I have decided to take everyone’s advice, all at once. I will be the perfect consumer of medical advice, turning my body into my Temple of Medical Correctness.
I’ll start with today’s news:
Slippery Slope! One Tiny Truffle Can Trigger Desire For More Treats. Boy, did we have to start with chocolate? Well, they say you should face your problems head-on. “When participants were allowed eat a truffle, they unconsciously activated a goal of indulgence, the authors explain.” So if I eat that truffle, next thing I know I’m at Bittersweet Bistro ordering that dessert plate where they give you one of everything.
No chocolate, check.
My husband, when he sees me stealing chocolate from the baking basket, likes to joke, “Getting some medicine?” You see, I have read that the reason I have such low blood pressure may be my addiction to, eh, affection for chocolate. And today I have learned, “Dark Chocolate Is More Filling Than Milk Chocolate And Lessens Cravings.”
OK, so how do I work this into the truffle thing? Oh, yeah:
Truffles AOK as long as they’re made from dark chocolate, check.
I’m trying to figure out how this could affect me. I already have my husband, and I guess this tells me, for one, that I must like his smell. But the thing I really learned was to ask a lot of questions before I ever volunteer for medical experiments: “To make their odor evaluations, panelists sniffed vials of underarm sweat previously collected in the laboratory from volunteers.” Ew.
In the world of generating sweat, I just learned that “Caffeine Reduces Pain During Exercise.” I wish I’d known that in high school, when I was a competitive runner. Now that I’m an ex-competitive runner with bad knees and a mal-formed back, I like to listen to my pain. But maybe I’ll try caffeine for psychological pain. The only thing that hurts worse than back pain is hearing your kids fight while you’re laid up on the couch with back pain!
In case my back pain gets so bad I’m laid up in bed, I will pay attention to this one: “Control, Treatment Of Bed Bugs Challenging.” Note to self: don’t get bedbugs.
I used to think that I worry too much about the future. But now I know that I was wrong: worrying about the future is good for me! This just in: “Focus On The Future: Long-term Goals Help Us Resist Unhealthy Urges.” OK, so they did say longterm goals and not longterm things I definitely don’t want to happen. So instead of worrying about the future I plan now to think about the lovely future ahead of me in order to keep down my unhealthy urges. So when I run into your car at a stoplight, don’t be mad. In the future, you wouldn’t have been there anymore!
And then there’s stress: There’s a whole stress thread on Science Daily that makes for an interesting theory: Cortisol is the hormone your body releases under stress. The bodies of children with Asperger Syndrome (the form of autism formerly known as “Idiot Savant”) don’t release heightened levels of this hormone in the morning, as the bodies of “normal” people. (Note to self: find a better word than “normal” in quotes.) Women who were under stress during pregnancy are more likely to give birth to an autistic child. Further, “Antisocial Behavior May Be Caused By Low Stress Hormone Levels.” However, “Children Distressed By Family Fighting Have Higher Stress Hormones.”
So lastly, after I binge on dark chocolate, tell my husband he need not shower anymore because I’m attracted to the scent of his sweat, drink double espressos to numb the daily pain of being a parent, all while thinking about the fabulous plans I have for the future, making sure not to be a future volunteer for medical experiments, I will instigate plenty of family fights to keep my children’s stress hormones up so that they will neither suffer an adolescent-onset form of autism nor become delinquent teenagers.
What a relief it is to have a plan.
