Day 47, Violent attacks of the noxious kind

Saturday afternoon was an uncomfortable time for me, yes yes, and I didn’t think I did anything to deserve it. But the human body has its own very unsubtle, and in some cases funny in retrospect, way of letting us know that what we’re doing to it isn’t what we should be doing. It has its own special way of asking, would you please stop doing what you’re doing? Thank you. Because that kind of stuff isn’t going to help in the long run and as a lesson for the future how’s about something you’ll never forget? Good.

Every so often I’ll buy a steam-in-the-bag bag of vegetables from the freezer section of the supermarket because chopping and peeling vegetables is definitely not my favorite thing to do. It’s just easier and sometimes I think I’m entitled to a little bit of ease (even if I haven’t been working too hard). Well, concerning this particular incident, I bought and ate one of those bags of vegetables for lunch on Saturday, an Asian Medley variety of vegetables consisting of broccoli florets, julienned carrots, mini corn (anyone else think that’s as crazy and weird as I do?), and sugar snap peas. I tend to get rid of the peas because I don’t think that those will react well to my body and its numerous allergies (take a look at my Day 17 entry for the reason for my concern).

That particular variety is also “Specially Seasoned”, meaning that it’s not PCP-kosher but whatever. Now compared to all of the other “Specially Seasoned” varieties of bag vegetables in the freezer section the Asian Medley is by far the least “Specially Seasoned” so I don’t feel bad about getting and eating it. The calorie, fat, and carb levels are almost exactly the same as any other mixing of vegetables so the problem isn’t there. There are only two differences, one is in the level of sodium listed which is obviously more than plain vegetables, not much more but more. The other difference is in the taste of the actual stuff: intensely noticeable right off but it soon turns into this mish-mash of indistinguishable flavors blending together to become something salty, unidentifiable, and eventually, admittedly, unsatisfying.

Which brings me to my Saturday afternoon. Let me start by telling you about the e-mail Patrick sent to us all on Saturday afternoon (well, Saturday afternoon for me, at least). This particular e-mails topic was about salt and why we are all limiting our supplementary salt intake to as little as humanly possible before we start going into salt withdrawal and die (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt#Health_effects). (Also, how weird is it that I have a problem concerning my salt intake on the exact same day that I get an e-mail by Patrick about our salt intake? It’s creepy, almost).

In the e-mail he enlightened us as to why we are trying to limit our salt intake and the basic gist of it was this: there is already enough sodium in vegetables and fruit and etc. in our diets that we don’t need any additional salt added to it, either by the manufacturer of the food we eat or by our own hand. There is enough in all of the PCP foods that any extra is superfluous. Now since we are on low sodium diets and have been for forty-seven days now any extra sodium we put into our systems that isn’t already in the vegetables we’re eating will certainly make itself known to us.

Hence this posting. It seems that the extra sodium in the Asian Medley bag of vegetables was enough to slightly tip my new daily required amount of sodium over the edge, enough to send me on a slippery slope of gastrointestinal displeasure. Yippee skippee, eh? One of the side effects of going over my new limit of sodium, according to Patrick, is an uncomfortable bloating sensation and, boy, is that what I ended up with about three or four hours after I ate that Asian Medley. The bathroom never looked so inviting.

So, touche, body of mine. Lesson learned. But how about next time you just “accidentally” cause me to burn up that stuff in the microwave or on the stove where I’ll be forced to eat something tastier and healthier for me, instead of putting me through that crap again because that was almost unbearable.

Are we cool on that? Let’s hope so.