Day 4 and Sonic happy hour is calling my name

I'm hitting a wall here. Thud. Not liking this detox one bit and am already imagining myself going back to my old ways. Horrible I know but I am so addicted to my sonic fountain coke and get giddy when I go during happy hour and get one for 81 cents. But I'm doing good and drinking my water. Lots of water all the while wishing it was my beloved coke. sigh.

As far as nausea, this morning was the first time I woke up without it. Yeah! I ended up making a green smoothie for breakfast: kefir, spinach, banana, goji berries, and chia seeds. It was yummy but didn't keep me as full as long as I had hoped. Lunch was a high fiber wrap made with turkey, spinach, and red pepper. I ended up eating Mariposa's leftover wrap for a midafternoon snack. I have been hungry and not sure why? For dinner I am making a big salad topped with tuna, peppers, tomatoes. Hopefully it will tide me over till tomorrow.

Today was a super busy day. It took me 1 1/2 hours to clean all my floors in the house. I felt like I had done a workout when I finished! Then I got Mariposa registered for soccer for the fall. I stopped by at Barnes and Nobles to return a book (found it cheaper online) and instead got The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. It is a self improvement/spiritual book based on the teachings of 4 tenets: as written in the book: Be impeccable with your word (be true to what you say), Don't take anything personally (that is a hard one for me), Don't make assumptions (working on that one) and finally Always do your best. It came recommended to me so I'm hoping it will inspire change within me.

*Artist* is becoming quite the cook and what good time indeed. It's hard for me to eat what the rest of the family eats and she has really learned her way around the kitchen (great for me!). So right now she is making beef stroganoff for the family to eat with dinner along with corn. I'll be eating my salad with them wishing I was diving into a plate of yummy, warm comforting stroganoff. Can you tell I am really hitting a wall here? It's almost like I am mourning the loss of being able to eat whatever and drink whatever and be happy. I'm hoping tomorrow I will wake up feeling better and not feeling like the cravings are getting the best of me.

Tonight should be fun. Our dear friend works at a theatre and has offered us free tickets to see G-Force with the kids. I'm excited to get out with them and just enjoy some time even if its watching a kid movie. Last night *artist* and I went to see Julie and Julia. OMG you have to see this movie!! It was so so good. I loved every bit of it. Be warned it is long and your butt will be numb when you stand up after watching it for 2hours but its so worth the butt numbness. I swear. Watching it was like reliving my childhood. My mom always cooked gourmet and as a child I wished she cooked like everyone else's mom aka pork and beans, meatloaf, but NO my mom would get live lobster drunk in beer then cook them up for a gourmet dinner. What little did I know just how nice that way of eating was. Now I know how good it was and watching the movie just took me back to those days and all those memories. Such a good movie for sure! While we are on movies another good "date" movie is The Ugly Truth. Holy crap was that ever funny. The whole theater just chuckled through that one. Its all about the girl side v/ guy side of looking at things and let me tell you both you and your mate will love this one. So funny and such a good date movie.

Battery is now drained from laptop. Time for it to get charged and time for me to find something to keep my mind off of coca cola and home comfort food.

God is speaking

I just found this verse out of the Book Of James in the Bible and how apprapo it is: James 1:2 "My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials".

Whoah. This is exactly what I needed to read today. Just yesterday I was thinking about how bad things happen to good people and why they do and how to handle it when it does. Here is my answer. God wants us to find joy in all that we do and all that happens. I also think its through our trials that we learn and grow immensely and become stronger from them. We gain wisdom, insight, and empathy through our trials. I guess what I am learning is to not focus so much on the trial but the reward at the end. To be joyful knowing that we will be better and stronger for it. To trust that our Lord will not give us more than we can handle and that through Him all things are possible.

Day 3: healthy goodies

I went to the store and bought some health food goodies. On my prior detox I really did not delve much into these foods but rather stuck to what I knew ie: veggies, whole grains in limited quantities, and lots of water. This time around after a lot of reading and researching I am learning just how important not only supplements are but food as well. Food can act as your pharmacy, healing all that aids you. So, this is now my pharmacy along with a handful of supplements I am currently taking.

Agave Nectar: it is a natural sweetener derived from a plant. It does not affect your blood sugar the way table sugar does. A little goes a long way and is great to use to sweeten tea, oatmeal, anywhere you would need a dose of sweetness.

Sushi Nori: I have never tried this stuff and am waiting to get some courage up to try. It is loaded with live enzymes, minerals, and is all around good for you. I'll let you know when my courage sets in to try that! But from all that I have read its really supposed to be good for you.

