How to Get Rid of the Evil Sugar Monkey

"Restlessness and discontent are the first necessities of progress."  -Thomas Edison

Evil Sugar Monkey

I've had a couple people tell me how they connected to the discomfort and sort of melancholy restlessness that brought me to this challenge.  I believe that sensation is our potential best-self communicating to the conscious mind that...."um....heeeellOOOOoooo, it's time to make some changes!"

But, let's be real.  Changes are intimidating: hard to start and super easy to put off.  That's why I'm bringing to you a wonderful step-by-step article on how to "Dump the Sugar for Good" from stumptuous.com.  Seriously, click here and give it a read...it will make you laugh, nod in a agreement, and then help you get on the sugar-free train to....well NOT diabetes-ville, that's for sure.

If sugar is not the habit you're looking to kick, I believe this article gives a great foundation to maybe cutting out alcohol or junk food as well.  If you're feeling that restless discontent, maybe give this challenge a shot!  And don't forget to be gentle with yourself; one slip up is never a good reason to give up.  Peace, love, and a happy Monday to all!

Broken-hearted Knees and What To Do About Them

"IBS, Fibromyalgia, back pain, neck pain, knee pain and more are due, in large part, to our thoughts and emotions. " -Dr. Steve Rosman


I was disrobed and lying under a sheet in immense amounts of disorienting pain.  "Uggggghh," I moaned into the face rest as Jason, massage therapist extraordinaire, dug into my quad, "I seriously think I'm gonna throw up."  I didn't.  But, as the hour ticked on, Jason brought up the concept of emotions/traumatic events being trapped or stored in the body.  It was the second time in two days that someone had told this to me after working on my legs.

I thought back to the Sunday night before my week-long Case of the Mondays and big break down.  Jason had aggressively worked on the knots and ropes that live in my legs these days.  During the week following that massage, I had felt increasingly worn out and distraught by work and (although not mentioned before) suddenly ever-present thoughts of an ex.  Ok...let's be real...THE ex.  I was surprised by the persistent haunting of our past relationship in my brainspace as I had thought I'd come to terms with it and moved on.  For me, there was a lot of anxiety and emotional pain during our on-again-off-again, three-year relationship that ended last December (around the time my knee pain began with a vengeance).  During the week-long haunting of relationships past, I cried more than I had in the previous six months, for no apparent reason.  Following my most recent massage, I was inundated by thoughts of another, more ambiguous, loss from the last six months that continues to be a large source of confusion and sadness for me. Was this all a strange coincidence or something more?

How Frogs and Inertia Help You Get Sh*% Done

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."  -Antoine de Saint-Exuper

Sometimes I wonder if everyone has a brain like me, one that buzzes and whirs and keeps me up at night, striving for efficiency in everything, envisioning the ideal of every situation with no clucking clue how to get there, second guessing, insatiable, analytical...it can be exhausting.  But I love my brain, for within it is everything I've been, everything I am, everything I will be.  My brain is my greatest attribute and my greatest obstacle all in one gray, wormy, three lb mass.  


My brain does not let me rest, and I'm grateful for it.  I'm proud of the successes I've accomplished so far: kicking a seven year addiction to caffeine (this one's been on the New Year's rezzy list for five years or so); resting heart rate has gone from 75 bpm to 62 bpm; a smattering of new PR's at the gym after a year's plateau (snatch 110#, butterfly pullups, handstand push ups, etc).  Exciting!  But, enough?  Nope.  So where to go from here?  Here are the steps that help me get sh*# done.

Paleo-Zone: A Way to Look Good Naked

"The deepest secret is that life is not a process of discovery, but a process of creation. You are not discovering yourself, but creating yourself anew. Seek, therefore, not to find out Who You Are, seek to determine Who You Want To Be."  -Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God – Book 1

First off, happy hump-day to everyone!  I know I personally do a quick cheer each week when I get over the hump...two more days till I get to sleep in, yay!  Also, I will always jump at the chance to say "hump," especially in a non-crass way.  And every time I use the word "crass,"  I think of my dear mother who has coached the crap out of me to not embody the aforementioned modifier.  It's a tough job, but she has heart and endless determination.  

We are approximately sixty days strong into The Clean Year.  Whoop!  Time to do a recap.  It started with three weeks of hell, i.e. withdrawal symptoms from caffeine and sugar followed by approximately three weeks of smooth sailing.  My energy levels went from a 5-6 ish range to a 7-9.  Restful sleep became easier to attain.  My skin cleared up quite a bit.  Cravings were not too frequent and not too strong.  Six weeks in, I hit a big wall and cried about it, publicly.  Discovered new ways of crutching myself.  (Yes, I turned "crutch" into a verb...you're welcome, world.)  Stress levels sky rocketed, refined-sugar free binging commenced, skin broke out, tossing and turning replaced sleeping, used all possible restraint to not drink a gallon of beer/wine/tequila to relax my old-fashioned way.  Gah!  Refocused and rejuvenated myself with outside time and with support of a great community.  Began ten weeks of Paleo-Zone style grub-munching a week and a half ago.

