Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Halfway

I'm two weeks in to my Paleo January.  And I've been meaning to write this post for days, but damn, I've been busy.

Yo, Paleo is not easy.  It's not quick, it's not cheap.  It's time-consuming.  It's a lot of effort.  At least, right now it is.  I'm sure this is the kind of thing that gets easier and cheaper as time goes on, but right now it's not either of those things.

Remember how I said I was so excited to spend all my time in my kitchen?  PFFFFFFTTTTT.

I spend....like....ALL my time in my kitchen.  And I haven't worked out, because I've been so concerned about the other things I need to get done in my kitchen so that I can eat.

I think primarily what's hogging so much of my time is a) making sure I have lunch for the days ahead, and b) prepping for the next night's meal.  With that said, I did pick some pretty ingredient-heavy and semi-complicated recipes for this month.  I need to fall back more on my old stand-bys, like a protein with a vegetable side dish.

Ok well enough of that.  I swear I didn't come on here to complain.  I was actually coming on here to talk about good things.  :)

I have noticed some serious changes since starting Paleo!  Many of these changes, I noticed within the first week.

1.  Within days I felt happier.  Lighter, less stressed, and more easy-going.  I felt very positive.  (This was before I weighed myself and was so jazzed about my weight loss.)  This carried over into other aspects of my life, too -- work didn't seem so bad.  Aaron's car got hit by a Septa bus - former Cristin would be spazzing and worrying - Paleo Cristin is just like "Eh, what are ya gonna do?"

2.  Some physical things I noticed:
a. My skin cleared up.  Remember I said I had broken out real bad?  It cleared up pretty quickly.
b. For my entire life, I have dealt with having chapped lips.  Some times of the year it's worse than others.  But at any given time, I have 3-4 tubes of Vaseline in various locations of my life to keep my lips moisturized.  This is supposedly a sign of dehydration, but that can't be it for me - if it is, I've been dehydrated my entire life.  (Maraea even has them, so maybe there's something genetic to it.)  It has never mattered how much water I've had to drink, my chapped lips have never gone away.  But now, I think they might actually be starting to clear up.  They are still there to some degree, but not badly; and, they just feel different.  I don't know how to describe it.  But something is happening there.
c. One of the symptoms that drove me to my doctor's office two summers ago was that my skin used to become itchy, it seemed, when my stress level rose.  I had read that this was a sign of a thyroid condition.  When I started my thyroid medication, this symptom went away.  In fact, if I forgot to take my thyroid medication, about 12-18 hours after my missed dose, my skin would start to get itchy.  Now: I haven't taken my thyroid medication in about a month now.  My skin still gets itchy sometimes, but not nearly as frequently.  So now, I'm only taking an allergy medication to keep it at bay if I feel it start to flare up.  That hasn't even been as often as every other day.  It's been less often than that.  So there is definite improvement there.

Two weeks in and all of those things?  Two weeks.  This is no coincidence.  And if it's a placebo effect, then it's a darn good one.  At the end of the month, I'm planning on making an appt with my doctor so I can get some more bloodwork done.  I'm not going to tell him I've been off the thyroid meds; I'm just going to ask that my levels get checked.  What if I'm fine?

What if I cured hypothyroidism right out of my body?

If that's the case, then in the last year I will have successfully weaned myself off of three major prescription drugs.

It's kind of amazing to think that food has the potential to heal you.  I read a quote that said something along the lines of "Food can be either the slowest form of poison or the most powerful form of medicine".  Think about that.  If you put nothing but unprocessed, whole, natural foods into your body, how could that be bad?

No comments:

Post a Comment