figuring things out, and honestly... you're handling this incredibly well. Hell, I'm a tough bitch myself, but when I was doing South Beach, the first week, I woulda mugged a kindergartener for their lunch just to get an orange. People got tired of listening to me talk about how... I just want one orange, dammit. Just one.

You are doing this downright gracefully. It is educational to me to watch.

Wow, thank you. I feel like a bumbling klutz about it all. If I had already been a good cook before this started, or if I had been a trained nutritionist, or something, then *poof* it would be quite a bit easier. But I'm learning stuff like, oh, how to chop onions, from scratch. There is a LOT to learn!

The cravings can be really bad, especially when cutting out 80% of your diet in one swell foop. I think mainly I'm past most of that, though. What I want is the ability to eat socially, convenience and ease, and something -- anything -- that tastes appealing. I can probably get there, except maybe the convenience and ease, but I'm not there yet.

Before you say it, yes you shouldn't HAVE to do this, but if there's someone in your office who normally organizes snacky things and parties, you could make up a list of stuff you CAN have, organized by store. (E.G., Trader Joe's _______, Whole Foods _______, Safeway ______, etc.)

That would make it easier for office food. Or at least remove excuses like "We didn't know what was OK to get you."

Yes. This.

That will help. Some people may want to help, but not know how. This makes it much easier for them to help in an actually helpful way.

I need to do more "research" (shopping, cookbook-reading, what-have-you) on which snacky things, if any, aren't carb-based. I dropped into a Walgreen's this morning looking for snacks, and they carried exactly two things I could (and would) eat: my Lindt 85% chocolate, and hardboiled eggs. No new things for my list there. But I know there have to be some.

As we've gotten larger and actually keep a list of whose turn it is to get lunch for office lunch days, we've just asked people to add restrictions to the page - not that the whole thing needs to meet all of the restrictions, just that you include something reasonable for all of the options. Off the top of my head, the list has included: no shrimp, vegetarian, "vegan but don't even try, I'll bring my own", no beans, no raw fish... so when someone gets boloco wraps, there are veggie ones, and there are rice-and-meat-only ones (or even better, we're big enough to get the qdoba hot-bar, where they show up with build-it-yourself tacos for N); when there's sushi, there's katsu as well. Sometimes people screw up (well, not with the shrimp one, that's actually a fatal allergy, not a "mere" preference) but most of the time it works, and everyone makes an effort. Simply communicating about it does seem to have made a difference, socially (I'm sure it's partly because we're big enough that as long as *some* people are being receptive and encouraging, the others will take the hint.)

Works for us, anyway, though we're starting to get big enough that it's getting more complicated (last time I needed several people to help me carry food the two blocks back from Mary's :-)

We have quite a few vegetarians, including the one company founder, so we're good on that score. One early employee can't eat various kinds of beans (I think it's some kind of kinase deficiency, maybe?) but beans are generally easy to avoid in American culture. She'd have a lot more trouble in India, where cross-contamination of just about any dish could put her in the hospital. Sadly, that's what I'm like here. I am avoiding just about any dish! :-) For example, I'm not at all sure I could eat *anything* Mary's makes. Almost all spicy dishes are heavily sweetened "under the hood", and of course noodles and rice and pancakes and ravs are all out, and that leaves... I don't know what.

Yes, I should do that. Heck, I should have those lists MYSELF; so far, what I know I can have is mostly raw ingredients that need to be cooked. That isn't enough knowledge to offer to a person planning happy hour.

*hugs* I've had several people whom I've been close with over the years go through those same challenges and seeing them up close, I know it's not as "easy" as saying "suck it up."

It's unbelievable to me how difficult this is. Somebody once compared it to "dieting" and I about wanted to smack her; if I could be merely "dieting" I would jump for joy right now. I am almost starting to doubt my own sanity.

har har har -- the almost doubting your sanity part is some kind of hidden built in thing. (No, I'm not being sadistic, it is rather dark humor though.) Takes me back to life on crutches: I could so see how the psychological parts were built in to the deal, but also sort of deep and hidden. Have you seen the magazine "living without" -- I don't recall which Whole Foods I was in recently that had it by the checkout (could have been in Palo Alto, or may have been the one by Hamilton off 17). I think of that because I do find there is some help in others who understand and/or know how to actually help.

Do you have a working email address? Or do I need to post offers *here*?

*wry laughter* You are so right about the hidden built in thing. Sometimes that's worse than any of the obvious parts of the problem, because at least the obvious parts other people will (when sufficiently beaten over the head) understand and if they choose they can help, but the nonobvious parts you're alone with.

Haven't seen "Living Without".

Not sure what you mean by offers. I do have a working email address but it is so spam-choked that I've gone to a whitelist system. Comment here & delete, or send Rob, your e-mail address and I will make sure to whitelist it.

Living Without is a magazine about restricted diets. There is a segment of This American Life that refers to it to -- possibly Starly Kline (sp?). I may have to go find it for you -- seems like just the ticket for your current situation -- food restriction humor...

I don't think you are a whiner. Or at least, to the small degree you are, I can see why. :) I don't know exactly what to do about the food. As others said, I'm sure you could talk to somebody and make sure they get something you can eat now and then. Which would be nice, but a) sort of puts you in the center of attention, with which I don't know if you would be okay, and b) only helps sometimes. The rest of the time you'd still feel left out.

I wonder if it might be better to keep something in your desk you can eat. Maybe (if possible) something you can stick way in the back as a treat you never allow yourself, but only take out when everyone else has a treat. That way, you almost feel rewarded as part of the group, even if you are theoretically rewarding YOURSELF. :)

Thanks about the whining. I'm kind of hypersensitive to that kind of thing, because honestly, I *do* have good reasons to whine, and yet -- It's like when I faced the fact that my foot pain was likely to last the rest of my life. I wanted to be a healthy pain-free active 70-year-old some day, but that choice wasn't open any more. I did have a choice though. I could be a bitter nasty friendless gimpy in-pain 70-year-old, or I could be a cheerful humorous gimpy in-pain 70-year-old. Whether I had good reasons to be bitter or not, the second choice was far more appealing. And here I am again. I'd rather be a cheerful gimpy person who can't eat most anything instead of a bitter gimpy person who can't eat most anything. (sad half-smile)

I think the treat concept is right on the money, and I'm working on that. So far I have found a bunch of things needing refrigeration. I'll find more and better stuff as time goes on.

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Some days are like that

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yes, it is

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