Lunch boxes are not just for kids

As back to school time approached this year, we set out to find the perfect "cool" lunch box for my niece Paige.   Since what she wanted was a Disney's Frozen lunch box and Disney has decided to make everyone miserable by not making enough Frozen  merchandise to meet the demand, our search ended up online.

Paige did get her lunch box thanks to Aunt Stephanie so all is good. But during the fruitless online searching, I came across a product called LunchBlox by Rubbermaid. I was immediately intrigued and had to head out to Target to check them out. Why, you might ask?

Well, let me tell you about a little known fact that comes along with chronic illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. You can not only be too tired to prepare food for yourself, you can actually not have enough energy to eat it. Yup...too tired to eat.

This actually happens to me a lot. My energy is actually at its lowest during the day. My natural body clock is off. The technical term for this is sleep phase disorder. Or as my family will say, I am part vampire. I struggle to go to sleep before 3am because my energy is high at night. I also often get hungry and want to eat when everyone else is sleeping.   This can lead to bad food choices during the day when my energy is at its lowest. It is not unusual for me to either not eat at all or snack on unhealthy food. I just don't have the energy to make a healthy lunch.

But wait...I do have energy at midnight. Hmm. Maybe I need to pack myself a lunch for the next day?  So what if I am not actually leaving the house. But what to pack and how to pack it?  I don't like sandwiches. I prefer to snack on small amounts of a variety of food.

Enter LunchBlox. These Rubbermaid containers are various shapes and sizes allowing you to the freedom to pack a variety of different foods. There are snack size, entree size, sandwich and salad size etc.   That's great right?  But how are they any different that the millions of disposable food storage containers sold in most grocery stores?

First off, these containers are sturdy, wash well and can be microwaved. But the novelty and cool factor of LunchBlox is that they are designed to fit together like puzzle pieces so all you containers of various shapes and sizes don't end up a jumble in your bag. And most come with a reuseable ice blox to keep your food cool.

So how do I use them and why do I love them?  Tonight I was hungry and since it was the middle of the night my energy was high. So I decided to make myself a salad. I thought to myself, it would be nice to have one of these for lunch tomorrow but I will never have the energy to make it. So out came the LunchBlox. I made two salads. One to eat now and another seperated into the different LunchBlox containers. So when I want to eat lunch tomorrow, all I have to do us open the containers, dump everything together and eat. 

These are the four containers I used for tomorrow's lunch. They are they salad set, a snack size, and two small containers. I like a bunch of stuff in my salad so the salad set alone was not enough for me

In the three smaller containers I packed cucumbers, black olives and (if I had been leaving the house) dressing. 

This is a side view of the salad set. It has a space for lettuce and then a tray for accessories. 

In the tray I have croutons, carrots and a small container that is meant for dressing. Since I like a larger container for dressing, I actually put bacon bits in it.

 

This is the cover of the salad set. The grooves in it are what allow the other pieces to snap in place. 

Here it is all assembled. 

The last piece that you would use if you were taking this on the go is the specially designed ice pack. 

The entire set snaps right onto the ice pack to keep it cool. 

Pretty neat huh?  And it does all "snap" together. They are made to fit together like puzzle pieces. Some people say they snap together so well you do not even need a bag. I don't know about that. With my limited hand strength, I don't always get them clicked into place so I would like a bag if I were going anywhere. Although, just for this blog post I did managed to click everything together tight. 

Yes, I am in fact holding the entire system upside down in this photo. Like I said, this feature does not always work for me, but really, how often do you need to hold your lunch upside down?  

So far the only two drawbacks I have found to the system is one, finding a place to store the containers. I will likely just go buy a bigger Rubbermaid bin and toss them in it rather than try and jam them into our already full cabinets. Right now they are in a reuseable shopping bag. 

The second drawback is that since the containers are of various shapes and sizes, it can be hard to fit them in standard lunch bags.  Rubbermaid has thought of this and sells bags specifically designed for the LunchBlox system. They come in two sizes. If you want to be able to pack the salad set shown above or any of the larger containers, you will need the bigger bag.   

