Reflection

I've been really disappointed with myself for falling away from Paleo.  I'm coming up on my 1 year anniversary of going Paleo and I'm not where I had envisioned myself to be.  I went about 8 months as Paleo and have since been struggling with the last 2 being a complete failure.  I can certainly feel the change in my body since I've not been eating Paleo.  I've gained back some weight and that feels really bad.  I gave all my old clothes away and am consequently living in the same pair of pants day in and day out.  I refuse to go buy new clothes.  I simply must make a change and overcome this trial.  The holidays are over for the most part and I will be turning my focus to preparing my meals in advance (BE PREPARED!) and concentrating on taking care of myself.

I think, looking back over this past year, I can begin to piece together my downfall.  I started Paleo January 3rd and by May I had quite losing weight despite having plenty still to lose.  This was very disappointing to me.  I was eating next to nothing and spending quite a bit of time thinking about my dietary preparations and yet getting nowhere.  I continued on through June and by mid July I was still at a standstill.  This is when I decided to add in exercise.  Naturally I went overboard and hurt myself.  I continued on into August with exercising until I could no longer push forward.  This was a tough blow because I had pinned my hopes of kick starting weight loss with exercise.  I forged on through September and mid October and managed to maintain my weight but not lose any.  I went on a mini vacation in mid October and started off trying to be Paleo but ended it off the wagon and it's been a struggle since then.  I started picking up extra shifts at work while still going to my parent's place to help them.  Some of my hours at work were night shifts and during all this I quit preparing meals in advance.  I basically quit cooking too.  I just feel tired and don't feel like spending time in the kitchen after putting in extra hours.  I lost motivation.  I just quit.  It's really quite hard to realize this and put it down in writing but it's the truth.

So, let me make a list for this new year so that I can reclaim myself, my health.

1. Start cooking again! (A good place to start is with the Paleo Plan meal calendars.  I still have my printouts from when I started that a year ago.  Do this and don't think about coming up with recipes.  It's like auto pilot.  All I have to do is cook what they tell me and eat it.)
2. Be true to Paleo!  (No sneaking non paleo food items.  Cold turkey like I did a year ago.)
3. Slowly introduce exercise! (Start with going to the pool on my days off.  Eventually start a C25K.)
4. Only talk about my "crazy diet" here! (This may seem a little odd but I hate the scrutiny and stupid ass questions I get from people that I really don't give a shit about.  These are the people who I know aren't asking me because they want to make a change in their life.  These are the assholes who every time they see me eating something, come up and stick their nose in my plate and then proceed to ask me if "bagels are paleo, you mean no spaghetti, how about whole wheat bread, french fries...that's a potato they're a vegetable".  They just keep rattling off grain based foods the whole time they quiz me.  Why?  I really don't know other than they are jerks.  So, I really only care to talk about this with like minded people and maybe my close family and friends (Some of whom I am going to have to gently inform that I don't like being made a spectacle of in front of non paleo people when we all sit down to eat.  Please do not worry about what I'm going to eat, I'll figure it out and no one will probably even notice that I'm not eating grains, legumes, or dairy.)
5. Blog more and update Facebook!  I think being more active within the online Paleo community will help.  Forging ahead on my own is sometimes lonely and I have only myself to rely on.  So if I don't plan ahead then the whole show grinds to a halt.  I'll still only have myself to rely on but at least I'll have people to talk to about it.

That's all I can think of for now.  It's probably a pretty good place to start.  I think I may have run off on a little tangent in #4 but it felt kinda good.  Here's to a great 2012 and thank you 2011 for being the year I started my new life even if I did have a little trouble solidifying it.

A Fresh Start

Below is the second running post I posted on my now defunct running blog.  I'm incorporating these old post into my paleo blog so I have everything health related in one spot.  I figured it was as good a time as any to import these since I'm not really doing any cooking or following a paleo lifestyle or running.  Why you may be wondering?  Well, I'm gearing up for a fresh start.  I'm going to be focusing on diet again and my hip/back injury is really close to being rehabbed that I plan on starting a C25K program soon.


Originally posted August 28th, 2011
Okay, so I've made it to the point where I can go around the block without much soreness to the muscles in my lower legs.  But now I've got other problems.  Namely some blisters.  They aren't bad but there's some blistering going on and it's mainly on my left foot.  After visiting the forum at Invisible Shoe I've learned that this is more than likely caused by pushing and pulling with my foot and probably due to over striding with that leg.  It just so happens that the little injury I inflicted on myself from my rowing and shod running extravaganza is on my left side.  I'm also having some lingering hip flexor soreness from that injury as well.  So clearly I need to continue to rehab and take it easy while I'm out there as well as continuing to work on my form.


I've been trying to convince my sister to join me in huarache running but she thinks I'm borderline nuts although I think she would like to try it.  I was talking about form and how after a particular evening's run I hadn't done so well with form due to knocking some little blisters on my foot.  I picked my foot up to show her and she snapped the following pictures.

