Routines'R'us

On my recent Asia trip, I had to participate in a business dinner at a Japanese restaurant. In case you don't know my food habits, here is a short summary of what I don't or can't eat:

1. I am Vegetarian (so no meat)

2. Allergic to Peanuts and Sesame seeds (so that rules out certain places like Thai restaurants, select Chinese restaurants that use Sesame oil, etc.)

3. Allergic to shellfish (not that I eat fish, but if they cook using the same utensils or some of that gets transferred, I still get a reaction

4. Allergic to eggplants (that rules out a few dishes in middle eastern , Italian restaurants)

5. Allergic to select fruits/vegetables (simple check is, if it has fine hair on the skin, I can get rashes just by touching them, if I eat them there will be othe side effects)

Usually when I eat things on the allergy list the symptoms are skin eruption, wheezing followed by a throbbing pain in the base of my head behind my left ear followed by extreme light and sound sensitivity which is immediately followed by violent throwing up till my stomach is empty. Then I sleep out of sheer exhaustion and after two or three hours wake up like the world is a rosy place and feel on top of the world. 

This happens periodically. With a lot of food restrictions, I have managed to make these "food poisoning" episodes (as my parents and wife call it) less frequent. The problem though is that when they hit me these days, the magnitude of the episodes is increasing on a Logarithmic scale. It is like I exchanged frequent mild tremors for a Banda Aceh type quake! 

Now given all this, I do NOT carry Epi pens with me because my allergies are not the deadly kind. On the Immunologist scale, most of them are a level 4 or 3 reaction. Severe enough to end up immobilized for the short term. Then again, I have not tempted fate by deliberately exposing myself to high levels of these "toxins".

Recently I am hearing that the reasons for this are :

- that kids who are not exposed to lot of different foods as babies are more prone to getting food allergies (eating street food as kids can help was one idea that was talked about)

- some of these are genetically transmitted triggers (my had had excema as a child)

- some of these are environmentally acquired (dust allergies etc.)

I am also told by friends who read the "news" that :

- reintroduction of these allergens in small quantities helps overcome this as long as it is done at a young age

- one can naturally outgrow allergies to certain foods and develop allergies to new ones, if one is prone to such allergies and that one has to periodically "test" for such changes (a colleague of mine has developed an allergy to almonds close to the age of 50! )

- allergy to peanuts could be allergy only to dry roasted american peanuts vs. boiled Indian peanuts (this I can actually vouch for.. I can eat a few Indian peanuts without getting a severe reaction but the large US peanut gives me rashes within a few hours)

- There are "eastern treatments" that can work for this ranging from :

   - oil pulling (gargling sesame oil in your mouth for 10 minutes and spitting it out for 30 days)

   - going to some place in Andhra where they take a small live fish and push it down your throat 

   - going to kerala where they put a flour dough boundary on your stomach and fill the surface of the stomach with some herbal liquid which absorbs the poison from your insides 

etc. etc. It may not be fair for me to clump all of them under same bucket as some come with more evidence, recommendations, different thumbs up/down ratio on Youtube comments, and other metrics which are equally helpful in evaluating cures. In spite of having a lot of respect of eastern medicine (our elders were wise) but being a product of western HEROS thinking (Hypothesis, Experiment, Result, Original Schedule, Status .. for those who are wondering), have not tried any of the pulling, fish shoving or toxin absorbing stomach swimming pool treatments. 

Instead I have always :

- Watched what I eat

- Mostly eat only home cooked food (take my lunch with me to work every day)

- eat the same thing on trips (after doing trial and error in different restaurants, different dishes, and taking my own food with me for the most part of the trip)

I am also not fun at business dinners because of my abstinence from alcohol, sodas and coffee. So it is either sipping water without ice, orange / apple juice or apple cider or tea!

On this recent dinner, the chef was challenged to know of my Vegetarian status and allergy status. So he got "creative".  I get the "poor guy" looks from people which baffles me. Even if I am allergic to a subset of food, there is still plenty I can eat! 

The restaurant came up with mountain yam cooked and extruded to look like pasta, a funnel of asparagus, cucumbers, and other greens in a yogurt sauce, something called dragons beard leaf, some other stuff that folks had difficulty translating into English.. 

