About 15 Degrees to the Left
Wherein our narrator experiences something that
may or may not be of significance.
I have been on the Atkins' "Induction" program
for a little more than 24 hours. Well, maybe 36 hours, because on Wednesday
evening - having done the shopping necessary for the high-protein high-fat
low-carbohydrate regime - I nibbled a bit of the "good" foods. Yesterday, as is
typical with folks going through an Atkins induction, I started the day with
bacon and eggs. Only, Australian bacon isn't like yummy crunchy American bacon
- it's more like a cross between American bacon and Canadian bacon. A little
weird. But hey, with a breakfast like that, what could possibly be wrong? I
had to wipe the fat dribbling of my chin and change my shirt - which had gotten
some fat spattered on it during cooking - before I could leave the house with a
lunch of ham to be wrapped in romaine lettuce, a couple of hard-boiled eggs,
kalamata olives, cherry tomatoes, and some goat's milk
feta.
This is a diet I could get used
to.
What was weird, though, was that as
the day went on, my energy level fell lower, and lower and lower. I asked Nic
for a ride home in the car, because I feared that waiting for the bus in front
of AFTRS (which I invariably do) would only lead to a fit of distemper. Better
to stay a little later and have curbside service. By the evening I had one of
those low-grade headaches that could last for days, and bemoaned the fact that I
have no ibuprofen to clobber the pain in my kopf. And I think I fell asleep at
about 9 PM. My poor body, clobbered by no cigarettes, no carbohydrates, and
some swimming (500m Tuesday, 600m Wednesday, YAY ME!) didn't know what to make
of the lack of toxins, sugars, etc., and simply shut down in the most orderly
way possible.
I woke up a few times to
pee. Atkins is diuretic - as are most diets - and somewhere in the middle of
the night I realized the headache was gone. Yay! But when I woke up, an echo
of it hard returned. Blech. I got up and set to my morning yoga. My head felt
- unusual. Clearer on one hand (easier to focus on the energetic manipulations
of the yoga) but I still felt...flat. As if I weren't quite thinking. I
finished the Green Energy and Opportunity set, and lay back for my five minutes
rest, something Tim Childs nicknamed the "flavor seal," a bit of naming which
has stuck with me ever since. My thoughts drifted. I still was feeling sort of
blah.
Then - it was very weird - I had
a truly euphoric moment, the kind my body associates with certain drugs that are
very bad for me. How odd, I thought. But nice. Then, it was as if I felt my
entire body - consciousness and being - slowly rotate about 15 degrees to the
left. Turning...turning...turning...done. Then, suddenly, I felt great: clear,
energetic, happy, calm.
While I'm not
sure, I believe at that moment I went into lipolysis, and started burning my own
fat. That's what the good Dr. Atkins says it should feel like - once the body's
supply of glycogen is exhausted, and it makes the critical change from
carbohydrate respiration to fat respiration. Which means, from that moment, I
began losing weight.
I suppose that I
just could have had a moment of dizziness, but it didn't feel disorienting, or
uncomfortable, It felt...good.
Time
will tell. And today I have more yummy low carbohydrate food, including some
beef/pork meatballs I cooked up last night. Whee. At least my body won't be
protein-starved. And given my raging sugar addictions - I know perfectly well
how addicted I am to carbohydrates, and how I occasionally binge on them
(sometimes more than occasionally) - it's all to the good. I'm beginning to
wonder if some of my more mercurial aspects (that is, my nasty mood swings) are
because of sugar-level fluctuations. Within a few days - or perhaps today, if
I've entered lipolysis - I'll know how stable (or unstable) my moods have
become. It could be a whole new
day.
I'll wait and
see.
***
This
has not been the greatest day. Two things went horribly wrong. Specifically,
I had two heretofore unknown events happen to me: schedule crashes. That is, I
had two simultaneous events planned. And this happened not once, but twice. In
one day.
The first of these has to do
with OZDOCS, which is an organization of documentary film makers from Australia.
They have monthly meetings, and asked me to speak at their December meeting.
Only they couldn't settle on a date. It bounced around. I asked them for some
finality, but they never provided
it.
