A Painful Surprise


This morning, I weighed in at my established time (8:30am) and the scale showed a weight loss of 0.2 pounds. Normally, I would take that to mean the Capitol Hill bar passed the test, but there is something else going on this morning that I think is even more significant. I’m feeling pain in my sacro-iliac joint.

I understand that when inflammation is triggered in our body, it will very often be experienced as a symptom in our ‘weakest link’. In other words, some people will get headaches, some will have acid reflux, some will experience fatigue or moodiness, and some will have body aches.

This pain in my sacro-iliac joint is something that has mysteriously plagued me off and on for years. Until this morning, I never associated it with generalized inflammation in my body. But now I’m considering the fact that something that I ate yesterday (most likely something in the Capitol Hill bar) has caused an inflammatory response that doesn’t register as weight gain (or is perhaps offset by a larger weight loss due to my caloric deficit), but is enough of an inflammation to exacerbate my familiar pain.

I did nothing to aggravate the area. There is no physical reason why that pain should be revisiting me. It is so very interesting to suss this out. This is a pain that I have long attributed to my overdoing it or misusing my body in the studio while exercising, but today I have shown that it is likely just brought to life by inflammation.

It is possible that, in the past, my strenuous exercise could trigger an inflammation response, thereby causing the pain to return, but it wouldn’t have been because of something I did, per se, but rather in the gestalt of what I did. In other words, that I simply did too much work and sent my body into inflammation.

Of course this is all speculation and anecdotal, but considering all of the attention I’ve been paying to this all month, I feel like I’m in a good position to make theoretical assessments based on the data I’m collecting.

It isn’t surprising to me that the Capitol Hill bar would trigger inflammation. I sort of expected it. But what surprises me, is that it doesn’t show up as weight gain, as I thought it would, but as a symptom that I’ve been experiencing for years.

I feel like a veil of ignorance has been lifted and I have a brand new explanation for my occasional, insidious back pain. Now, it’s a matter of going back and finding which food in that long list of ingredients is the actual culprit.

I have told myself that I would give myself a day of rest in between testing days if the test came out negative. In other words, I don’t want to be in an inflamed state while doing another test. But today I am breaking that rule. I am putting a familiar dish, which is a mixed vegetable bake, into a wheat pie crust.

As I have indicated, I’m feeling that it’s about time to take myself off of the strict regimen and to let myself have the freedom to eat whatever and whenever I want without keeping track of it. I feel like I need a few days vacation from all the science research.

But I’m still fascinated by this field of study, and will eventually go back on the program and continue with more tests. For now, we’ll see what the pie crust does to me, and then I’ll see how I feel about going forward with the test for pork chops.

I am expecting the pie crust to give me a reaction, so that would mean tomorrow would be a safe/friendly day and I’d test pork chops the following day.

I’ll be sure to post any of my findings.   Thanks for reading.

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