Why Paleo-Zone?  First and foremost, because when I eat this way, I shed fat like it's nothing (click here to see), I lift heavier weights and get faster times on workouts, I feel amazing, and most of all, my energy and moods become super stable and positive.  I know that for me, it's a great avenue to work towards greater health and ultimately, a long and disease-free life.  The nutrition lecture at Crossfit Verve a week and a half ago reminded me of the reasoning behind it.  Paleo is all about eating quality, anti-inflammatory foods: lean meat, veggies, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar.  Paleo style eating can come in all different flavors and can be tweaked to meet each person's individual needs.  Check out this nice, concise blog that compares and contrasts the different takes on "caveman grub".  Zone, on the other hand, addresses the quantity of food/macronutrients I put in my pie-hole.

Realizations since starting my Paleo-Zone party are as follows:

- Weighing and measuring is a pain in the ass...AT FIRST!  Then, it becomes a part of the routine.  Easy peezy.

Post 5K recovery: 3 blocks of food and a crap-ton of ice.

- I was eating wayyyyyyy too much.  As in, I don't get to eat just cuz I feel like it?!  

- When I'm consuming appropriate amounts of carbs, protein and fat, I am forced to eat a ton of veggies so I don't starve all day.  I have to think about my carbs and how to "spend them".  Luckily, that's how my body likes to be fed...it's the brain that needs the convincing.

- I'm lazy.  Or maybe it's just that I have no free time.  Either way...I don't cook that much.  I love to look droolingly at food blogs.  I dream big, then get back to my reality:  eating bags of frozen veggies or raw no-prep veggies, with a hunk of meat that I mass-grilled on Sunday and sliced up avocado or a few nuts.  Even the lazy man's Paleo is delicious.  Not joking.  People get jealous.

- I get smaller when I eat appropriate amounts of quality foods for my lean body mass.  Who knew?  So far, I have shrunk the same amount (a couple lbs and about a half an inch at the waist) in a week and a half as I did the first seven weeks of this journey.  Boom.

- A food journal is a fascinating tool.  You can figure out all sorts of sh*& about your body by looking for patterns of what you eat.  It is also a necessary practice for significant forward progress in my nutrition.

- A well-balanced meal that will keep me full and energetic will also make my jaws hurt from all the chewing.  Seriously, I eat at top speed all the time, and these meals still take, at the very least, ten minutes to finish.  If it's done in two, we've got a problem.

Driving back from the cabin with Sarah Bear and Jo Jo.

- Life still comes first.  Out of the last ten days, five were great Paleo-Zone days and four were Paleo-Zone-ish days and one was a Paleo-ish day.  Great?  Nope.  But I went to a cabin with some of my favorite friends, where we cooked and ate as a family...was I gonna whip out my scale and measuring cups right there?  Nope.  I might be there one day, but last weekend was all about friends and food and fun.  And watching them get all happy-drunk while I sipped on sparkling water with a splash of juice.  It was a GREAT weekend.

So, the next "crutches" in my squashing machine (not to be confused with the smooshing machine, says the reality T.V. addict...hahaha, cracking myself up) are grains, most dairy, eating too much or "just cuz I wanna", and too much fruit.  I'm on my way back to Awesome...and loving the journey!

I know a ton of people who also started dialing in their nutrition recently, how goes it with you?

How You Can Change the World, One Sticky Note at a Time

“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.”  -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

My awkward face.  Not pretty.

You may remember that I promised a laundry list of my most terrible habits at the end of my last post.  Well, I might have been the slightest bit hasty in that assertion.  You see, in a non-exhausted state of mind, I realized that it might make my life really awkward to truly lay out all that stuff in so public a manner...seriously.  What if one of you fine blokes decide you want to date me, but then you already know all my crappy, embarrassing stuff (which actually may reverse that first statement) and I know none of yours?  Awkward.  Walking into the gym, I'd be super self-conscious that everyone would be thinking about my weird habits and therefore would turn red a lot and probably stutter as well.  Awkward.  So, here's the deal...I will happily share my crutches as they are relevant to "The Clean Year" and upcoming goals.  Cool?  Thanks, I appreciate it.

