Having learned I have significant anaemia, I decided to increase dietary iron, take my iron tablets, and give myself unrestricted permission to become a human burrito while watching Border Patrol.

HOWEVER, my housing company texted me and it derailed my cosy plans. They informed me that the surveyor – who didn’t turn up last time hence me calling him invisible – would be coming on Friday.

So, I had to postpone my rest to clean my flat. To make matters worse, adding iron to my diet also didn’t go very well either. There was a whole chaos goblin level pistachio creme incident. It isn’t all bad at all though. So far, my stomach remains painful but gastritis-free, and the ambience of my flat has improved considerably thanks to my son’s vinyl record player purchase.

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Preparing For the Surveyor.

As soon as the housing company sent the surveyor text on Tuesday, I knew I had to start cleaning immediately.. It’s been quite a while since I was able to clean my entire flat in a day, and not even the thought of having someone coming to view my flat has given me motivation.

When I’m cleaning I get ANNOYINGLY interrupted by breathlessness and feeling half dead.

That’s pretty unsurprising though, giving my haemoglobin, in medical terms, is fucked. It’s probably similar to cleaning while half way up Mount Everest – instead of altitude sickness, I have lack-of-iron sickness. Plus, I’ve barely slept for a week because I have cluster headaches and exertion regularly triggers severely painful attacks.

I really hope The Invisible Surveyor materialises this time though, this will be the second time I’ve prepared my flat and got up ridiculously early.

What made cleaning easier was the Flash Direct to Floor stuff I bought thanks to a Netflix advert I mentioned in this post. The advert was actually not wrong for once: it really is fantastic. It makes it much easier to clean floors, it dries fast and smells so nice. I really did enjoy how amazing my flat smelled afterwards.

It’s Thursday as I am writing this and I still haven’t finished my flat, but I am EXHAUSTED today, I really just wanted a day of writing this post and recovering.

Most of the mess I had to clean up in my kitchen on Tuesday, was due to the Return of the Chaos Goblin the night before.

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The Return of the Chaos Goblin

Thanks to the way I have been recovering, I haven’t had intense hunger, extreme hunger, or any type of binge-like behaviour for MONTHS. I really like everything I eat now, and have spent AGES making my food even more enjoyable – balancing functionality with fun.

When you’re 42 and recovering from an eating disorder, functionality does not become less necessary, unfortunately. When I was 20, I could survive an 18-hour shift by eating kebab meat, chips and gravy, followed by various Iceland processed beige foods with bread when I got home.

Now, if I even ate those things – with my same body but older – it would cause me to be less functional than not eating at all.

So, when I designed my own meal plan for my recovery, I added a lot of function. My calories are fairly low (but completely normal) due to my current inactivity so I had to fit everything my body needed – high protein, fat, high fibre and carbs – into 1750 calories.

This may sound awful, because the internet has equated functional foods to punishment, but I LOVE all of my functional foods.

I look forward to my burrito every day, I really LOVE salad so much that I crave red onions and kale BAD if I run out. I’ve eaten it every SINGLE day and have NOT got bored of it once. Even when I have Greggs, I work it in so I can still eat my burrito. I wouldn’t choose ANYTHING over it.

I feel this same way about all of my functional foods. I really LOVE them, and I LOVE how they feel when I eat them. It’s almost as if my body thanks me. It feels so good.

There is also the FUN.

I have a problem with snacks: they don’t seem to do anything for me. I could graze indefinitely. So I plate a couple of snacks and make them into a meal. Then it feels like I have actually eaten something: it’s super fun, and it’s always different depending on what I am currently hyperfixated on.

At the moment, I eat two rice cakes with pistachio creme, a milk slice, a couple of chocolate pistachios and two lidl energy balls.

So, when I came to add iron to my diet, the only thing I could change was getting rid of that snack meal and replacing it with fortified cereal with full-fat milk. This meant I didn’t have room for snacks as well.

I lasted 3 days, before my body decided it had quite enough of The Sad Flakes.

It caused intense, binge-like hunger and I ate all of the snacks I’d REALLY missed after I had eaten the cereal. I found it pretty funny, though, because cereal is often presented as this recovery food. The narrative would have it that, because I swapped rice cakes for cereal it was a recovery win, and that’s what caused me to eat the entire box of cereal.

No. Absolutely NOT. There was no more cereal.

I did NOT want cereal, I do NOT want it EVER again. I wanted my rice cakes with pistachio creme, my milk cake, my energy balls and my chocolate pistachios.

The cereal felt like restriction, because it was restriction. It also turned my entire meal plan into function. Cereal is sinfully boring. Although it has succeeded in it’s invented purpose, it is MEANT to be boring: a bowl of the same plain thing over and over again. Unlike all of my fun snacks.

