Friday, June 5, 2009

Day #5

Home Practice - Bikram #95
Thursday

Home Practice - Baptiste (45 min) #96
Friday

Yes. Five days under my belt. One more Bikram home practice tomorrow and then I will venture back into the studio on Sunday. I am excited to get back into the swing of things.

The soreness is going away. I gave my body this week to sort of get used to the 45 min Baptiste workout. Next week I want to do the 60 min Baptiste workout at least 2x and the 45 min only once.

I do already feel a bit skinnier, but I am refraining from weighing myself until Sunday. I feel so much better both physically and mentally now that I am getting into a daily exercise habit again. And I realize that I have a tendency to be a little bit obsessed with the scale. So during the 14 week challenge I'm gonna try my best to weigh in once a week instead of daily.

Today I happened upon an old blog post from Bliss Chick about how she got rid of her migraines. (You can check her blog in my blog roll if you're interested.) For me, I think it's been almost a year since I had my last migraine. And it's also been a whole year since I gave up diet soda.

In her blog post BC talks about triggers and mentions dairy as a big one. Reading her words it was almost like something clicked in my head. When we consume most commercially available milk, cheese, etc. we are ingesting a BOATLOAD of antibiotics and synthetic hormones. How could this intake over years and years NOT screw with our bodies delicate hormonal balance and upset the natural intestinal flora of beneficial organisms?

So, drumroll please... Beginning tomorrow, 6/6/09, I am hereby giving up dairy for an entire year. I may add some organic and raw products back into my diet at a future date. But not until I've gone cold turkey from all milk and cheese for a full year. You reading here are my witnesses.

It's going to be hard. But that's what I thought about giving up diet drinks and it really wasn't too difficult once I made up my mind to do it. This is my health we're talking about. And that is of the utmost importance.

5 comments:

  1. Yay, Ellen! You know, I used to weigh in every day religiously, and now i weight myself, like, once a year. I used to think about brining my little scale with me on vacation (no lie), and now I don't even own one. IT'S GREAT!! I've found that there's just not much useful information in the scale. I can SEE my body, I can FEEL how it's doing, and I can check whether I still fit in the same pair of jeans. ;-) So yeah... I like the direction you are going...

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  2. I haven't weighed myself since August. I'm going by clothes and general look as well. A good use for the scale is to do a before and after yoga weighing. This can really drive home how much extra water you need to drink. I did this a fair bit about a year ago, and I was typically losing 7-9 lbs in a class. That meant drinking at least 100 extra ounces of water, just to keep up.

    Ellen, I tried posting yesterday, but I guess it didn't take. I'm really glad you are back blogging again.

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  3. Thanks Duffy.

    I am glad to be blogging again and *really* glad to be back with the yoga program. ;))

    My weight loss before and after yoga has never been that pronounced. Usually between 1 and 2 pounds. But then again I haven't done any dry classes. Just goes to show you how different we each are.

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  4. Ellen, As you probably read, I gave up dairy for about three years, but then I discovered ORGANIC (this was quite some time ago) and it changed my life! I could do dairy again. I think, though, that the cleanse was super important to do FIRST and then switch.

    You can do it! I'm thinking a year would be excellent, but don't replace it with fake stuff -- soy has it's own problems. Just go without. ;)

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  5. Yeah. I think that I need to go cold turkey first before adding in the occasional bit of organic and/or raw dairy products. I find that my body generally does a lot better with no dairy. Cheese is like crack to me - I can't have just a little.

    I also realize the problems with soy but am using it during the transition period if I'm in a pinch.

    Thanks for inspirign me to do this!!

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