Day 2, KM’s 8-16

Today marks Day 2 of my Whole40 and the second day I will motor home under my own power.

Nothing is really different from 24 hours ago except that I made a decision… a commitment to myself to do something good for myself.  Something I know is successful.  Something that I know is not necessarily a cake walk but something I know I can do.  I am giddy with excitement knowing how amazing I’m going to feel in 40 days and how proud of myself I will be when I’m done!  I know I will feel that I earned that good feeling and there is a sense of euphoria that can only come from choosing to do something outside your own ‘norm’.

Ran/walked home from work yesterday.  7.75KM in 1 hour and 26 SECONDS… dang… My goal in the next three weeks is to take that 26 seconds off.  Not a huge goal I know, but this is a ‘marathon’ not a ‘sprint’ and it’s about DOING it, not doing it faster than anyone ever has.  It’s about doing it, not talking about it.  It’s about just DOING IT!!  So today I will go DO it again and get kilometers 8 through 16 under my belt.

Actions speak louder than words.  I’m off to go action my future now!

 

 

 

The Hummingbird Coin

One day last year in the middle of my struggle for sanity and a firm grip on my life, my dad came down to visit. We took the bus down to Granville Island and while he was talking to a sales clerk, I was digging through a dish of small pewter coins…. On the front each one had a Northwest Coast Native animal symbol and on the back an inspirational word. I found one that said Peace on the back with the depiction of a hummingbird on the front. The sign on the front of the dish said ‘Pocket Spirits’ and while I’m not much for the idea of items being ‘spirits’, I felt compelled to buy it. I thought if I didn’t have any peace of my own, maybe I could at least have this… I carried it around in my wallet for a year… every time I went into my wallet I saw my small bit of peace.

I was pretty far from being peaceful and it would take me an additional six months to actually find peace, but still this little coin I held on to… the only peace I had at the time. It was a small reminder that peace was out there and that it was something that I could have. Something that I wanted. I didn’t know what it felt like but I was sure that when I had it, I would know.

I’ve mentioned how I found my peace in December. The calm peaceful feeling that I now have is one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received. I don’t know if you can identify the feeling of peace if you haven’t had the feeling of being not peaceful. It’s hard to describe… the immense sense of calm that I feel now. I still have my moments of course and I still have bad days, but I’m peaceful overall.

About three weeks ago I found the coin on my desk. I don’t know how it got out of my wallet but when I saw it on my desk I knew I didn’t need it anymore. I’d found my peace and it was stronger and more powerful than the piece of pewter I was holding. I sat, rubbing the coin for a long time… playing with it… contemplating it… and at that moment I knew that I needed to give this very important piece of my healing away. I have a friend that could certainly use some peace and so I said goodbye to my coin and put it back in my wallet so it was with me the next time I saw him.

I’m an incredibly sentimental and romantic type of person.

(Romantic:  defined as marked by the imaginative or emotional appeal of what is heroic, adventurous, remote, mysterious, or idealized).

Most people in my life don’t meet me there… my sentimentality is oft regarded as cheesy or ridiculous. My ability to remember tiny, seemingly insignificant details about people I care about, and my innate ability to understand someone more than they can ever know has been labelled as crazy. I assure you, it’s not crazy and it’s not something I can control. For those that I care a great deal about, it’s a built in operating system (to steal a phrase from a friend) function to care about and recall these small details… things that seem insignificant rarely are. I’ve spent a lot of time in my life hiding it… laughing along when my sentimental side is dissed… pretending that it doesn’t bother me that instead of appreciating who I am at my core, I’m mocked for it. Truth be told, it does bother me… of course it does!  It’s a side of me that is integral to my character and no one feels good to be mocked on about something that is innate to who they are.

I took a chance giving my coin away to my friend. In the ongoing effort I’ve been making to be true to who I am, I knew I was going to say what I wanted to say, regardless of how my sentimentality had been received in the past. I was pretty sure that this time would be different.

I took the coin out of my wallet and held it tightly in my hand. I told the story of how I ended up with this coin and then, pressing it into his hand, said ‘I’ve found my peace. Now maybe you’ll find yours’.

The gift was received in just the way I gave it. That it was just an object at one point but that it had meaning to me and I was passing it along. I was told that it was a true gesture of love and trust. And I wasn’t mocked as being sentimental or cheesy… I was met where I am with an understanding of who I am and why something like this would be important to me. The gesture wasn’t cast off, but accepted and embraced in the pure way it was given.

There are some ‘things’ that we have and hold on to that cease to become things… they assume a life and a power of their own and while to the naked eye this is just a $2 piece of metal, to myself and to my friend, it’s a powerful piece of love and friendship and powerful love and powerful friendship can change our worlds. When we change ourselves, we change the world… and when we find our peace, we find that the world around us has more peace.

My hope for my friend is that every time he reaches into his pocket and his hand grazes this coin, that he feels the power in the care of another. That he knows that if I can find my peace (and Lord knows, it was a hard road!) then he can find his peace and he will forever have a friend to walk down that road with him.  We are only alone on difficult roads if we choose to be… and those in my care… those who gain access to the core of who I am… they will never be alone.

