Life: The things that keep me healthy

So,  this blog is a pretty simple one.  It covers a few of the products that I use to stay healthy.

The obvious one is the Army.  With our workouts, which we call PT (physical training), every morning for an hour and a half, you think it would be easy to stay healthy.  And this was once true, but since I work for the battalion, I find myself working during PT more often than I would like.  And since I have to be at the office by 0545 now, and am lucky to get off by 1700 , it doesn't give me much time at home to get the things I need to (especially for deployment) done and still get plenty of sleep!  So, when given the opportunity  I almost always sleep in.  Plus, I am not a morning person! I would much rather stay up late and wake up sometime after the sun, than be on the Army's schedule.  And, even though some say I will get used to it, I have been getting up at or before 6 multiple days a week for ten years and I still haven't "gotten used to it"  I don't think I ever will.  Anyway, most of the Army's workouts (especially in my unit) includes a lot of running.  I know for my age, weight and body type, a mile run burns about 105 calories.  So, the Army is great for just burning calories, but since it doesn't always happen, I have to add other things to my life.  (If you want help tracking your runs, walks, hikes or just about anything else, I recommend downloading the free Endomondo app from either the play store, or the app store).  

When I can't get P.T. into my daily routine, I love doing Yoga.  My sister-in-law put me on to an amazing website to help, too.  I always found that if I did dvds that I wouldn't keep it up, because eventually I would get bored doing the same routines.  And finding time going to classes is way more difficult than making sure I get to do PT.  Plus, most gyms and studios charge (and that's frequently about $10/ class).  But yogaglo.com is different.  With Yogaglo, you can pick any time duration from 5- 120 minutes, you can pick your level, your style of yoga, a specific instructor, a specific body part... whatever you want! And it is only $18/ month (and you can cancel anytime).  Plus there are literally thousands of videos because they are uploading them all of the time from a studio in California.  You can schedule them for yourself, pick your favorites and add them to your queue.  And for me, yoga has been such a big part of my recovery (see 

Health & Exercise: Yoga daily, Health & Exercise: Yoga Update and Health & Exercise: Learning to Read Your Body to read more about why I do yoga and how amazing it has been for me).  

But that isn't all, of course.  Occasionally, I find myself putting on a few pounds (I fluctuate up and down about 5 pounds during the year).  And when I get to the higher end, I like to retrain my body.  The problem for me is, I work out a ton for awhile, and I get used to eating the calories to back it up.  Then I go through lulls of not working out as much, or eating really unhealthily and it puts on the weight.  Now, a few pounds may not bother most people, but my thought line is that a few pounds can add up fast.  Most people who are overweight don't notice until it is too late, or maybe they just don't want to.  It is much easier to maintain the weight that you are comfortable with, than yoyo-ing constantly.  So, when I start to realize I am adding the pounds back on, or I am just eating too much, I start counting calories.  I like to use Loseit!  You can use their website or their apps to help you track meals and exercise, create weight loss goals, and even create your own recipes so you know how many calories are in your home cooked food.  You can also add friends (making you more likely to achieve your goals).  I mostly like to track calories to retrain my body for how much food I should be eating and to get comfortable "eating less" which is actually the correct amount for my desired healthy weight.  Plus, since it's not really dieting, you can feel free to cheat! If there is a potluck, or your celebrating a birthday dinner, don't worry.  Eat whatever and then go back to tracking the next day!

And last but not least, my husband and I recently started getting Organic Groceries delivered to our door, thanks to our friend Jordan.  Door to Door Organics charges a flat rate for boxes of varying sizes.  You pick the size box you want, how frequently you want it delivered and if you want fruits, vegetables or both.  You can create lists of vegetables you don't like, or ones you love and they try to accommodate.  And you can sub out items for ones of similar values if you want to change something.  Plus, you can then add additional fruits, vegetables, meats, bakery items, or dairy if you want.  And, for all of their food, you know that it is organic, but you can also find non-GMO, locally grown or made in the USA organic foods.  It is always fresh and wonderful! I would highly recommend checking them out.     

And last but not least, when my neck and shoulders are out of sorts, or the stress is piling on, I love getting Nueromuscular Massages from Parker at The Shade Tree Massage Therapy.  Her prices are great for the amazing work she does.  I will definitely be missing her while I am deployed!

Health & Exercise: Learning to Read Your Body

So, this is an odd blog post, but it was something Kevin and I were talking about and he suggested I blog about it.

The photo that brought Vietnam into American homes.

I have always been amazed by some of the worlds most exclusive societies.  Mostly, that of devote monks.  I'm sure you've heard stories of them: those that can control their heartbeat down to almost deathly levels, those that can control their body temperature regardless of the temperature outside, those that walk on hot coals, those that can withstand any pain, etc.  The most infamous in our time would be Thich Quang Duc who set himself on fire (also called self-immolation) to protest the treatment of Buddhist's in South Vietnam by the Catholic government in the middle of a busy town square.

The amount of self-control these people have generated and the degree to which they are in tune with their bodies has always fascinated me.  The ability to manipulate the body with the mind is astounding.  Even something as simple as the placebo effect shows how much power the mind has over the body.

