Rebuild from Depression Blog

Part of my recovery from depression has been eating a whole lot of high-fat food that I avoided for the better part of the 1980s and 1990s. Low fat diets were the ticket to an enviable Body Mass Index and dress size. It did work for the ten minutes you could stay on a diet of bagels and plastic cheese. It turns out that those sorts of diets are bad for the long game. Our brains need the fats in our foods to stay healthy.

Low carb diets offer another option which do allow fat. These diets also work for the ten minutes you can stay on them. Actually, to be fair, I find these diets much easier than the low fat sort. However, I have faced a dilemma: I have realized that I require a certain level of obsession to stay on any of these diets. I dieted through the 1980s and 1990s with a certain level of obsession – just enough obsession to stay on the diet, but not quite enough to inspire a clinical diagnosis of obsessive compulsive disorder.

Today isn’t actually my birthday but we did have the cake today. My birthday was Sunday and I would have posted my thoughts on that grand day had I remembered it was my birthday. My sister called at some point to wish me a happy birthday and I said “Whoa. It’s my birthday.”

My dad arrived later and I asked “Wasn’t there something you came over here to tell me?”

He pondered the question, chuckled, and said “Did I miss it again?”

“No, now is your chance.”

You might have guessed that birthdays are not the biggest of events around here. This birthday was different, however. Between writing paragraphs on an article, my mom and I cried our eyes out over what may be my best birthday news ever.

Best birthday present