Day 7 of taking turmeric everyday

I'm on the phone, waiting for replies when I'm not busy. Thankfully, I was busy for much of the day - taking care of the cat, making breakfast, doing work, meeting a friend for lunch, having her over for a swim and then dinner, back to hanging out with the cat and now this.

I texted a few friends and though not all of them replied immediately, the one I wanted to hear from took ages and then stopped replying altogether. To be fair, this is more than he's done in a long time. Perhaps because it is Sunday and he had time, but the message was cryptic and I don't handle that very well.

I shot him a question. Radio silence. Some negative self-talk ensued. I tried to breathe through it. For reinforcements, I went on YouTube to watch a zen buddhist talk about how to love (it was a bit of a wormhole, because I watched three more videos by the same instructor and managed to fall in love with the idea of increasing the capacity to love so I may love infinitely).

It worked, somewhat and for a short time. The negative talk reappeared and I somehow wanted vengence or other form of relief. I wondered what is it about this person and/or behaviour that resonates with me? Do I like feeling shit? No answer was forthcoming, but I noticed that (a) I want attention and (b) not being able to deal with this properly resulted in a moment of anger directed towards the self. At that point, I gave myself five minutes to do body scan and meditate on whatever showed up.

Also nothing. At least I'm calmer now. There's less craving and more general tiredness from all that scattered energy and the swimming earlier today. And I've given it some attention.

Before writing this piece, I took a turmeric pill and read all of the previous entries for this week. Three things I'd like to focus on to see the effect of taking turmeric everyday:

- how my joints feel, particularly the right knee. I haven't been exercising much lately but whenever I get active, the right knee tends to feel some pain. Now that I'm on my third day of period, I think I can start exercising again.

- how my skin shows up. The cut I had from a few days ago has healed. The spots which appeared and then proliferated now seems to have stopped spreading. My face has some red spots, though. They look like mosquito bites more than pimples, but since it's that time of the month, I can't say for sure.

- rate of hair fall. I am only testing this by how much of my hair I have to vaccuum off the floor. Pure eyeballing/guesstimating. After swimming, I shampoo and condition my hair immediately so it's feeling full and soft, but there is a lot of hair on the floor. Fine, scrawny and short.

If I do a round two of this experiment, I would want to check how it affects my cholesterol, period and non-period bloat.

What did I eat today?

- Breakfast was coffee with milk, toast with butter and jam

- Lunch was rice with vegetables at a Mamak stall. I tried to eat mutton, but it was too chewy

- Dinner was two mushroom tacos and one beef taco-like thing. The vegan tacos had corn in it, which I don't enjoy in general, although there's really nothing wrong about corn. I used to eat it all the time with tuna mayonnaise (a kind of British deli obsession)

And plenty of water and cold tea. After one week of taking turmeric:

+ no knee/joint pain

+ skin healing fast, although the face looks a little ruddy and spotty

+ hair is falling as normal (not too much, but also not visibly reduced)

Let's see how the next two weeks goes.

[Read about Day 6 here]