Check-In: 2016-03-31 (Thursday)

Diet: fruit, moderate sugar
Exercise: walking
Sleep: a bit short, though wake-up time was reasonable
Mindfulness: need to do some meditation
Spirit: walking in sunshine, games, visiting with friends, corresponding with family

I am starting to get settled into life in Edmonton again, a process that was thrown off a bit by my getting sick within a few days of arrival. In particular, this disrupted my sleep, which I am once again struggling to deal with. My plan is to get out of bed consistently in the morning and train myself to get tired at night again. I'm only a couple days into the plan so I'm pretty tired today. Hopefully tonight I'll be able to implement a midnight lights out and get to sleep by one or two.

I could use some meditation time, too, a practice I have fallen out of. I will try to get some in this afternoon.

Otherwise I'm doing pretty well. Good to see friends and family again. I'm currently gathering up tax documents to get them out of the way and looking into getting my car insurance lowered since I'm not commuting right now.

Of Wheat And Hayfever

Sorry for my long absence from the blog, but I have recently been hit with a wave of vegetative erotic activity--that is, plant pollen. For the majority of the past week, I have been getting hit with classic hayfever, including the sneezing, itchy throat and eyes, and immense lethargy. And this is while taking anti-histamine.

What's interesting about this is how long it has been since I have had bad allergies. I noticed that last year, I had much milder symptoms. I had also hypothesized that it might be the reduction in wheat that reduced my allergies, since my aunts have found other auto-immune disorders like arthritis were better on a low-wheat diet. And recently I have been eating a lot of wheat.

So for the last several days I have returned to a low-wheat diet, and lo, my symptoms have tamed themselves quite a bit. Now this is bad science, of course, because there is only one data point, no control group, and I am unable to control the variable of how much pollen is in the air. In fact, I don't even know how much pollen is in the air. It's possible that the season for poplar pollen has ended and that's why my symptoms have abated. But it is still one more datapoint suggesting that wheat somehow causes the immune system to go rampant.

So I'm going to stick to the philosophy of, "I don't know the science of the low-wheat diet, but I feel better when I am on it, so I will keep going with that."