Good morning!   I am about to whip up an awesome green smoothie and go out and tackle all the leaves in my yard, and then finish my Christmas lights.   The 3 inches of rain last weekend interrupted my Christmas light hanging, so I am finishing this weekend.  We are excited that Michael’s mother is going to be able to come visit us for Christmas!  We haven’t seen her in a year.  I am so blessed with awesome, wonderful in-laws.  Michael’s family is so warm and friendly, and I love them all.  I actually have two mother-in-laws, since Michael’s father is remarried, and they are both incredible, lovely women who I love dearly.  How lucky am I?

Our yard is so wooded with beautiful oak trees that sunlight barely hits the ground.  They are a blessing AND a curse.  I tried growing a garden this year, as I prefer fresh-picked, organic food that is as full of nutrients as possible.  The only thing I was successful with was tomatoes and jalapenos, and it took those forever to produce.  The vines grew 20 feet long and all up into my roses, reaching for sunlight, I guess.   The only spot in our entire yard that gets any sun is right behind our back deck.  I was so disappointed that everything I planted just didn’t grow.  When I was growing up, we had a huge garden and hardly ever bought a fresh fruit or vegetable from the store.  My parents still have a big garden every year, and Mom freezes and cans tons of stuff.  

I think I am going to have to find a sunny piece of land to purchase for a ‘remote’ garden, or borrow some land from a friend.  The deer here are terribly hungry anyway.  I had to put up a huge deer fence around my tomatoes, and they even tore that down at one point.   Do any of you grown your own fruits and vegetable?  What do you grow?  What are your organic techniques?   Please comment below and share.  I would love to hear from you.

Friday was crazy busy trying to get real estate contract stuff done, and then we had Christmas parties stacked on top of each other.   At the second, people were trying to force-feed me the pizza they had bought.  They were saying I was ‘too skinny’ and needed ‘meat on my bones’, and even though it is said jokingly it feels like a put-down.  I am human, and it does make me feel bad.  I have plenty of meat on my bones, thank you.  It’s just that my meat is muscle and not fat.  It seems like if you try to be healthy, that people just want to see you fall.  I really think they feel guilty and just want to see that you are no better than they are.   But I was DEFIANT!  I mis-behaved and didn’t fall to the crowd, plus I just truly didn’t want any of the toxic, chemical-laden pizza.  I was thinking that if they wanted to make an example of me, then I would be a positive example for health and show them that I didn’t need bad food to have a good time!   We had a wonderful time anyway.

This whole mentality of people trying to get other people to eat unhealthy food has me thinking deeply about the subject.  Why?  What is it that drives people to do that?  It hurts me when someone laughs and says that they don’t want anything healthy, that they prefer the unhealthy things.  I love many of these people and I know I am going to lose them to diseases and they are going to suffer.  That hurts me in my heart, and I want so badly to do something about it.  But there is not much I can do if they don’t want to change except keep on being an example.  One Christmas party-goer refused to eat one of the pizzas, because it had ‘green stuff’ on it.  Wow, a smidgen of healthy food in a nutritional wasteland, and the healthy green peppers caused this person to reject the whole pizza, and grab only the meat-only pizza.  I just cannot grasp this mentality. 

A family member of mine recently said to me that ‘it would do his heart good to see me enjoying a big steak’.  What?  Why would that do his heart good, when it would be damaging mine?   I have reflected deeply on that comment, and it is still confusing to me.  I am not some anorexic, stick-thin waif who doesn’t eat.  I eat like a horse.  My smoothies alone are about a quart each–that’s a lot of food!  I love food and thoroughly enjoy it.  If you love someone, wouldn’t your heart want their heart to be healthy?

You know, it’s not about long life, either.  I could get hit by a dump truck tomorrow driving to work.  Nobody knows how much time we have alloted on this earth.  But if that happens, I will leave this world having vibrant health, great energy, no sickness, no pain, no diseases, and feeling great every day.  That was not the case when I was eating SAD (Standard American Diet) or even when I was on the supposedly healthy high-protein low carb diet.  I suffered from fibroid tumors, causing me to have a hysterectomy.  I had terrible joint pain, back pain, digestive problems, headaches, colds, and major breathing problems.   I looked good on the outside, but I was degenerating rapidly on the inside.  After changing my diet two years ago, and going to 90-95% raw and living foods about a year ago, all these things have disappeared!   It is so worth it to not have to suffer with these things on a daily basis.  No matter when our time comes, it’s more about the life in your years than the years that you live. 

I had a swollen tonsil blocking half my throat and causing recurring infections, sore throats, and difficulty swallowing food.  Now, the tonsil is completely normal after being swollen for 30 years!   That happened in less than a year eating living foods, so I know the swelling was caused by a toxic reaction to something I was eating.  And all the doctors over the years, ever since my childhood, would just shrug their shoulders and say they didn’t know what was causing it but it was ‘nothing to be concerned about’ and there was nothing they could do.  I wish, oh how I wish, that I had known about living foods before I had my hysterectomy.  I really believe the fibroids would have dissolved over time.  I don’t know that for sure of course, but I feel that they may have, just like the tonsil.  I have read many accounts of women overcoming fibroids and other ‘female’ diseases through living foods.   They were horribly painful and caused many peripheral problems, but at the time, I didn’t know of an option beyond surgery and I was desperate to escape the pain.  One fibroid was about the size of a grapefruit and was crushing my bladder.  I literally felt relief as soon as I woke up after the surgery.  It was dramatic.  But I would have delayed the surgery and tried living foods, had I known that was an option.  It may not have worked, and I may have had the surgery anyway, but at least I would have exhausted all the natural options.   Oh well, hindsight is 20-20, and now I count my blessings every day, thankful for the new path of health and for feeling so great!

I just did a really quick intense circuit workout yesterday at home.  I didn’t feel like driving all the way into the gym.  We live way outside of town, so it’s a 30-minute drive to my gym.  Plus, yesterday was all about football.  Did I mention I am a football fanatic?  I did my circuit in the second half of the SEC Championship game, slightly irritating Michael, but I just couldn’t sit still that long!  I did all kinds of lower body exercises, like jump squats, bench jumps, step-ups, lunges, hamstring curls and hip bridges on the exercise ball, bicycles and exercise ball pikes for abs, clean and presses for shoulders, and a few others.  I try for 30 reps of each one with either no rest between sets or just a few seconds.  This takes about 30 minutes, and is pretty intense. 

I also made a lot of food yesterday:  Cilantro Soup, Jicama Rosemary-Garlic mashed ‘potatoes’, more Spirulina Pie of course, and my awesome guacamole.  We finished up our batch of Chili, which is to live for!  So today I think I will make a nut loaf and some onion bread from Rawvolution.   I also have to prepare appetizers and desserts for several Christmas parties this week.

I had better go make my smoothie and get ready for yard work.  This morning’s smoothie will be made with fresh collards from my dear friend’s garden–yum!   Collards blend beautifully in a smoothie, and have almost no taste at all.   I think I will blend them with bananas and mango this morning. 

Have the best day ever, and Be Defiant!

Hugs,

Christy

December 7th, 2008
Categories: Living Foods Recipes, Workout Routines. Tags: bodyweight exercises, circuit workout, facing fears, health, healthy, living foods, raw foods, raw vegan, standard american diet, Workout Routines
Author: Christy

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