Those of you familiar with me will no doubt immediately recognize a phrase Pace must have said to me – multiple learning modalities is not something usually spouted from me. Though I do greatly like the ring it carries, I’d say something more like, “lots of different ways of learning.”

What does “multiple learning modalities” mean?

Pace and I make an awesome team because, not only do we phrase things differently, we teach differently. We have very different communication styles – and it’s a big strength. Pace is a techie geek, I’m a book geek. (Being a book geek has amusing side effects; sometimes I’ll pronounce things funny because I’ve only ever read them before. Endless laughs.) Pace loves explaining things, I’m a storyteller. Pace is logical, I’m emotional. Pace learns best by reading (words and diagrams are best) or being lectured followed by practicing and experimentation on her own, and I learn best with visual and audial input and hands-on guided practice and repetition.

In The Usual Error, we explain things. Unsurprising given the non-fiction bookiness of it. However, we don’t just leave it at that. We have at least one detailed illustration per chapter, and at least two examples given in story-form. We have a table of contents, a table of stories and examples, and a table of illustrations.

It’s the usual error in The Usual Error.

For me, I’d be far more likely to remember the picture of the little girl hugging the beat-up teddy bear than the phrase “It’s okay to have problems.” Or, if I remember a phrase, it’s more likely to be related to the story in the chapter than the explanations therein. Thus, we included different types of indexing to help different learners find what they’re looking for.

When we drafted Marty to illustrate, I told him this would be a great challenge – illustrating communication without using the same concept of two people sitting and talking over and over would be tough. He rose to the challenge and far surpassed our hopes, bringing us genius ideas and potent illustrations that bring the concepts to life.

We made much effort to reach several different learning styles with the book, and we’re reaching out to audial learners with the audio book. We do the same thing in our workshops: we lecture a little (but invite interruption), we play games, we give pictorial handouts, and we have interactive discussion.

How we learn impacts everything we do.

It’s only been in the last few months that I’ve gained a better understand of how I learn. The impact of knowing my own learning style is incredible; it gives me the power to take my learning style and apply it to the things I’m learning, which in turn strengthens my ability to actually learn and retain.

I was inspired by Megan to take markers to books when I read, and that makes a huge difference. I scribble, highlight, doodle, underline, circle, make ?s and !s, and dog-ear my way through books, and I’ve started wanting to read non-fiction. This is huge for me! Previous to six months ago, I’d only read one non-fiction book in my entire life, and now I’ve read several – and enjoyed them and retained what I learned. I’ve also learned that I’m far too audially sensitive to enjoy recordings or other such things; if it’s too loud or too soft or there’s any kind of background noise, I can’t focus. I also need visual stimulation while I’m listening to spoken word recordings or I tune them out.

For example, in Online Business School, you get audio files and .pdf files. The .pdfs are transcripts of the audio tracks. Naomi’s sultry voice matches the text – almost exactly but not entirely – and it’s awesome. That was a huge help for me in both being able to focus and in being able to retain. Having Pace right there as a study buddy was even more awesome, and if I’d've printed out the transcripts so I could color and highlight, I think I’d've been in learning heaven. I’d probably be able to recite the entire thing, so it’s probably best that didn’t happen.

If Naomi had been singing instead of talking, I would have the whole thing memorized.

I mean, I learned the order of the planets from a catchy song on Blue’s Clues. It works!

Either you or the internets will know.

I learned by trial and error, but there are lots of good sites on the internets that can help you figure out what your learning style is. I’ve tried a few of them, so here are the ones I enjoyed.

This one is neat and accurate, but you have to purchase a detailed report. It gives you a little bit of info for free, though.

This one made me laugh and feel like a freak because I said yes to all three columns nearly ever time. This means, which I already knew, that I have Multiple Learning Styles.

I took three or four others, but found that a lot of them require your email address or other information, so I won’t recommend them. Suffice to say, you can google for “learning style free tests” and take the ones you like. For me, every single one I took said I have “multiple learning styles”, so they’re either generally accurate or I’m a test-breaker.

Take your pick.

You can also pay attention to yourself and not even ask the internet (this is scary and hard, I know). I already knew I have multiple learning styles, because I want to listen to music, highlight, doodle, discuss, and fidget while I read or work. I cover the entire gamut!

Knowledge is power!