Quinoa: Another food I have not yet tried. It is packed full of amino acids making it a complete protein. Many vegetarians eat this to get their protein in. I am not a veg. but I like the way protein makes me feel fuller longer. I hope to try this goodness in a few days.

Goji berries: Yummy! I tried them for the first time and they are so good. The texture is like a raisin. You eat them right out of the bag or you can sprinkle them on oatmeal or blend up in a smoothie. They are chockful of antioxidants and are known for their healing properties. They enhance you immune system helping it to function better. A very small handful is all you need with this little powerhouse of sweet goodness.

Chia seeds: Ok these were scary at first. And just so you know yes these are the same things that you see late at night on the infomercials selling chia pets. I have to admit after eating these I have envisioned a chia pet growing in my tummy! ha! Let me tell you these are soo yummy. These too are a complete protein, gluten free, high in fiber, and high in minerals. A little goes a long way with these as well. When I first made a bowl of these I was surprised to see how little was in that bowl. You use 2 tablespoons of chia with 4 tablespoons of liquid ( i used unsweetened vanilla almond milk) and let it sit (gel) for 4 minutes. I looked at it and thought how in the world is that little amount going to fill me up. Well let me tell you it does and keeps you full until lunch. This is coming from a girl who can eat 1 1/2 cups cereal and still be hungry 2 hours later.

Green tea: I usually do not drink this as I find it bitter. However I have read about adding a bit of agave nectar and vanilla almond milk to take the bitter out. I'm planning on drinking this tonight. This tea is full of antioxidants as well as anti cancer properties. My goal is to have a cup a day of this protective, healing tea.

Lemon water: I should be drinking this upon rising but I'm finding myself still a bit nauseated. I just can't stomach the thought of drinking lemon water early in the morning right now. I'm hoping in a couple of weeks I will be able to do this.

As far as detox symptoms I have been tired. Luckily its summer and the kids are sleeping in late as am I. This is helping immensely being able to sleep longer as sleep is so healing to our bodies. I'm not sure what I will do when school starts back up in a couple of weeks. I'm hoping by then to be detoxed and feeling energized so I won't need as much sleep.

As for eating today:
breakfast was chia seeds with goji berries sprinkled on top. decaf coffee with stevia and a splash of cream.
Lunch will most likely be a salad topped with tomatoes, peppers, tuna, and my mom's dressing.
Dinner not sure yet. But it will be something along the lines of fitting into my new diet.
I have been reading about how important it is to eat something every 3hours but I just have not been hungry. If you eat every 3 hours it actually will stimulate your metabolism so you burn more calories. At this point I just can't justify eating between meals when I am not hungry.

I'm off to head to Barnes & Nobles with the kids. Hubbie left work early today as he is just exhausted from all the work he has been doing. I'm hoping to give him a couple of hours of a quiet house while the kids and I browse through the bookstore. I have a book on hold I am planning on picking up: The Four Agreements. It came highly recommended to me so that will be new book to read and hopefully inspire me on my new journey to healing.

Day 2: New Me, New Hair

This is me and my new hair. The photo does not do it justice but I had it colored and had some caramel highlights put into it. You can kinda see the caramel highlights in the first pic. The first pic reminds me of those cheesy high school pics you take for the yearbook and how they make you sit and smile. I just wanted to take a very quick pic before I had to make dinner and that was the first pose I did. What can I say I stick to what I know...yawn. boring. I know...Maybe in the coming weeks I can venture out on some better pics ha!

Ok onto my commitment to me. I woke up feeling a bit nauseated again. I stayed nauseated until the afternoon. Not sure if its from my endo or detox but thankfully it got better. I ate chia seeds for breakfast which were sooo yummy. I will post about those babies tomorrow. I ate a salad topped with shrimp for lunch. For dinner I ate some leftover beef in a corn taco shell (unfried, just warmed on the gas stove). For some reason I haven't been real hungry. Not sure if its the heat or the fact I have so much junk stored in me but I'm glad I have not been ravenous. The one thing I totally forgot about doing this morning was drinking lemon water. I have read you are supposed to drink lemon water first thing in the morning to help cleanse your body before eating. I'm hoping I will remember tomorrow.

