Thursday, October 27, 2011

You are what you eat..... (part one)

A couple of years ago totally out of the blue I got sick and an evil, evil, evil clusterfuck took up residence in my intestinal tract...

Stomach pains,  bloody poo and a massive and sudden weight loss took me to the doctor and then to the emergency room and finally to the hospital where I was diagnosed with an Irritable Bowel Disease known as Ulcerative Colitis...

"Irritable"... Having or showing a tendency to be easily annoyed or made angry.

Ain't that the truth...

I've got an easily annoyed gut.

I can't eat shit...

or regular stuff w/o consequence.

Incredibly frustrating to a girl who could eat a kitchen sink (and all it's contents in one sitting).

My gut and I are forever trying to work out a compromise...

I feed it what it will tolerate

and in return I get no pain

and no public embarrassment...

(toots and such)

I'm beginning to realize that my crabby belly would like to me to slow down on the cow and pig and beef up on the chicken and fish.

Poultry had been off my radar as sustenance for years ever since my Grandma K brought a couple of chickens to live with us in the suburban town of Dearborn Heights Michigan for two weeks back in the 1970's...

We city children took to the chickens like ducks to water...

For two weeks we pretended to live on a farm...

and farm living it truly was when Grandma chased down one of our two "pets" and wrung it's scrawny necks right there in our back yard...

and then before our saucer sized bulging eyes she chopped off it's little head,

then put it's lifeless, plucked featherless body into a pot of boiling water where it stunk up the kitchen with such a horrible, horrific stink that I remember it, vividly, to this day.

I watched in horror as she squeezed the chicken body of it's feather roots... like she was popping huge blackhead pimples..

Holy be-jeeesuz ... it was awful.... (AWFUL!!!)

But not the most awful part...

the most awful part came when she sang.....

"DIN-NER............!!!!"

Oh hell no....

No no no no no no.....

I couldn't devour little Clucky... or any of his kin.

So for years I've managed to avoided chicken like the plague.

However, my crabby belly has different ideas on that.

We make chicken a lot at work and so lately I've been "forced" to partake.

I mean, come on...if I won't eat the food (and yes, the loveables notice when I don't eat their food).. then they probably shouldn't maybe eat the food as well...?

I started off with little bits of chicken smothered in anything that could help take my mind off of the "blackhead" issue...

I kind of hold my breath while I chew and swallow quickly.

Over time is has gotten easier...

Easier especially since my gut doesn't growl or grumble at me (at ALL) when I eat it.

I haven't yet gotten up the nerve to prepare any at my own house...(for personal consumption)

I still find it hard to get that "smell" outta my mind.

Initially I chalked that up to just one more crazy ass personality flaw until I read this little snippet....

The Frontal Cortex by Jonah Lehrer, a contributing editor at Wired

While olfactory associations enjoy a "privileged brain representation," that hippocampal link is less important than the unpleasantness of the smell, which is much better at predicting whether or not we'll remember the memory a few days later. 

This is the bleak truth of the brain: it clings to what we don't like.

So from now on, I don't answer to "hey crazy"...

1 comment:

  1. I have a friend who lived on a chicken farm when she was young.

    She says she wouldn't touch chicken now even if she was starving!

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