Ate or tasted stuff that was translateable and found it to be tasty after mentally preparing myself for the worst. Then they gave a sauce which had some green wasabi stuff, white stuff and a powder that had to be mixed in the sauce.. (could clearly smell sesame seeds on that powder and avoided it) for the yam to be dipped in and it had a sambar flavor! 

There were some dishes that were simply shutting down my nose with the smell and those I passed on to my fellow diners. The tea was great as was the conversation and I loved the fact that everyone in the table at least respected my "sensitivities" in a literal sense. Everyone else in that table had a penchant for fine wine, high proof alcohol, exotic dishes of every kind from everywhere in the world. In short, I was feeling like Buddha dining with the Anthony Bourdain family! 

After that dinner, I did not go through the usual throw up routine. There was mild rashes and a stomach upset for 48 hours, but the rashes are gone now and the stomach is well set after a day of dieting only on bananas, oranges, grapes, almonds and coconut water. 

This weekend, I plan to start eating one sesame seed and one peanut on saturday, increase it to two each two days later, four four days later and see how far it goes. I have to see what the breaking point is. Worse case I will drink salt water and throw up.  Was inspired by one person at the table who drank like a fish who could not handle alcohol at all as a young man but he told me he conditioned himself to it over time as his job involved a lot of wining and dining! 

Will post the results HEROS table style and let you know if shocking the system on a non linear scale helps condition it better. Somehow my initial "gut feel" is that a linear increase my condition it less. While my experiement is still not as agressive when it comes to the max, it is still a lot less than eating a full ellu urundai! 

Routines may be good for me, but I think those periodic throw up sessions after "food poisoning" were actually doing me some good in a self regulating way. 

Yoga has definitely helped with getting back to normal post such attacks, but even doing yoga 200 times a year for more than six years has not eliminated the food related triggers. There are other triggers like dust, old library books, certain incense sticks, perfumes etc. that I have improved with respect to tolerance levels.

(these topics have all been broached before in various forms.. here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here..   but going for the experiment this time).

Will come back with data!

Focusing your mind - Bikram Yoga followup

This is a followup to the previous post which described physical changes after starting Bikram Yoga.

Before trying to describe the Behavioral changes over the last 6 weeks (Yes, it has been 6 weeks and so far we have made it to 40/43 days!), there are a few important physical changes that were left out in the previous post.

- Softening and shinier skin. With all that sweating your skin becomes extremely soft like a baby's skin. It also starts reflecting light. Your nose, forehead etc. reflect flash when photographed. The front part of your leg where the skin stretches over the bone also starts to get shiny.

- Hair loss (if you can call it that) in select areas of the body. Inner thighs, the inside of your arms near the elbows, the calf area, the few hairs on your chest all gone. There are a lot of guys who show up to class who are as hairy as they get, but just letting you know that for someone who did not have much body hair to start with this is was a good thing... and yes, your chest reflects a lot more light than before when flash photographed.

- Phenomenal ability to shut your ears from the inside. Well, guess all married men acquire this ability to filter out select sounds from the wife, kids, MIL over time, but this is like magic. You can stop listening to things without ear plugs! Like a switch. Needless to say the four women in the house are all upset with Daddy's new found skill.

There was also one day when I slowed down in class after the first 20 minutes when the towel turned a bright yellow where my sweat pooled on it. Having been through Jaundice in 5th grade was worried about having done something to my liver and started doing one set instead of two throughout the rest of the class. The teacher told me that it is normal for some folks to sweat yellow and to drink more water. Later internet searching showed that this is a reaction to the urea from the sweat (same urea from urine gets out through sweat) to some of the new bio-degradable laundry detergents. As it so happened we brought a new "eco" detergent from Costco two days back and it is not a concern anymore.

Now that we have all that documented for other people who might look for information, here is the part about the mind.

The first few days of Yoga was spent in coping with the body changes. It also came with guilt for not having treated the body nicely all this time since the accident, for abusing it with a lot of 14-18 hour work days, bad food choices etc. etc. Then there were thoughts of "why didn't I do this before. This place is so close to home" and some internal justification that it was not meant to be then and it is meant to be now.

