Healthy Obsessions The Adventures of a Mild Obsessive Compulsive

Jelly Belly Gluten Contamination

January 20, 2011 12:30 pm ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

You know how, when you pick up a packaged food and you read the ingredients, they list potential allergens? Like “processed in a facility with peanuts” or something similar? I’ve always made the same assumption that the author of Gluten Free and Tasty made: if they’re labeling food allergens, that means they are conscientious, which means that they would have listed gluten were contamination a possibility. I assumed it meant that I was safe. Not so…

Apparently Jelly Belly lists several products as gluten free that aren’t. They’re made on machinery that also processes gluten containing products. Which means contamination.

This is why we need the FDA to make rules about what can and cannot be considered gluten free. Thankfully, they’re in the process of defining the term and passing regulations.

Posted in: Food and Diet ⋅ Tagged: , ,

Dining Out, That is the Question…

January 7, 2011 5:45 pm ⋅ 2 Comments ⋅

Heading off to the Cheesecake Factory for a friend’s birthday dinner, and all I can think is… do they have a gluten free menu? do they even know what gluten is? what are the odds of cross contamination (high). Do I dare risk it?

Honestly, I don’t know. I’m tempted to eat a muffin now (I love you, Udi’s!) and not eat when I get there. Or maybe order a float. A float should be safe, right? Soda and ice cream. But wait, ice cream sometimes has gluten in it. Or is contaminated. Or maybe they didn’t clean the ice cream scoop well enough after scooping out some cookies ‘n cream (man, I miss that).

Such is the daily life of a celiac. I’d say it made me OCD and neurotic, except I was already OCD long before my diagnosis.

Posted in: Asides, Food and Diet ⋅ Tagged: , , ,

10 Effective Sleep Aids

December 22, 2010 2:50 am ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

There are tons of different sleep aids out there. Some work, some are complete snake oil. Expensive snake oil, at that. Lord knows many of us have bought plenty of it. Here are some things that do work. Not all of these items actually help you get to sleep. Some help you wake up at the right time or in the right way, which kinda goes hand in hand with that whole trouble sleeping thing.

  1. Melatonin Sublingual 3mg – 60 – Tablet – Gluten free sublingual melatonin from Douglas Labs. It’s a small, small tab that you place under your tongue about a half hour before bedtime. It will dissolve slowly. This is by far the most effective melatonin I’ve found out of the many that I’ve tried. The only thing more effective than this, for me, is Ambien. For some reason, this brand is only distributed through “healthcare practitioners” and, apparently,  Amazon. If you’re like me, and you have trouble falling asleep at night, it might well be from a lack of sufficient melatonin, and this may well be worth trying. Read more →
Posted in: Medical, OCD Dream Gear, Sleep ⋅ Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

Sleep Tracking: Looking at the Zeo

December 21, 2010 5:38 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

If your goal is accurately tracking your sleep, the Zeo is your best bet. Let’s look at why.

The Tech

The tech on the Zeo is completely different from the actigraphy of the fitbit and Sleep Cycle. Instead of focusing on movement, and then deducing sleep phases from that (which is helpful, but has a greater margin of error), the Zeo focuses on brainwaves. Based on the same tech as EEGs, it tracks the phases of your brain activity. Well, it tracks the electrical impulses of your brain activity and then deduces from that your sleep phases. This is also not *perfectly* accurate, but neither is an EEG. As my ENT told me today (hi, Robson!) there are several different phases that can look like REM.

In a sleep lab, it takes more than just monitoring, it takes interpretation. You’ll have sleep specialists looking at your EEG read outs and making their own analysis of your brain activity during sleep. EEG is probably more accurate than the Zeo, but it’s also a lot more cumbersome. Witness:

EEG

Zeo

Read more →

Posted in: OCD Dream Gear, Record Keeping, Sleep ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,

Sleep Cycle Messes Up

December 20, 2010 12:25 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

Sleep Cycle woke me at exactly the wrong moment this morning. I was in the middle of a dream (which the Zeo was quite aware of) when Sleep Cycle went off. Which just goes to show that Sleep Cycle really is  quite imprecise. It’s better than nothing, but not better than the Zeo.

