Uncategorized – in thriver words

Finding Your Comfort Food

If you grab anything in the kitchen when you’re distressed, have you considered spending time finding your comfort food? As the days grow shorter and temps cooler, many of us begin to dream of comfort food. This year, election season seems to be putting people on edge adding another level of desire for comfort.

White bowl with black rim filled with pumpkin colored soup garnished with sour cream and parsley on board with napkin and spoon on white cloth covered in parsley and seeds.

Here’s an experiment that can provide distraction and help you narrow the list of foods you reach for when you need comfort.

Often, distress leads us to flail about grabbing at anything that might lessen anxiety. When we mindlessly start eating, we aren’t necessarily choosing the most effective foods. This can mean that we have to eat more in order to feel calmer.

When we change that process to a deliberate one, it both helps focus us on something besides feeling ramped up and keeps us from consuming calories trying to get to the thing that works. It can also help prevent feelings of guilt.

Step 1: Hot or Cold?

When you feel a need for comfort, begin with a drink. Try hot herbal tea, hot broth, or hot cocoa. Make note of how you feel.

The next time, try cold. Cold herbal tea (passion tea is excellent chilled), ice water, or milk. Note how you feel.

Caffeinated drinks aren’t by nature going to calm you, but you don’t have to rule them out. The aroma of coffee calms me. And as long as I don’t overdo, it can help get me past the antsy feeling I get when I’m fighting sleepiness.

Step 2: Salty or Sweet?

If you’ve determined that heat has an impact, choose a salty or sweet version of hot or cold.

For example, if warmth has more benefit for you, try warm salty foods like queso, pizza, baked or mashed potato, or mac & cheese. If you feel better with cold foods, choose cheese and crackers, pretzels and hummus, nuts, olives, or pickles.

Warm and sweet choices could be cobbler, pie, brownies, fresh baked cookies, or poached fruit.

Cold sweet choices might be fruit and yogurt, ice cream, smoothies, pudding, a milkshake, or candy.

Step 3: Perfect Combo

Some people feel best with the perfect combination of protein, vegetables, and grain carbs. The combo may combine salty and sweet and be served hot or cold. For some, a mix of salty and sweet hits the spot. Others may prefer hot and cold together.

Hot apple pie with ice cream is a perfect combo for some. Others might prefer hot apple pie with melted cheese on top. One is warm and cold and sweet and has protein. The other is warm and salty and has protein.

For some people mac & cheese is the perfect combo. It’s warm and salty and has grain carbs.

Trying new combinations can lead you to comfort you haven’t previously imagined. You may even discover that the best comfort food for you is what you grew up eating with your family on special occasions.

There’s no right or wrong to comfort food choices as long as you only include foods within your dietary restrictions. The idea of experimenting with specific choices and noting how you feel is simply to help you know exactly what to go for to feel better. That way, you feel better sooner and without accidentally consuming too much in an effort to find the thing that will satisfy.

Instead of waiting until you feel distressed, have some fun giving comfort food a trial run! The competition is sure to be enjoyable.

There’s No Simple Test

One of the most frustrating things to hear from your doctor as you struggle to get a diagnosis is: there’s no simple test that is definitive. If you have a disease or condition like MS, celiac disease, MCAS, IBS, or any other autoimmune or dysautonomic dysfunction, you’ve may have heard similar things for YEARS while symptoms continue to diminish your quality of life.

Worse still, without a diagnosis, family and friends may begin to treat you like a hypochondriac. This can lead to trying to talk you out of your symptoms, treating you like you’re crazy, or refusing to honor dietary requests. A lack of diagnosis certainly doesn’t help you get the support you may need.

Gowned scientist in goggles, mask, and gloves holding a slide and pipette. Top of microscope visible.

Even though skepticism has grown around some scientific areas, most of us go into a diagnostic process believing we will come out with a definitive answer and a treatment plan. We have a sense that our doctor is as curious as we are to get to the bottom of the problem. This may sometimes be true. Often it’s not.

Sometimes because of a lack of imagination or curiosity, but often because of the limits of the tests themselves, one in 13 (almost 27 million) Americans are living with an undiagnosed disease. That number rivals the number diagnosed with diabetes. It’s almost 10 million more than the number who have been diagnosed with cancer.

Understanding the limits of testing may not get you to a specific diagnosis, but it can help you know what is still on the table even if your numbers look “normal.” How can you find those limitations?

Ask questions!

Hopefully you are already working with a health team that considers you an integral member. If not, you may want to consider a change. If so, you may still need an advocate to go with you to appointments.

When you’re the patient, there’s a lot to think about. You may become too absorbed in navigating the physicality of an appointment to ask questions for yourself or absorb the answers you’re given.

Prepare a general outline for your advocate and tell them your goals. They can help you get the answers you need.

Here are a few things you’ll want to cover:

Ask what specific tests are being done. Write down or text yourself the answer. You can look these up later.

Ask how the specific tests were chosen – the doctor is going to use their experience to get to a beginning theory of what’s wrong.

From that point, they’ll either get positive results or begin to eliminate things that aren’t wrong. All of this narrows the field of likelihood. But sometimes, it doesn’t mean you don’t have something. It just means they can’t be sure. Ask how specific the test is. Ask how accurate it is or what percentage of cases it catches.

Ask what the best next step is.

If you don’t like the approach, ask if there are other options.

Get another opinion to confirm.

Once you begin a treatment plan, give it time to work. If you are not getting positive results or you’re suffering from side effects worse than the disease itself, you may want to have your doctor revisit the plan.

It would be wonderful if there were perfects tests for every disease and condition that exists. There simply aren’t. But there are always new ones in development.