After the first week, there was a total sense of detachment with "high decibel noise". When the kids or wife spoke, daddy listened. When they raised their voice, it was filtered out. Same thing at work in meetings where folks got all hyper. Invariably, you realize that when it gets to that point at work or home, filtering out does not change anything. The people who scream don't accomplish anything anyways and only when they calm down themselves do we get to a solution. The only times in the last six weeks this control was not exercisable was when someone lied and my face and ears turned red because blood rushed to my face. Most of this may be commonsense and things regular people do all the time, but it is a new experience for me.

For a person who was always "hyperactive" and quick to get excited over technical things, this is a big change. In other words my signal to noise has gone up by orders of magnitude. This is perceived by people around me as "operating at a higher level", "separating the wheat from the chaff" etc. etc.

Right now, the reaction to anything that is touted as a major problem is "okay, think. what next". There is a deep breath that is being taken before making any serious decision or before opening ones mouth in meetings or at home. Sometimes it is better to leave things unsaid and when you take that breath you realize it and stop yourself.

Controlling your anger is more difficult when you start yoga. The first week was tough. It was like you became a women and were going through PMS. There was a lot of frustration, anger, and happiness. Was really emotional. This went away after the first week.

This change might be perceived by some as a "he doesn't care anymore" or "is he going to quit?" or sometimes your kids might make statements to your wife like "daddy doesn't listen to me anymore" and your wife might think you are going to leave the house and go to the mountains. You walk away from situations where you would have stood and fought and the other person just goes "what happened? you don't want a fight?", "you not man enough?"..

Have realized that this aloofness is not a good thing right now at this stage of life, especially in light of the man enough part, and have corrected it in places.

Now for a sensitive topic. Internet sites, "Bikram quotes" from people who are writing negative articles about him, say that your drive to do things in bed is supposed to increase with yoga and this is something to brag about. On the contrary, the first two weeks after doing yoga, that was the last thing on my mind. All those pretty people you see in the studio and nothing stirs inside you. You go to Santa Cruz and there are good looking women frolicking in the beach and you don't get excited in any way.

Skimpy clad women are not new to me, even from ballroom dancing days. There it was all about blocking out that from your mind and focusing on the dancing. Here the issue seems to be that there is nothing to block. You expect your brain to work on blocking out a thought but it is like the thought didn't arise in the first place. Again, this is a personal experience and maybe something is different with me. If you tried yoga and went through the same or similar experience, please do drop a note in the comment box. There is not much out there in terms of experience from a guy's perspective. Probably guys are not outspoken when it comes to this topic and guess most guys would not want to talk about this, leave alone blog about this.

Have to admit that I have tried to think about this a little too long. Was this a reflection of how doing things in bed were in the past some way to feel alive or feel good about yourself and now that Yoga makes you feel good, you are okay with all that taking a backseat? Or is it the fact that sleeping earlier and focusing on your breathing taking priority over everything else? It is likely that the sleeping hours before the wife comes to bed and leaving hours before she gets up is the root cause and not some mind thing. Hence the request for others to share their comments. You might be perceived as self centered and selfish by your family if you went through similar things. Guys don't play "hard to get", girls do. So when a guy is perceived that way, something has definitely changed.

One theory (self analysis of course) is that even for a guy, there is a lot of hormone changes possibly going on what with compressing parts of the body and extending them and having blood flow to parts that have not seen such flows in ages. Maybe a side effect of those hormone changes? If you are touching your own forearm and go "wow.. this is smoother than my wife's hand" then maybe you have an issue. Even had a weird dream of me becoming like Lord Shiva in his ArdhaNarishvara form (half of his body is man and the other half is Parvathi).

Internet searches tell me that yoga by default reduces chemicals produced by body in stress situations (cortisol). It also stimulates all the glands in the body. From day 10 to day 30, could not care less about anything. Over the last ten days with some experimenting and self analysis, have come to the conclusion that :

- nothing wrong with me physically
- nothing wrong psychologically with respect to being turned on either but you have to willingly turn on a switch in your head and make it say you want it
- somehow the default setting for sensuality is turned off and you have to turn it on at will

So there again, if you feel your drive is gone and you don't seem be bothered by it, it may not be gone. It is very much there if you chose to go for it.

Having had no training as a doctor or a yogi and not having much data go with from the internet, this is the best I could do to summarize the last part. Yoga is supposed to make you realize that the "you" or "my" is not worth it. Guess you get there through a process where you first realize what the "you" is all about.

