Trying Again

Well hello to my old friends. I bet you forgot I existed.  It has been so long that I couldn’t remember my password!  I fail to understand why, as much as I love to write, I cannot blog on a regular basis.  I guess it goes hand in hand with my inability to stick with anything!  Diet, exercise, resolutions, etc.  My weight yoyos like crazy.  When I exercise, it is down, when I am highly stressed, it is down.  Anything in between and I begin to look like a hippopotamus!  I don’t seem to be able to find a happy medium.  And so, I am starting to work on a new me all over again!  Is that a collective groan that I hear from my readers?  I don’t blame you in the slightest.  Nonetheless, I am going to give it a shot.  And since it is spring, this is an apt time for Springcleanedmom to do some spring cleaning!

What exactly are you doing, I hear you ask?  I don’t usually do things in half measures so I am throwing myself into a Whole30.  Yes, me, the anti-high protein, -low carb girl. Yes me, the anti-paleo girl.  I couldn’t care less what my cave-person ancestors ate and I don’t believe that today’s diet should reflect what they ate.  I know, I know, this doesn’t make sense at all.  Well, here is what I like about Whole30.  They are not advocating for a caveman diet.  They are advocating for a healthy diet.  A good deal of what they say makes sense to the scientist in me.   And a part of it is plain desperation.

It all started when I was a wee-little lass.  The “sick headaches”, the fatigue, the anxiety, the depression, and the insomnia.  And it only got worse through my college years, partially because I discovered alcohol (actually, that discovery was a little earlier than college).  My 20s were the worst years for depression, my 30s for migraine.  My 40s haven’t seen much in the way of depression, but pain has been my companion for a very long time now, as has insomnia.  I started running in my 30s and although this new-found love went hand-in-hand with a healthier lifestyle and weight, it also went hand-in-hand with chronic hip pain.  While surgery fixed some of the hip problems, it hasn’t been the complete answer to my troubles.   Every so often I have major flare ups which require steroids.  And in the past two weeks I have had shingles and debilitating back pain.  Out of shear desperation, I have turned to the internet and as luck (or misfortune) would have it, I stumbled across the Whole30 program!

Anyone who knows me, knows that I love to eat.  I am addicted to food.  While I am fortunate enough to enjoy healthy foods, I am a potato chip addict.  If it wasn’t so bad for me, I’d live on a diet of dips, chips, and red wine 🙂  Who wouldn’t want to do that?  As you can imagine, I don’t feel so good when my diet consists largely of fat and sugars.  It is time to detoxify.  I am also treating this as a migraine elimination diet. I have started many of these over the years but have a hard time sticking with them.  Why do I think Whole30 will be different? Because it has an end date.  They even have a plan to add foods back in to the diet after the 30 days.  The one problem for me is that I am scheduled to have surgery mid-way through.  I thought about starting the “eating plan” after my surgery, but why wait?  If I cannot stick to the diet during my overnight stay in the hospital, so be it!  Technically, the folks who developed the 30 day plan would require I start over.  I will wait and see.  I am highly unlikely to beat myself up about eating something “off-plan) while in the hospital.  The two weeks of healthy eating prior to my hospital stay can only be of benefit.

Today is Day 2 for me!  Day 1 was a breeze.  Today I am lacking energy but given that I am on pain killers and muscle relaxants, I don’t think the diet is soley to blame!  I am looking forward to the morning when I wake up with the “extraordinary energy” that so many Whole30 and Paleo folk describe.   I am not hungry.  That is a good thing.  I do want something sweet but I can handle that.  I am feeling rather positive about this new journey even though I have never experienced a diet-induced change in how I feel.

How about you?  Who has made a significant dietary change and reaped benefits?  I’d love to hear your stories!

So Much for Good Intentions

Why is it so hard to blog regularly?  I love talking and I love writing.  Yet, blogging is a chore. It isn’t as though I have nothing to blog about either.  Heck, no one needs to have material other than day to day life!  But here I am.  Perhaps one of the reasons I haven’t been blogging is because all of my good intentions to change my lifestyle have not come to fruition.  My recovery from hip surgery was a lot longer than I anticipated and as a consequence, I have gained 20 pounds since my last marathon.  I also had a very busy semester so time was not on my side.  The upside is that I feel as though my hip is 99% recovered and I can run again.  I joined Weight Watchers online on Monday and plan to use it to help me through the silly season.

The easiest way for me to lose weight would be to give up my wine in the evenings.  During the semester breaks, this is easy, but during the academic school year, I have made a habit of unwinding with a glass of wine while cooking dinner and then usually another one with dinner.  And my glasses are no 5 oz!  What can I do instead?  That is really what I need –  way to unwind in the evenings that doesn’t involve alcohol.  Having two young children means that I am not free to just disappear and do whatever.  I have the Tony Horton Power90 DVDs and they have been instrumental in getting me back into some form of shape but the kids hate it when I do it.  They want my attention.  I even try to get them to do it with me, but they last through one set of exercises and then they’ve had enough.  So today I have two questions:

How do you maintain and not gain weight during the holidays?

How do you unwind after work?

