Update & Revision

Good morning! I slept in this morning, just got up and am on my exercise bike now 🙂 Yesterday I stepped things up and added stretching in to my routine, important but ouchy and not fun. However, I felt great later in the day. I’ve never actually been one to start my day with exercise or stretching, even though I know doing both in the mornings is the most beneficial. I’m not certain how it will go once my neck heals and I’m back to working both of my jobs, but I’m hoping if I can get the habit entrenched enough now it will be easier to stick to later.

I also continued my research on anti-inflammatory and fibromyalgia friendly diets and realized I made a mistake the other day….zucchini is not a nightshade food, eggplant is. Not sure how I confused the two! But this makes me very happy as I love zucchini and almost never eat eggplant. I did have a dream that my guy made me breakfast, an egg scramble, and I was suuuuper torn about whether to just shut up and eat it or stick to my guns, apologize, and not it eat. Good news is my guy knows I’m cutting everything out right now and I don’t think that will actually happen lol.

Anyway, as I may have implied, I did exercise first thing yesterday and am doing so today as well! I hope tracking my progress with my new exercise and diet endeavors will help me to stay on track. I’ve done a good journal at least a couple of times in the past but that feels like such a big commitment, whereas this seems more manageable for me and still builds in accountability. Here’s hoping for a great weekend!

Update & New Restrictions

Okay, today is day three. Once again I started my day by getting up and doing 15 minutes on my recumbent exercise bike, which felt great. I’ll admit though, last night I fell asleep unexpectedly at 8:30pm! I’m guessing my new exercise routine combined with a big Costco trip to stock up on healthy foods (read: lots of lifting and carrying big, heavy things!) and some cleaning wore me out more than I realized. But when my alarm went off at 7:30am this morning I felt wide awake and ready to start my day! Super unusual as I am not at all a morning person and never use caffeine. Felt great!

This morning I had to drive to see my pain care specialist for trigger point injections. I’ve done this in the past to help manage my fibromyalgia pain and muscle spasms so I knew what to expect, but this time the target was focusing on my neck injury from the car accident back in June. I’m not sure if I’d just forgotten how extremely painful TPIs are or if it really was worse because we were treating something different this time, but it was pretty rough. I did get the usual near-instant intense relief, so much so that I got dizzy and light headed for a few minutes. However, by the time I drove home I was starting to hurt and my pain level has continued to rise all day. Again I knew to expect this and hope to feel great when I wake up in the morning, but getting through this evening is rough.

The other good news is I’m sticking to my diet 100% so far! However, I was reading online about potential trigger foods and realized there are some foods I love and have been eating that are in the nightshade family with potatoes and if I truly want to do everything I can to reduce inflammation and pain, I need to also cut out:

• Tomatoes
• Zucchini
• Bell pepper

Sad! I’m really hoping to be able to add some of the foods I’m cutting out this month back in to my diet in the future, but I’m pretty sure I react poorly to potatoes, so although I also love these three foods it’s worth it to me, at least for now, to try cutting them out and see how I feel.

Here’s hoping tomorrow is a better day!

Fresh Start

Yesterday I made a decision – I’m going vegan. I’ve gained a lot of weight over the past year and after being rear-ended in June I’ve been dealing with a significant neck injury. I’ve been feeling so out of control, fat, ugly and just horrible about myself. So, starting yesterday, I’m taking back control. I’m still super limited in what I can do physically because my neck is still healing but I own a recumbent exercise bike and yesterday and today, as soon as I got up I started my day with 15 minutes on it. I know from experience I have to go slow and I’m going to do this right this time.

So, two days in a row I’ve actually exercised which is SO exciting even if it is only a little. The diet is a bit more complicated as I need to respect my fibromyalgia, mixed connective tissue disease and sensitivity to sulfides. I’ve done some research and in addition to going vegan, I’m also cutting out:

• wheat
• potatoes
• berries
• any drinks other than water & alcohol

I know from previous experience that I felt much better when I cut out meat, limited dairy and avoided trigger foods like berries & grapes for about two years, so this time I’m taking it a step further and totally cutting out dairy. For years I’ve avoided tuna because of the whole mercury and heavy metals thing and I object to farm raised seafood but I do occasionally eat wild caught salmon, crab, halibut etc. For this round I haven’t made up my mind about whether or not I’m willing to include wild-caught seafood so for now that’s TBD.

Well, that’s the update for now! Here’s hoping these changes help me feel better and lose some weight over the next month or so 🙂