Knowing how you learn gives you power. I used to think I was stupid because I did very poorly in school – but it’s because I don’t learn when someone talks at me, and taking notes never helped. It’s not my style, baby. Now I know there’s nothing wrong with me, I learn perfectly well – within my styles – so I can take advantage of myself (woo!) and learn in my own way.

My own way is surrounded by books, markers, fluffy cushions, good friends, music, and my laptop.

What’s yours?

I finished a book on Sunday.

It changed my life.

I’m keeping the title a secret for now, because it’s slightly misleading. The book is about how we view ourselves, why we do the things we do, and how to make it better without forcing and abusing ourselves.

We learn that we’re bad from a very young age. We’re taught that our bodies are separate from our minds. We live in a mind-based society where we sit and read and compute and learn, and we get the running-playing-dancing joyous movement squeezed out of us.

“Sit still!”
“Calm down!”
“Be quiet!”
“Don’t touch that!”
“Stop wiggling!”

I used to teach preschoolers. My class was always, by far, the best class in the school because I didn’t teach them stillness or quiet. I taught them to play, to move. We had reading time, sure, but then we would play. We would dance, we would sing, we would go outside and run. When the weather was outside-prohibitive (which happens a lot in summer in Texas), we would sneak outside for 10 minutes at a time or I’d clear out the center of our room and we’d run and play tag or spin in circles inside.

Most adults will agree that kids need to move. Kids need to play. Kids need to spend time outside.

So why do we think adults don’t?

We sit around staring at our computers, sitting at our desks, sitting on our couches. And then we wonder why we’re depressed and overweight and unhealthy!

But it’s more than that. We’ve started using food as a substitute for all the emotions we’re suppressing. Need connection? Eat something. Need comfort? Grab a snack. Need excitement? Go out to eat. Need socialization? Eat! Feeling depressed? Stuff food in your face!

And it works. Temporarily. We eat and we feel better. The chemicals in the “food” we eat make us feel sated, even if we’re really not. Ice cream can’t replace even five minutes with a friend, but we’ve learned to feel as if it does.

When I was a little girl, my parents owned a frame gallery. It was attached to our house, so they could both work while my brother and I were both left to our own devices. My brother rode his little firetruck up and down our driveway a hundred million times.

I sat on the couch and ate.

I used food as my love and comfort, because my parents were busy and needed to work.

Now, I don’t blame my parents. They were doing the best they could, and I respect their decisions and I love them both a huge lot. But they were busy, and I was (and am still) high maintenance and need lots of attention to feel loved. I wasn’t getting enough. Food was readily available, and I learned that eating made me feel better, feel less alone.

A habit I carried long into my adult life.

But this book, helped along by several personal revelations, really brought all this to light for me. It offered the simple advice of turning food back into food – nourishment and sustenance – and finding ways to get my other needs met. It advised thinking about why you’re eating, every time you go to eat something.

Thinking about eating isn’t something we usually do, other than a great anticipation for our next meal.

There are two big points in the book; this is one of them. Thinking about what you eat before you eat. Consider your food. Is it even real food? Here’s a hint: if it has a paragraph of ingredients, it’s likely not real. It’s been processed far beyond what food needs to have done to it, and if it says “enriched” – that means they’ve taken the nutrients out of it and put them back in. This blows my mind. It also prevents the nutrients from nutrienting our bodies; we can’t process man-made nutrients very well.

I digress. This one thing, considering my food and the reasons I’m reaching for it, has drastically changed my eating habits in only a few days. I found that, when I’m not actually hungry, I’m motivated to eat by desires and needs for other things, things that food is only a (poor) substitute for: comfort, affection, play, socialization, reassurance. Once I know what I really need, I seek it out.

For example, at the grocery store yesterday, I reached for a pint of ice cream. I read the ingredients (a very short list), and deemed it acceptable. But once I had it in my cart, I started thinking about why I wanted it, what I would feel when I ate it. I realized I was really desperate for comfort and reassurance, so I put the ice cream back. When we got home, I snuggled with Pace for a while. My needs were met and I felt much better – without the ice cream!