Last week, I hit a wall.  A big one that had scary, militant gorillas on top of it.  And battery acid dripping down it's sides.  I wrote about the wall and the aftermath of the crash and was was surprised by how uplifted I was by both the process of putting my thoughts down on the screen as well as by the emails and calls full of encouraging words and listening ears.  Thank you.  Sometimes it is scary to just be real and lay all your cards on the table.  It puts you in a very vulnerable, uncomfortable, even awkward spot, standing with your arms raised, not knowing if a hug or a swift punch to your gut is on it's way.  It's especially difficult to be real when the "real" is just not that pretty.  Often, with great risk comes great reward.  This time was one of those.  Sometimes, a little affirmation, empathy, and just knowing that people care is all a person needs to climb back outta that funk, ready to take on the challenge that previously beat her down.  The whole journey of last week had me reflecting on how powerful these seemingly small gestures can be.  Even more, how these individual actions joined together to form a straight up tsunami of love that lifted me up right out of the gloom.

A Case of the Mondays

"Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives."  -Henry David Thoreau

I'm going to lay it all out there.  All the raw ugly of this week and how I got here...exhausted, disappointed in myself, and sacrificing precious sleep to get the words whirling around in my skull out on a screen in hopes that they will R.I.P.  Why air my embarrassing secrets on the worldwide web?  Because, this is my year long project to make increasingly better choices and habits to enrich my life, increase the good I do in this world, and feel/be/look a lot healthier.  That all starts, and can only continue, with frequent honest reflections on what IS...right now.

Right now, work is a cluster f-bomb.  Please excuse my near swear, dear readers...but there's no other way to put it.  I've had the beginning of anxiety attacks (which I've only experienced a handful of times before, but never at work) and nearly cried almost every day.  Why?  Well, I certainly will not bore you with the mundane intricacies of my career as an educator in an extremely under-funded, extremely high-needs school...but I will just say that every person in my building does the work of two or three people...and no matter how much you do, it's just never enough.  And at the end of the day, you're working your ass off, spread so thin that you can't really do anything well, knowing you're doing a crappy job, but not knowing how to make anything better and carrying the heavy knowledge that in the end it's just the kids and your health that pay the price.  

Muffins from today.  Don't worry, I gave them all to my
coworkers.  I did smell the crumbs though...is that weird?

I hit this wall every year.  Emotionally, physically, and mentally, I find myself in a place of hopeless, exhausted despair.  It's around this time when my good ol' crutches calm my mind, numb my emotions, and give me the energy to carry on.  The crash came early this year.  And as my "case of the Mondays" continued to Tuesday, then Wednesday, then Thursday...I began to drown in the old urges.  (Man, it was so easy to be crutchless when I wasn't stressed and sleep-deprived!)   Tuesday and Wednesday, I had to fight my brain, which was wheedling, "It's only ooooone cupcake, no one will even know!"  By the time school ended today, I was done.  Capital D.O.N.E.  I had a stream of pirate curses and not so choice "French" running constantly through my mind as I walked out my car.  My brain and body and stress-induced urges were screaming for alcohol, "just a bottle of wine...sit on the rooftop and drink till you're relaxed," that sneaky voice in my brain coaxed.

Bovine or Bust: Cows and Your Diet

"One decision [does] not stand on its own. Each one is laying neural groundwork that will bias future decisions and eventually you [become] the summary of your habits." - Craig Weller, Barefoot Fitness

We've all said it..."This has been a super hard week, I deserve this beer/cupcake/pizza/Starbucks."  I know I said it nearly every day of teaching...or, well, to be honest, probably adult life.  It was just more true the days I was teaching.  The days I didn't "deserve it" because of how rough life's been, I deserved it because it was  special occasion.  You know: my birthday, Christmas, the day before Friday, Friday, the day after Friday.  Sadly, this one justification, "I deserve ______", has been the downfall of nearly all of my health-related goals.  The knee injury to my box jumps.  The dial up to my Internet.  The empty bank account to my to-do list of international destinations.  You get the idea.  But here's the truth: you deserve to feel great, to look awesome, to be insanely healthy, and to function the best you can for as long as possible.

Brain cow - so cute...but dangerous!

I've read some wisdom-ous words (yes, I make up words when I can't find the perfect one) recently.  Craig Weller, a guy I used to train with and learn from writes a brilliant blog about life, fitness, nutrition, and other topics.  He describes a concept called self-herding in one of his blogs (originally written about by Dan Ariely...author of fascinating books about human behavior and decision making).  Self-herding is basically the tendency humans have to make the same choice they have in the past when facing a similar situation, even when the past choice was made emotionally, irrationally, or under diress.  Basically, your choice is the lead cow part of your brain and the subsequent choices are the herd cows that brainlessly and forcefully mosey on in the same direction unless you really fight them.  Mooooo.