Facing My Demons

I hate stairs.  I have hated them my entire life.  I have done everything I can to constantly avoid them.  Living in Denver hasn't made it any easier.  Where in other cities I could walk up two flights of stairs and be slightly out of breath, in Denver I walk up one flight and feel as if I've walked up two.  Two flights feels like four and three flights...well...get me an ambulance or an oxygen tank please.  Adjusting to the higher altitude of Denver is a challenge that may take years.

So why, do you ask, do I love going to Red Rocks?  Not only is it an amphitheater comprised mostly of stairs, but the altitude is higher than Denver making each set of 8 stairs difficult for me.  This morning Joe and I headed up there and he wanted to walk the trail while I wanted to walk the bleachers/steps.  Normally when we do this, he drives me to the top of the amphitheater and then drives down to the Trading Post for the start of his trail.  Starting at the top, I typically walk all the way down (65 rows) and then begin my slow climb back up while I take it 6 steps at a time and crisscross over the bleacher rows.

Today I felt like I needed more of a challenge, so I asked Joe not to drop me at the top, but instead that I would get out at the Trading Post with him, which starts below the bottom of the amphitheater.  On that side of the amphitheater there is a ramp.  A dreaded, not to ADA code, massive ramp.  I had to walk this ramp three years ago for a concert and I hated every minute of it.  So for some reason, today I wanted to face this ramp head on...tackle it to show it who had the power.  Me.  Not it.

My workout began below the ramp, so I had to first walk up a hill to get to the ramp and then up I started at a slow, even pace.  At about half way, my polar heart monitor started beeping, warning me that I was over my THR, so I stopped and took in the view.  The sun was quite brilliant today, but the breeze up that high was nice.  Once my THR was back within my acceptable range, I made it up the rest of the ramp.  And to be honest it wasn't as bad as I remembered it!  Don't get me wrong, I was breathing heavily, but it just seemed better this time than three years ago.

After the ramp is about 45 stairs until you are at the (almost) base of the theater.  (I say almost because it actually plants you about 6-8 bleachers up which were blocked off for a concert set up.)  I had made it!  Before I went up the ramp I told myself that if I was too tired, I wouldn't walk the bleachers and would head back down.  But getting there and seeing the other people working out inspired me to keep going.  So up I went, 6 stairs/3 bleachers at a time crisscrossing my way to the top.  I also mixed in 10 sets of 10 wall/planter push ups as I ascended and felt awesome.  Once I was triumphantly at the top, in no way I had ever done before, I unceremoniously began my descent.

I made it back to the car under 45 minutes...all of which were in THR except for the minute I was over my THR.  It felt so amazing to tackle that ramp and those stairs.  It made me feel so strong and powerful.  I can't wait to try it again next week and see how I have progressed.  My reward...cane sugar lemonade.  So delicious.

Moving Forward

So it is over 24 hours from my last post, so I thought you should have an update on my progress.  Since I last spoke to you, I have accomplished the following things:

