Food and I

I have a bit of a funny relationship with food.  As a PWCF I have problems with digesting food, particularly with absorbing fat.  This means I have to eat as much food as I can, as often as I can, to maintain a healthy weight; its what I call the CF Diet. I can't remember a time when there wasn't a dietitian/doctor/nurse/parent telling me I needed to eat more-they still do! According to the health pros I should really be consuming one and a half times the recommended number of calories for an adult female- which I find practically impossible!  Added to this pwcf don't produce enough of the hormone ghrelin that makes the body feel hungry, so even tho I have to eat a lot I very rarely feel hungry.  People often say to me "oh you are so lucky you can eat whatever you want and not get fat."  Although I usually just smile at this remark, what I would really like to say is "b*ll*cks!  Getting past the obvious fact that being thin is never going to be any sort of compensation for having CF, this is simply not true.  I do not get to eat what I want, if I did I probably would not eat very much at all and would survive on tea and cake!  What I have to do is eat even when I don't want to, when I am feeling nauseous or when I have awful heartburn and quite frankly this is not fun.  If I don't eat enough the weight falls off me at an alarming rate and I can go from my okish BMI of 19 (the dietitian would prefer 20+, 20 being 'normal') to about 16 or even less, which is getting into dangerously low. malnourished territory.  For most women this would probably be fabulous-easy weigh lose, but for me it means no energy, lungs get rapidly worse and I end up on IVs or worse.  Without the high calorie intake I try and maintain, my health collapses frighteningly quickly, so I really don't have a choice as to whether I keep to my diet.

I would seriously contend that my CF diet is just as hard as any diet to loose weight. Frequently, I get to a point where just the thought of having to eat makes me utterly miserable and sometimes I even start feeling sick.  People often think that I must just 'be used to it', and yes, I suppose I am used to it but that doesn't make it any easier.  It also does not change the fact that its never going to get any better.  I have a target weight to get to and I have occasionally managed to get to it, but once I'm there the slightest cold can result in my falling straight off it again.  Also, maintaining this weight is really difficult, if I relax my intake down goes the weight again.  So, not only is this diet unpleasant it is unending. I am hopeful that a new study that is designed to see if injections of ghrelin could stimulate my appetite may make eating a bit easier if I am actually hungry sometimes. However, the study is still going and it takes a long time for these things to be approved-sigh.  In the meantime I will just have to keep eating...

Fantastic book!

Not really all the same size...

In a bid to make my cf diet a bit more easy to live with, I do tend to eat little and often rather than big meals which frequently get thrown up again... This is probably why I adore afternoon tea and small baked goods. They are much easier to eat and really help keep my intake up.  Also, as Dan Lepard says in his book Short and Sweet (pictured) sometimes 'we like to have our own cake rather than a piece of someone else's!"  I'm trying to widen my small things repertoire a bit and I found a recipe for Chocolate Whoopie pies in Dan's book that looked very promising.  They are two small cakey-biscuits sandwiched together with marshmallow frosting and finished with chocolate icing-nom.  I think I may have made mine a little bit big, and next time my inner pedant will definitely insist I get the piping bag out and make them more tidily! I dolloped these ones onto the baking try with a spoon and I think they were a bit big once put together to be described as bitesize...  I was feeling far too lazy to be more careful, but I think they could look really fantastic if made a bit more effort. I'm not totally convinced by the marshmallow frosting that sticks them together, as I do find marshmallow a bit too sweet even for me and it is so sticky that dealing with it is fairly annoying! However, the little cakey bits are delicious, so next time I may try using butter cream or possibly chocolate ganache. I also like the idea of experimenting with a lemony version and maybe a chocolate and cinnamon one...mmm...