I felt really bad about letting my intense-hunger chaos goblin win, because I may have eaten everything I had in the flat that wasn’t cereal-shaped. I did worry about eating so much and I got pretty upset, but then I turned it into a potential recovery win – getting up the next day and doing NOTHING to fix it.

Unfortunately, this was Monday night and the housing company texted me Tuesday morning and I started cleaning, so I didn’t get a chance to deliberately stay still and not compensate.

Probably just as well I ate a bunch the night before. With anaemia I needed whatever energy my body could generate.

The Return of the Snack Plate has fixed this whole issue and I’ve been absolutely fine since. I really don’t want sad flakes ever again. I’ll just have to supplement iron, if my stomach doesn’t declare war.

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The Hard to Swallow Iron Pill

This is the fourth day of taking Ferrous Fumerate every single day.

I thought that taking it every other day was more beneficial because of hepcidin. However, I’ve since read that if you have fairly bad anaemia, hepcidin can remain lower anyway. Taking it every other day didn’t prevent gastritis last time, and I need as much iron as is biologically possible as soon as is biologically possible.

I also have to take it with food because my stomach – fine with eating a ridiculous amount of snacks at once due to a pistachio creme deficiency – is NOT fine with tablets. It is a delicate little bean.

I have to eat with my MH meds too, despite taking them very late at night, or my stomach issues often flare up. Taking iron with food can reduce how much is absorbed, which is another reason I’m following the daily plan.

I’ve been surprised that I’m mostly fine. My stomach hurts a lot. The pain makes me constantly imagine the shape of it, which is really odd, and I feel “stuffed” quickly as if I ate too much. But it isn’t gastritis, so currently, I can live with it.

I’m looking forward to the iron actually working, though, because I’ve been anaemic for a year and I think I’ve forgotten what not being anaemic feels like.

That’s certainly the case with the breathlessness. I did wonder why strength training had not made me any fitter in NINE MONTHS. Bulgarians would ruin me; I’d get so breathless I’d see black spots, feel faint and feel nauseous. But lower level breathlessness just feels normal to me now.

I’ve taken a break from doing strength, so my body can make some more haemoglobin. I’m proud of myself, though, because I’ve been eating the same amount of food even though I’m now not doing that either.

If I gain weight, I gain weight.

Removing that snack plate and swapping it for the exact same calories of cereal DID NOT go well for me, so I’m not removing anything for NOTHING. Terrible idea.

It’s weird though, since I’ve started taking iron, I’ve felt even worse with the anaemia. The same thing happened when I had an equally awful vitamin D deficiency, I didn’t even notice the severe deficiency at the time, and then. when I took 25000 UI of vitamin D I suddenly felt symptoms of it..

Coincidence probably. Maybe both got worse at the exact same time I began treating them. That would be totally on brand for my body.

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It’s Not All About the Iron

I have been having considerable fun watching my son become hyperfixated with vinyl records.

It all started when he came home and declared his upcoming descent into acquiring physical media. He always informs me when he’s about to do something different, as if to say: I need you to get on this train with me, no questions asked.

“Everyone always says that you get more left wing when you go to University. I never believed that. I was already left wing, how could I get more left?

Then, I go to Uni and suddenly I am completely against digital media. I want to pay for things and be able to own them. The fact that you don’t own anything digital is concerning to me. They can just take it away any time. I am going to buy physical media instead” he declared, standing up as if he were delivering a closing speech to a jury.

He also informed me, years ago now, that he was trans in this exact manner.

I laughed, “The only way you could get more left wing was buying a DVD? But in all seriousness, I have followed court cases where people had exactly these objections. People took Apple to court because they wanted access to the media their dead relative had paid for, and things like that”.
“Also, you would have loved millennial bedrooms in the early 2000s. They were absolutely chock-full of CD’s and DVD’s. You’d have been in your element”.

First it was a Blu-Ray player and Project Hail Mary, then came the record player and vinyls.

This has led to today: him being ridiculously excited about his new Minecraft record. His room now has permanent Minecraft ambience. The sound really fits his room with all of his Minecraft pig plushies.

Most importantly, it suits his vibe.

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Keep On Keeping On

Hopefully, given I’m going to post this on Friday, the surveyor will have materialised and all of this will FINALLY be over.

Hopefully my stomach doesn’t suddenly get VERY annoyed with my iron tablets. And I’ve learned NEVER AGAIN to remove pistachio creme, AT ANY COST, or my body will stage a snack based revolution in the kitchen late at night.

Je suis crème de pistache!!

I have also learned that my son, even though he is now 21, is STILL always a source of smiles, and his excitement is still infectious. Him and his little cosy Minecraft sounds have kept me going this week.

My sons room all day today :-