simont | (no subject)

I was planning to lay off the Chinese food last night and see whether it helped my Sunday-night insomnia. However, after the extreme hangover of doom I decided that my sleep patterns were likely to be completely disrupted anyway and I'd probably manage to have insomnia no matter what happened, so I ate Chinese anyway and will do the experiment some other weekend when it has a better chance of being controlled.

Good job too, as it turned out, since I was completely wrong in the other direction and slept like a log. If I'd avoided Chinese just before that happened, then I might have wrongly convinced myself that it was to blame, and sworn off it unnecessarily! That's pretty scary. I hadn't fully considered the risks of this business until now.

In other news, songster pointed out a blog entry suggesting that at least one other person had the same problem as I did with the Star Wars trilogy, so it doesn't seem to be a one-off. How depressing. My second copy has apparently already been dispatched, as well; I bet they just shoved another one in an envelope and didn't actually check it was OK…

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I think the not sleeping on Sunday nights is more likely to be due to low-level stress about going back to work the next day. Anyway, a more sensible and pleasing way to conduct your experiment might be to eat EXTRA chinese on other nights of the week.

low-level stress about going back to work the next day

Yes, this has always been my assumption too. It was only when Owen pointed out recently that Chinese food was also a possible suspect that I thought it might be worth experimenting to find out which was to blame.

to eat EXTRA chinese on other nights of the week

This was suggested before as well :-) The thing is, if I do that and then have insomnia, then I still have to test leaving out Chinese on a Sunday, so the whole process takes longer to produce a definitive result. Better to test straight away in the environment I will eventually want to run in, is my philosophy.

Um. Just had the Chinese-food -> insomnia thing myself.

I hadn't fully considered the risks of this business until now.

This is why they have exclusion diets for trying to work out in a controlled way what things in your diet might be responsible for making you feel crap. The downside of such diets is that they invariably involve living on rice and boiled fish (or similarly exciting foodstuffs) for about two weeks before you're allowed to introduce anything interesting back into your diet.

If you're thinking of trying an exclusion-type diet for yourself, I'd recommend the one in the book You Are What You Eat. It's a TV tie-in, but don'tlet that put you off. There's amazing advice in there on how to feel happier, stronger and healthier by eating the right things. It's led me to cut down massively on dairy products, caffeine, refined sugars and wheat, and I do feel that I have more energy for it.

Thanks for the tip, but I'd probably use the one recommended by my GP ...

Fair enough - I was thinking for a DIY version. If you have a GP who can give you proper advice on diet, you're a lucky woman!

Have you asked your GP? If so, why wouldn't/couldn't he help?

I mean, I just said to mine that I was feeling under the weather (tired, low-level stomach upsets, headachey, etc.) nearly all the time, & I was sick of taking ADs which always just made me feel worse, and I wondered if at least some of the symptoms might be diet-related, and was there a good way I could test this? And he went away and asked a nutritionist & then got back to me with a diet-sheet and said I could follow it myself if I wanted to.

But it's not a "diet" that you stick to for ever. It's a fixed-duration process where you basically eliminate everything from your diet that's even vaguely likely to cause allergies, for 2 weeks (IIRC), and then reintroducing things in a controlled fashion. (The reintroductions sound about as horrible as the abstinence -- you have to have enough of each thing that it would definitely cause a reaction if you were allergic/intolerant to that thing, e.g. drinking a pint of milk a day - blehh!)

I can do you a copy if you want, but I've never tried it, because it really does require having several weeks when you can completely control what you eat... and usually in any given month I have too many meals-out and parties and stuff that I just don't want to miss! The symptoms I get are all so vague and low-level that I can't quite convince myself that the hassle of the diet is worth the potential gain...

I would be interested in a copy of it, if you could make me one.

And the downside of *that* is that it can be self-fulfilling - if you cut *anything* out for a prolonged period, there's some chance of there being some kind of reaction when you reintroduce it. Usually temporary, but if you take that as confirmation of suspicions, then you'll end up cutting out foodstuffs or whole food groups for no damn reason.

Never do this sort of thing except under the supervision of someone who doesn't stand to gain financially from diagnosing an intolerance.