Happy Random Friday!

The other night I was really really upset… I cried until I couldn’t breathe and then when I couldn’t calm myself and I couldn’t take it anymore, I begged God to just let me sleep… Within no more than 60 seconds my tears stopped, I was calm and peaceful.  I wasn’t asleep… sometimes the prayer you say isn’t the prayer that was answered.  I’m glad I wasn’t asleep… I was so peaceful and had such clarity over my situation… I was hearing answers to my struggle… I eventually fell asleep… calm, peaceful… comforted.  That feeling stayed with me and reminded me that I do not have to have these experiences by myself… and that I need only to ask for help.

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I’ve been pretty tired this last little while as I mentioned yesterday.  Case in point… I went to the store yesterday evening to buy some face wash and got to the counter only to find my wallet was missing.  After racing around the city to all the places I’d been that day (including the hospital board room and my office), I went home and found that I actually hadn’t had my wallet with me for 3 days… it was in another bag I’d taken to the gym… As a person who is very detail oriented, not realizing I hadn’t had my wallet for 3 days is a direct result of my sheer exhaustion!

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I wrote myself a letter from FutureMe.org about two months ago and received it yesterday.  It came at a very interesting time because I’d just been thinking how eating W30/Paleo had become a habit and was no longer a struggle.  Part of the letter that I got yesterday was asking from the past if it really sucked and if I was getting any better at it.  I have strayed a couple times in the last month… I ate some rice with a Greek dinner one night and had a Vodka/Soda one night… no big deal… it’s not the drama fest that the ice cream incident was.  Maybe because I know that this is a lifestyle, not a diet and in a lifestyle, one must understand that things come up and you just keep going… I feel so good when I eat clean that it’s second nature.  My FutureMe letter asks if I’ll do another W30… One day I might go and do a proper W30 again to get really clean but for now I think I’ve got a good thing going that keeps me on the straight and narrow 99.9% of the time and allows me to choose that .1% and feel guilt free.

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I’m continually flabbergasted by people I know who tell me you can’t lose weight on the Paleo because there’s too much fat, or that it’s not healthy to not eat corn… and then these same people do idiotic things like the HCG diet (look that sucker up!) or some 30 day juice and fruit only ‘cleanse’.

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This weekend I will finish making the screens for my windows (hopefully my lessons learned with my prototypes work out!), sew another skirt I think, go to the gym, cook for the week, catch up on my rest from this insane week.

Easy Whole 30 Chicken Curry

I like to make a ‘dinner’ item on Sunday night that I can then heat up and eat with freshly roasted or steamed veg for the weekday evenings.  Before I started my W30 endeavor in February, I wasn’t much of a cook.  It was even worse if you went back to this time last year when I would happily eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch or a bagel and cheddar cheese for dinner.  I bought my lunch almost every day, which was stressful and annoying, not to mention incredibly expensive.  Fast forward to now and I personally cook from scratch everything I eat.  I mentioned the other day to a friend that I should stop referring to myself as a bad cook because I’ve actually gotten quite good!

I have a pretty hard and fast rule about cooking and that is that I generally don’t make things that have more than ten ingredients.  Now, those ten don’t include salt and pepper, but usually I don’t even come close to the upper limit of ten, so my cooking is pretty fresh and pretty easy! I also usually only cook things that I know I can make a big batch of for left overs so that cooking during the week is a pretty uneventful ordeal.

To get inspiration for my meals, I usually go online and look at a few recipes of what I want to make and then make up my own version. I find that internet recipes are usually not seasoned the way that I like them, so when I write recipes, I expect people to take the seasonings as a guideline and often I don’t put in measurements.

That said, I’m going to share the delicious Chicken Curry that I made on Sunday. 

10-12 boneless,skinless chicken thighs

1 large can of diced tomatoes (check to ensure W30… dang sugar is in everything!)

1 large onion, diced

2 tbsp diced garlic (or whatever suits your taste)

1-2” of a piece of fresh ginger, grated

2-3 large handfuls of broccoli florets

1 can of coconut milk

Ground yellow curry powder

Ground cumin

Salt and Pepper

 

Cover a large plate with a layer of curry powder, cumin and S&P

Coat both sides of each chicken thigh in spices.

Heat oil of choice in a non-teflon pan (I used coconut… went well with the dish but you can use EVOO) and then panfry thighs on both sides until cooked and juices run clear.

Remove chicken from pan.

Before deglazing, add ginger, garlic and chopped onion and sauté for a few minutes.

Next, add the can of diced tomatoes and the handfuls of broccoli and put the lid on.  The liquid from the tomatoes will deglaze your pan and give your sauce a lovely flavor.

While the broccoli is cooking, empty your can of coconut milk into a bowl and add in additional curry powder (I like my sauce very curry-y so I added 2-3 tbsp)

When the broccoli is cooked to your liking, add the coconut/curry mixture and cook for a few minutes.

I put this into containers in the fridge and when I’m ready for dinner, I roast some extra broccoli and throw some butternut squash into the pan with the heating chicken and sauce and then serve it all over the broccoli with some cubed cold avocado.