Glancing through these, I like them both. The Every Salad Ever cookbook is very exciting because there are many options for grain and pasta salads.
The What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking: Make It Fast book is also interesting, and I can see using this one more than her first book.
I bought a new cookbook, Protein Power Smoothies. Figured I’d try the Strawberry Cheesecake Smoothie for lunch today.
I am on Zepbound right now so I’m trying to pack protein into every meal. This has a full serving of vanilla Orgain in it. Two scoops.
And I just can’t. I drank maybe 1/4 of it and it isn’t the flavor, which is okay if a bit artificial in the sweetness department. It’s the protein powder. I thought if I drank too much it would just come back up. The texture is just a lot.
Is it an acquired taste? I like my smoothies very fruity and this was not.
I took my first shot today. Didn’t even feel it!
I’ve dieted since I was a teen but I was far more active then. I used to ride my bike everywhere, walked a lot, etc. Once I got married I started gaining weight because I had access to a car and was making regular meals.
I went on Weight Watchers in my 20’s. I lost 44.5 lbs and hit my goal weight in 6 months, mostly because of ADHD/OCD hyperfocus. Once I lost the hyperfocus, the food noise along with some illness and stress led me to gain it all back and then some. And then I had three kids.
I was then diagnosed with thyroid cancer in my 40s. I remember getting weighed before my second surgery to take out the other half of my thyroid and the nurse saying “Once you’re on hormone replacement, this weight will come right off.” Hahah. I weighed 204 pounds then.
I had tried Weight Watchers again and failed. I had gotten up to 279 at one point. So I started intermittent fasting and yoga and got down to 239. And then the pandemic happened. I ended up gaining some of what I lost back but not all.
I started Zepbound today. I was able to get it because I have sleep apnea on my part D Medicare. I have haunted this sub and read a lot while the process of getting this medication ground its way through my insurance. I’m hopeful at this point.
One of my more recent reactions is to vaccines. Not every vaccine but most of them, I get hives at the injection site. I saw an allergist who recommended front loading antihistamines (Xyzal to be specific) and taking them that evening and the next day too. Two tablets. This has not really helped much at all. I didn’t take them for the last vaccine (flu) and had no reaction. I’ve had reactions to tdap and Covid vaccine.
So my question is this. I am starting Zepbound tomorrow and will be giving myself an injection once a week, stomach, thigh, or the back of an arm. Is there anything I can do to lessen the possibility of injection reactions? Would icing the site first help? I’m going to do the first one without any prep to see how it goes but I would rather not try taking Xyzal since it and Zyrtec make me really tired. First generation antihistamines exacerbate my restless legs syndrome so I have to avoid those.
Life got in the way, and my starter languished for a year in my fridge. I got it out over the weekend and revived it. I decided it was ready to bake with yesterday. I had seen the stand mixer method someone posted the other day (third photo) so that’s what I decided to try.
300g water
125g active starter
200g whole wheat flour
300g bread flour
15g salt
I followed the instructions until I got to the counter rest. When I pulled the dough hook out, the dough seemed cold and stiff. So I turned the oven light on and put it in there to rest. The oven was still slightly warm from heating up a pizza roll for my son so it was quite cozy. I left it in there for about an hour. The dough had almost doubled and felt exactly as it should. I shaped it, put it in my floured banneton, and put it in the fridge for 12 hours on the front of the bottom shelf. Then I followed the baking instructions. I let it sit for 4-1/2 hours before cutting into it.
Tastes a little salty to me since I was diagnosed with high blood pressure so have been cutting back. But it still tastes great. Far better than the double loaves I made last year, which didn’t use this method. I finally feel like I know what I’m doing.
I’ve had RLS almost all my life. It used to only bother me when I was tired and needed to go to bed, but in more recent years it’s become one of the things that wakes me in the middle of the night and keeps me awake if I wake for some other reason.
When I heard about Requip several years ago I asked to try it, and I ended up with horrible augmentation so I had to get off it.