Recently the body and mind seem to have reached a steady state and the changes are not drastic. They are all gradual changes in strength, flexibility and the ability to focus or defocus on things and ideas. There is no more weight loss either. It has plateaued out.

Not going to add more posts on Yoga. If anything, will update these two posts or add things to the comment section. The real goal was to put these things out so that other folks looking for info. will at least see one persons perspective and add more data to their decision making process on continuing with Hot Yoga.

Life, just got interesting!

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Allergies 'R' us

It was a surprise to see that this was food allergies awareness month!

Why the surprise?

A lot of folks do not know that one can be allergic to certain foods.

One in five kids in California suffers from skin rashes triggered by some form of food allergies, is what I was told by a doctor a few years ago.

This post took a long time to get out, not because I did not want to write about food allergies, but because it brings too many bad memories. With work getting way too busy and the overall concern for the state of the household moving forward into the next six to nine uncertain months, the last thing to do was a deep dive into the brain to go over memories better left repressed!

It is food allergies awareness month and what has to be shared will hopefully make many people open their eyes to this problem.

When baby Sundaram was around four plus years old and was put in first grade at the local school, there was lot of stress. There was also a lot of playing around with balls made of tar(pitch) from the road laying machines, frogs, insects and plants in the backyard. More than anything, there was all those kadalai urundais (Caramelized peanuts) and ellu urundais (sesame seed balls) with a liberal dose of bajjis made using Nallennai (gingelly oil)!

These were days before we had the Palmolein and Sanola in late seventies India and that was precisely the first time, baby Sundaram got what was diagnosed as "Karappan", which in English that we know now is a form of Eczema.

Life takes a different turn as this mild irritation gets complicated by an allergy for Sulpha drugs (which were given to treat the problem) and pus filled blisters appear all over the body, especially where the hair follicles are. White fresh school uniforms worn in the morning come back from school with blood and pus stains all over. There is a fear among other students as well as among other parents and the kid is forced by one and all to stay home.

The sulfa drugs having backfired badly, and the typical soframycin type creams prescribed not doing anything, the family doctor actually suggested some "siddha" medicine which seemed to have better results in cases like this.

So, the parents take the kid to what was (dont know if it still is!) the Raja Rajeshwari Siddha Vaidhya Nilayam and we go meet a 90 year old Siddhar, who is puffing away on his cigarette! He takes one look at the kid and gives him some Thanga baspam (gold powder) to be mixed with honey and taken twice a day and an amazing goop called "neer-adi-muththu" (pearl from the bottom of the water is the translation).

The parents take turns applying this goop over the boils and after two months things take a turn for the better and everything is forgotten. There are a few "porukkus" (scabs) here and there, and once in a while there is a patch of hair from the head that just falls down with a scab, but a five year old doesn't know anything and is happy to get on with life.

Things take a routine and almost every alternate year, there is a mild recurrance of the boils, but they subside after one or two show up. The parents have also figured out by now that putting the kid on a Thayir saadam diet (rice and yogurt) seems to work wonders for his skin problems. They have also learned to let the kid pick his food.

Let's talk about that. If a kid with food allergies instinctively stays away from certain foods, but eats other foods, the parents have a couple of options:

a. force feed the kid, stuff he/she is trying to avoid
b. berate the child for being a picky eater and then force feed the kid
c. understand something funny is going on and check (after all who doesnt like Mangoes? or ellu urundais?)

Well, b. was the default option, till my grandpa defended me. He just told everyone to back off. If the kid did not want it, he did not want it. He ate the bananas and apples didn't he?

Today, there is another option

d. Get the kid allergy tested!

When I was in seventh grade, somehow the dormant blisters came out full strength. It was mind boggling. I would have blisters everywhere. Couldnt stand, sit, lie down. To this day, no one knows if food triggered it, or if it was some bacterial infection (along the steph lines) that did not have a cure. Western medicine left me for dead. Anything the local doctors tried only made it worse.

Again, we went to the Siddhar who was now nearing 100 and was still sucking on his cigarette! He looked at the blisters, took my pulse, pulled up my eyelids and looked into my eye and declared "raththa sudhdhi illai!" (blood is not pure!) and gave some instructions to his assistant.

