Plan, plan, plan. Prep, prep, prep. Eat. Eat. Eat. Time it. I ate too little! I ate too much! Weekends are for pizza! Do I have the money to support my current eating habit? Do it again.
I look over at the kitchen, which sits in the bagua feng shui map in sector 4: knowledge, wisdom, self-improvement, Saturn (representing discipline). Last night, I cooked firm, salted tofu with olive oil, quinoa with tumeric, hard boiled eggs, and mixed dried cranberries into a cup of cottage cheese. I cut into a cucumber that somehow got frozen, in my fridge! Not sure how it happened but a beautiful piece of produce was completely ruined! No, I did not decide to give it a proper burial, unless the trash is sufficient.
I am beginning my brave journey of actually logging my process publicly. I've always admired people who chose to take basically near naked photos of themselves as they whittle their bodies down into sexy healthy goodness. Even though I have always been in the fitness industry, fitness for me was never about how cut I could get, but instead, how functionally strong I could be. It's not that I'm becoming shallow in the shadow of my 40s, but that I see a different purpose and method to my madness, now that my body has proper healing time. I was teaching too many classes, doing too much cardio, and basically burning my body out. Looking back at my life, my body was not behaving well. It was not properly assimilating macro or micronutrients. I was not eating enough proteins, and sometimes simply overeating.
Just recently I decided that enough was enough, and that it was no longer enough to just keep saying to myself that it was enough...to just be vegetarian and lifting weights. No. I needed a nutrition plan that worked for me without making me feel like I needed to deprive myself of anything. But it stands to reason, that certain foods, certain timing, and certain amount of load, make my body feel optimal. It's not that I can't eat anything I want. The timing though, it has just everything to do with how well I end up feeling at the end of a day. And quite frankly, I want to feel good enough to get that workout in everyday, knowing this will improve my goals.
Sometimes it seems as if there's really not much to this. Then I get a reality check about mine own nutritional complication I bring into the picture, such as this evening, when Valrhona chocolate and raw almonds seemed to call me at the same time, and I begin to see the patterns and traps that most come to me for, in order to help them see a path through.
This summer was about going deeply within, but it was also about seeing how others share the light of similar struggles all around. I have finally decided to pick up my staff and lead people the way they were meant to be lead, through the nutrition walk with more intensity than before.
I joined a community called Integrative Nutrition. I am now on the road to becoming certified as a health and life coach. It gives me the chance to dig through a number of questionable systems and get the low down of the nutritional book writing industry. I really want to know why authors and doctors have come to their conclusions, and how I can make the whole process a little less confusing and a little more compromising, more loving and more interactive, a customized experience...just from the changes in timing I have noticed muscularity and build. There is so much more to say, but I'll stop here by saying that, from wherever you are, are, adding this nutrition piece to exercise is the perfect marriage. I took my first set of pictures and I am so excited to see the changes.
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