Friends and PCOS

I am a little bit worried about seeing one of my friends. Most of my friends are pretty good with their body image, or don't talk about these things with me, but one has some issues. She always comments on other people's bodies and claims that various acquaintances have an eating disorder (a bit of 'projecting'), and she is very ostentatious about eating certain foods that she perceives as 'healthful', or eating particular quantities.

I strongly dislike drawing attention to myself on the topic of food. I haven't really wanted to speak to my friends about the GI thing, but I did mention it to some friends when I was first diagnosed about a year ago.

I don't think I've written about that yet. Basically what happened was I watched a TV show about PCOS in late 2010 and thought that the symptoms sounded like mine when I was 15, but I was overseas and couldn't really do anything about it. I vowed to see a doctor when I returned home to Australia in September 2012. Meanwhile, in July 2012 I stopped taking the contraceptive pill, which I had been using to battle the acne I thought was caused by teenage hormones, as I assumed that after six years I didn't need it anymore. Wrong. The acne returned straight away, along with that thick coarse body hair. However, my newly re-frizzy hair also started falling out (much to my distress), my period stopped completely, I couldn't lose weight despite following a very strict diet and working out three to five days a week, and my moods swung dramatically. It was a pretty bad few months. I cried a lot for no reason whatsoever, which frustrated me even more.

It took me ages to get the incompetent GPs at my local bulk-billing clinic to get me a referral, and then I had to wait two and a half months to get an appointment with the specialist. As mentioned in the last post, she is the loveliest lady ever, and really knows what she is doing. She diagnosed me correctly, performed surgery on me to make me healthy again after not menstruating for six months, and then told me to come back in to see her. In the meantime, she had mentioned that there was no cure for PCOS, but weight loss on a low GI diet was recommended. I was supposed to go back to see her, but a week later I was due to move cities for my final year of university, and so thought I could manage it on my own.

Wrong again. The mistake I made was not booking an appointment with a nutritionist specialising in PCOS straight away. Instead, I just Googled 'low GI diet'. Protip: the Internet is full of batshit insane dieters with fully-fledged eating disorders disguised as paleo dedication. What I took away from that is that carbs are bad, and in order to ever get healthy, I would have to go on yet another low-carb diet. As previously discussed, low-carb diets are my binge kryptonite, and are guaranteed to send me crazy within 30 minutes of embarking on one. Needless to say, the first half of this year was one giant daily swing from no-carb no-sugar to miserably eating cake, convinced that not only was I a failure, but I would be a sick diabetic infertile failure (diabetes and infertility being the two major issues to come out of untreated PCOS).

In a way, this extra layer of misery was the final push I needed to start seeing a therapist. One of the first things therapists give you is a generic meal plan to try and regulate your eating mechanically and get you off the diet/binge cycle. My therapist acknowledged that she didn't know much about PCOS and gave me the name of two nutritionists. I resisted for about two months, convinced that I would have my precious carbs and chocolates taken away from me after being allowed to eat them in the intuitive eating programme.

Finally, unwillingly, I trudged off to see one. She was also a very nice lady, but I was firm with her: I had NO interest in knowing what my weight was, I was NOT there for weight loss, I would NOT be cutting out anything that I had been given in my meal plan because a clinical psychologist gave it to me and what would you know you're only a dietitian.  Luckily for me, she was also a very kind and tolerant lady. Even more luckily for me, carbs turned out to be the most important food group for PCOS (which requires a low-GI way of eating). I was taught that a well-balanced meal is about half non-starchy vegetable, a quarter protein, and a quarter lower-GI carbohydrate, but even a third of each would be fine.

All my fears were laid to rest. Nothing was being cut out, everything was on the menu. My way of eating wasn't going to result in a loss of limbs. There are certain foods that are high GI and so are processed quickly (e.g. potatoes, bagels, watermelon, polenta, most white breads, jasmine rice), but you don't have to cut them out, just pair them with low-GI proteins and carbohydrates, or swap them for lower-GI options when possible. Basmati rice was low-GI. My favourite bread was low-GI. Rice noodles were low-GI. Pumpkin's GI rating was pretty moderate. Desserts of all varieties were allowed in small doses, just as my therapist had told me. Likewise, the odd serving of deep-fried chips was not going to close my womb forever. I could breathe again.

Anyway, this brings me back to my social fear. This one friend always makes a big deal of people's dietary restrictions, whether they're real or not. When planning to catch up she made a point of saying that we could go to a place that was 'dairy free' or 'gluten free' - knowing that I don't have a problem with gluten or dairy. In reality it will probably be fine, I just don't want to have to deal with it at all or have it raised. I don't want to have to deal with her unacknowledged issues when I have my own (does that make me a terrible friend?), I either want her to work her problems out - with my support - or for her to stop mentioning these things. She is a good friend otherwise and I don't have any other problems with her, so I doubt I will ever mention this. It's just something to have to deal with.

I don't really feel this way with other friends, it's just her. For example, another friend was complaining the other day about how preparing and planning healthy food takes a lot of time she doesn't have and her current living situation makes it hard for her to eat what she wants. Even though this friend is not fat and doesn't have disordered eating, I had no problem sympathising with her and was totally fine to listen to her. I think it's the lack of honesty in the first friend that irks me a bit; if she pointed out her own issues with food just once then I could understand why she is so critical of others.

I also don't want to have to re-explain low-GI to the people I'd originally (mistakenly) explained it to as low-carb. To be honest none of my other friends will even care as they only care about my wellbeing, so this fear is a bit irrational, but I'm just going to sit with it nonetheless.