Out came two things, which I will take to my grave. One was a small bottle with seven markings on it. It was some kind of extreme laxative that would make you stay in the bathroom and not even hold water! Within those seven days, it would make any normal person look like a concentration camp survivor. The second thing was a "thailam" that had to be rubbed over my head in an attempt to cool it down.

All said and done I went from

to



in less than one year. The second photo is after the recovery and back to school going days.

The intermediate stages were not worth being photographed! (Now that we have Google, did image searches on skin blisters to show San what it looked like and found the pictures for "folliculitis" , right top picture is a match!)

After that episode in seventh standard (where 3 months were spent in bed), the rest of school went by without any events. By then the family and extended family adjusted to my special eating habits. Almost on a routine basis however, there would be skin rashes, itching, severe headaches and migraines.

That is when my dad came out of the allergy closet and told my mother "when I was a kid I also had similar skin problems". Till my seventh grade he never admitted that he passed on anything negative to me. When little Sundi repeated ten digit numbers from memory, there would be the "that is my boy! He has my genes" speech.

Don't blame my dad though. He probably was suppressing such memories also, only to find them catching up with him thirty odd years later! He taught me the greatest trick though. When the pain hits the lower back of the head right above the neck, he would ask me to dring a lot of hot water (no salt, nothing). Just a lot of hot water! and wait for three to four minutes.

It would make me throw up violently. Drink more water, more vomitting , and keep going for another 15-20 minutes till your eyes water, you have nothing else in your stomach and you feel absolutely fresh. It is almost like the whole world suddenly turned beautiful! Have experienced this so many times that somehow the stigma of throwing up like that is gone.

This was followed by four years of sumptuous feasting in various mess halls in Banaras. Every now and then there would be a throbbing headache and the hot water trick would always work like a charm!

Before I knew it, college was over and it was graduate school in the USA. That is when Sundar discovered "Peanut butter"! A concept that he had never heard of in India. Have peanuts made into a paste, put some crunchy peanut pieces in the paste, and use it to make a sandwich! Two days of peanut butter sandwiches and it was back to drinking hot water.

The only good news was that one did not have to wait in front of the gas stove for an agonizing five ten minutes to get the water hot. Hot water came readily available from the tap in the land of opportunity! Throwing up was never made easier.

That was also the time this body discovered Cheese Pizza. Wholesome food with no allergic side reactions whatever! Life was good between Pizza's and noodles and the sambar, rasam and curries which were all homemade with Saffola oil!

This glorious time is punctuated by the vegetarian's attempt to try some non vegetarian food (thanks to help from local friends!). A piece of salmon from a friends plate was tried only to be followed by two days of sickness. That pretty much ended the non vegetarian experiment! That was also the time when a doctor in the USA suggested that not all people were able to handle certain foods.

Doc: Why try salmon now?
Me : A friend wanted to know what Salmon tastes like?
Doc: ???? but your friend eats salmon
Me : my friend has been eating salmon since childhood. the idea was to get the perpective of a person who had never tasted it in 23 years of life and see the reaction
Doc: Well you have some reaction, alright! Don't go near seafood in general. You seem to be very allergic.
Me : So I should not try to eat any meat. God designed me to be a vegetarian?
Doc: I said seafood. Obviously you are new to the meatscape. You can try to eat chicken? Chances are your body won't handle red meat as well considering how delicate your stomach is.
Me : Thank you!

That was when I realized "Mera Thayir Saadam Mahaan!"

After staying far away from meat, got married and San came to make my apartment a home. As is customary with any new Indian bride, she went to the local grocery store to buy oil to "eththufy the kudumba vilakku" (light the family lamp) and needless to say she choose "Idhayam Nallennai" (gingelly oil) and she got a large bottle. It was not even close to Deepavali and that meant she was switching over from the Saffola and slightly bitter vegetable oils to the desi Gingelly!

Wham! The migraines hit and they hit hard. The skin also started acting up. The new bride was literally scared. She could not handle her hubby throwing up every alternate day. She knew that the throwing up made him feel better instantly and he used the word "food poisoning" once or twice. She was also tired of the implication of her poisoning him somehow (you know those pesky India phone calls on Sunday morning?).