The other main point of the book is movement; back to what I was talking about earlier. We stop moving somewhere in our youth, and most of us don’t ever get it back. But we’re creatures of movement, and it’s against our nature to sit still so much! Once we find the joy in movement, we might find that we don’t want to sit still, we don’t want to stop moving. Dance, run, bike, swim, spin in circles, wiggle, fidget, swing, bounce. Move. It feels awesome and natural, once you overrun those ingrained patterns.

There’s far more information in the book than I can convey to you here, so I will unveil the title and hope you get it for yourself. Don’t let the title mislead you, though – it’s about life and living it joyously rather than just food. Transformational Weight Loss, and it’s for sale as a tree book on Amazon or an ebook on his site. I can’t recommend it enough!

Eating only raw food for the past two weeks has been horrible in every way imaginable.

The food tastes horrible.

There have been a couple of things that don’t taste horrible, like Kyeli’s Tangy Twitter Salad, a cacao/avocado pudding thingy, and some fruit smoothies. But almost everything else has tasted either meh, bad, or too horrible to consume. It’s gotten to the point where I’m dreading meals because I know I’ll have to force icky-tasting crud down my gullet.

It’s ridiculously expensive.

We bought a $500 blender, and it doesn’t even work that well. It’s shorted out a couple of times, and some of the smoothies it makes are still a little gritty. It wasn’t the cure-all it was made out to be. The actual food is ridiculously expensive, too, especially when we buy organic. We’ve spent between $800 and $1000 on groceries in the past two weeks. Sure, some of that has been staples that won’t get used up quickly, and some of it was stuff we threw out because it was disgusting, but even accounting for that, it’s still ridiculous.

It takes a huge amount of time.

Kyeli is doing all the food preparation (*huge crazy appreciation*) and she’s been spending about four hours a day on it. And this is when we’re making recipes from The “Lazy” Raw Foodist’s Guide and Raw Food Made “Easy”! If this is easy, I can’t even imagine difficult.

I’ve had less energy.

At first I thought I might have found an advantage of raw food, because I was sleeping better. But I think I’m just sleepier. I’m getting sleepy around 9 or 10 instead of 11 or 12, and getting up at the same time. I’m more awake in the mornings, but I get nappish throughout the day.

I’ve been spacy.

I’ve been getting spaced-out a lot. It’s not quite the same thing as the “cottonheaded” feeling I’ve described before, but it’s close.

I’ve been miserable.

All these accounts of euphoria and an increased sense of well-being that raw foodists report? No signs yet. In fact, I’ve been significantly more miserable for the past two weeks. I’ve been grumpy, depressed, and irritable. I’ve had a couple of brief hour-long spurts of feeling happy and good, but for the most part it’s been all bad emotionally.

The food cravings are driving me mad.

I’ve been craving food that’s far less healthy than what I was eating before I went raw. Greasy jalapeño poppers with ranch dressing. Meat Lover’s Pizza. A Big Mac. I’ve never even eaten a Big Mac! The meat cravings have lessened over the past two days, but they were very intense and difficult to resist for about a week. Oh, and now Kyeli’s talking about bacon on the phone and now I want bacon. Augh! It’s so weird! And now I’m craving Amy’s Southwestern Vegetable Soup. A lot. And I have been every day for the past two weeks. I’m so attached to these food lollipops that I’m driving myself depressed over it.

So why is this happening?

I think it’s happening because we’re doing it wrong. When we decided to do a 30-day raw trial, we thought it would be roughly like our 30-day vegan trial. We would stop eating a bunch of foods, we’d have cravings, and we’d see what it’s like.

WRONG.

Being a raw foodist is not a diet change.
Being a raw foodist is a lifestyle change.

We didn’t understand what we were getting into. You just eat different food, right? No. It’s so much more than that. Let me enumerate the myriad ways in which we’re doing it wrong.

1. We didn’t do enough research beforehand.

We felt intuitively called to going raw, and a couple of our friends whom we trust say it’s the best thing ever, so we jumped in headfirst. We had no idea. Without knowing a lot about nutrition, we don’t know what to eat. We have a meal plan, but we haven’t been able to follow it accurately because of taste and time. When we fail to follow it, we don’t know what to replace it with, so we just eat whatever’s at hand, like fruit, raw nuts, and sundried raisins. Since we have no clue about the nutrition side of things, we’re probably eating all the wrong things in all the wrong combinations, so it’s no wonder we’re feeling crappy.

