Life's sunsets...

Just a quick update today- people have asked about the next blog installment, and I wanted to let you know what is going on and why I haven't posted this week. Our beloved cat, Cosmo, is making her exit from this world right now. She is 15 years old, and has kidney failure and a lung tumor that is restricting her ability to breathe. We have known that she had not a lot of time left for awhile, but in the last few years she has bounced back incredibly from multiple health issues, so we weren't sure if this downturn was the final downturn... now we are sure. She seems to be free of pain, and we are just trying to keep her warm and cozy until she decides to make her exit. I will update the blog next week after she moves on and we have had some time to say goodbye to our beloved little girl who has been with us for so long. Thanks for all of the well wishes some of you have already given me. Death is part of life, and I am trying to honor it and her as best as I know how.

From Functional to Flourishing: Part One- the first steps

Hello Loves! Here we are today, ready to jump into the new series I will be writing, "From Functional to Flourishing". As I said in my last post, I have gotten many requests lately from friends and internet readers who are feeling crappy and don't know where/how to start feeling better. I SO UNDERSTAND HOW YOU FEEL! Two years ago, I was sick, stressed, frustrated and exhausted with no idea how to change my life in order to not be those things! It can be so overwhelming to change anything about your life when you are feeling crappy, and you may defeat yourself by trying too much at once and failing and thinking that you can't get it together so you just don't try. Now I understand that little changes can facilitate big changes, so I encourage everyone to start small- you probably don't have the energy for big! I am going to break this series up into a bunch of posts on different things, but today I am just going to start with 2 easy things for you to incorporate into your life right now- baby steps, right?

(I have to put this out there- I AM NOT A DOCTOR. If you feel unwell, see a doctor. I encourage you to see a Naturopath rather then a conventional doctor, but do not rely on the internet to solve your issues. Everything I say here is only based on my personal experience, and may not work for you.)

I am a firm believer that food can heal you or harm you, so that is the first place I am going to focus on. Many people have asked about cleanses- do I do them, how do I do them, what do I think of them...? In my mind, there are two different ideas floating around about what a "cleanse" is. Some people think it's a juice fast or the Master Cleanse. Others think it is a pure whole foods based plan (like Whole 30 or the 21 Day Sugar Detox). I believe a fast is different then a cleanse. A fast (consuming only juice or liquids for a set amount of time) sets most people up for failure. We need whole food. Period. In my opinion, you only screw with your metabolism when you fast to "cleanse", and if you go right back to eating pizza and beer after you juice cleanse, you really haven't helped yourself at all. A whole foods cleanse where you can set yourself up for a new way of eating/a new mindset about food permanently is going to be much better for your health, because it sets up a healthier lifestyle rather then restricting for a few days and then going right back to where you were. I of course think fresh pressed veggie juice is a part of a healthy diet, but it shouldn't be your whole diet. This brings me to my first baby step to thriving:

DITCH THE PROCESSED FOODS! In my next post I am going to talk about elimination diets and what you can do to feel better via specific foods, but today I just want to start slow with all this... If it comes in a bag or box and it has more then 2 ingredients (I am not talking about dried pasta or beans or flour and things like that) DO NOT EAT IT. No processed salad dressing (oil and vinegar is a winning homemade combo that is super quick and lacks all that extra sugar and chemicals and processed crap that store bought salad dressing has), no cheese puffs, no crackers, etc. Shop around the outside of the grocery store (dairy, fruits and veggies, meat, bulk bins for beans, nuts, etc) and stay away from the inside isles that are full of junk (even at health food stores, organic packaged food is still processed!). You can have easy, lovely meals with beans and spices and veggies thrown into a crock pot in the morning for dinner that evening that taste better then the packaged equivalent and it will be so much better for your body. Just walk away from shelf stable foods. It will take a little bit more time to cook rice and veggies and meat, or crock pot a stew, or chop veggies for a fresh salad then it would to microwave a dinner, but you are going to have to start somewhere and this is it! Invest in a crock pot, it is by far the easiest way to get fresh food when you have no energy to spend a bunch of time in the kitchen- and make extra so you can freeze it and have a ready meal when you need it!