Posted in: Asides, Record Keeping, Sleep ⋅ Tagged: , , ,

Gluten Free Mall Coupon

December 16, 2010 11:05 am ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

I can’t make use of this, but perhaps you can; Gluten Free Mall has a coupon for 10% Off –  Order made by 12/17/10. One use per customer, so anyone should be able to use the code.

Coupon Code: dc88f1

Posted in: Coupons & Sales ⋅ Tagged: ,

Sleep Tracking: Looking at Fitbit

December 14, 2010 11:03 am ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

Of all the sleep tracking devices, my fitbit is the one I’ve used longest. Unless you count the CPAP.

To use the fitbit for sleep tracking, you slip it into a wrist band, worn on your non-dominant hand, press the button (there is only one button) until the fitbit blinks START at you, and go to sleep. Pretty simple.

It uses the same tech as Sleep Cycle: accelerometer. As we already know, that’s a standard measuring device for sleep tracking. There are two major things that fitbit does better than Sleep Cycle.

Read more →

Posted in: OCD Dream Gear, Sleep ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,

Sleep Tracking: Looking at Sleep Cycle

December 9, 2010 10:24 pm ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

As mentioned before, I’ve been using the fitbit, the Zeo, and Sleep Cycle all together for over a month now. Honestly, I like all three.

With the combined data, I’m getting a good picture of my sleep. However, most people are not going to be as gadget happy as I am, and will only go for one of these sleep trackers. Maybe two at the outside. So I’ve been trying to figure out which of the three I’d pick if I could only pick one. And the answer is: it depends…

Sleep Cycle

Sleep Cycle is the one I expect will be most commonly used, simply because of the price point. It costs .99 cents. That’s pretty damned hard to beat. However,  Sleep Cycle is the weakest of the three trackers.

(This is going to be long; skip to the bottom if you just want the bullet points).

Read more →

Posted in: OCD Dream Gear, Record Keeping, Sleep ⋅ Tagged: , , , , ,

Gluten Free is Such a Fad

November 30, 2010 6:30 am ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

I’m standing at the checkout at WholePaycheck with my usual basket of gluten free items, and the checker looks at my basket and then smirks and says, “That’s such a fad right now.”

Anyone else ever get this kind of reaction?

On a very personal level, I find it frustrating. Not the fad itself, not precisely. But… Celiac disease is a pain in the butt. Particularly when I was first adapting to the lifestyle, I resented it. No cookies, no kitkats, no pasta, no flour tortillas, no easy shopping anymore. And getting that kind of smirk and snark just made it worse. Like ladling a cup full of condescension sauce over schadenfreude pie. No one likes being the on the receiving end of schadenfreude.

Read more →

Posted in: Food and Diet, Idiocy, Medical ⋅ Tagged: , , ,

Fitbit vs. Zeo vs. Sleep Cycle: Accuracy

November 30, 2010 12:38 am ⋅ 4 Comments ⋅

I’ve been using all three for at least a month now, so I feel like I can give them a fair shake. Let’s do a quick recap of what each one does.

  • Fitbit – Accelerometer, used both as a pedometer during the day and as a sleep monitor at night when strapped to your non-dominant wrist (I still don’t know why non-dominant, but I’m willing to go with it). Conventional sleep labs also make use of an accelerometer.
  • Sleep Cycle – There’s an app for that! (Sorry, I just couldn’t resist). This app for the iPhone uses roughly the same tech as the Fitbit. Accelerometer based monitoring. You place your phone on your bed, near – but not under – your pillow. It tracks movement via the mattress.
  • Zeo – Completely different tech. Instead of monitoring movement, the Zeo focuses on brain wave activity to track sleep phases. The monitor comes on a headband that you wear to bed. As tech goes, this is most akin to the EEGs used in sleep labs.

Read more →

Posted in: OCD Dream Gear, Sleep ⋅ Tagged: , , , , ,