2. We didn’t allocate enough time to eating raw.

We started eating raw a week before we moved to a new house. It was a very busy and stressful week. We didn’t want to put off the trial due to busyness, because we’re always busy. But we didn’t understand the time investment it takes to do raw properly. We ended up making every single meal while we were blindly delirious with hunger. We didn’t make time to prepare things in advance, so we’ve been constantly scrambling. It’s been a huge source of stress in our lives. And whenever our routine gets out of whack, for instance when we moved and packed our blender, or when our internet was out and we spent several hours at a coffee shop, or when our house smelled like gas and we needed to evacuate until they could fix it, we were screwed! We either ate random raw snacks we had on hand or we just went hungry, which led to more blind delirium when making the next meal.

3. Umm… I guess “a myriad” is two.

There are oodles more things we’re doing wrong, but they all break down into not realizing that being raw would be a lifestyle change instead of a diet change.

All this leads to two questions. One is the obvious one: “What now?” I’ll save that for last. The second one is a tangent, but I think it’s a very important one. Oh, wait, there’s a third question, too. Let me come in again.

1. Did you lose any weight?

Yup, we lost about 5 lbs each in the past two weeks.

2. Why did bad-tasting food make me so depressed that I didn’t want to
get out of bed in the morning?

None of the raw food information I’ve read has placed a strong emphasis on taste. They say “If it doesn’t taste great, add berries, agave, or raw honey,” but they don’t talk about what to do if all the recipes make you want to gag, you have to force-feed yourself to get them down, and the thought of eating another salad makes you want to vomit. So perhaps I’m in the minority here.

I have two theories about this, one psychological and one chemical. The psychological theory has to do with the part of myself that wants to feel safe and warm and comfortable. It’s part of my primal self, and it’s very childlike and simple. Food has a direct tie to this part of me, so it equates “yucky-tasting food” with “not safe, not comfortable” and gets scared.

The chemical theory is that since I wasn’t eating raw in a healthy, well-balanced way, my brain chemistry got all wonked up, so I got depressed. Maybe due to vitamin B12 deficiency (although I’ve been vegetarian for a decade, so go figure) or maybe due to some other nutrient deficiency. When I’ve gotten depressed in the past (thanks, Elly, for helping me realize this) I feel like everything sucks, regardless of the root cause of the depression. If I’m depressed for an emotional reason, a circumstantial reason, or a chemical reason, I still feel like everything in my life is horrible.

So, the depression isn’t necessarily a sign that everything in my life is wrong. It’s a sign that something in my life could use some attention and improvement, and that if that something gets better, the other horriblenesses will (*poof!*) away like magic, since they were made of illusion and cotton candy in the first place.

We’ll see.

On to the final question:

3. What now?

Kyeli and I are, as of tomorrow, aborting our raw food experiment. We do still feel called to raw food, but now that we know the costs involved in terms of time, money, yumminess, and focus, we’re choosing to put our time, money, and focus elsewhere, like on our business, our son, and our relationship.

We know that we’re missing out on all the awesomeness of being raw if we started doing it right and got through the rough bits. But right now, we’re already feeling overwhelmed with being full-time entrepreneurs and full-time moms, and we feel that adding “full-time raw foodists” to that would bring us too much stress and badness to be worth the potential goodness.

We’re definitely going to change the way we eat, though.

• We’re going to eat more fresh vegetables in various forms.
• We’re going to eat much less refined sugars and processed food.
• We’re going to avoid wheat, either entirely or mostly.
• We’re going to cut down on starches and carbohydrates.
• We’re going to supplement our vitamin B12 and see if that makes a noticeable difference in how we feel.
• We’re going to experiment with various foods and combinations of foods to see how they make us feel and how they affect our bodies.

We’re going to put time and effort into educating ourselves on health and nutrition, and eat more mindfully and informedly.

We’ll let you know how it goes. (:

Pace and I went raw on Sunday.

What does that even mean?

It means that we’ve stopped eating cooked and processed foods, and started eating lots of green things and multi-colored things that actually grow from the actual earth. Like sprouts. And carrots. And plants and leafy things and, um, ya know, other things like that. We’ll eat them plain, in smoothies and juices, in interesting mixes and blends, on a train and in the rain!

Wait. No more eating out? No more social eating?