It was a good day. I was expecting to be cranky and moody from the detox but actually I had a good day. I think being at the hair salon for 3 hours with my fav. stylist helped! She has been doing my hair for 11 years now and I would not be able to trust anyone else. She was actually the one who cut off 11 inches of my hair 2years ago so I could donate it to locks of love in honor of my mom who had lost her hair on chemo. That was a difficult haircut for me but she did great and made me feel so good about what I was doing. Today I walked in and told her I needed a color to hide all the grey (there was a ton!) and I told her I wanted to change it up a bit with some other color mixed in. (hence the caramel highlights). I love it. I'm feeling renewed.

When I came home from getting my hair done, hubbie's eyes just lit up! He loved it. He told me I looked beautiful across the dinner table. What could be better than that? (at this moment not even chocolate).

Day 1 commitment to me

I woke up late along with the kids which made us late to our weekly story time at the library. Uugh. What a way to start my first day of detox. Stressed already. I took a couple of breaths, woke everyone up, and hurriedly got ready. I decided to make a green smoothie for breakfast which I drank in the car. I made it with plain kefir, spinach, and banana. It was good except that before I drank that I had drank a small glass of OJ to take my vitamins with. I forgot that OJ and kefir do not do well on my stomach together. Feeling nauseated from that combo and will not be doing that again.

For vitamins after doing some research I have added evening primrose oil and fish oil to my regime. Supposedly they both help with endo. so I'm hoping to see some changes soon. Besides those I am taking a multivitamin, vit. c, vit. e, vit. b complex, probiotic, and candex (a candida cleanse pill I have been taking every since my candida problems 1 1/2 years ago). I spread out the vits over the course of the day so that its not too much on my stomach and liver. For lunch I had a yummy salad of baby greens, salmon, cherry tomatoes, topped with my mom's salad dressing. She makes the best dressing and she makes me some every week to keep in my fridge. She makes it with evoo, balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper, garlic. Yummy! My tummy is feeling a bit better but my first reaction is to drink a coke to soothe my upset tummy but I know I can't so I am drinking plain water. For dinner I am making fajitas and beans and I will eat my fajitas with lots of veggies and salsa on a warmed corn tortilla (no cheese or sour cream). My family will eat theirs' on flour tortillas with cheese and sour cream. yummy but I can't. not on this diet.

I'm thinking of going to the health food store to see if they have any goji berries. I keep hearing about these berries and am now interested in trying them. We shall see. Right now I'm feeling a bit tired, nauseated, but committed.

A new commitment to me

I hate change. I fight it until I get to the point where it just has to happen. I have been struggling with life these past few months. Stress, poor diet, insomnia has led me to feeling bad. My endometriosis is out of control (had 2 very heavy periods this month almost back to back). I have an eczema flare up I cannot get control over. I have what I think may be a fungal infection on my hand. I actually went to the dermatologist the other day to have it looked at and they ended up taking a skin scrape KOH test on it. Boy those hurt. (note to self take advil before letting them slice the top layer of my skin off with a razor blade with no numbing cream.) The test showed negative for fungus yet they said you can often get false negatives so they basically sent me home without a diagnosis. They just said put some cream on it and if it doesn't get better in a couple of weeks to come back. Uugh.

I swear I feel like every time I go to doctors they have no idea what is wrong and I end up paying money for nothing along with time wasted waiting to get seen. The other day at the dermatologist it was a 3 1/2 hour ordeal before the whole thing was over. I usually end up diagnosing and treating myself for whatever is ailing me.

Hence the new commitment to me. I have decided that I have let worry, fear, stress, poor diet ruin my life. It has turned me into a walking malady of disease and it has to stop. I have made a similar commitment to myself a 1 1/2 year ago when I was suffering so badly with candida. For 2 months during that time I went to family doctor, dermatologist, and internist to get treated for candida that would not go away. I was on numerous antifungals, creams, potions, you name it and nothing worked. I finally researched candida treatment and found that diet and managing stress were the number 1 fighters in the fight of candida. So I put my butt on a candida cleanse eating a mostly raw whole food diet, learning breathing exercises to control my stress, and after 2 weeks of being on the detox my symptoms were clearing up fast! I felt so good then. People who hadn't seen me in awhile would ask if I had lost weight (I hadn't. stayed the same.). They would ask if I got a new hairstyle (no.). They would ask how I looked so good...it was my new diet and my commitment to eating live foods that provided my body with live enzymes which my body glow. literally. I loved how I felt. I loved how my candida symptoms went away. But all that came with a hefty price both wallet wise and emotionally. It was muy expensivo eating this way. I was having to go to the store daily to stock up on kale, lettuce, veggies, etc. Then the preparation time of washing, dicing, and sometimes steaming these things was hard. Add to that me cooking and making my foods while having to make other foods for the rest of the family to eat. They love me and my cooking but lets face it they don't want to eat raw kale salad (which was a part of my diet). So cooking dinner became this laborious affair. I had to make a meal for myself then set that aside and make something for everyone else. Then eating out was hard. We love eating out as a family but when I was on this diet there was a limit to where we could go. Basically I had to make sure wherever we went they had salad as that was what I could eat. This made it hard on everyone. Soon my hubbie and I would fight over the money spent on all my healthy foods I had to have. Soon my hubbie would get frustrated by not being able to just go through any drive through and get something real quick because there was nothing there for me to eat. Soon I started getting comments from my own kids of "another salad? you are eating another salad?" It was hard and after a few months of doing this diet and being symptom free of my candida I ended up slowly going back to my SAD (standard american diet) ways. I slowly started indulging in fries, sodas, and before I knew it I was back to my old ways. Drinking my sonic cokes in happy hour, driving through the drive thrus for burgers and fries all the while wondering why I had no energy and why my endo. symptoms continued to get worse.