Recent Travels

As the school year winds down, I find myself dreaming of vacations.  Of course, I cannot take any real vacations this summer since I well and truly overdrew the vacation purse over the past 6 months.  Fortunately, my last trip home was for a happy event.  This is where I witnessed someone close to me get married:

Only my husband and I went on this trip.  It is difficult to make the decision to travel without the children.  However, when each child costs over $1000 to fly to my homeland, it is difficult to justify.  We did take them late last year and my older son has been twice now.  It is unfortunate that it is so expensive to travel, but at least there are many things for us to see and do in the US.

Today is Saturday and although cold, it is a beautiful sunny morning.  Makes the ever so glad that I did not succumb to the desire to buy a bottle of wine last night.  This reduced alcohol thing is working out ok, even if I do have some fairly strong cravings at times.  I have had a dull headache for the past few days but that too is bearable.  We took the kids to see The Lorax last night and it was delightful.  Tonight, hubby and I will go to The Hunger Games.  We are not big movie buffs.  In fact, the only movie my husband and I have seen together at a cinema since we have been married is Race Across the Sky (I think that is what it was called – the Leadville Mountain Bike race?).  With two kids and no family to watch them, movie nights become expensive.  We have found a great sitter, which is lucky, be every time we need a sitter, we are spending at least $100 for the whole evening.  I guess one might argue that you cannot put a price on sanity, but sometimes I find it hard to justify paying a sitter.

And somehow I am back to the balancing of family and life again.  I keep hearing how important “me” time is or “couples time”.  And I totally agree.  My husband and I have quite a strained relationship and kids haven’t made it easier.  But stressing about money also puts strain on a relationship so where is the balance here?  Add to the fact that the kids are at daycare all day, and you might come to the correct conclusion that we don’t want to spend time away from them in the evenings.

I know you are hearing lots of complaints from me, but keep in mind that this is my outlet.  It is healthier to vent here than at home.  I tend to fall into a vicious circle – get stressed, drink too much, take too much migraine medicine and cannot sleep.  Take sleeping pills, brain gets foggy, coping abilities decline, stress increases…  and so on.  It has been nice to have a less clouded brain as of late.  The stress is still there and sleep doesn’t come as easily as I’d like, but I feel more motivated to do things well when I am a little more “sharp”.  For me, these things come in cycles.  With one month of the academic year left, I know I have three months of down time ahead of me.  While I will be expected to work, work takes on a different meaning over the summer.  The boys will still be in daycare, which sounds cruel but they get to do all sorts of fun stuff in the summer – like go to the local pool every week.  They get to do more stuff than they would if they were home with me (because technically, I am still working – gotta love a 12 month contract at a teaching institution).  But I will have the luxury of taking them late and picking them up early.  They can have the day off if I want to stay home with them for the day.  Yes, summers are my saving grace, my mental health care. I cannot wait!

And Time Goes By

Do you want to know how many blogs I have started?  Hmmm, I think this might be the 4th.  One of them actually got a lot of mileage but it was a private blog with lots of photos for my family and friends on the other side of the world.  I don’t even remember how to log in to it, and to be honest, it doesn’t feel the same now that my mother is no longer here to read it 😦

Enough of that for now!  This week has been a true test of my grit.  Both of the kids came down with strep throat, this being the busiest time of the year for my husband and me having various teaching commitments and various other meetings.  However, we survived the ordeal and both of us walked away tired and with moderately sore throats.  The good thing to come out of this is that I haven’t had so much as a craving for a drink since the weekend.  I wish I could say I have been headache and hip pain-free.  No such luck. A couple of Zomig and the rest of my Lortab later and my headache is mostly gone but the hip remains a literal thorn in my side.  Tomorrow is an exciting day as I get to visit with a friend of a friend who happens to be a Physical Therapist who specializes in, you guessed it, hip problems!  And she is doing this as a favor, as in, for free!  I don’t ever get stuff for free so this is a very exciting prospect.  I feel a bit guilty as I actually have a referral to see a PT, but, as seems to be happening more frequently these days, I don’t know where it is!

Let’s talk about mothering for a bit.  I have been at it for over 5 years now and I don’t feel as though I am any better at it.  It is just plain, hard work! My biggest problem is guilt.  I feel guilty that the boys are in daycare all day and I feel guilty when I do non-work stuff on work time.  I never feel as though I am giving my all to both of these important facets of my life.  I give even less to my husband but he is wonderfully non-demanding and he is excellent with the kids.  I sometimes wonder how different things would be if we’d had girls instead of boys.  Would I be better at playing with them?  I grew up with two brothers so I thought I’d have no trouble with boys, yet, I just find it difficult to want to play with cars and to even play hide and seek.  Come to think of it, I hated cars as a kids and never wanted to play hide and seek with my brothers.  My boys NEVER, EVER stop!  We have trouble getting them to bed at night, we have trouble slowing them down enough to eat dinner and we have trouble getting them moving for daycare in the morning.  Weekends are totally exhausting to me and I feel guilty for being this way.  I know it must get easier at some point.  Am I a bad mom for wanting to have me time? The only real me time that I get is when I am working!  And at 10 – 11 PM at night if I happen to be lucky enough to get the boys down that early!  With the little guy rarely sleeping through the night (he is 3 by the way), and me getting up around 6 AM most days, I am just plain tired all the time!  My mother-in-law is coming in to town this weekend – THANK GOODNESS.  This means downtime for me. I love having her visit and so do the boys!

Well, since tonight is a night when the kids decided to cooperate at bed time, I should take advantage and get my butt up into bed. Buenas noches.