We won’t eat out much anymore, which is actually a good thing given how much we spend in restaurants monthly. (We’ll probably still occasionally take our son out for pizza, though.) There are a couple of places in Austin that are raw-friendly, so we’ll go there when we need a night out, but in general, we won’t eat out.

As for social eating, that’s an interesting one for me. I’m really hung up on social graces and being proper and not rocking the boat… hold on. No, seriously. No I’m not! I rock the boat all the time! What was I thinking? Well, I don’t like to cause problems for people during special occasions, which is what I was thinking about.

For example, one of my dearest friends is getting married next week. I don’t want her to freak out about how to feed us at her long ceremony and after-party (commonly called a reception by those not currently brain-impaired). I also don’t want to explain to several hundred people why I’m eating food I brought with me, don’t want to deal with their reactions (lots of people feel threatened by bizarre diets and thus get angry, which I know from personal experience (keep reading)), don’t want to go several hours with nothing to eat when surrounded by food that I’m probably not over yet. Like cake. Oh gods.

And what do we do when we travel? It’s hard enough to feed us when we’re traveling vegans.

So yeah. I have fear and uncertainty and haven’t figured it all out yet. It’s like I’m human or something.

But in general, like on Game Nights, I can have snacks and little meals in portable containers and we can munch on our stuff while others munch on their stuff, and there’s no big deal. Social eating, for the win!

Seriously, why am I doing this?

Because I’m afraid.

Because when I looked at Angela’s site, I freaked out and got super-angry and incredulous and defensive – like she was threatening me just by existing. What is that about?

I’ll tell you.

I’ve been interested in going raw, or at least trying it, since I first heard about it on Steve Pavlina’s blog. I really like and admire Steve, (even if I currently only know him mostly through his blog), so it was good for me to read all this stuff from him. A trusted source, as it were. At first, it freaked me out. Then it tempted me. Then it annoyed me. Then it frustrated me. Then it boggled me. Then it pissed me right the fuck off, oh yes.

I read about Steve’s raw adventures for months, on and off. I had all those feelings, over and over. Then my darling friend Megan, who I love and respect close up and personal-like, started talking – excuse me, ranting and raving – about food and what we eat and how we eat it, and I started listening. Really listening.

And all those feelings I was feeling from Steve’s ginormous list of raw posts started surfacing again.

Is there a point to all this?

Yes.

The point is, I’ve been afraid for far too long. For far too long, I let fear rule me. I made decisions in fear. I stayed stuck because I was too afraid to unstick myself. I waited for a hero, someone to save me, because I was too afraid to save myself.

Fuck that.

Once I realized that I was the only one who would ever save me, I got to saving. I learned to identify fear and fear blocks. I started facing my fears and knocking them down.

I went from worrier to warrior.

So now, when I find fear, I pick at it. I comfort it. I ask what’s up. I figure out what I’m afraid of and what I want to do about it.

Fear no longer rules me.

I’m still afraid, don’t get me wrong. In fact, last night – barely 36 hours into our raw food run, I broke down and cried. I freaked out. My blender isn’t good enough to blend nuts into paste, and I’d spent over an hour making dinner already, and I couldn’t take it. I even wanted a cheeseburger, wtf? I got so bogged down in fear that I couldn’t breathe for a while.

Yeah, I still feel that, still get paralyzed by it, still get blocked by it.

But I’m not gonna let that stop me anymore.

I’ve been vegan (well, technically, non-dairy vegetarian) since November. Here are some of my observations from the last three months. In general I’ve felt much better since I stopped eating cheese; here are some specifics.

The cheese pizza experiment

In early January, I was still craving cheese. I decided to eat a cheese pizza to see what happened. I was irritable for three days and congested for a week. It wasn’t worth it.

Cutting out dairy was a double-or-nothing for me. When I stopped eating dairy, I felt better, more clear-headed, more compassionate, and I had more energy. But then when I ate that cheese pizza, I felt far worse than had been my previous baseline when I was just plain old vegetarian. It was as if my body had adjusted to the non-dairy state, and trying to go back was horrific.

Soy cheese may contain dairy products

We bought some soy cheese. The second ingredient was milk products, but we found that out a little too late; I’ve been congested ever since I ate it. It was apparently for lactose intolerant people, but whatever it is in dairy that messes me up, I guess it’s not lactose, because the soy cheese definitely messed me up.