Second baby step to thriving:
Drink a cup of warm water with lemon in it right when you get up in the morning. I drink 16 ounces of warm water with a half a lemon squeezed into it every morning, and this goes a long way to helping you feel well. Even if you are a coffee drinker, I am not telling you (right now at least) to stop drinking coffee- just start with a cup of warm lemon water first. The warm water hydrates and activates your digestion, and the lemon is very cleansing to the liver (and helps your skin glow). After sleeping all night, your body is dehydrated, so putting warm water into it straight away will do you good. I find that it helps my bowels to move properly, and actually gives me energy because it hydrates my body quickly.

So that is it for today: no more processed food, and warm lemon water in the morning. Start there, and please let me know how it goes and how you are feeling! Next week I am going to talk about elimination diets and removing inflammatory foods to foster wellness. Until then, have a fabulous packaged food free weekend!

Wellness series: Radiate

Hello Blog readers! Happy May! The month of April has flown by, and mine was filled with lots of awesome stuff- visits from beloved friends with their new babies (the best kind of visits!), a re-commitment to a way of eating that helps me thrive (back to the Paleo template and feeling great), a new acupuncturist who specializes in and is treating us for Fertility (which has been super interesting and we have seen lots of positive changes already), and a huge new addition to our garden project (even more yummy food growing this year!). In the last week or so, I have gotten 4 requests from friends and blog readers who are trying to start down the path to wellness, and are looking for some "where to start" guidance. It seems more then a coincidence that I have been asked about this repeatedly recently, and I started mulling over the idea of doing a sort of "where to start when you feel like crap" series to highlight what worked for me and give some easy recommendations for starting your journey back to feeling well. I am going to try and focus on basics that will work for everyone- it is so overwhelming when you feel like crap and know you need to eat better/heal your gut/deal with your life/get more energy, etc etc etc- feeling terrible and trying to do so much at once to change is unmanageable and will just make most people throw in the towel right away. It's all about little steps that then add up to big changes. Nothing is going to change overnight, but you can and will get to a place where you think to yourself "hey, I haven't had a headache in a few days... and I didn't even notice" (or something similar, that was just my first experience with starting to feel better). I will break it up into categories, such as food, hormones, sleep/stress, supplements/herbs, and mind/emotional work... something along those lines - this is a fluid process, so I don't have it all totally mapped out now. Food will be the first topic, as that I feel food is the most important part of any healing journey. Food has the capacity to help us to thrive or help us to die, and I firmly support letting food be thy medicine... So my next post will focus on that. Today I just want to suggest something a little "woo woo" (that's the phase we use when I talk about something hippie-dippie around these parts), but something that I used as a tool when I began my healing journey (so bear with me, we are about to get flowery and mystical up in here!). I am a reader and a writer by nature, so words and images are very powerful to me. I love the sounds of certain words, and the colors and images that they invoke. Even just thinking about a word or an image can change your mindset (think mantra or power phrases) and focus your brain. When I started trying to get better, I sat down one day and thought "what do I want? in one word, what do I want to feel?" and I started writing down all these words that were inspiring to me in terms of wellness... such as "heal", "thrive", "nourish", etc. I picked my favorite of those words, and wrote it in colored markers on a piece of paper in my journal (you could just do this on a piece of paper too) and doodled pretty things around it, and it became my mantra- when I felt like shit or felt like eating something that I knew would make me feel sick or when I felt like I couldn't get a handle on my emotions, I envisioned my word. It helped center me, helped to remind me why I was trying to motivate to cook dinner instead of grabbing packaged food. I know you are probably all smiling a little smile and thinking "Oh Steph, you're so cute you are such a hippie", and while that is true, it really did change something for me. And it might work for you. It is really easy to get overwhelmed by the bad stuff when you are feeling unwell ("I always feel crappy and I won't ever feel better so I am just going to resign myself to feeling like this because cancer is unavoidable and the world is horrible" etc etc etc)- it is good to have a little mental gong of sorts, to bang on and remind yourself that you can get better and you will get better. If that sounds crazy to you, no worries, I get it, but it worked for me and I still use my word frequently to motivate me to keep moving towards thriving.

So we begin the wellness series with a word. I will share mine with you, feel free to use it or to come up with your own. When I asked myself what I wanted, when I was feeling completely sick and bogged down and in a big mud puddle of unwell, I decided I wanted to radiate. Bright beautiful light, radiating on everything and making everything warm and sunny and nourished. So I leave you with that today, go out into the world and RADIATE! Even if all you can muster up today is a smile at a stranger, or a compliment to a friend who is exhausted too, do it and radiate and feel a little glimmer of a glow. And feel free to chuckle at my hippie dippie-ness while you think it :)