Saturday, September 3, 2011

Lamictal Day 54: 100 mgs. Relationship Stress Decreases, yet Appetite Problems Continue,

For the past ten days, I've been hard pressed to differentiate between loss of appetite due to stress and loss of appetite due to medication.  Learning that your mental illness and learning disabilities are fucking up your marriage can do that to you.

Yesterday I experienced a breakthrough with my relationship drama.  My partner expressed some frustrations he's been withholding from me.  I had the opportunity to express some of my own frustrations.  We got to a place where we agreed that our current patters were royally horked, and came up with some creative solutions to address them.  All in all, we both woke up this morning feeling better about our marriage than we have been in days.

I was expecting that the reduction in stress would mean a reduction in my appetite problems.  But no!
In spite of being in a better place emotionally than I've been in a week and a half, today was a bad food day.  I had force myself to choke down my breakfast.  I ate less of it than I needed to, which meant that I was down on calories for the day ... which meant that by the time afternoon rolled around, my mood slumped.

I'm going through a lot right now.  I need my mood to be as stable as possible.  I need my meds to stabilize my mood.   I need adequate nutrition to stabilize my mood.  My meds impair my ability to eat.
This impairment destabilizes my mood.

It's pretty obnoxious to be in a place where I feel like lamictal is working for me, but where the side effects are preventing it from really working.  I go up to 150 mgs on Monday.  What will my appetite be then?

The upside is that I'm losing the weight I gained last Spring thanks to the combination of Abilify and Lexapro.  And today was the first time in several days that I experienced my late afternoon/early evening mood dip.  I just hope, as I head into Autumn, that I can balance the beneficial mood effects of lamictal with the detrimental mood effects it has on my appetite.

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