1. I have created a dairy-free meal plan for the week.  Here is a picture of my menu board.
2. I went back to aquatics today and Joe joined me.  I was welcomed back by many of my fellow classmates, which was nice.  The instructor teased me and gave me a hard time about my absence.  Apparently the class was much harder than it has been in a few weeks and I think he did that for me.  He kept saying, "This is what you get when you take 3-4 weeks off!"  All in all it was a great class and I was in THR for 30 minutes.  I can't wait to go back on Friday!
3. I missed my opportunity to start strength training yesterday because of work, meal planning, grocery shopping, and a night out with friends, but I plan to do both upper and lower body strength today.  (But after I recover from my hard aquatics class!)
4. All meals will be cooked/made at home today!  So last night our outing was "Film on the Rocks" at Red Rocks.  The movie was "Blues Brothers" and it was a blast.  Joe and I met friends in the parking lot for some pre-movie tailgating.  Our friends brought a grill and cooked up brats and hamburgers.  I had a brat and guess what?  It didn't hurt my stomach!  Woo!  I made a salad and we brought some chips as well.  All the food was awesome and the night under stars was lovely.  We even got to see a fox in the parking lot!
5. My new salad obsession that I brought last night and had just now for lunch is a mix of spring lettuce and spinach, strawberries, sliced almonds, hulled sunflower seeds, and balsamic vinaigrette.  It is a variation on my salad that has chunks of fresh mozzarella.  I was worried that I wouldn't enjoy it as much without the cheese, but the sunflower seeds give it an extra crunch with the almonds and it is really tasty!  I don't even miss the cheese.  And it was a hit last night as well.  Score.  New summer salad.
6. For the past week, I have been feeling quite bloated after dinner and I haven't been sure why.  I hadn't had any dairy and not too much gluten (not that I am watching gluten, I just know it can make some bloated).  Those nights I was bloated were nights out at restaurants, so it is hard to say what the culprit was.  Last night, I was not at all bloated and I wonder if it has anything to do with not eating at a restaurant.  I am really not sure, but we will see how I feel today after eating at home all day.  I don't know what the point is here, just that I am keeping an eye on it and trying to figure out what's going on.
7. For lunch, I made my Beef and Bean chili (recipe on the side of this page), but I substituted the beef with ground turkey and the beef broth with veggie broth.  Joe is enjoying it and says he doesn't miss the beef.  Just one more step in limiting our red meat.  Also, I don't feel like I need to load it with cheese or sour cream, which I have done in the past because it is just so yummy as is.  Bonus.

Time To Be Selfish

I know I have had quite an advantage over others when it comes to trying out and practicing my new life style.  As someone who works from home, I am able to make my own schedule and make time to fit in my workouts and healthy eating.  After a few months of being able to focus on me, me, me, I finally got a taste of what this new life style has been like for others as they try to fit it into their hectic lives.

My trip out of town was followed by two weeks of Joe's awesome sisters being in town followed by a week of my good friend, Laura, being in town for a convention.  Add that all up and it has been almost an entire month of me not being able to be totally selfish in my time and eating habits.  I think I have eaten out almost every day in the last month.  I did cook a few dinners at home when Joe's sisters were in town, but ultimately, we jam packed their visit and were often out exploring Colorado and too busy to cook at home.

During this time, I was able to see my relationship for cheese with what it really was as I think I tend to eat it more in restaurants than I do in my own cooking.  And I was able to live in a no-diet way and allow myself what I wanted when I wanted.  So I have also been practicing not making myself feel guilty about those choices.  I have eaten and let it go.  (Still my favorite practice.)  Unfortunately, I have also really neglected my activities.  Yes, there was some hiking and white water rafting mixed in our adventures, but they weren't always daily and I am starting to feel the effects of being inactive.

Yesterday, I took Laura to Red Rocks and we walked the stairs and bleachers from the bottom to the top and did 100 wall push-ups.  It felt great!  And it really got me excited to get back into the game.  I am ready to start some new routines and to get back into some old ones.  The kitchen is calling me and the fridge is saying, "Feed me!  I'm empty!"  So today, with all guests sadly gone, I am reclaiming my selfishness and restarting my new habits.

My Plan:

1. Create meal plan and shopping list for the rest of the week.  
2. Research new 'cheese-free' recipes to make at home.
3. Go back to aquatics tomorrow morning. (I'm sure they've missed me!)
4. Plan to walk the stairs/bleachers at Red Rocks 2x a week.  (Tuesday and Thursday?)
5. Get back to my strength training.  (Alternate upper body and lower body workouts starting with upper body today.)
6. Starting tomorrow (because of dinner plans with friends tonight), do not eat out of the house until at least next Monday or Tuesday. (Save money!)