I don’t want potato salad anymore

I used to love potato salad. It has eggs in it, but since I’m not strictly vegan, just non-dairy vegetarian, it was technically okay. But the lonely container of potato salad just sat there in the fridge until it went bad. It just felt heavy and icky and it didn’t sound appetizing anymore. This is weird to me, and pretty awesome. I don’t have to constantly exert my willpower to stop eating things that are bad for me, because they just stop being appetizing. It’s neat. (:

I eat entire bowls full of nothing but vegetables

For anyone who has known me for a long time, this will probably freak you right the hell out. I used to be The Vegetarian Who Doesn’t Eat Vegetables™. Now I eat vegetables with a little sauce and spices. I eat vegetables with rice. Yesterday I ate a red pepper like an apple. It’s yummy! Once I stopped bombarding my taste buds with synthetic crap, I started being able to actually enjoy the flavors of all this natural food.

Kyeli and I have decided to try eating only raw food for the entire month of February. We’ll let you know how it goes! (:

Mo Pie over at Big Fat Deal (an awesome blog about issues faced by women in general and overweight women in specific) wrote an awesome post on Friday, ending with the question “Can you be overweight, yet truly happy?”

I’ve struggled with my weight for most of my life. I got heavy as a kid and only went up from there. I’ve been teased, hurt, persecuted, tormented, and excluded based on my size – and more than a little of the abuse was from my own self. I spent most of my life feeling like a victim, trapped in my overweight and horribly out-of-shape body, not liking myself and hating my body.

But, as I said to Mo Pie, then I started paying attention. I started listening to myself. I started hearing those hateful thoughts that would go through my mind at random times, the insecurity that would float by whenever someone stared at me for any length of time. I knew that I would never say such things to someone I loved, so why was it okay to say them to myself?

I’m finding now, in this new and tender place of self-love and self-respect, that my numbers don’t matter. My weight, my size, my measurements – they don’t define me. They are but a small drop in the lake that fills and creates who I am. What matters is how I feel. If I feel ill or unhappy all the time, something needs to change. If I feel healthy and happy, that’s great – no matter my size.

And I find that, as long as I’m listening, paying attention, and taking good care of myself, I am truly happy.

I use eating out for three main things:

1) celebrating
2) rewards
3) financial security

We eat out to celebrate anything from getting a little return from our insurance to getting our blog in the top million. We eat out to celebrate with friends, family, or just us.

I get the desire to eat out to reward myself for various things, and most of the time when I ask, Pace consents. We usually go to my favorite places when this is the case, so it feels very rewarding indeed.

When I was little, my family went out to eat weekly or more, even after my parents got divorced. When I was out on my own, I often couldn’t afford to eat out. Then, when Pace and I got married, our financial situation improved drastically, and we started eating out a lot. This ingrained in me that financial security equals eating out a lot.

A few months ago, I started eating vastly healthier and far less in portions. This has led to internal dissonance – wanting to eat out for my three reasons, but not wanting to eat poorly or overeat. Even in Austin, it’s difficult to find places to eat that fit my strange food habits. And then, as our grocery bill climbs (healthy food is more expensive because that makes sense (sarcasm)), eating out becomes less and less attractive to our budget as well… but the three needs haven’t magically gone away for me.

Today, Megan and I were talking about this. She said she used to have the exact same three things, and she solved it brilliantly, and I will now regale you with the solutions.

1) celebrating
2) rewards
3) financial security

1) Celebrating can be done at home! We can celebrate by inviting friends over and cooking together – someone can bring something interesting to drink, someone can bring dessert, and we can make a meal to share. Sharing food with friends does not have to be done in a restaurant! In fact, I imagine that sharing food prepared by myself with friends would be even more rewarding and celebratory than sharing food in an outside atmosphere.

Oh! In fact, we can even celebrate without inviting friends over! We could have special meals we rarely have, light some candles, take time to discuss our celebratory intent, and really make it feel special and different!

2) Rewarding myself by eating food that actually makes me feel sick seems counter-productive. Megan suggested finding something I really enjoy that’s either a little too expensive or a little too sweet for regular consumption, and get that when I feel I’ve done something to deserve a reward. I think this is fucking brilliant.