So we go to a doctor and he pokes ... let's see... a batch of 64 needles in an 8x8 grid dipped in various allergens on my back. Then follows up with injecting 8 little drops into the right hand and 9 into the left hand.

An hour or two later, they read the needle points one by one on a scale of 1 to 4 (4 being severely allergic and 1 being a non issue). Some of the needle prick points have now swollen to the size of grapes! We are scared. The doctor triumphantly declares that Sundar Narayanan , Age 27 has severe food allergies and has been living with it all his life without knowing it! He also suggests that the tests he did were for american plants, american foods, drugs, etc. and considering my diet was Indian food, we should make a trip to India and get tested for Indian food allergens!

On our next trip to Madras, we go to Anna Nagar to a certain "Mahathi" clinic and a doctor there tests me similarly for Indian foods. She gives me a different list..

After cross referencing the American and Indian doctors diagnosis, San and me figure out that Sundar Narayanan, Age 28 can pretty much eat Air without falling sick.. and yes, maybe he can also eat Thayir saadam!

There are apparently ways to get rid of some of these allergies. One includes completely eliminating those foods from the diet and a slow and gradual introduction of that item into the diet to check severity.

When things like Brinjal, Pumpkin (poosanikkai) and Potatoes get cut from a Madrasi's diet, one gets very very irritable (if you dont know what we are talking about here, go read PGW's "The Nodder" , a small story in Blandings Castle and you need no more explaining).

Finally after this purgatory period (which was a more dignified version of the liquid from 7th standard), it was found that the only two allergies that mattered or which stayed were

a. sesame seeds
b. peanuts

There were others like Seafood (which were taboo and we didn't care) Mango, strawberries etc. (which were disliked instinctively) that didn't make a difference.

For the last 8 years, this house has not had peanut oil or sesame oil in the house. If it is used, it is done on separate vessels.

All near and dear ones know this at home and at work. People who come back from Europe or even Israel (with candy labels in Hebrew) tell me if there is peanuts on the candy and ask me to stay away!

One good thing is, the hot water treatments are now few and far between!
Another good thing is that in the US, the ingredients are always nicely labeled and there is no risk of buying something from a store and eating it by mistake. The only risk is when going to some restaurant and they use sesame oil to cook but dont tell the customers when you ask them what oil they use!

There have also been two new additions to this house over the last eight years and that goes back to "what it means to live with food allergies".

When I heard the MIL pray out loud after Jr. got a skin rash "please god, let not Jr. take after her dad", it sent me to pieces. Turned out that the chlorine in the swimming pool had irritated her skin (this was shortly after her first swimming lessons). So far she is not allergic to any foods or medicines.

Again when the Little one developed dry skin, the same prayers (this time from San and her mom)! The little one does take after me a lot and so far she is not allergic to food, but has very weak skin. So she is being watched for the food she picks.

So far, she has not developed any strong recurring dislike for any food. That is also a good sign.

A lot of friends ask "how do you live with this?" and the answer is quite simple

"Carefully"

With a little watchfulness on the ingredient list and some practice, peanuts and sesame seeds are dealt with!

At least I was lucky enough to find out what caused problems. A lot of people have to spend years to find out!

So, a final piece of advice to parents out there. Food allergies are very common and are usually not severe. However, if you suspect something, give your kid the benefit of doubt and let him/her avoid certain foods. If in their adult life they outgrow those allergies, they might start eating those foods anyways, but you will spare them the sickness!

Also people who are allergic to plants, chemicals may also be highly succeptible to food allergies (a doc told me this). So if your kid's eyes start watering when they play with a dog or cat, they are probably allergic and that means there is a chance they are allergic to certain foods also and is worth checking out.

Links to previous posts here, here and here!

ps. thanks to Tharini for staring this thread and to Boo for reminding me to write!

pps. for those of you who wonder why a guy so deep rooted in Western science has a healthy love for eastern science, the "daadi" saamiyaar (bearded ascetic) as he is rememebered in our familiy, was one of the best doctors we have met! He just sat there in padmasana in his loin cloth, chain smoking at 90+ years old... but he was one hell of a doctor!

ppps. When writing about something this close to my heart, there is no proof reading and I type as fast as one can think. So this post was corrected for typos today!

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