I can not tell you how the bags are because, as of right now, I primarily use the LunchBlox at home. Living on a very limited income, I have not been able to justify the expense of buying the bag.    But who knows, maybe Rubbermaid will see this post and decide to send me a free large bag to review.  Ah, it is nice to dream.

Being able to prepare a healthy lunch when my energy is high and eat it when it is low is a big step toward eating better and improving my overall health. And the LunchBlox is a great tool for that. 

The moral of this post is to think outside the box and you will find new ways (and sometimes new products) that help you take advantage of the times your energy is higher to make life easier for the times when the energy is gone.

What worked for me

This post is an update to my previous posts from so long ago. Since it is over a year later, I wanted to share what worked for me and what didn't.

1.  Email clean up to songs. This worked wonderfully for me. My email box now rarely gets over 100 emails. Once I got it under control and unsubscribe from emails I did not want, I no longer had to clean it daily. But if I see it inching toward 100, on goes a song and down goes the email count.

2. Mail sorting boxes. OK so this failed horribly. We are still buried in paper. The boxes filled up in a week and broke. But the thing is, the idea was not a bad one. We did sort what came in and get rid of what we did not need. But we had no good place to put what we needed to keep or deal with at a later date so it just accumulated in the boxes. So we are still struggling with this. I have a feeling this will be the last part of our house that we get under control. But we are making progress and I am hopeful that once we find a place that works to store the paper we need, then the mail trays will actually be useful. So this is still a work in progress.

3.  Litter genie. Yup I still love it. In fact, we have added an elderly hamster named Abner to our household. He was surrendered to our shelter already 3/4 of the way through his expected life span and my heart broke at the thought of him living out his few remaining months in the shelter. Thankfully my amazing niece felt the same and decided he should be her first ever small animal pet regardless of how long (or short) the rest of his life would be. So now not only do we use the litter genie for the cats, we use it for the debris from the daily spot cleaning of Abner's cage.

4.  Sunrise lamp. It does still help. I am currently going through a horrible sleep phase, one of the worst in a long time. It is a result of the multiple courses of steroids I was on in the year my asthma was out of control. And my new asthma med makes breathing easier but sleeping harder. But I still notice that it is easier to wake up on the days I use the sunrise lamp. My sleep needs to improve if I am going to continue to make progress but I will take it one night at a time.

5.  The black hole that is my closet. Is still clean!  This is a HUGE accomplishment for me. I could not keep my closet clean even when I was "healthy". It is not totally uncluttered but I can find what I need when I need it.

So that's about it for updates. Coming soon in what works for me, I will tell you about a cleaning product and house cleaning system that has made it possible for me to contribute to the house cleaning in a small way for the first time in almost 10 years.

And in the months to come, I hope to share my attempt to regain some of my strength and balance while I work to find an exercise program that works for me regardless of my multiple chronic illnesses.   Right now I am way to close to being bedridden. I can only tolerate being up for a few hours at a time without needing to rest. So there is no question this will be challenging but I am determined to try.   Wish me luck!

Down but not out

So to say have I not posted in a while is an understatement. It has been almost two years.  And it has been a very rough almost two years. One thing after another combined to knock me down again and again.

I won't bore you with all the details. Just that I was hit with major blows in all areas of my well being. Financial, mental, medical, family, etc. There were good times of course, but they seemed few and far between. My health took a turn for the worse and I ended up with frequent emergency room visits for severe asthma flare ups. I had to pretty much withdraw from life as I knew it to try and stabilize my breathing. And the final blow was when my mom, my rock, passed away a few months ago.

It is like being down a dark dirt hole and having the dirt bury you deeper each time you try and climb out.

I am still feeling like that some days but the major turning point is that I am slowly regaining my determination to not let my health get the better of me.   After many many doctor visits, my asthma is starting to respond to my new treatment plan. I am back on pain medication for my chronic pain, which I hate but it is a necessary evil while I can not exercise.

Any unlike so many others, I have the support of a loving family who, while they may not truly understand what it is like to be me, they believe in me and are there for me no matter how hard it is.

So in the words of Thomas Jefferson, I plan to : "Do what you can with what you have, where you are. "

I may be down but I am not out. I will work my way back into the life I want. One day at a time.