Plenty of people at the senior centre on Elm Street tell me the same thing. They skip breakfast, or they push lunch to three o’clock, and they say it keeps their head clear. I used to believe it too, back when I was on my feet all day in the basement pharmacy. A light stomach feels like a sharp mind for about an hour. Then the fog comes in, quiet as weather, and you think it is your age. Most of the time it is your lunch.
How to keep your memory steadyWatch the video before your next appointment.
The empty tank feeling
It burns down low. That is when you stand in the kitchen and forget why you came in. That is when the name of your own neighbour goes missing for an hour. It waits on you to deliver.
What I saw at the counter
Thirty-two years behind a pharmacy counter teaches you patterns. The people who came in worried about memory slips very often had one thing in common. They ate once a day, maybe twice, with long stretches of nothing. Some were proud of it. Some were widows and widowers who had stopped cooking for one. Some were on pills that dulled appetite. I never said what was wrong. I said what I always say. Write down what you eat for two weeks, and when the fog comes, and bring me the paper. What is written down is remembered.
A friend asked me plain
My friend Ruth asked me straight out last spring. She said, Diane, is it my head or is it that I don’t eat till two? I told her what I would tell anyone I love. Choose a single tweak to your eating pattern, then wait a full six weeks before deciding if your thinking feels clearer. If the fog lifts, you have your answer without a single test. If it does not, we talk to Dr. Okafor and look deeper. She made a face, but she did it.
The man with the coffee
There was a man at the walking group, a friend of the walking group leader’s, who swore black coffee till noon was his secret. He told me, I feel light, I feel sharp. The walking group leader told him, you forgot your own hat on the bench Tuesday. He laughed. Then he tried eggs and toast for a month, at her nagging, and he came back and said, I hate that you were right. He still skips sometimes. The fog reminds him.
Go watch the video explainer before you decide your memory is the problem, because it lays out what is usually behind these slips after sixty and a way to work on it.
Six weeks on paper
Here is how Ruth’s trial looked, with real numbers on real paper. She started on March 3rd of this year. She weighed herself that Monday, mostly out of habit. She ate by nine thirty every morning, wrote it in the paper calendar by the phone, and marked each afternoon with a number from one to five for how foggy she felt. By the week of April 14th she had one foggy day in seven, and it was the day she skipped because of a dentist appointment at half past eight. Six weeks, one change, forty-two little numbers in pencil. That is how you find out without guessing.
What actually happens, from everything I watched at that counter and now at the centre, is that the fog creeps in so slowly you blame yourself instead of your plate. It is not the only thing. But food is the one you can change tomorrow morning.
Ruth kept at it through the spring. By summer she was cooking a little again, which she had stopped doing after her husband passed. By autumn she told me she had gone back to her library books without rereading the same page four times. The change was not dramatic. It was the slow kind, like a kettle warming. Those are the changes that last. The grand fixes you read about in magazines are mostly paper.
If you have been skipping meals and blaming your memory, stop guessing and go watch the video guide now now, all the way through, and then do the six weeks with a pencil and a calendar. Bring the paper to your pharmacist if you want a second pair of eyes. We have more time than the doctor, and we have seen this before.
My husband just asked me where the good scissors went. They were in the drawer where scissors live, which is where I told him they were. He said the drawer lied. The drawer did not lie. But I let him have it, because he made the coffee this morning.