Sweet Tooth Attack

Darn darn darn! I soooo want something sweet and oh so not healthy, not that I'm that big of a health nut, I figure if I write this down, I might not succumb. Any other time and I'd be digging into my stash of goodies, or making something... the reason I am resisting is because of something I learned as a teen, sugar tends to lower my resistance (health), I learned this by trial and error because of allergies, hay fever is what it used to be called. I used to have to take a handful of antihistimine pills just to get through lunch rush when I worked at a fast food joint. I found out that if I cut out sugar during the months when my allergies were at their worst (itchy red eyes, nose running like a faucet, sneezing 10 times in a row...) if I quit all sugar then most if not all of my symptoms went away.

As an older adult, I have not had many problems with seasonal allergies, in fact the most I usually ever suffer with is the itchy red eye thing, I just use eye drops with an antihistamine and it is usually over in a couple of weeks, I might sneeze once or twice, nothing more. Since moving to a completely different area, I wondered how my body might react to different allergy stimulus, but didn't think too much about it. The first 2 years and I had little to no problems, well this year has been different. It started out with the red itchy eyes, now I'm doing the sneezing, runny nose thing, not anything like I did as a teen, but darn it, I don't want to go through this every year! The eye drops are not helping much either, I broke down and bought some generic Benedryl, I've only taken it once, I don't intend to make that a habit.

Today, I decided enough was enough, my eyes itching, my nose running then plugging up. I pulled out my DIY netipot, it's a water bottle with a sports top, I made up a batch of warm water with salt and a few sprays of food grade H2O2 diluted down to 3%, I put my head over the sink and poured the warm salty water through my nose, first one side then the other. I did this again about 20 minutes later. I didn't take any antihistamine, though I did do the eye drops. It worked, my sinuses dried up to normal, and I didn't have to blow my nose all day. This is something I may have to do on a daily basis until the allergy season is gone.

To top all of that off, I broke out with fever blisters, something that happens occasionally, but this time it hit with a vengeance! I can usually feel them before they fully form, if I catch it quick enough I can medicate with Abriva and they never show, for some reason this time around I either didn't notice the first signs or they never happened and went directly into forming blisters. I usually only have one blister, and they don't usually get big, this time I have 3 separate clusters on my bottom lip and they are particularly bad. I have been been very careful to wash my hands a lot, don't want to spread this to anyone, I have been taking zinc, vitamin C and echinacea, all in hopes of ending my lip torture sooner, once the blisters have formed, it's almost too late to stop it, it just has to run its course, I'm glad I'm not going out in public too much, yeah I can be vain about some things, especially big ugly blisters on my bottom lip. :)

I rarely get sick, rarely! And when I do, I tend to not get the major symptoms that most everyone else gets, I usually get over the rare illness pretty quickly, for whatever reason, I have had several things hitting me at once, seemingly unrelated, but who knows, no one really knows the triggers for fever blisters, and the allergy thing I blame on my diet lately. I haven't been eating right the last month, my Dad came out for a visit and we ate rather richly (yeah, I enjoyed it!) and ate lots more sweets than normal, I've even been drinking sodas, something I haven't done on a regular basis in years, and now I think I'm paying for it (not your fault Dad, I could have and should have done better).

So now, I have to get back on track and eat right, not that I'm a major health nut, I just don't eat a lot of sweets and sodas, I definitely don't eat the diet crap, that's worse than eating the sugar laden stuff in the first place. When I want something sweet, I usually make something, there is a cinnamon biscuit I enjoy making and eating, I put in lots of freshly ground flax seed, chia seed and millet, there is real sugar in it but not much, and with the addition of cinnamon, that helps to counteract the sugar's effect on the body, that usually takes care of my sweet tooth without too much harm done. I don't have an exact recipe, I just don't cook that way, but here is basically what I do, I take about a tablespoon of each of the above named seeds and run them through a coffee grinder, then I add them to about a cup of Bisquick, a tablespoon of sugar, a hard dash or two of cinnamon, then add enough water to make a biscuit dough, I preheat a cast iron comal (flat cast iron pan) and place golf ball sized bits of dough on the hot pan, I put a lid on top and cook it for a few minutes on one side, turn over and cook for a few more minutes, long enough for the biscuit to be fully cooked through. I enjoy pouring raw honey or agave syrup on the hot biscuits and eating them up! The scent of cinnamon wafting though the house is irresistible!

OK, enough complaining, the sweet tooth has passed, now I can go back to surfing the internet and getting to bed soon.