I would also like to point out that I really enjoyed my conversations with Laura while she was here.  She follows a vegetarian and mostly vegan diet and she had some good insight and advice for me in my food struggles.  She suggested that once I have been dairy free for a few weeks to then test if it is purely lactose that I am sensitive too, or casein as well.  There are cheeses out there with casein, but not lactose that I should try.  They are tastier than the totally vegan kinds and I will be able to find good substitutes with casein cheeses.  She also picked out a butter substitute for me that is vegan and really good!  It melts and tastes quite lovely on my english muffins.  So thank you Laura for the inspiration and ideas!

Inner Struggle, Struggle, Struggle

I put the word 'struggle' in the title of this post three times so you can really understand the gravity of my inner struggles.  You're welcome.

One of the core things we were taught at Green Mountain was to live our lives away from diet mentality.   Eat what we want, when we want, but be mindful and stop eating when we are full.  Sounds simple enough, right?  Well, it is until you start paying closer attention to how certain foods effect you.

I have been quite enjoying the fact that I can have a cupcake at any point in my life.  Never again will they be taken away or forbidden.  The freedom of knowing I can have a cupcake at any time is so wonderful.  It takes the pressure off of me having to eat one that appears in front of me at any moment.  I have the ability to look at that moment and say, "Nope, not hungry. I'll pass."  Or "Heck yeah!  Bring on the personal sized cake of awesomesauce."  Every moment is a choice.  My next one can be a good one.  (Or bad one!  It's my life!)

I have learned that to deprive myself of a type of food is detrimental to my path to health.  If I really want a food, I should just eat it and let it go because otherwise, I won't be satisfied with the 'healthier' option I choose and may continue to overeat to compensate for unsatisfactory choice.  I could save myself unneeded calories and headache if I just ate what my mind wanted.

And there in lies the problem.  What my 'mind' wants.  Not what my body wants or needs.  They didn't quite go over this struggle at Green Mountain (if they did, I don't remember because I was too excited about the 'eat whatever you want' teaching).  Over the last 3.5 months, I have been following my 'mind' a bunch.  I have been enjoying my more fruits and veggies, but I have also been enjoying my natural cookies and cheese and the occasional non-organic, possibly fried treat.

You guys have been with me as I have come to the conclusions about certain foods:

Fried Chicken Fingers = Nausea and Upset Body for 24 hours

Hot Dogs = Severe Stomach Cramps

Cheese = Mucus, Coughing, Death by Toilet

But, but....I REALLY WANT THOSE THINGS!!!  Green Mountain told me I could have them!  I just have to be mindful and stop eating when I am full!  But isn't mindfulness, by definition, the act of paying attention to how my body reacts while I eat?  I have been focusing so much on trying to be mindful to hunger cues that I have unintentionally started paying closer attention to other ways my body reacts.  Stomach cramps, nausea, mucus...

Any smart person, and I really hope to be one some day, would immediately make the connection of the bad side effects and just wouldn't want the items anymore.  But I can't quite seem to do that.  I smell a hot dog and I salivate...I don't grab my stomach thinking about what could become of it once said hot dog is consumed.  As you learned from my blog yesterday, I have been suspicious about dairy for two years now, but have shrugged it off because it is so damn good.  Shouldn't I have stopped cold turkey the moment I made the connection that cheese = death by toilet?  Who wants to suffer like that?  Am I a masochist?  Why would I continue with behaviors that harm my body?

Oh wait...haven't I been overweight my entire life?  Haven't I struggled to keep up with people, breathe properly, and fit into hip clothes?  Why wasn't that enough to make me change my ways?  Am I lazy?  Unmotivated?  Do I secretly hate myself and think I should be punished?  I honestly don't think I can answer 'yes' to any of those last three questions.  So it's got to be something else.  How do I change the way I think to make my 'go to' question to myself always be, "What can I do at this moment to help my body feel great?"

Cheese, hot dogs, and fried foods certainly won't be the answer to that question ever.  I have become so stuck in my ways; entrenched in the Standard American Diet (SAD), that I have allowed myself to overlook basic things like feeling good.  Bloating, gas, mucus, stomach cramps have become my normal.  As I suspect it has for most Americans.  (Did you know that 75% of adults are lactose intolerant?  And that about 80% of them ignore their symptoms?  We only have the lactose enzyme in our bodies as babies.  As we grow, the enzyme goes away and we are no longer able to digest lactose.)

