Food

[mrissa]

So hungry tonight. I had wild mushroom lasagna and carrots at dinner, and just now I've added a pluot and some cheese. (Mmmmm. Cheeeeeeese.) So much food. Every once in awhile I get ravenous, ready to eat not a horse but an entire stables compared to my usual amount. It's, as far as I can tell, entirely hormonal. (You other female types have this?) That doesn't seem to make it less real.

The problem is that I hate the feeling of having eaten too much. Hate. Hatehatehate. Would rather be -- not in unlimited amounts of pain, surely, but in minor pain, yes. I would rather have a headache than a too-full stomach, but not a migraine, to place it on that scale. (timprov thinks this is possibly abnormal. I think it's more likely unusual.) The other problem is that I'm hypoglycemic, tend to pass out when insufficiently fueled. So the edge between the two is thinner than perhaps it ought to be.

It leads to nights like last night, when I woke up at 2 a.m. too hungry to sleep and too tired to get up and eat. That was not so good. Shaky by the time I got up at 6. Hence the pluot and the cheese. Fingers crossed.

I made peanut butter fudge tonight, and the cake but not yet the frosting. I'll do that in the morning. And the rhubarb custard. And the rosemary buns. And maybe some gingerbread or banana bread or something for mornings at WorldCon, if I get really ambitious. And then the rest of the grocery shopping (the Byerly's and wine/beer run to go with today's Cub run), and those bits of the cooking that are up to me. Which is not as many of them as first planned, since T. looked at my mental state and said a great big "NO" to putting me in charge of more stuff.

Here's what I like about baking: I feel competent at it. It's concrete. If I do it right, it always comes out the same way. People's reaction to it is almost always straightforward. I don't always have to concentrate on it. Once I've done the first bit, there's nothing to do but wait and read my book and go on with my life.

Here's what I like about writing: I'm always running into ways I don't really know what I'm doing (but could maybe learn). It's abstract. If I do it right, it never comes out the same way twice. People's reaction to it is complicated. I always have to concentrate on it. Once I've done the first bit, there may be nothing to do but wait and read my book and go on with my life, but there's almost always a next bit and a next.

I don't think I would like baking so much if I didn't have writing in my life. On the other hand, I don't think I'd get by writing if I didn't have something like baking I could just do every once in awhile as an anchor. It's not the same as cat-vacuuming (no, really, it's not!). It's grounding. Very different. Sort of.

Comments

[pameladean]

It's perfectly real. Many women's basal metabolic rate goes up sometime just before their period. We burn more calories suddenly. I discovered this fact in, of all the icky places, a diet book for women that gushed and squeeed about how lucky this circumstanvce was because you could eat just the same amount and burn more calories! Morons. (I verified the assertion in a more scientific place, but I don't actually know whether science has since moved on to some other notion about the matter.)

Pamela