New Tools for a Whole New Game
Insofar as talking and eating are integral parts of who I am, getting used to a whole new way of being is exhausting.
These first two weeks with the fracture but without the wires…I had it easy. Not being able to chew is annoying, but not lifechanging. Straws made things easier, but were not a necessity. Now, an immobilized jaw rules out anything that can’t make it up a straw, and then some. Foods with seeds or skins are pretty much menu benchwarmers until August, which means I’m either going to miss some of the best of the summer harvest, or get very experimental with the blender.
Everything is trial and error. I’m having what one might call a “doctor, heal thyself” moment; for all that I know on an intellectual level about learning theories and trajectories, it’s not so easy to accept that I have alot to learn and much failure to endure in order to get good at this. Already there have been a number of failures in the last 36 hours. More on those soon.
The biggest gamechanger of all is retooling the strategy for meeting my goal of getting enough nutrients while still eating real food (in the Michael Pollan, “don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize” sense). One of the hardest pieces here is that I have almost no data from which to elicit feedback and make good decisions. Normally I am not at all scientific about such things — when it comes to food, I have a pretty great system of intuition and cravings that works well for me. Now that I’m consuming foods in such strange combinations and and quantities, I need help. And not so much the help of a nutritionist, as many have suggested. My problem isn’t that I don’t know what I should eat; it’s that I don’t know what’s in what I’m actually eating and how best to consume what I need. As a pathetic example, consider my lunch. I mixed a jar of organic baby food (a “country dinner” of meat, potatoes, and corn) with a splash of water to thin it out. It took me a normal lunch amount of time to drink it with a straw. I felt full afterward. Then I looked at the nutrition facts on the jar: seventy calories. Unless you are six months old, that is not enough to qualify as lunch.
So I’m in the market for online tools that help me track and manage my daily nutritional intake. I know of a few such sites, but if you have one to recommend, let me know and I’ll check it out for a forthcoming post. It seems these tools tend to be designed for weight loss or fitness, but I’ll be reviewing them for what they can do for overall health and how they can help people with specific dietary or medical concerns.