So the answer to my struggle goes something like this: 

1. Constantly ask myself "What can I do at this moment to help my body feel great?"  Repeat often like an affirmation until it becomes part of how I naturally speak to myself.
2. For now, cut out dairy, hot dogs, and fried food completely until I can honestly make the body/mind connection that alerts me these foods are bad.  If I deny myself these foods long enough, my cravings will go away.
3. Make the connection!  Make my mind alert me of these bad foods instinctively.  Such as when I see heroin (okay, I've never actually seen heroin)...my mind immediately sends up a red flashing siren in my brain to stay away.  (Just say no!)  Couldn't it do that with foods that make me feel terrible too?  If I begin a visualization regime (Jon Gabriel has a method in his book to help me with this) then eventually I can make it instinctual.
4. And finally, find alternatives to help me feel satisfied without feeling denied.  As I explore more and more healthy, natural, organic foods, I find myself enjoying them more than my more processed or pesticide-laced counter part.  I no longer want romaine or iceberg lettuce.  I want spinach!  I can't eat non-organic grapes because the pesticides (no matter how much I wash them) make my mouth itch, but the organic ones are heavenly.  I would rather have my homemade chicken nuggets from fresh chicken breast than the mystery, fried food meat that I get at restaurants.

So as you can see, I am reforming my mind daily.  It is going to take me a long time to completely institute my four steps above...but I'm getting there.  My path may be rocky at times, but it is long and I am slowly learning how to pave it.

Oh, Cheese.

I have a very complicated Love/Hate relationship with cheese.  I love it, it hates me and that leaves me feeling used and empty.  Why can't it return my love?  I have given it so much time and energy and praise in the last 32 years.  Why must it abuse me so?

About two years ago I made a connection with cheese and my stress.  After much trial and error (over 30 years?) I came to realize that when I was super stressed at work, my body reacted extremely poorly to cheese and dairy.  What does that mean exactly?  Well, without getting too graphic, I have extreme cramps followed by a long horrible visit to the bathroom.  In really bad cases I find myself wondering if this is what death feels like.  It ain't pretty.

So armed with my new connection, I stayed away from all dairy while I was stressed out.  When I wasn't feeling very stressed, I ate away and enjoyed my cheese like normal.  If I got into a habit of eating it and a stressful day came up then BAM! regret would immediately set in and I would be reminded of my 'special' dietary needs.

Since my stressful Tut job ended back in January, I have been living a cheese-loving filled existence.  Almost six months feeling free to eat as much dairy as I want.  Isn't it great that I have figured out my cheese triggers?   Whoopee!  As long as I never have another stressful day in my life, I am good to go.

"Not so fast there, Crawford!" I hear you saying.  "That doesn't quite make sense.  Are you sure you aren't having other symptoms that just aren't as extreme that you may be ignoring?"  "Ha ha!" I scoff. "You don't know what you're <cough, cough> talking <cough> about!"  Sigh...now that I am more in tune with my body and paying attention to how different foods effect me, I am seeing those 'small' symptoms.  And guess what?  They aren't that small!

I am currently reading and enjoying, "Crazy, Sexy Diet" by Kris Carr.  She has a chapter about all animal products and goes into detail about mucus causing dairy.  That's right "mucus causing".  Yuck. As with every new health book I read, I try to take all advice with a grain of salt and slowly come up with my own decisions.  So I read this chapter a few days ago and didn't think much about it except to think about possibly decreasing my cheese intake.

Fast forward to tonight's dinner.  With Joe's sisters in town the last 2 weeks, we have been eating out a lot and I have been neglecting my veggies.  So tonight for dinner I made huge salads.  They had strawberries, mozzarella, sliced almonds, and balsamic vinaigrette.  Joe's salad had turkey as well, but I wasn't feeling it.  The salad was delicious I was feeling good.  Until about an hour after I had finished eating.