Perhaps I'm use to them but I really didn't think they were all that bad.  However everyone on Facebook thought they were gross and that it looked painful.  Well, it might have looked painful but it's not.  The dark areas aren't really blisters  more like a callus with blood.  I'm not sure what they are but they aren't a thin layer of skin with liquid underneath. It's blood but it's dispersed through the skin layer and it seems a couple of layers deep.   Now on my left foot you can see a rather larger blister under the area between my big toe and second toe.  After this I learned to shorten my stride and I haven't put that big of a blister on since.  As a matter of fact, I haven't really put on any blisters since concentrating on the length of my stride.  Now, I need to figure out what I am doing wrong that is causing the blood spots.  I suspect I may be landing to hard on my foot which I'll stew over in another post.

New Addition

So my little blog is going to be getting a new addition. Earlier this year I started a blog to yak about my new adventures with running. I decided to streamline and import those posts over to this blog so that I would have everything in one place and perhaps make it easier to blog. So, over the next few weeks you may see some of those posts showing up here as I work them in. I decided to combine them because becoming Paleo has led me to trying to exercise. I say "trying" because I seem to always manage to mess it up and injure myself and then I'm on the sideline.

Imported blog post from August 28, 2011
Let me put this out there right now so that there are no misconceptions...I'm a piss poor blogger. But sometimes I like to be able to put down in writing what I'm feeling so I turn to my blog page. None of my friends are in to running or attempting to run (since that's my current state). So I'm going to ramble about here until I get bored of writing about it.

Let's get on with it shall we? I'm in the process of trying to turn my life/health around. I've changed my diet (permanently) to Paleo and now I'm trying to incorporate activity. About three months into my dietary change I began having dreams about running. It wasn't the dreams where you're in slow motion or you can't get to your destination or something is after you. These were dreams of running for enjoyment. I was happy in these dreams and running because it was something I loved. So this of course set me off on the idea that I was suppose to be, by some intrinsic nature, a runner. I was sure it meant something, it must be a sign. It's my dream and we should follow those, right? Well, I didn't. I went for a couple more months before I decided to do something about these dreams. The time came when I decided that I had better act on my subconscious. I didn't really know where to start so I downloads a C25K app for my iPhone and started my journey.


Almost as quickly as I started I managed to derail myself. I decided that it wasn't enough to start a running program after years of sedentary behavior. I also hopped on my Concept 2 row machine and proceeded to over do it thus wrecking my lower back, which I have done in the same manner previously. So I gave up the row machine and decided to keep running since I could do that with nothing more than a little tightness in my lower back afterwards. I kept pushing through each week until I got to the end of week 4 when my body told me if I wasn't smart enough to stop; it was going to make me. I puttered back home and laid up for about 3 weeks while my back and hip re-cooped. During this time I read about running and tried to figure out the physiology of the human body. In the process I came across information about barefoot/minimalist running which I had heard about but since I was a couch potato I just chalked it up to a bunch of nutters. But this time I was on a mission to become the runner I had been seeing in my dreams and so my curiosity was peaked and I hunted around on the internet for blogs and websites. It seemed that the Tarahumara were always sited as the inspiration for barefoot runners and I found a video on them which it turns out I had already seen when watching NatGeo about a year ago.

So I started thinking about buying some minimalist footwear. Problem is, I'm poor and I didn't really want to invest a lot of money into something that might be my next fad. So, I gave up on the idea but it didn't really give up on me. I would find myself looking at barefoot bloggers and wishing this was something I could try. I even started trying to go barefoot more often but I'm such a tenderfoot that I knew I would be able to start running that way. Eventually I came across Steven Sashen's website Invible Shoe. So I began trolling around there and reading the message boards and his blog and watching the videos he has posted until finally I decided to buy a do-it-myself kit. I got the Classic DIY kit and the 6mm Contact kit. I put together my Contact kit and started my new journey of trying to become a minimalist runner. Heck, I was just going to try to become a runner who just happens to wear next to nothing on her feet. Here is a pic of my totally unpedicured, polish chipping off the toenails, flip flop tan-lined feet.

I went for a little spin half way around the block after I put these together and was so excited. That little 6mm sole did wonders for making me comfortable while running on the sidewalk but it made me FEEL the sidewalk. It's sort of hard to explain the feeling of running in these huaraches. They are snugly attached to your feet yet your feet are not bound in a pair of shoes. The sole is minimal and you feel the ridges and debris on the sidewalk yet it doesn't hurt when you land on a pebble.


After running up and down the block a couple of times I could certainly feel some soreness in the muscles of my lower leg. I had read about how you should change from a heel stike (cause by modern foot ware) to a forefoot strike so I expected some muscle soreness. So I'll be taking short spins around the block until I no longer have this soreness in my lower leg. I'm certainly looking forward to increasing distance and working on my form (forefoot strike, shorter stride, softer landing). It's a lot to think about and the feedback is constant. I must look like someone who is completely in the zone while I'm out there because believe me when I say it takes every bit of my pea-sized brain put one foot in front of the other, correctly.