3) As I mentioned, buying healthier food does wind up being more expensive. Why not take that expensive eating out and turn it into those healthier groceries? Having financial security provides us with good, healthy food that makes us feel good, food we want to eat and enjoy eating!

I am really looking forward to implementing these awesome ideas. We’ve already burned through our food budget for September, but starting October 1st, we’re going cold turkey (with three exceptions). We’re going to try eating in for 30 days, implement all the above ideas, and see how it goes!

I’m really excited about it!

The other night, I had a weird food experience. I ate half a bag of Doritos, most of which I consumed well after I stopped wanting them. I mulled on this for a long time, trying to figure out why the hell I’d eat so much junk, especially after I stopped wanting it.

I think I figured it out. I think it was a starvation reaction.

My system has adjusted and now expects whole, alive, nourishing sustenance. When I fed us junk devoid of nourishment, my body panicked, thinking no goodness would come of the food I was ingesting and went into overdrive, needing to consume as much as possible in an attempt to scrounge some kind of life-sustainability from the chips. This created a need to continue eating them even well after I was consciously ready to stop, because my body was afraid of starving. I didn’t get full, either, because that kind of “food” doesn’t actually get processed and turned into anything useful, so it was being shuffled out as fast as I was putting it in.

When I eat life-giving real food, I get satisfied and only eat when I want to and can stop when I want. I don’t panic and don’t wonder why I’m eating so much, because I’m not eating so much. But every time I eat foods that aren’t as nourishing, I get that feeling and end up eating far more than I wanted, and far more than I needed, and I get over-full and feel icky.

Food is so interesting and exciting!! Our bodies are so amazing and interesting!

At the beginning of July, I launched into a new way of life.

At the end of June, Pace and I read a really awesome post on motivation. This got the two of us thinking and talking quite a bit, and Pace made a post about the fundamental equations of motivational alchemy and another one about the power of habits (and there’s a third one yet to come!).

I found that I am particularly drawn to soft self-discipline and hard self-discipline. I thought about what I want out of life, what I want to do to achieve those goals, and set some rules in place.

I’ve really adhered to the hard rules I set, even surpassing them. I’m really pleased and I feel like I’ve come a long way.

In July, I exercised at least five days a week (sometimes more). I missed four days in a row due to ankle weirdness, but made it every day on either side of the break – even though the break put me back in the dip. I started paying attention to what I eat, culminating in eating tiny meals every two to three hours and much healthier foods.

As a result, I’ve lost 10 pounds! More excitedly, I’ve lost 5½ inches in my waist, 1¾ inches in my upper arms, and 1 inch in my hips!!

I’ve never lost more than 5lbs. I’ve gone up and up and up, but never down. I cannot describe the joy I’m feeling!! (:

It has been hard. I’ve been sore nearly 24/7, tired a lot, and exhausted for the past couple of days. Yesterday I didn’t think I could finish my workout, but I did, and today was easier. My endurance is up, my self-esteem and confidence are up, and I’m feeling really good. I’m really happy and extremely proud of myself! Woo!

I think I have low blood sugar. Reasons I suspect this include:

• My brain gets really fuzzy up to an hour or two before mealtime. I get very spacey and irritable, and I have trouble making decisions.
• After I eat a large meal, I often go into a food coma. I go into a slump and have low mental and physical energy.
• I also often slump around 3 or 4 in the afternoon.
• I’m ravenous throughout the first half of a meal, sometimes even longer.

For the past few days I’ve been trying to eat smaller meals at mealtimes and eat healthy snacks every two hours or so. It’s greatly decreased my frequency of slumpiness and my frequency of spaciness/bitchiness. We’ll try it for a while and see how it goes. I’m also going to try varying my foods somewhat and see if I notice any differences in how I feel.

In other good health news, Debbie from Good Life Modalities seems to have fixed the circulation in my feet and hands! My hands and feet, most notably my feet, used to get cold easily. But for the past few weeks, they’ve been totally great! In fact, I’ve been uncomfortably warm when wearing the socks that I usually wear! This is really impressive. She is really awesome. In fact, I’m paying for another session with her out of my own spending money, because we already exceeded our “crap” budget this month due to getting car troubles fixed, and I didn’t want to wait until next month. I think I’m sending a good message to myself that my health is worth spending my own money on.

Hopefully these positive physical changes will improve my mental well-being too. (: