Day Three: Still moving.

So first off, despite what everyone says about only weighing in once a week, I jumped on the scale this morning and discovered I am already 5 pounds down! YAY! Now, I know there's normal weight fluctuation and all that but I was so stupidly happy to see that! I think I really needed to see it because I've been totally bummed out that this massive change in diet I made at the beginning of the year hasn't resulted in melting the weight off the way I'd sorta hoped it would. More on that in a minute.

It's still a push to get from waking up to hitting play on this work out. Apparently I'm a lazy, lazy creature because I can honestly say that if I hadn't promised myself that I would log everything in this blog EVERY SINGLE DAY, there's next to zero chance I would have done it today. I was way too busy doing nothing on the internet. The stupid thing is, once I get started, it's really easy to push through it. Well, maybe easy is the wrong term-it's definitely a sweaty, all-of-my-muscles-are-screaming kind of easy. It's just that once I start it, I don't even contemplate ditching out halfway through.

I don't know why so much of health and fitness is that way for me. Take yoga. I love yoga. LOVE IT. Honestly. There was a time I was seriously considering going through teachers training just because. I had little to no intention of actually teaching it, but I craved it so much it seemed logical to go through the training anyway. During that go, I was actually doing somewhere around 5 hours of yoga a day. That's how much I love yoga. But I still find myself randomly stopping my practice. I have no excuse for this. Every time I do it, I actively miss it and still refer to myself as someone who does yoga...even when I'm not. I don't get it. Now I'm lucky if I even do my short shots with Mr Crandell. By the end of this week, I should be adding yoga back into my daily routine. It's just too silly not to.

Anyway, I keep mentioning food and not really talking about it, so here goes:

I changed my diet at the start of the year pretty dramatically and, although weight loss was something that was in the back of my mind, it was not the main thought. See, I have MS. It's not quite so bad as it sounds, I don't have all that many symptoms and for the most part you wouldn't even know that I have it if I didn't tell you. I was diagnosed back in 2008 and, with the exception of one hospitalisation, it's not something I've had to spend too much time thinking about since my initial diagnosis. It didn't stop me from spending a full day meteor hunting in the Arizona desert and dragging huge ass rocks across science knows how far back to the car, for example. I am not what one would call terribly fragile. But it is something to think about, and it is something I would like to keep as background as possible.

It seems like there's been more and more in the news-especially here in the UK where there are so many MS patients-about diet and MS. So I set out reading. I found out that there are several MS trigger foods that should be cut out completely (some can be systematically added back in later to see if your personal body chemistry can handle them) These are dairy, eggs, gluten, yeast, and legumes. I will say that the only one of these things that totally bummed me out were the legumes. No legumes means no hummus and I LOVE HUMMUS.

So what do I eat? I eat fish most days. I also eat a ton of fruit and vegetables. I eat so many fruits and vegetables that I don't even have a chance to feel restricted really, because I really quickly got to a point where I just crave the stuff.

For the most part, I follow the diet Terry Wahls came up with. If you want the super involved details, you can get them all here: http://www.terrywahls.com/  But I don't eat all the organ meat. Or the red meat in general. I pretty much stick to fish. I've been poking around and it's pretty clear that all the places where they really just don't have MS are places where they don't eat dairy and consume a ton of fish. A lot of them are also warm, sunny places but you can't win them all when you're married to a Scotsman, right?

I started this dietary shift thinking I would feel really restricted, but I honestly don't. I do have to think things through a little bit more and, if I were smarter, I'd be preparing something ahead of time before I go out to the pub with my giant so I don't decide that tray of chips on the way home is a good idea. Oh well, for the time being the pub is out anyway. And, as I said before, I also started it out thinking that my weight issues would take care of themselves since I would be eating so much good stuff. I'm sure it does for a lot of people, but not for me. It's okay. It actually makes sense when I really break it down. I just wasn't moving enough. I work from home, so there's no walking to work-or even part way to work. It's cold and wet and miserable outside, which I have a really hard time with, so I'm not wandering around the neighborhood taking pictures and discovering things like I would be doing if it were nicer out. As a result, I spend nearly all day sitting on my ass. Even eating right won't help me. That's just the way it is.

~ Brooke

PS. If you wanna check out one of my very favorite yogi's give Jason Crandell a shot. He's not woo-woo at all and that always wins my vote.