It was then I began to feel the mucus rise in my throat.  I started to cough.  My nose began to run.  My stomach cramps returned and I had to book it to the bathroom for one of my old fashioned "Am I going to die?" experiences.  Now, first let me say that I am not stressed.  I am feeling pretty good about life.  So then why the stress-induced lactose intolerance episodes?  I think it was to wake me up to those first three symptoms that I have obviously been ignoring for WAY too long.

The mucus rising, the coughing, and the runny nose.  I have been eating a lot of cheese for the past three weeks and I have been very snotty...not in a snooty sort of way.  I felt great before dinner and with the chance to focus on my food once again without travel and guests to distract me, I was fully aware of what was happening to me.  My stomach reacting as it did was my final wake up call.  My body is not designed to handle dairy.  Boo.

Tomorrow I will continue this thought with my current inner struggle of: How can I live a 'no diet', 'no depriving' lifestyle if what my mind wants is something my body does not?

Baseball=Hot Dogs

I am currently at a Colorado Rockies game having a great time. A challenge I have encountered here is the smell of hot dogs! This while stadium smells delicious! As I've said before, I love hot dogs. I've enjoyed them at many ball games throughout my life. It's become habit. 

Before we got here, I gave myself a little pep talk and told myself to find options other than hot dogs because when I had a hot dog two weeks ago, I had quite the stomach ache. I figured once I got to my seat and away from the concession stand, I wouldn't be tempted anymore. Little did I know that the whole place would smell so awesome for the whole game!

But I am resisting. I just keep reminding myself that I do not want to spend half of this game doubled over with cramps. So I've had large pretzel and I have my eye on a frozen strawberry lemonade. I will win this hot dog battle today!

Here is a pic of me in my 'L' shirt that I bought yesterday and my new Rockies hat. 

Colorful Colorado

With Joe's sisters in town, we have been quite active exploring Colorful Colorado.  Today we went White Water Rafting on Clear Creek!  We went on Class 4 rapids which are apparently beginner rapids.

The first challenge of the day was getting into a wet suit.  Thankfully, the rafting guides help to pick out what size we should be and warn us that it is hard to get on.  My wet suit was about a foot too long, and I was able to get it over my shoulders easily.  The challenge came when I had to zip it up.  I would get it zipped a little and POP! it would unzip just like that.  Finally, with the assistance of Natalie, I was able to get it fully zipped.

Once the wet suit was on, the wet jacket, life preserver, and helmet were fitted.  I was told that if I could breathe easily then it wasn't correct.  So my lack of breath was a good thing apparently.  After some instruction and boat placement, we were on the rapids.  I'm not going to lie...I was a little scared.  I had been rafting before, but it was 13 years ago and I was much lighter.  When I focused on the commands we were given, it helped me to not be scared.  I knew that if I paddled as hard as I could we would be safer than if I didn't paddle at all.  So I paddled as hard as I could and I was thankful for my strength training because I felt awesome paddling with all my might.

At the end of our run, we had a small window to get our boat to the side of the creek to get out and on the bus before we kept going down the creek to the Advanced rapids.  No thanks.  So when we missed the spot we were supposed to stop, Joe and I pushed our paddles hard in the water to slow our boat down so we could get caught by the other raft guides.  It was exhilarating and a little scary!  I did not want to go down the 10' drop that we were told laid beyond our exit site.

After the run, it was great to get that wet suit off and I think it was grateful to get off me because once I unzipped it, it fell right to my knees!  Before we left the rafting place, I decided to buy a tee shirt to commemorate the event.  I picked out an XL like normal and tried it on over my tank top.  Joe said that it looked too big!  I didn't believe him, but decided to try on the L and it fit!  I couldn't believe it!  I am excited to wear it tomorrow because it makes me feel awesome.  :0)