I ate more last night than I would usually eat in three days and it’s not finished, I seem to have almost as much still sitting in the fridge to be consumed today. I suppose we all have eyes bigger than our stomachs but no matter how much I enjoyed my dinner there is one thing I know without a doubt, I couldn’t eat like that more than once a month and even then I would probably only have about half. I don’t know what it is about eating, but I just don’t have the a great interest in it, something I never suffered from in the past, I was like everyone else was happy to eat whatever was there to eat, I always had what most would call a proper meal once day, even when I was alone I still made the effort to cook, because I loved doing it and eating it. Last night I ordered a 10-inch pizza, some onion rings and mozzarella sticks, and some Indian desserts that although the perfect heart attack in every mouthful, I just adore as a total treat, odd for someone who on the whole doesn’t like or eat sweet things. In the past I would have eaten every scrap without even a second thought, I managed just about half and I was so full, I just couldn’t go to bed until it settled even though I was already past my normal bed time.

I suppose our relationship with food is one that most of us never really look at unless you or someone close to you has a real problem with it. I was a well-overfed child, like most of my generation our parents had lived through the years of rationing and they wanted us to have as much to eat as we wanted, as they were never going to let us know what hunger was. The problem with that desire was it meant we all had far too much! Cooked breakfasts or cereal and toast, three-course school lunch, two courses at dinner time, followed by as much bread and jam we could want and of course the cakes if that wasn’t enough there were sandwiches and biscuits before we went to bed. Not too surprisingly I was a tubby child, not fat by any means, accept when I was a toddler, as I was also like every child of my generation, I never really sat still. I was always outdoors as long as it was no further away than the far side of the park opposite the house, well out of sight, but always running, cycling climbing and active. The downfall hit me when I was in my first job, just sitting there, no running, no sport, no activity faster than walking. My weight fluxed right through until I was pregnant with Jeffrey when I reached 18 stone, mostly down to baby and fluid, as within 6 weeks I weighed just 12 stone 7 lbs, but I had been scared by what happened to my body and I took my food under control, it meant that I first had to learn to calorie count and once my weight was down, to spend the rest of my life keeping a silent estimated tally, plus taking emergency action should I gain even a couple of pounds, but I never has a problem again until my MS turned progressive.

Finding yourself unable to eat is actually the last thing I would have expected from MS, I had no idea that I could ever be unable to swallow until the day it happened, nor did I think that just a few years later that when the stress of life was ripping me apart that my body would simply stop processing and dealing with food, so much so I spent 3 years with a Gastric nasal tube, luckily something that fixed itself when I became housebound. My weight slowly began to rise as I was more and more able to eat, but I have never to this day been able to eat great quantities without paying for it, just as I did last night and I this morning. I don’t know what the reason is or where even the logic lies, but my body physically has a problem with me trying to eat like everyone does. I have even had to move my main meal to lunchtime as then at least it has settled by the time I head off for my main sleep at night. Food making you feel ill and causes me more pain that I just don’t need, it isn’t right, but it is one thing that you learn to live with and how to manage it. Picking and grazing works best, it might take me over an hour to eat my cheese and oatcakes but at least I enjoy them. Yesterday was a special day and we all do all the wrong things on special days, even though Adam gave me an out, he even offered to forego his birthday treat, but I wanted to do the wrong thing and I did.

8 or 9 years on from the point I started to have eating issues, well you would think that I would now be able to say here is the answer, I can’t. MS has a bad habit of tweaking what it does to you just when you think you have it in hand. No I no longer have a tube stuck down my nose, and food doesn’t get stuck in my throat daily, but I have no great desire to eat these days and no matter how little it is, it still just turns into extra weight. Once you have spent several years not being able to eat, you actually get used to it, but it makes the weight thing even more annoying as I still eat less now than I ever did. What my MS will do next is anyone’s guess, but somehow I think it is reasonable to say that I will never be able to eat normally, it is just one more problem my health has caused and one more you just have to live with.

Please read my blog from 2 years ago today – 25/04/12 – The bogeyed monster

I know that times I am guilty of coasting in life, I think we all are, last night thanks to one silly little thing, I got a kick up the backside that I may have needed. With me out of work, Adam and I had decided that the normal gifts we would give each other were out of the window, that’s part of why I wrote the post I did yesterday, I know he reads these post and with no physical gift, I could send it in words. Adam in the past had always sent me a large bouquet of flowers that were delivered during the day, last night he came home clutching flowers but not an expensive bouquet, flower that actually meant much more. He had gone and selected bunches from the florist of white……