Hot flashes and flatulence.

I fell off the wagon last week – again.  I answered the siren call of caffeine and gluten. We’ve got one of those single serve Keurig coffee machines at the office and I’m always jealous because there are all these snazzy, olfactorily orgasmic caffeinated flavours, wafting their way through the office air.  Flavours that people who can drink caffeine willy-nilly, carry around in their mugs, making disgusting yummy noises.

I caved.  Twice.  The Hazelnut Cappuccino and the Southern Pecan seduced me.  I’m a whore for sweet coffees.  I freely admit it.  Perhaps others will learn from my mistakes. I dropped my loonies in the peanut butter jar that we use as a “CONTRIBUTE TO THE COFFEE FUND” receptacle and picked up the caffeine crack pipe.  Plus I might have had a french vanilla latte from Tim Hortons.  Then, oh DEAR GOD, I had a chocolate mint black tea at home, because my body was now jonesing for the caffeine. 

So there was all this caffeine RAGING through my blood stream, bouncing around like a hamster in dryer, that had to come out.  How does it exit my body?  Through my torso.  Hot flashes that could power the eastern seaboard.  I was waking up stinking of sweat because I’d been flashing all through the night.  My usually sweet-smelling arm pits reeked of wrestler…  from sleeping.  Pajamas on, pajamas off.  Hair matted to my skull from head sweat.  David woke up one morning and let out a panicked shriek until he realized it was actually me in bed with him.

Then there was the gluten.  If you’re going to fall off the wagon, you might as well just throw yourself under the wheels and allow your severed body to land in the ditch, right?  We had an office meeting (which is where the first hit of caffeine came in, the sinful hazelnut cappuccino).  Timbits were at the meeting.  Timbits are from the Devil.  I never have them because the combined gluten and sugar puts me into a near sugar coma.  I stopped counting at 10.  And then, later in the week, when we had an off-site meeting, with more Timbits, I had another… we’ll call it 10.  And I had pizza that night.  I ate my thin-crust pizza, moaning my way through the crusts.  And then I ate David’s crusts, from his rising-crust pizza, dipping them in ranch dressing, synapses in my brain over-firing from the delicious gluten.  The flatulence happened shortly thereafter and was SPECTACULAR.  From the reek of me, you’d have thought that I’d eaten a small cow who’d been fed a steady diet of garlic for its short life.

Nice girl, shame about the flatulence.

So this week I am starting over.  No caffeine – no matter how good it smells.  Decaf all the way.  Wait!  I can get flavour shots!  I could line up bottles and bottles of flavour shots by my desk and turn my sad decaf into giddy, flavourful, pseudo-sex drinks!  Plus having those bottles would be incredibly festive, you know since we’re in the holiday season and all.  And I picked up a gluten-free pizza crust at the No-Frills on Saturday so we’re set there.  When life hands you flatulence…