But over the last few days I've
been in near-constant communication with the organizers of EthnoBotany III, an
event that's a lot like the Mindstates or other conferences in the USA. And
given that I'm a fixture on that circuit in the USA, when they found out I was
here in Australia, I immediately received an invitation. The conference runs 29
- 30 November, somewhere up north of the "Gold Coast" area north of Brisbane.
(I hear there's rainforest up there. Real rainforest.) They're willing to foot
the bill for flying me up - I'll cover the cost of my hotel - if I was willing
to give a talk. As these are my people - in a way the academics could never
really be - I said yes. Unfortunately, plane flights being what they are (lots
of folks fly up there for the weekend) it was impossible to get me back to
Sydney before 8:30 PM on Monday night. I figured, well, the OZDOCS people
haven't confirmed anything, so let's just do
it.
About 10 minutes after I'd sent off
the confirmation email, the fellow from OZDOCS called, to confirm a date:
December 1st. Sorry, I said, but I've been booked into something else and won't
be free on the 1st. I hated doing this, I really did, but, hey, they've been at
this for two full weeks (at least) and if it's taken them this long to get it
all in gear, should I hold myself up? I think not. Still, I felt bad. And
that was only the first blow.
At 12:30
PM I came back to my office to find a message from SPAA, the folks I'm speaking
for next week. In that note it was revealed that I'd double booked again, this
time much more severely. I was scheduled to be on a SPAA panel at the same time
I was scheduled to be giving a lecture at RMIT.
Whoops?
How this happened is that the
first mail from the panel organizer listed the panel time as 12:00 - 1:30 PM.
Which I noted. A follow-on email from SPAA indicated the panel was from 3:15 -
4:45 PM. But I guess I ignored that one. And I'm not sure that I scheduled the
RMIT talk after I got that email, or before. It was all around the same time,
actually. Either way, I was functioning on information that wasn't actually
accurate. So wham. Collision number
two.
I wrote RMIT, and gave them a
number of alternate times during which I would be free to lecture. Perhaps an
hour later I got a call from the coordinator on my mobile. She wasn't pleased.
Australians play a passive-agressive game to express their displeasure; they're
never actually angry (like an American would be), they just sound very
disappointed, and a bit put out. This made me feel even
worse.
I'm still waiting to hear back
on what the final plans for RMIT will
be.
Now, somewhere in the slough of my
personal despond, which may have been at least vaguely related to my blood sugar
levels - which actually feel remarkably stable, as though the lipolysis has
kicked in. Here's hoping. Anyway, I get a call from the fellow who arranged
the RMIT talk - ostensibly to help promote me in Australia, but the real reason
is to help him promote himself and his projects (though I suspect he thinks I'm
oblivious of this). He said he'd just gotten a panicked call from RMIT - what's
up? I related that I had a scheduling conflict, and that I was working to
clear it up. No words of encouragement from this bugger, mind you, just a
demand that his problems get fixed. Then he hangs
up.
And now I'm seething, because now I
have something that I can honestly be upset about. I'm upset that I've had to
break two engagements in one day (in that respect I'm a true performer - the
show
must
go on), feeling none to good about that, and now I feel very much as though I've
been used. I feel like a whore who's just been bitch-slapped by her pimp. And
that isn't a great feeling.
Fortunately
I have friends, even here on this far side of the world. So I wrote one and
walked into the other's office. While there venting (thank you, Nic!), the
friend I wrote called my mobile, to offer his support. And that meant a lot.
It took the edge off, particularly as he reminded me that RMIT was getting a
freebie. SPAA is paying for my appearance in Melbourne, and RMIT is simply
taking advantage of that. So if SPAA has scheduled against me, too bad RMIT.
And that's entirely true.
That's when I
started feeling better. Now I'm almost feeling normal. A little sheepish,
perhaps, at my own inability to manage my speaking calendar (though it is nice
to be so popular), and hoping that no one takes long-term offense at this.
Hopefully, all of it will work out.
And
now I'm nearly home. It's a cloudless, warm day, and I'll soon have a swim,
driving my body even further into lipolysis. Whee!
Posted: Fri - November 14, 2003 at 08:23 AM