sunday, june 10, 2001
cravings

of late i am being hit with some of the strangest "cravings", especially for me. this has been going on for about 2 or 3 weeks now, some of it odd, some of it not so odd, some of it down right scary, especially for me. food cravings really are nothing new, i've always been prone to food "fixations", sometimes very specific and other times fairly general. and occasionally i experience the insane need for sugar. it's one of my biggest downfalls, actually, and one of the reasons i gave up on diets. i have the sweet tooth from hell and it just won't quit. every so often it seems like i kick it, then it comes back with a vengeance. and yes, this has been one of my cravings of late.

another one is red meat. a number of years back we reduced beef in our diet and rarely buy it any more. we replace it with ground pork in things like tacos, turkey if the pork is unavailable. we a lot of chicken, some fish, cheeses, eggs, some beans. we're not quite vegetarians, just low key on the meats, mostly because of price. in addition i take a centrum complete and an iron supplement to manage my anemia. so i am not short anything as far as i can tell. if i forget to take anything i need, someone invariably reminds me (or my body does, but we try to avoid that). but of late i have been experiencing serious beef cravings. not just meat, but beef specifically. cheeseburgers, the greasier the better, steak, ribs, anything that's beef. the only time i have ever felt anything close is when i worked for s.d.a.'s and was eating the "meat supplements" they used instead of beef (i.e. veggie meat in a can). it wasn't particularly nasty, but by the end of a week my body made it clear i was not meant to be a vegetarian. this is almost as bad, but i am eating small quantities of beef and am eating enough other meet and meet substitutes to cover me.

and we just saw a black angus commercial with steaks. saxy is now on his way to the grocery store buying steak because we both just have to have it.

along with this is a nasty craving for salad. but nor just any salad. it must be a saxy salad. but that may just be his fantastic cooking in play there. (okay, so there is not much cooking, but his is still the best salad i have ever tasted!).

the other two cravings have nothing to do with food but are equally annoying.

one of these is sleep. i want to sleep, a lot. i still stay up late because i actually can not get to sleep before 2 or 3 a.m. i have tried, it doesn't work. i am a bonafide night owl and will probably remain so till my dying day. period. but there are times when i go to bed and i pass out for 10 or more hours at a time. that is a lot of sleep for someone who usually manages quite well with about 5 hours and gets backaches with more then 6. i have been told i can be very hard to get up during these spells of hibernation. the good news is that they seem to be lessening in frequency. but they are still very weird for me. the first time i slept past 3 p.m. i realized i hadn't done that since i was a teenager in high school a good 20 years ago (yes, dating myself...ssssshhhhhh). back then i made it a habit to sleep until all hours of the afternoon, particularly one weekends and snow days. but this kind of sleep-a-thon was over about the time i had kids with a few exceptions, almost all having to do with health. i am doing what my doctors say, taking my medications as ordered, doing well in school, and, in spite of the acute need for this quarter to be over, am not burned out. so the sleeping does not make much sense at all.

the final part of my diet seems to be a dramatic increase in libido. we're talking it used to be dead and now it's so alive that if i were single this would be entirely too scary. i really am getting the man's eye view here with the constant thinking of and physical responses to plain old fashioned lust. however, unlike most men, i have not been raised with it so i seem even less able to keep the damn libido in check. well, i keep it in check, i am not running around and grabbing every man i can get my hands on, but i seriously doubt i am managing to hide my interest well at all. the truly sad thing? saxy has been trained to handle my much lower levels of desire since we became a couple and breaking that training is a bit more difficult than a woman would imagine for most men. the good news? mornings no longer bother me any more. of course, whereas once a week used to suffice, we're having to deal with once a day isn't enough. every man's dream unless he has been trained otherwise and has gotten used to it.

maybe this is all stress related and will go away once the quarter is over. i am at the finish line, last paper written, 4 paper journal entries for the fiction class to do then finals. although i did have one friend suggest i may be hitting my "prime of life" (in which case i can do with less food in the picture).

of course, it may be too much for saxy to hope for some cravings to pass. with his luck we're in for a long bedroom haul here. ;)