Tiny's Blog

Tiny's Blog

Tiny's Blog

Dietary Changes and the Five Stages of Grief (Part 2)

Dietary Changes and the Five Stages of Grief (Part 2)

Following on from Part One where I talked about feelings of denial and anger in making major changes to diet and lifestyle, I wanted to continue in Part Two by discussing the final stages of grief – bargaining, depression and acceptance. We tend to associate grief only with really traumatic events like deaths, relationship breakups, or rehabilitating from serious addictions; however, when we have to eliminate certain foods or behaviours from our daily lives we can go through a similar, albeit less marked, grieving process. Hopefully this two part blog post will help to prepare those of you in the early stages of making changes for any negative emotions you may experience en route to acceptance! BargainingFor me this was easily the phase that lasted the longest! To an extent I still do it, but in a much less dramatic fashion! When I realised I was stuck in this phase, it marked a…

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Dietary Changes and the Five Stages of Grief (Part 1)

Dietary Changes and the Five Stages of Grief (Part 1)

If you are affected by a chronic health problem, sooner or later you are probably going to need to make some fairly major, permanent changes to your diet and lifestyle in order to improve your condition. Reading around nutrition books and blogs, you may get the impression that with a bit of grocery and kitchen organising, this should be a quick and easy process. Tales abound of people drastically changing their lifestyles overnight and turning their health around as a result. However, people tend not to write about the emotional impact of making such changes, leaving us to conclude that any setbacks they experience are due to lack of knowledge rather than lack of willpower.In reality, making significant and lasting changes to eating habits can be difficult, because for most of us, eating is not something we do simply to obtain nourishment. We eat for pleasure, we eat to socialise,…

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Tiny Tips for Dealing with a PGAD Flare

Tiny Tips for Dealing with a PGAD Flare

A flare up of persistent genital arousal disorder (PGAD) can be a frightening as well as deeply uncomfortable event. If you have been dealing with the condition for a while, you have probably already developed your own strategies for easing it, though there might still be some ideas here to help you further. If this is one of your first flare ups, you might be experiencing real panic and despair, wondering however you can find relief. Below is a list of things that I myself have found helpful during PGAD episodes. Some of these might also assist with flare ups of interstitial cystitis (IC), which has a lot in common with PGAD. Please note that I am not a doctor and nothing in this post is intended to constitute medical advice. If you try any of the things below, you do so at your own risk. Please note also that the…

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Introduction to Persistent Genital Arousal Disorder

Introduction to Persistent Genital Arousal Disorder

Before reading this post, please note that sexual arousal refers to a physical state, whereas sexual desire refers to a mental state. For example, if you want to have an orgasm, but have had a big argument with your partner, you may be experiencing arousal without desire. If you want to make love to your partner, but your body will not respond, you are experiencing desire without arousal. Persistent genital arousal disorder (PGAD) is a condition where a person experiences prolonged and intrusive sexual arousal without accompanying sexual desire. In its simplest terms, you really, really feel like you need to orgasm, to the point where it becomes an unbearable sensation, but you have not been thinking sexual thoughts or partaking in sexual acts that have caused you to become actually turned on. Worse still, if you actually do orgasm, the feeling often does not abate. Therefore, while sex normally (hopefully!)…

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Brilliant Bicarbonate of Soda!

Brilliant Bicarbonate of Soda!

Following on from my first blog post where I discussed my experience with Liposomal Vitamin C, I wanted to write about what I did to relieve my symptoms during my cystitis flare up. Please bear in mind that I knew what had caused the flare and was certain that there was no infection. If there is ever any doubt about the presence of infection, I would recommend that you get checked out by a healthcare professional and treat the infection as well as its symptoms. Allowing infection to go unaddressed may lead to kidney infection, which is a more serious issue.In the past when I have had cystitis, there has always been infection present and so I have never much bothered to treat the symptoms, just the actual infection. I’ve used antibiotics and D-Mannose to do this and since regularly using D-Mannose I have never had a bacterial bladder infection.…

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Liposomal Vitamin C and the Bladder

Liposomal Vitamin C and the Bladder

I’ve been fascinated with the idea of taking megadoses of vitamin C during times of stress or following exposure to viruses since I first discovered the work of nutritionist Patrick Holford over a decade ago. He advocates taking 3g of vitamin C every four hours at the onset of a cold, until all symptoms are gone. Plenty of other nutritionists and complementary healthcare providers support this view, with an article on vitamincfoundation.org even advising doses in excess of 100g a day for some conditions. While I have never reached (or felt the need to try to reach!) these dizzy heights, I have on several occasions exceeded 10g per day, usually when I have been in the throes of a cold.The problem is that achieving megadoses using mineral ascorbate forms of vitamin C is tricky. One must be careful not to overdose on the mineral of choice and, obviously, drastically increasing…

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