But I am actually starting to learn that this is far from the realm of only achievable for the extremely devote, it's for anyone. Maybe not at the "set yourself on fire in protest" level, but at the very basic one.  My bouts into massage therapy and yoga have started me on this journey without me realizing.  I'm not going to go into my reasons for needing trigger point massage since I blogged it before (see My Journey into Alternative Therapies) and I know I have blogged a couple of times about my journey into yoga (see Yoga Daily and Yoga Update), but ultimately, these two things have helped me become more in tune with my body and how it feels.  Because of the massage therapy, I am starting to be able to identify which muscles are tight and causing me problems.  I don't know these muscles by name, but i know where they are and where they go (like the muscle that is currently giving me trouble starts in the back of the leg and comes up around my hip towards my abdomen, which, by the way, is very difficult to stretch).  The yoga also helps in this.  While I am stretching, I can actually feel when my muscles aren't opening up and creating circulation properly.  My flexibility has improved, but I am still not fully able to reach each yoga position.  Yet even still, I can tell when my circulation has increased properly in certain muscles, when I need to spend more time in a position and when the stretch needs to go deeper.

I was talking to my massage therapist about this and she told me that this is actually the natural progression for those doing yoga.  (If you are doing yoga and are becoming more flexible  but you aren't more in tune with your body, you are probably doing something wrong.)  But the odd thing was what she told me next.  Parker told me that next I need to work on sending my breath to the areas where I know I need more oxygen rich blood.  Now this is still weird to me, but it is basically identifying which muscles I want to send my breath to, really considering as I breath in and then think about that breath as it enters my body and sort of push it to the area I want.

This is still really odd to me and I haven't really figured it out at all yet, if I even can, but I figured I would give another update and share how far things have come for me.   I will write another update if I manage to figure out how to really direct my breaths and hopefully then I might be able to explain it better.

Health & Exercise: My Journey into Alternative Therapies

I mentioned in my yoga post that I see a massage therapist and thought I would share about the alternative medicine that changed my life.

My pain began probably somewhere between my junior and senior years of college.  I had experienced joint pain in my knees (mostly from running long distances on hard surfaces and years of improper running shoes) before but I started to experience pain in my shoulders, especially when doing push ups.  Slowly the pain grew and I occassionally had painful popping in my right shoulder and then the left.  My treatment... ignore it! Suck it up! Rub some dirt in it! Drink water! And every other terrible piece of Army advice.

Then about a year ago, I started having neck pain.  I thought it was from bad pillows and some lack of sleep.    I tried some Aleve and of course, that did very little.  So I ignored it some more.  Then in January I had the worst headache of my life.  I was sensitive to light, my right hand went numb, and I was slurring my words, when I could find them.  I went to see my doctor after and she was concerned that it was either occipital neuralgia, migraines or a stroke.  I was having lots of what I called residual headaches (basically two weeks of minor headaches constantly) and so she gave me medicine for that.

At this point, I had never considered that the shoulder pain was related to the neck pain was related to the headaches.  So, I kept ignoring it.  Then I had another crazy headache in May.  I took two fast dissolving pills that are over $100 each and it did nothing except make me nauseous and sick the whole next couple of days.  So I went to see my doctor again.  Though still concerned about occipital neuralgia, and about why I wasn't going to the ER about possible strokes, she knew that since I didn't respond to the migraine medicine, it wasn't that.  So she wondered if it was tension headaches.  And, being the best Army doctor I have ever met, she sent me to Acupuncture and a Chiropractor to see if some of the tension in my neck, shoulders and back could be causing the headaches.

Both the chiropractor and acupuncturist believed this to be the case.  My chiro explained it like this: The muscles in the neck and back are connected to the nerves at the base of my skull.  There is so much tension in my back and neck that when it gets too tense my muscles are pulling on those nerves causing terrible headaches.   So I started seeing each of them weekly.  The chiropractor's adjustment helped more than the acupuncturist's needles, but both were only causing temporary relief.  I was still in so much pain and it was really interferring with everything by that point.  The little relief I was getting made it feel that much worse when the pain came back.

My chiropractor then told me that really what I needed was a massage therapist who could specialize in trigger points, because I have so so so many of them.   Unfortunately, massage therapy is one thing that Fort Carson doesn't offer, so it wouldn't be covered by Tricare (the Army's medical insurance), like acupuncture and chiropractor were.  

However, my husband's flexible spending account (FSA) would. Anyway, seeing Parker at The Shade Tree Massage in Colorado Springs changed everything for me. She is a neuromuscular massage therapist and I see her for trigger point massage. It is a very painful type of massage because it goes deep into very tender areas, but Parker helps increase circulation to the areas and always keeps moving around to cause less pain in the trigger points. After all the pain I have been in for months, I am finally reaching a point of being pain free. I am certainly not there yet, but there are many days where I have little to no pain. And most of the time, even when the pain comes back, it isn't as bad as it was before I started massage therapy. I was in so much pain that I pretty much quit doing outdoor activities, couldn't clean my house without pain and headaches, and simple things like laundry became nearly impossible. I needed so much more sleep and rest and I was begining to feel like I couldn't do anything else. But with Parker's help and a lot of trigger point massage, I am truly getting my life back! *For more information about Parker and The Shade Tree please visit her website at theshadetree.massagetherapy.com.