So much easier said than done. I’m sure it’ll be better once I’m into a routine. As horrible and exhausted and miserable as I feel now, I have the belief that once I’m getting up, leaving the house, doing something, and bringing home a paycheck – plus meeting more people and finding more things to do for fun – I’ll find it easier to ignore the irritants, sleep when I need to, and deal better with my exhaustion and current physical woes.
There’s a guy on the ADD forums I’ve been visiting who’s all pumped about a carb-free diet that he’s on, which is patently unhealthy. Seeing as how the people reading these forums are in many cases desperate for something that’ll help them, they’re as likely to take bad advice as good, so I posted about the dangers of ketosis, which sets in when the body does not get enough carbs to survive. He starts telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about, ketosis is good as long as you “get used to it”, and I’m thinking, how do you get used to gout, kidney failure, liver damage, bone density loss, and heart failure? So I post a few reputable links to medical papers and articles by clinical nutritionists and doctors, and he posts that these people are stoooopid, too, and he doesn’t need to read these links to know they’re quacks. Then goes on about the wonders of ketosis. Posts some links. Well, I go to those links. Not one of them is from a reputable source, only one mentions ketosis (and it tells of the dangers of ketosis, so clearly he didn’t read even his >own< links before posting) and all but one (which is the blog of a woman on Atkins) is selling supplements and books for carb-free diets. Hmmmm. Quite objective. I’m getting a tad bit ticked here, because he’s going on and on about how wonderful it is to live on meat and fat alone, and everyone should try it, and what do these stupid medical doctors know anyway. So, since he won’t view my links, I put up a post with statements from Northwestern University School of Medicine, The National Health Ministry of the UK, and the American Heart Association. His response? “Where did you get this nonsense? This is all propaganda!”
I’m nuts by now. Trying to be calm, but this is crazy. Finally, I say to him that he can go and do whatever he wants, since he’s bound and determined to ignore the facts and put his health in serious danger. As a parting shot, I ponder why mister “all carbs are bad carbs” is using a Bacardi Limon label as his avatar. Yeah, that’s when the moderators came in and said I was picking on him with that ad hominem attack. I suppose you could call it ad hominem, what I was trying to express, though, was “consider the source.”
But now, there have been a couple of other comments supporting me (“I know a guy whose breath smells so awful nobody wants to be in the same room with him – it’s his ketosis” “I know someone who went into kidney failure because of ketosis”, etc.) so I’ve decided to just do brief facts. He posts about how healthy the Inuit are with their all raw all meat diet. I go to Canadian Census information and cite their statistics, average lifespan 17 years shorter than other canadians, 70% higher incidence of Leukemia, and 66% higher suicide rates. Plus the fact that they have to hunt for their own food, build their own shelters, and make their own clothes. Just left it at that. So I’ve gotten over the initial rage, and I’ll be a nice lady, I’ll just get it out of my system with bullet points here and there. And if I really explode, I’ll just do it here. Heh.