Without perfection, our best line of defense is information. Ask, and ask, and ask until you have the information you need.

Teal Pumpkins

If your child has a food allergy or sensitivity, be on the lookout for teal pumpkins this Halloween. The Teal Pumpkin Project began with one mother who wanted allergic children to have a great Halloween experience. https://www.foodallergy.org/our-initiatives/awareness-campaigns/teal-pumpkin-project It was later adopted by Food Allergy Research & Education (FARE) and made a national initiative.

Halloween illustration. Black square with round teal and blue circle containing flying bats, a bare tree, and jack-o-lanterns.

The idea is to provide non-food Halloween treats in teal pumpkins that are easily identified. This means an allergic child can go directly to treats that are safe for them. There’s no standing around feeling like the odd man out.

In general, filling a teal pumpkin with non-food treats is simplest for everyone because no labeling or label reading is required. One of the things that makes Halloween hard for the allergic is individually wrapped candy often has no ingredient list other than on the outside packaging. Once candy goes in a host’s bowl, there’s no label available for trick-or-treaters to check.

If your child is especially prone to feeling different, you may want to solicit help from friends and neighbors. Encourage them to participate in the teal pumpkin project. In addition, provide each one with a small bag filled with safe edible treats marked with your child’s initials. Text when you’re about to arrive and have them place the bag on the top of the teal pumpkin.

If you have a trick-or-treat route filled with teal pumpkin providers who choose non-food treats, you can also have a special pumpkin at home that has plenty of safe, edible treats for the end of the evening.

Your family might also choose to make some treats together like cake-ball spiders, lava cake dino-destroying mountains, popcorn balls, or caramel apples. The specifics will have to work within your child’s particular restrictions, but the memory-building family time can make everyone feel included.

Adapt your child’s favorites into scary appearance and ramp up the atmosphere by using Halloween themed serve ware. Don’t worry about perfection or trying to do too much. Going overboard can make a kid feel just as different as leaving them out.

The idea is just to let the child see that they are seen, considered, accepted, accommodated, and welcome as part of the family, crew, troupe, or friend group. I know that probably sounds like a duh statement, but othering from adults is an everyday occurrence. And children follow their example.

In spite of its national presence, your community, neighborhood may not yet participate in the Teal Pumpkin Project. In my city of 207,000, there’s currently one household on listed on the Teal Pumpkin Project map. Households may be rare in your area as well.

You can change that by becoming a Community Captain https://www.foodallergy.org/take-action/teal-pumpkin-project/teal-pumpkin-project-community-captain You’ll find many resources for getting started on the website.

Even if you don’t have time to be a Community Captain, you can add yourself to Teal Pumpkin Project map, print out one of the free participant signs or flyers, or mix a few non-food treats into your regular candy bucket.

My Halloween focus again this year is offering Breakfast Bags of nutritious food in addition to candy for anyone who wants one. Last year, I ran out in 30 minutes and had to throw together a few more from items in my pantry.

This state has the highest percentage of food insecure children in the nation. Allergies and sensitivities are a big deal. They can be life-threatening. Starvation is life-threatening as well.

No matter how you may view adults in your community, hunger and allergies are never a child’s fault. Providing for them is the least we can do. Please consider a teal pumpkin.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Communication

If you understand the importance of communication and do your best to communicate well, it can be frustrating when co-workers don’t. But the truth is, you can only control your side of the equation.

In this world of abbreviations and emojis, I’ve noticed it’s much easier to say nothing than ever before. This may work fine in some situations. In fact, it can make you appear to be more of a team player than you actually are.

But saying nothing can also be deadly. If you are a pilot, communication with the tower or other aircraft can determine whether or not you make a safe landing. If you are a doctor, clear communication of instructions to your staff and patients can make the difference between complications or smooth recovery. And closing the communication loop builds trust with clients, patients, and colleagues.

Seems like internal communication would be an area of emphasis in policy and training in all industries. And yet, communication is often the most broken system in an organization.

Two men seated. One is masked and gesturing. Blonde female with ponytail and mask leaning toward second man with gloved hands out palms up.

In healthcare systems, this is unimaginable. And yet it is problem repeated day in and day out.

Developing good communication systems is not as complicated as setting criteria for transplant eligibility, developing infection control procedures, or reducing the number of opioid prescriptions. But it can make a huge difference in morbidity and mortality.

So why do health systems focus on external communication and image branding instead of the kind of internal communication that makes patients feel seen and cared for? This would build the brand in a more significant way and get better health outcomes. Better health outcomes will further a positive view of the brand.

This is a rhetorical question. I don’t know why it’s not a priority. I’ve served in multiple advisory positions in a hospital as well as a vendor that worked with hospital marketing departments. Overall communication procedures are something that just never get much traction and, in one instance, direct push back.

In that instance, I feel like there was a desire to avoid transparency. But that’s not always the case. Often, it’s just a lack of thinking the process all the way through and spending the time to write policies.

And there’s currently a weird belief that presenting facts is somehow being confrontational. A lot of people avoid anything that resembles, or that they can imagine might be, confrontation.

Other than quality managers, it’s possible that health system leadership simply doesn’t recognize the importance of communication. Their training may include bedside manner, but most of the focus is scientific.

A pilot study of the effects of more complete communication on medical outcomes in a specific group of patients and/or patients and families could be instructive. If it shows improved medical outcomes in a group that receives more communication, it could help the issue gain legitimacy within the industry.

And all of us can let our health providers know that communication is important to us. Highlight it on every quality survey you receive. Mention it during every doctor visit. Put it in the comments in your patient portal. And express appreciation when the system gets it right.

We can’t control what the system does, but all of us together are a lot of voices. If we keep communicating, at some point, they will hear us.