My iron levels have always been normal, but after reading that RLS is caused by the brain having problems taking up iron I decided to take supplements. Since then, mine has been mostly controlled by taking a vegetable-based iron supplement, vitamin C, vitamin E, and a leg vein formula.
Until recently when I started getting some breakthrough, but it was still okay. Until I started taking some antihistamines for some MCAS problems with itching and it made everything worse.
So having read that the current treatment has shifted to gabapentin and pregabalin (Lyrica), I asked for the latter from my PCP since gabapentin can cause problems with blood sugar.
I was excited to start it. The first night it seemed to help. Not quite perfect but the sensations in my legs didn’t bother me quite as much.
The second night it didn’t seem quite as effective and I was having full symptoms waking me up in the morning, which is something new and very unwelcome.
The third night it didn’t help at all. It was impossible to calm my legs down in the ways I usually do by walking around and standing doing the dishwasher or by playing a video game that distracts me.
So I’m not going to take it anymore. I know I could go up on the dosage but I don’t want to have to jump the dose up so high that it will be hard to come off it. Surely if it was going to work at all, it would work evenly over every night instead of losing effectiveness every night. This is just like the Requip.
I did add some vitamin K and magnesium glycinate, but at this point I’ll be happy if I can get back to my mostly controlled symptoms that can be dealt with by activity or distraction. In the meantime, my PCP is referring me to a neurologist.
I had started taking Claritin in the morning and a Benadryl at night to deal with the itching I have almost all the time. Intense itching from eczema or intertrigo-like itching even though it never gets better with treatment finally clued me into it being MCAS. And the antihistamines were helping so much but they made my restless leg syndrome so much worse that I will have to discontinue them if I ever want to sleep again.
I was up all night last night trying to calm my legs down and all the usual tricks didn’t work. I can’t take Requip because it caused augmentation (made it worse). I control the RLS with supplements, which are mostly effective though it still kicks in if I wake from a histamine dump/cortisol spike in the middle of the night. Usually I can calm my legs down with distraction (playing a video game that requires concentration) or standing up and doing something like emptying the dishwasher. That didn’t work last night.
Has anyone solved this problem?
ETA: the supplements I take for RLS are a vegetable based iron supplement, vitamin C, vitamin E, and a vein supplement. I take magnesium but I’m pretty sure it’s not magnesium glycinate.
RLS is caused by a problem our brains have with iron uptake, which is why the iron supplement helps me.
At any rate, I am hoping more for an antihistamine that doesn’t affect the RLS. I have taken Xyzal and that doesn’t but it also makes me so tired I can’t do anything but sleep and lay around. Same with Zyrtec.
I made this wonderful cheesecake using a recipe from NYT Cooking but added 1/2 tsp King Arthur’s Fiori Di Sicilia to enhance the citrus flavor.
Quite suddenly in the past month I went from being able to walk for a steady 20 to 30 minutes on the treadmill or outside to being only able to walk 5 to 15 minutes, and I have to push myself all the way.
My heart rate is hitting the target so it’s not congestive heart failure. The only thing that happened before this was I had caught and got over a cold (not Covid, I tested). It’s the first one I’ve had in a few years because we still mask whenever we go out. But somehow I picked it up when I was getting a mammogram.
Has anyone else experienced this as part of their disease progression? I’ve walked 5 days out of the past 6 and I still can’t push past 15 minutes. In any ordinary way, I would be up to at least 20 after walking this consistently. Does it get better?
I talked to my PCP about a possible Sjogren’s diagnosis, and I was happy to find him receptive and willing to help as he usually is. He admitted he doesn’t know as much about Sjogren’s as he would like and would have to do some reading. He scheduled some blood work including SSA and SSB and urged me to reach out if anything seemed to suddenly go south. We talked about seronegative Sjogren’s and he was aware that it’s a thing. And he told me he knows how well informed I am and doesn’t think it’s all in my head. So I’m hoping a diagnosis is on the horizon but we shall see.