PMS vs IBS

Once, a guy asked me if PMS was really that bad.

"C'mon Anney," he scoffed. "It can't be that bad."

I replied quickly. Honestly. Grave.

"Yes," I said. "It can be that bad."

Up until that point, I'd been considering dating him. I withdrew that consideration faster than I could yank out a tampon and whip him in the nose with it.

Most intelligent men and women know PMS is no bullshit. Every chick is different. But a bleeding vag is a wound like any other. Wounds hurt!

What a lot of men don't know is the not-so-obvious stuff that we go through. Fatigue. Lead limbs. Cravings. Depression. Bloating, IBS. Anemic women have to monitor their iron intake. My sister passes out all the time on the first day of her rag. My old roommate used to have to call out from work, because she was vomiting all day.

Fortunately, I'm not that bad. The worst is the depression. It gets so bad that I can't leave the house. Once, I walked out on family Christmas. The cool thing is that I know when I'm overreacting now, because I know when the rag is due. Sort of. I'm not that regular either.

Lately I've been really hung up between fatigue and cravings.

The two are mutually inclusive. The cravings talk to me about the fatigue. They whisper: "You know why you are really tired? It's because you need to eat chocolate."

I ignore the voices and ignore the voices and ignore the voices... until I remember that my girlfriends have been known to subsist on cheese steaks, BBQ fries, and candy hidden around the house. Tina Fey jokes trickle into my mind. If Liz Lemon can eat five doughnuts before noon, why can't I have some chocolate?

The next thing I know, two boxes of vegan gluten free chocolate cookies are building a block of brick row homes in my belly.

Hmmm... sounds strangely similar to last Friday night.

It's so funny how it happened. All the cookies I bought, I arranged into a tin. I sat down in the living room with the tin in my lap, and just went to town. I didn't even turn on the TV.

This is what the tin looked like, when I finished.

Holy Flatulus, what's wrong with me?

All Saturday and most of Sunday I felt sick. IBS sick, of course. The morning run sucked. All the work I had to do remained undid. I felt helpless against the allure of the "What Muppet are You?" quizzes on Facebook. That Radiohead song - "You do it to yourself, you do, and that's why it really hurts" - kept playing over and over again in my head.

There were questions too. Like: Why did I pig out so bad? Is it because I hold off from eating junk food so much that I eventually explode? Or am I just really weak?

I got no answers.

Eating bad is a kind of entertainment, I think. It's also a source of comfort. But there is something different between wanting a cup of soup on a cold day and needing chocolate during PMS. I'm inclined to believe that there's a biological or chemical need involved here.

This is craving like none I've ever had. And this is coming from a girl who's tried nearly every illegal drug on the market, short of heroin and ecstasy. So yeah, I don't become addicted to shit easily. I'm the anti-addict. I get bored too fast.

But not with chocolate, apparently.

My question is this: What should I do when moontime arrives? Bow to PMS or IBS?