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Today's Paleo lunch. |
From the beginning of November, pretty much, possibly a bit earlier (October perhaps), my life has been a little crazy. First there was the moving date that we had up in the air, not knowing when our new home would be ready. Then simultaneously I was working to finish up my book. Once that was finished, it was back to the packing yet not knowing exactly when we were moving. Then moving, unpacking, and putting our house together, then doing construction on our rental unit and then trying to rent it out, then preparations for my brother's wedding, and now we're dealing with major damage and leaks in our new apartment, and between all that, my family has been sick three times.
If you can imagine, things have been going a little nuts around here and my stress levels have been increased to the point where I'm constantly snapping at people, and I'm beyond exhausted. Between the crazy times I've had lulls where nothing is going on for a few days, and even then, I'm just really not myself, extremely wiped out, even though there is nothing going on in my life and the only thing keeping me "busy" is watching movies. It doesn't make sense that I'm so exhausted (the last time I felt like this was when I was in my first trimester of pregnancy, and I'm not pregnant), so I've been trying to figure out the cause of this all, because I need to have some sense of normalcy back, and to be fully functioning, and not this zombie like existance that I've been feeling like for the past few months, for my sanity and for the sake of my family. Yes, it started out because things were genuinely hectic, but I've had hectic in my life before and it didn't get to this extreme level, where I feel on the verge of collapse.
I was doing a lot of thinking, and I think I may have figured out it out.
The last time I genuinely felt this awful was 5 years ago when I was pregnant with Anneliese and all I was eating was dairy and gluten- I barely functioned. When I cut dairy and gluten out, I finally was back to myself. I know diet can have an extreme affect on me physically and emotionally as well.
For the past many months, because of all the craziness in my life, I've been trying to find shortcuts to make things easier, and the biggest shortcuts I took were in the kitchen. I've not only completely ditched the Paleo diet that I was doing so well on- nearly every meal was rice based, and I know rice makes me tired- I've also been eating pure junk when I've had a hankering for treats (no, Skittles and chemical filled non dairy ice cream and msg filled flavored Doritos and soda are not acceptable treats, no matter what diet you're on). I'm also not eating enough vegetables, etc... I started this because I was exhausted, but because of that, I kept on being even more exhausted and couldn't seem to be getting out of this rut- it was a bad cycle...
But on Friday I decided to take the bull by the horns and say that no matter how exhausted I am, I need to fix my diet, and make more of an effort to eat in a way that strengthens my body instead of hurting it. (Forget the scale- I have no idea what I weigh now- I know I gained, but that is the least of my concerns. My health is.)