Wednesday, September 15, 2010

[Detox Blog] Day 13 of 90

[11:15am]

Feeling Inspired

I'm beginning to feel really good. Between the nothing-but-raw foods, green drinks, detox pills, IROs, and tons of exercise, I'm feeling my energy level rise, rise, rise. It's an excellent feeling. I'm also feeling pretty inspired, hence the two recent recipes; Sweet & Spicy Dip and the Chocomon Cookie.

I recently learned from a video I stumbled upon how to make my own nut milk. (Soak nuts for many hours or overnight. Stick in blender with 1 part nuts, 4 parts water, then strain through cloth.) And I'm feeling so inspired by everything that I'm thinking I'm going to experiment and discover another new favorite today. Hopefully. Not all of my creations turn out to be something blog-worthy or photograph-worthy. We'll see...

New Exercise Plan

I've come up with a new exercise system that will help alleviate a bunch of issues at once. The issues that this new plan counters:

Cravings vs. Hunger
I have difficulty telling the difference between a craving and hunger. Hunger is when you're weak and tired. Cravings are when you desire chemical reactions in your gut or brain to make you feel good, relieve stress, or when parasites in your gut are sending you messages through your spine that make you want to eat unhealthy foods. Sometimes I think I'm hungry because I feel weak, but actually I just need exercise. Staying stationary for long periods of time will make you feel weak and tired.

Cravings
I crave the sweetest fruits. This could be because I'm detoxing. My research indicates that detoxing will cause severe cravings, which is appearing to be true for both my husband and I. I particularly desire potato chips, but since I'm obviously not going to be eating those, I tend to turn to wanting to stuff apples and almond butter into my mouth all day.

Overeating
I have a tendency to want to simply keep eating once I start. I can go a long time without eating and have it not bother me in the slightest bit, but then after one bite I want to eat, eat, eat, eat, eat until the cows come home and then some.

Lack of Motivation
I set myself to exercise plans all the time, but tend to only somewhat stick to them and then at some point I burn out and then I don't get much exercise for a while and lose much of the progress made.

Guilt
I often give in to my cravings and then sit there feeling guilty about it. This is unhealthy for a number of reasons, which I'm sure you can figure out for yourself.

My new plan addresses all of the above in a way that I find quite pleasing. This won't work for everyone, but it seems to be working for me.

For each non-vegetable I'm assigning a number of crunches I have to do first. These crunches are done in reps of twenty, so the assigned number to each item is either 20, 40, 60, 80, 100, 120 or whatever. The point is to push myself, and I don't forget that once I get started, so if I have a lot of energy, but the item only requires 20 crunches, then I'll do the hardest crunches I can come up with.

Crunches have many variations, and I rotate between all of these variations because it's more fun and more effective. I have a short article about that here.

I'm assigning the highest numbers to the "big bads" such as dried fruit and very sweet fruits. If my abs burn too much to do crunches any more, then I may exchange them in equal number for leg lifts, or divide the number of crunches by five to get push-ups.

Here are the numbers I've assigned mentally thus far:














ItemCrunches
Half of an apple100
A kiwi40
A banana60
An orange20
A fruit ball120
A raw bar80
An avocado20
A spoonful of Almond butter40
A quarter package of seed chips40
A handful of pistachios40
Half a mango80


So far it's really helping a lot. No more guilt because I know I earned what I ate. It matters less if I was only hungry because I needed exercise because then I still get the exercise. My cravings are reduces after getting the exercise and makes me more satisfied with the amount that I eat. And I stay motivated to do it because I'm being rewarded (by myself) afterwords.

2 comments:

  1. thanks for your comment. i had mono as a kid and then it came back as an adult as epstein barr. worst thing is that the doctor's don't necessarily believe in it.

    good luck with your cleanse and i hope it helps you. i put you on the blogroll.

    xoxo bitt

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yeah, doctors were really like "WHAT? How can you have mono again... We need to do more testing....." And I was like, "Mom, why do they need to do more testing? If they can't help, can I just go back to sleep now?" >.<

    Thanks.

    XOXOXO!

    ~Raederle

    ReplyDelete

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