I have been doing a lot of research lately. I have learned that endo. can make you feel tired, have cravings, moody, etc. I have also learned that there is a candida connection to endo. That is when my eyes opened a bit. Being that I had candida a year ago and did that cleanse I do remember that my periods were not as heavy and only lasted 4 days compared to the 7 days I have now. Once I detoxed my body I remember not having cravings (or not that bad I should say) and my moods were much more stabilized. I also have been doing research on eczema and that too is linked to diet and stress. Poor diet and stress are huge triggers for eczema. Basically both disease processes are results from a poorly functioning immune and hormone system. The best way to regulate both is through stress management and diet.

Which leads me to where I am now making this commitment once again. I do so with trepidation as I am going into this knowing darn well how hard this is going to be and how hard it will be on our pocket books. However, given the current state of my health do I have any choice? No way. So, I am officially starting today. My road to my own recovery. I fear these initial days of detox as my body purges all the toxins out of it but I look forward to 2 weeks from now when I am detoxed and am glowing and am full of life. I am going to blog everyday my feelings as I go through this. I so wish I had blogged through my candida cleanse. It would have helped me through this now. I am going to blog about what I am eating, how I am handling my stress, and what kind of symptoms are showing up. This way I can track just how well things are going or pin point areas that need more work. I'm off to make my first blog post on my commitment to me.

A nice day

Aw...it feels so good to be here right now. My bil picked up my 3 younger kids and took them to his house and *artist* is busy on her itouch. I am so proud of that girl. Since summer started she professed that she was going to save her money all summer long by doing extra chores and giving extra help and not going on the Internet for the summer (that one I could not do in a gazillion years. It about killed me being without Internet the first 2 weeks after moving in ha). So finally yesterday she had enough money saved up to buy herself an itouch. She is loving it and I am loving the fact that this girl gets what hard work is and what hard work pays off. She has learned the value of a dollar after saving every dollar earned for 2 1/2 months straight. She has learned that you must work for what you receive and be thankful for what you receive. What a great lesson to learn at such an early age. She makes me proud.

Hubbie is off playing basketball with his friends and I am sitting in Alejandro's newly cleaned, newly organized, newly decorated bedroom. God bless him. His room was one of the last to be really tackled after moving in. He is just all boy and to him as long as something functions then he could care less where a lamp is placed or where the world map hangs on his wall. Such a boy. However, having me for a mama (ocd at that lol) I finally tackled his room and got him organized for the coming school year. Dawn at Household Hints blog (I really need to learn how to link blogs here) had such a good article up on the importance of getting the kids rooms ready for back to school. By getting them organized and picked up it gets them off to a clean start. We even bought Alejandro a desk for his room so he wouldn't have to be doing homework on his bed or worse yet the kitchen table. I am loving his room so much that I am actually typing on his desk now and may I say this room is shining! His room looks great just in time for his birthday coming up. He is going to invite his best friend over for a sleepover so I need to start planning some fun things for them to do. Last year, his friend came over and I took them to the science museum, we made home made pizzas, and we tie dyed shirts. This year I am at a loss of what to do. More than likely swimming will be involved but other than that I need to get my creative juices flowing.

I need to be heading out soon to my sister's house for Sunday dinner. After that I'll be coming home to watch Army Wives. I love, love this show and no I'm not military but I do love this show. Who am I kidding? I love anything on lifetime.

Yep this was a good day and I was only 5 minutes late to church this morning. good indeed.