It is the 10th Anniversary of my cane purchase … the cane I no longer have any use for.
This anniversary marks a lot of grief, especially at the losses of parenting through those years. There were many times I wanted to drive my kids someplace but could not. I wanted to attend functions with them, but I was in too much pain. I wanted to play and have fun with them, but I was so fatigued there was no left-over energy to do so. I was unable to cook for them the way I wanted to or manage the house in the way I wanted to. I was on medications for constant pain, to help me sleep at night, and to keep me alert during the day. However, nothing had stopped my slow decline.
My kids are grown up and I have been blessed with beautiful grandkids. While I started my healing journey during this time period, these past ten years are still filled with losses. I wanted to cradle the babies to sleep, but was unable to hold them that long. I wanted to chatter with them, but I was so tired I could not figure out what they were saying… I wanted to play games with them, but pain or exhaustion prevented that. There were so many times I wanted to help my daughter out and take the kids for a day, but was unable. I was also unable to fly out when my son and daughter-in-law went through the traumatic birth of their first child.
As I look back on those years, I grieve deeply at how, as a family, we lost a lot!!
And yet through all these musings and this grief, and am SO THANKFUL….
I have come SUCH a long, long way. I can shower on my own, that is pretty cool! I can drive (albeit cautiously), I can go to a few places now without a huge set back. This summer, I even had the 4 local grandkids down to my camp and looked after them at the lake ALONE!! And they all lived to tell about it!!! My pain is negligible and my fatigue is now manageable. I can enjoy time with my grandkids and keep up with them (sorta!!).
Today, I am, living high on life… that is… 3rd floor of a Condo high. This condo has no elevator, I run my dog up and down those stairs a couple of times so he can fertilize the lawn here.
I am looking forward to the next 10 years… 10 years to play with my grandkids, 10 years to communicate with my own kids, 10 more years to make Rob roll his eyes at me.
And I smile…
Cause I know the next 10 years are going to be SOO good.
If we haven't paid attention to our diets in years, making all the necessary changes for optimal health can be daunting. It’s a lot of work to shop for different foods, to find new recipes and to revamp your whole diet at once.
When people have a chronic health condition, especially one that involves pain, it is ALWAYS something that can be improved through diet. I found a lot of success in simply changing one thing at a time. Through my research on inflammation, I discovered that a lot of the pain from fibromyalgia and arthritis could be reduced through diet changes. That is all well and good, but I was WAY too tired to figure out a whole new meal plan and a whole new way of shopping.
That wasn’t the only hurdle. It took time to adjust to new flavours and new foods. Not only did I have to adjust, so did my husband and three kids.
Here are five strategies I successfully used to revamp our family diet.
1) Only remove ONE item at a time. Just one. That is it!! It doesn’t matter if you choose coffee, sugar, gluten or dairy… ALL of these are often problematic for inflammation or pain. So pick just one… because it is very hard to go gluten free and dairy free if you are having coffee jitters or sugar cravings at the same time! The chance that you will stay the course increases with just one food as well.
2) Remove that food for at least 21 days before selecting a second one. Your brain needs 21 days to form a new habit. If you are not ready to remove another food after 21 days, give yourself another cycle of practice with the previous one. It takes 3 cycles of 21 days to make those habits stick. If you are anything like I was, you have a lifetime of bad food habits. You do not need to make all the changes in one season. (That’s just dumb! 🤪)
3) Before removing a food, take the time to find options!! If you are going to drink green or herbal tea instead of coffee, add that tea into your diet BEFORE you make the full switch. If you are going gluten free, purchase gluten free options and find a bunch that you LOVE prior to making that switch. That way, you are not eating new foods and removing a food all in the same day.
4) Let your family know in advance and enlist their support. Changes go much easier if you have people around you that are on board to encourage and support you.
5) Talk to a friend who has gone down this journey. They will be your best helper!! They will have jumped the same hurdles, had the same struggles and they can listen and guide you when things get rough.
Above all, be KIND to yourself. If you fall off the wagon, simply start over the next day. Remember your goal and think of this as a mis-step rather than some catastrophic failure. It’s a journey and you will reach your goal one step at a time.
If you are truly interested in changing your life, and in taking many small achievable steps to improve pain and fatigue levels and small steps to lessen sensitivities to food and airborne items, please join my health minded community.
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Follow the light/Vitamin D
Part one-Musings from watching my dog.
