Any-time-but-morning sickness

Mornings, lately, have been a short-lived time of hope for me. I wake up, I use the bathroom with that sense of urgency, and as I wander back to bed this sense of wonder spreads over me.

“What’d you say?” I ask my stomach. “You actually don’t feel like throwing up? You feel–normal?”

As I’ve nearly rearranged my entire life around a schedule that doesn’t require me to do anything before noon (although this won’t last for long, since I’ll most likely be starting a new job next week) I usually crawl back in bed for half an hour and bask in the wonder of feeling normal. It doesn’t last for long. Sometimes slowly, sometimes instantly, that queasy “I just got off a boat on choppy waves” feeling begins to grow in my core, spreading outward through my veins until my entire body feels nauseated. Then, with my empty stomach rumbling, I get to play the Food Game.

I’ve become pretty good at the Food Game in the last three weeks. I pull up a mental rol-o-dex of all the different (but fairly specific) food dishes that I might possibly consider eating. One at a time I flip through them, taking a moment to imagine the look, the smell, the flavor, the texture. Most entries make my stomach tighten up and my esophagus lock down–some worse than others. Eventually, I discover an entry that doesn’t cause the gut reaction of doom. Sometimes it’s something easy that I have on hand, like: as many tangelos as I can eat, or grilled cheese. Occasionally it’s more detailed and not something I can just whip up at home, like “cheese and onion enchilada with a corn tortilla, covered in red sauce, with a side of Spanish rice.” If I go out and get an enchilada and the tortilla is flour, the results can be disastrous.

Not really “disastrous,” but you know, I can’t eat it and I just stare helplessly at my food as I feel myself fading away from hunger.

Overall, this would be a great diet plan if I still had the energy to exercise as well. Instead of having that drive to always eat, and always being conscious of how much I’d like to be eating right now if only I wasn’t on a stupid diet–I always have the drive to not eat, even when my stomach is begging for the tiniest bit of sustenance. I think I’ve even lost a few pounds (it’s a wicked joke, I tell ya). One of the baby books I was reading warned that your metabolism slows way down as your body takes its time digesting food, making sure to squeeze every last bit of nutrition out of every bite. I’m sure that even with my drastically reduced caloric intake, my body’s still maintaining its “healthy” fat quotient pretty well. Bastard body.

Not like I’m trying to be skinny for swimsuit season or anything.

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