I've had a cold since Wednesday. At first my nose was feeling stuffy, then my throat hurt... I'm fairly certain I had a small fever too, but I was unable to confirm it. I have two thermometers at home - a regular quicksilver and an electronic one I bought because the package said it's fast and extremely simple to use. So I started with the simple one and it showed 35.5 C. I shook my head and tried it again... about five times!!! The best I got was 35.9 C. Then I took the conventional quicksilver thermometer, looked at the time, put it under my armpit and waited 10 minutes - guess what - it showed 35.2 C.
I was like, "WTF?!" I tried it again and finally got 36.0 C and I'm sure I had a barely feverish 37.0. I gotta get me one of those meant-for-babies extremely simple thermometers for dummies. The one that takes no skill whatsoever to use.So, what does a pregnant girl do in an abandoned laboratory for hours and hours on a weekend? The answer - crochet a dice bag! Of course I was working as well - I monitored the machines once every 20-50 minutes
and at times I spent a couple of hours watering plants or other similar stuff, but I was in the lab for 8-9 hours straight three days in a row so there was a lot of downtime! And while I was making myself busy with handicraft I watched nutrition videos on youtube. I am kinda obsessed with nutrition. I know very well how much casual food decisions can change my day. "Just a small piece of cake" makes me crave a soda 2 hours later and that soda makes me think about having pasta for dinner and that pasta will make me want to have a late night sweetened fruit yogurt. The cake itself has 300-400 kcal (worth every calorie) but the rest of the day is full of blood sugar highs and lows. I have a pretty low carb tolerance and I need to keep myself motivated to avoid eating too many carbs in my everyday diet. So I watched a biography of Dr Atkins.
I had heard from many sources that he died overweight from a heart attack. "His own diet killed him," I was told. Actually he was walking too fast on a winter day, fell and hit his head, fell into a coma, and died some time after. He wasn't overweight but the bed regime caused him to have extreme water retention and that's the weight that was published to the press. Quite different, huh? And then I watched a few videos of Gary Taubes, the author of "Good Calories Bad Calories". He is just brilliant! He's an investigative journalist who stumbled upon some older nutrition studies. He was surprised with his findings so he wrote a review of the studies.What he basically says is that carbohydrates have always been known as the fattening food. But then some nutrition experts got the idea that it's fat that makes people fat. They made a few studies which linked fat-consumption with heart disease and suddenly they turned the entire nutrition idea around - eat more carbs and less fat and you'll stay healthy and thin. Stores were soon filled with "low fat" foods, including low-fat cookies and fat-free pasta, which was nationally recommended as a healthy alternative to fatty foods. And soon after that USA was hit by epidemic obesity! As he was digging through literature, he found no valid proof that fat makes people fat. In stead, it is refined carbohydrates that are responsible for heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer and many other health problems.
I was also watching a video about B vitamins and magnesium - many people are not getting enough of them and they get depression-like symptoms like fatigue, weakness, inability to sleep, muscle tension, etc. And then people turn to antidepressants just to get even more bad symptoms and side-effects. It was really exciting and interesting stuff. These "Nutrition by Natalie" videos are very good. I literally watched them for hours. I got some good heath tips from there. She's a healthy eater AND a meat eater.
Cool! I don't really know anyone who I can discuss nutrition with. I think I'm gonna have to find another nutrition-obsessed person as soon as possible. But until then, I can't resist an occasional excited monologue about the biochemistry of eating.
PS! 35 weeks pregnant, 5 weeks to go. Some pregnancy discomforts are beginning to annoy me. I get a nose bleed up to four times a day. I don't lose much blood and it's just a weak blood vessel thing - blood pressure is okay. And I'm feeling kinda short of breath lately. Now it's difficult to walk over 5km straight. It was bound to happen sooner or later. I have gained nearly 13 kg and I will probably gain two more so that's not so bad.
And the belly has really grown! I still tie my own shoe laces but I often do a sloppy job and have to retie them ten minutes later.Baby is active and fun. She's getting quite uncomfortable in there so she now likes to stretch her feet as high under my ribs as possible. When she gets restless it usually helps if I give her a back massage. I still think her movements are cute.
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