As a society, we have almost completely moved indoors. We eat and sleep indoors. We transport ourselves indoors. We work indoors. Much of our play is indoors and we even exercise indoors.
This wasn’t always how it was!! Centuries ago, the main thing humans did indoors was sleep. Most cultures have a history of cooking outside. They hunted outdoors, foraged for food outdoors and played outdoors. In colder climates this changed for a season, but only for that season, and still, much more activity was all done outside.
We have replaced that with living behind brick and glass walls. Even when the temperature is perfect or even hot and sunny, we are inside all day in buildings that are now cooled off to the “perfect temperature”.
And all this indoor living interferes with our Vitamin D production. We need sunlight directly on our skin for so many bodily functions! (More on that in Part 2)
I was pondering this one day, when I noticed my dog, sitting in the ONE PATCH of sunshine in the house. It was early spring, and the sun was just becoming brighter and coming through different parts of the windows as it snaked its way around buildings and trees outside. And he was constantly finding that teeny tiny patch of sun to sit in.
When I would open the back door of my house, he would go outside and sit in the sun until he was cold, then come in and warm up. Umpteen times a day, I was letting him in and out of the house to seek the afternoon sunshine. Unless it was too cold, then he would find the one square foot of sunshine left in the house and sit there.
I thought about how so many of us in Canada are so Vitamin D deficient that, in Alberta at least, the government will only pay for testing of Vitamin D under specific circumstances. They simply acknowledge that we are all D deficient and need a supplement. Sunlight, however, is nature's source of Vitamin D. We should be more like my dog and seek the sunshine whenever we can.
And then the text popped into my head: “I am the light of the world”.
It was so easy to make these connections: When we do not get enough sunshine, we are alive, but we are just not full of energy. And when we do not sit in the glory of our Father’s light, we are still breathing and functioning, but we lack something. We lack the light of His energy. We lack power and we lack the Spirited life that we can only get through the light of our Father.
I love connecting thoughts like this, because when I see my dog seeking light, it reminds me first of all to seek sunshine, for my own health, because God uses sunlight for specific biological functions in my body. But then, watching my dog seek sunshine also reminds me to seek Gods word, God’s light and truth. Even better yet, I choose to often do my seeking of God’s truth and light in his sunshine.
If you are interested in learning more about light or Light, check out my free health minded community!
Stay tuned for more blog posts on sunlight and Vitamin D.
Do you have a Jones’s friend?
You know that saying, about how “we are just keeping up with the Joneses”? Yeah… we often use that in conversation in talking about keeping up with others in terms of “stuff” or wealth.
Well, that is not exactly what I am talking about. My "Jones" friend and I, we keep up with each other in a much more important way.
But I digress….
What makes her a “Jones’s friend”? Well, it is this…. Every time that one of us, steps out ahead of the other, in personal or emotional growth, in a business adventure, in a course that will benefit us, or even in another mild education “side thing”… we reach out to each other, and encourage the other gal to jump on as well.
And here is the thing… Sue and I are VASTLY different people…. She is organized, I am creative. (Read between the lines!) I am a drama show much of the time, and Sue is demure and more quiet. I laugh LOUDLY at the slightest bit of fun. Sue, however, has this amazing quiet dry sense of humour, that is often offered with an almost flat affect except for a slight turn of the corners of her mouth and a sparkle in her eye. So although we do so much together… we are VERY different in our abilities, as well as, our likes and dislikes. We each tend to have the bit of personality that the other does not and we fill in each other’s gaps. When we are together, I create the fun and Sue makes sure that I still have all my belongings together when we leave…..EV UH RY TIME.
But the MOST SPECIAL part of our relationship, the part that I cherish the most, is not the quiet times of contemplation, or the fact that she keeps our trips organized, or the fun that we have together…. It is that she is my JONES FRIEND.
When I lag behind, she sets me straight. Then she proceeds to tell me with organized clarity what she is doing. When she finds something beneficial to her life, something that helps her emotionally, or personally, or with her business, I get a text, message, phone or video call, while she tells me, (again with organized clarity) what it is all about, and there is always that expectation that I will jump on that band wagon to improve my life. And I usually do. And I do the same for her.
I laugh and tell her… we are like two teen girls that have to go to the bathroom together.
And Sue’s opinion of this… offered in her usually bland flat voice, filled with meaning…
“Yeah, it seems to be effective”. 😂
