I feel crappy. Some of this is lingering malaise from the migraine that knocked me on my butt yesterday morning and resulted in my taking the day off work. But some is directly related (I am positive) to the increasing quantity of absolute CRAP I’ve been eating. It’s kind of the trend this time of year. It starts with Halloween candy and continues on through the holidays, always results in unwanted weight gain, and generally makes January suck. But this year…this year is different. Because now I’ve got food allergies. Which, in and of itself, is not the culprit. It’s more that this year in order to FIND said food allergies, I went through a full on elimination diet, which resulted in my cutting out every single bit of crap, processed ANYTHING from my diet (and I certainly didn’t eat as much as the standard American household to begin with). Once the allergy was narrowed down to dairy, I went through the whole Pity Me phase, wherein I wanted to treat myself to whatever I could as therapy for the grief. That resulted in lots of coconut and soy ice cream. Homemade brownies (SO MANY home made brownies). And a handful of other dessert type things that really reactivated my sugar craving. And THAT was the kiss of death that slowly encroached on all the weight I’d lost doing the elimination diet. And somehow, somewhere in there, I started eating processed sugar more regularly. And then came my annual bag of candy corn. Which I didn’t even finish. And now I feel just…ill.
Processed crap aside, I just don’t have the carb tolerance I did at 20. Or even 30. Hubby doesn’t either. He was out of town for four days last week and even though he didn’t knowingly eat anything that should’ve caused his food intolerances to flare, he just felt awful when he got home because the food readily available in public is just…not as healthy as what we regularly eat at home (apart from my recent dessert obsession). When you have food allergies, you just end up (mostly) being cleaner eaters.
Well, we’re getting ready to get back to that in a big way at Casa Nolan. We’re both seriously ready for a detox. I hit up three different groceries yesterday stocking up on fresh produce. My new spiralizer came in (I got tired of the unfortunately named Vegetti), along with a new cookbook one of my Twitter friends recced to me: The 4 Hour Chef by Timothy Ferris. He’s a proponent of the Slow Carb Diet. No, that’s not a typo. I’m still researching, but best I can tell, it’s another diet that emphasizes foods that are low on the glycemic index and therefore digest more slowly. A lot like Paleo, but it allows some legumes (automatically a step in the right direction in my book). And it has a built in cheat day every week to let you have whatever it is you’ve been craving. That’s always been a very successful tactic for hubby and I both. So we’d save the potatoes and rice and pasta or whatever for that day. The cookbook itself is 600+ pages, but it’s not a normal cookbook. It’s the kind of book that’s built around a philosophy and is, frankly, something I actually want to read. So I’ll be sipping my way through that and cutting myself off sugar cold turkey other than the spoonful that goes in my tea.
I’m getting ready to change up my workout routine. Now that it’s cooler, I’ve started jogging again. I never thought I’d be someone who missed that. My weight lifting routine needs an overhaul. I want to incorporate more resistance training because that really strengthens the kinetic chain of muscles that go into all the movements we use in taekwondo–and that will help my balance and my accuracy. I started back with that in July and I haven’t been in any particular hurry because I’m having to relearn almost everything. Some stuff came back quickly once I got my flexibility back, and other stuff had to be learned from scratch (my original school was WTF…this one is ITA, so the forms are completely different). So relearning 3 belts worth of material in the span of three and a half months was completely fine with me. But I’m just about caught up, and that means I have to up my game to start really training seriously for my next belt test (which I’d like to take in January). And lord knows I need to feel better for that. So. Onward!