Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson

My husband has a lot of allergies and he's been researching different things to find a way to alleviate them.  He came across the Paleolithic way of eating.  It's nothing new, and several authors have written about it.  Ben has read Primal Blueprint and has been making diet changes to follow this sort eating lifestyle.  (I'll encourage him to blog about it so you can hear about his experience personally)

I love learning about nutrition!  Our Standard American Diet (SAD) is certainly sad and I am always interested in learning new ways to better our lifestyle.  I am feeding a small army here in my home and if we can raise them to be adults that will take care of their bodies and not become some sort of dietary statistic, I will feel like we contributed something good in this world.

I understand the premise of a paleolithic diet.  Eat foods that are unadulterated and unprocessed.  Eat them in their original form to maximize the nutrition they contain.  I get it.  But I am very interested to read the science behind this sort of lifestyle, how it can improve someone who has physical issues.  So this is something I am looking forward to read and I am sure I will share some exciting findings along the way.

Push Up Update

So I was chuggin' along doing my push-up routine when week 4 hit.  (Week 4 is grueling!)  Between joint pain from doing 120 or so push-ups over 5 sets and a funky virus setting in, I was having a hard time.  Maybe the joint pain was from the virus??

Anyway, after a little beef about doing them "girly style" I have decided to do the challenge from the beginning with MANLY push-ups!   I did the repeat "Initial test" and ended up doing half as many as I did when I did the test girly style.  Honestly, I was surprised-I thought I would have done less!!  What a difference it makes when you take your knees off the floor.  I liked how I could REALLY feel it in my stomach.  I could feel it in my stomach before, but not quite this much.

So I am adjusting my older adventure and creating a new one in the process. We'll see what happens after a 3 week break and during week 4 of the program this time around.

The One Hundred Push Up site has a really great break down on training  and the iPhone app for it is AMAZING!  If you have an iPhone/iPod and you want to take this challenge, invest the $1.99 to get the app.  It's worth it!

New Salad Recipe

 

We tried a WONDERFUL new recipe the other night. It's called Ultimate Chicken and we all loved it!! Packed full of flavor and is very filling for a salad.

During the winter I have a hard time finding the desire to make a salad. I do enjoy eating salad during the winter, I am just not craving it enough to motivate myself to make one. During the summer, I feel completely opposite with cravings of fresh veggies and light salads. 


With winter's cold days I like to eat starchy veggies, warm soups, casseroles  and such. But when spring starts to peek into the afternoon window, I find myself craving yummy, dense salads. This salad satisfied the craving with it's savory cooked celery, shallots and apple slices on top of a fresh bed of crunchy, baby spinach all drizzled with creamy dressing.

Week 4 Day 1

Wow! This push-up challenge is getting....challenging! Last night I barely did it. My arms hurt. My joints ached. It's a great feeling to finish what you started.

I took a few extra days of rest knowing that it was going to get harder. I thought it would help, but I am not sure it did. I will find out tomorrow, with a 1 day rest which is better for my body right now.

I don't want to injure or over work any part of my body where I wouldn't be able to carry on with the challenge. This morning, my shoulder joints were a little crampy. I hope I am not too old for such a challenge. (I know I'm not, plenty of decade older individuals can do pretty much whatever they want with their bodies when it comes to exercise) but I am certainly starting to feel older.

Your body always has a way of reminding you that you aren't 17. Luckily, if we listen to our bodies, and take things slow, we can strengthen them and stretch them how we need to. Aging doesn't mean a thing if you are willing to take care of yourself though diet and exercise on a regular basis. You really are only as old as you allow yourself to be.

Life is ALL about choices!

It certainly is, isn't it?  Should I workout today or wait until tomorrow?  Should I eat this apple or dive into that cookie?  Should I make good choices or bad choices?  Am I going to start today and do what I need to do to feel good or should I wait until tomorrow or Monday?  Life is about choices, always has been, always will be.

I have always been a black and white person, all or nothing.  Mediocracy and the grey area have never been in my nature.  Although in some areas this might be good, I am finding that it doesn't apply to everything.

In efforts to loose the last bit of weight and to create a lifestyle the invites health, I have learned that it can't be taken with an all or nothing attitude.  While an "all" attitude gets your workouts in and has you eating healthy and doing healthy behaviors, a person can burn out and can find themselves in the "nothing" attitude.  This attitude will undo all the good you did when you were doing the "all."  It creates a yo-yo of your life.  I spent well over a decade with this type of outlook.  I gained a lot more then I ever lost with this outlook as well.  All or nothing hasn't worked at all for me in my weight loss journey.

What I have found that has caused success isn't mediocracy either.  I never thought that I was living in the "gray area" either, I have realized that I HAVE been.  I have been doing well with the exercise and for the most part I have been eating well, but I need to do better.  Being in the grey area of things leaves you wanting to do better.  So in pondering recently, the thought of choices has become apparent.  You can be having a challenging day and you just want to do nothing at the end of it.  But here lies a choice.  Do you continue doing nothing being engulfed by the challenge of the day, or do you make a choice to do something else, something that gets you closer to your life's goals?  For instance, at the end of a day where the kids have been challenging, the house is a mess and I just want to do nothing, I have a choice.  Do I just sit on the couch and watch TV or get lost in a book and "relax" or do I do something that has me going to bed one step closer to my desired lifestyle?  I have the choice to workout and know I did something to get me closer to the goal of the lifestyle I want to create.  Nevermind that I didn't eat as well as I would have liked, or that I didn't fold the laundry or get some computer work done, I made the choice and worked out.  In that moment of decision, I decided to make a choice that brought me closer, not farther from my goals.

In life so often we are a victim of circumstance.  We just go through life and blame the things around us for not being or doing the things we want.  "I am too busy to focus on myself."  "If only I had more time." "If I had more money, time, health, space, happiness..." You fill in the blank.  This is easy to do and to get caught up in.  In life, I have learned, that you need to make the decision and then to make the choices that follow that decision.  It's our human nature to also sabotage ourselves.  We get used to a certain thing a certain schedule and we sabotage ourselves out of fear of what we could have. If you want something for yourself, you need to fight for it.  If you don't, you'll probably never achieve it.  In my life, if I want to have the lifestyle in which I dream of, it's not going to be handed to me and it's certainly not going to be easy or I would be living it right now.  I am going to have to fight for it.  I will have to make choices that bring me closer and avoid the ones that bring be farther.  We aren't stagnant in our lives.  We are either moving towards our goal or away from it, and it's always by choice.  If we are in a place we don't want to be, it's because we have chosen to be there through the choices we have made.

With this in mind, I find myself making better chioces.  By knowing that in every choice I am either getting closer or farther from my goal I must remember the decision I have made.  The decision to make choices that will bring me closer to my lifestyle goal.  Since I have made this decision to get closer to my goal, the choices will eventually get easier simply by the practice of doing so.  If I find a choice that is challenging, I will have to fight to achieve my goal.  The achievement of goals in life is not given, or stumbled across by accident, they are fought for.