Day 75 – O-Bla-Di O-Bla-Da!

Today is the first day I don’t have a whole post ready—so far I’ve been able to put a daily post together—because it's been very very busy and it is enough to say today that...

LIFE GOES ON!

Day 74 – Heave Ho!

Late morning, but I did go on a run today.  I’m not much of a runner but I know it is suppose to help (I guess any exercise for that matter) with overcoming candida.  When I run it is usually very easy for me to get distracted—usually watching all the cars that go by and am very observant.  But, today I wanted to try to keep a good time (todays average time was 9:37 pace over 3.51 miles) which I know isn’t great but it is pretty good for me.

I walked up our hill to the street where I run and took a few minutes to stretch—it was a pretty cold day and the whole walk up I thought about turning around and going home but I made it to the corner did my stretches and then hit the trail hard.  I listened to Pandora Classic Rock Power workout to get pumped up, but I also did something I have never really done before running.  I look as far ahead as I could and still have a focus on an object—any object that would give me good distance and something to focus on.

As I ran I focused on the object and decided not to take my eye off it.  As I thought about quitting I would just think: “I only have to make it to the light post” and then as soon as I would pass the marker I would look forward to the next—even rarely looking down at my watch to see what my average pace was.  Now I know this is not rocket science and most of you reading this are probably thinking… “yeah… Duh!”  But understand that this is not me, I usually just run with my end goal of getting home and usually let the speed and cards fall where they may and more often than not it feels like they fall to the leisurely run—maybe I’m turning over a new leaf in running?

Nothing real special about our breakfast and lunch but we did have an interesting dinner—before I get to that though I have to tell you about todays garlic experience.  This mornings dose went down without a hitch… OK, a slight hitch, it did burn going down and it did hit my stomach and give me a nice nauseous feeling but I held it down. Well… after lunch was a different story.

My wife has been better with the garlic than I have been today so we prepared (minced) her “dose” first.  She chased it down with water and seemed to do OK—I use OK lightly because it did make her nauseous and feel very sick but she held it down.  I, on the other hand, was not so lucky.  No sooner did I swallow the garlic and chase it with what felt like a load of water when I started feeling very nauseous and getting the shakes so bad it hurt but this time it didn’t stop there.  My mouth started to water and I kept having to spit into the sink (a trick I use—and I think most people use—to keep from throwing up) but it didn’t work.

As my wife left the room she heard the effects of the garlic but didn’t stick around or come back for the show.  Thank goodness I didn’t totally lose lunch and it seemed my stomach just expelled the garlic I had just swallowed—almost as if to say: “Yeah… not this time buddy—take that!”  I was still hunched over the sink for another 5 minutes waiting for my body to calm itself down until I felt well enough to walk away, which I did.  I decided that I had had enough for the day after that dose!

OK, so dinner was an interesting dinner—we decided to go to a steak house and try some tenderloin steak cooked rare.  I have always been a medium rare fan but never have tried the rare, but since my cousin told of the benefits she felt somebody can get by eating their “ancestral diet” we thought: “What the heck!”  Our waitress happened to be an old childhood friend who gave us the most classic look when we told her how we wanted our steaks cooked.

To make it even better we had to have a word with the kitchen manager to ensure there would be no “illegal” stuff on our steaks.  He was very good about it and my old friend insisted there were people who come in that are much worse than us at what the demand but I wasn’t totally convinced.  Anyway… it was a pretty good steak, not the best I’ve ever had but good.

Nothing new or earth shattering to report on the progress front—overall I do feel like my well-being is getting better every day but it is hard to measure unless I look back at my blog posts to see where I was.  Definitely not as ornery as last weekend but still not as good as I’d like to be.

My mom-in-law came over tonight and we gave her some of our cacao pow as well as a slice of our almond flour brown bread—both Excellent!... I think she likes coming over for those reasons. 

Day 73 – Garlic Garlic and more Garlic

In our quest to find out the very best for our bodies my wife and I have both decided to start mincing cloves of garlic every day and swallowing them.  I’ve done it before but have been out of the habit for a few weeks, but my wife has never consistently done it.  She is still having a pretty big issue with bloating—we’ve decided that the amount of food we’re eating is probably not the issue so it must be something else.  I guess there is flora (or something like that) and some on the internet—there we go again asking for trouble—say when ridding your body of candida it often opens up other imbalances, one of which is a flora imbalance in your small intestine and evidently garlic is key to treating it.

So for the next few days or weeks we will be mincing 2 cloves of garlic 3 times per day and chasing it with a big drink of water.  This mornings dose was not too bad for me—a few chills and some pretty bad stomach pains for a few minutes and that was it.  Afternoon it was slight worse, but tonight… OH TONIGHT’S was AWFUL!  After swallowing the garlic it took about 30 seconds and then it just hit me like a bad sickness.  I started to get the chills and shake a little while I had some cold sweats and had that funny taste in your mouth that you get right before you throw-up—you know the taste I’m talking about!  Needless to say I hope it doesn’t continue to get worse!

Breakfast today was easy—steel cut oats and our favorite green drink (some things almost always stay the same).  Lunch was quinoa with lemon juice, and green onions topped over salad mixed with our favorite green salsa (still needing to be added to a list of foods we find ourselves eating a lot of!  Had a snack this afternoon before taking my son to karate—some toast (from bread I made today—which needs to be added to recipes (basically 1 cup almond flour, 1 cup brown rice flour, 1 cup arrow root powder, 8 eggs, 1 avocado, 2 droppers of stevia, 1 teaspoon baking soda, ¾ teaspoon salt and then mixed together (liquid separate from dry—blended) then mixed together placed in a bread pan and baked at 350 degrees for about 45-50 minutes.

Dinner was a medley of leftover vegetables (the ones we hadn’t used all week).  Including asparagus, onions (yellow and green), peppers (yellow, red, orange), broccoli, lemon juice, sea salt, basil and coconut oil.  I’m not sure what it is (I think the 6 cloves of raw garlic I swallowed whole throughout the day) but I’m feeling very queasy and downright sick tonight—hopefully I’ll feel better for a nice Saturday!

Day 72 – You Can’t Catch Me, I’m the Gingerbread Man!

We found out today just how difficult it is to try to eat out—and it was a stark contrast to how we felt a few months ago.  It used to be that eating out was a lot easier than eating at home.  Much faster—you could just pull up to the window, order and go, or sit down, order and eat.  But… tonight there was a scavenger hunt run at the Salt Lake Running Company that they put on once a month.  It’s a great idea, you go to the store and then pick up a map and start to run—getting to as many checkpoints as possible to pick up a ticket (local restaurants and businesses set up before hand) and then back to the store.

Well… we knew we would be running late so we decided that tonight would be a little “cheat night.”  Sounded great in theory until we started to look at where to eat and looking at the ingredients.  We couldn’t eat at McDonald’s for a myriad of reasons that should be quite obvious (but beyond the obvious there were added things we are staying away from that we couldn’t eat like wheat and sugar… in chicken salad…).  We couldn’t eat at Chick-Fil-A since they too add things to their food we are staying away from, again wheat in chicken??? Whatever happened to beef just containing beef and no colors or additives or salad just having salad?  Or chicken just having chicken?

We let our boys eat and play at a restaurant and then we headed to the local Harmon’s (a local chain grocery store) where we found a vegetable medley and some sushi that we ended up eating.  We pretty much knew the ingredients, but we did cheat a little since the sushi had vinegar (although we are not sure on what kind so we are not positive that was a cheat).  However, even the vegetable medley ended up being a cheat because they cooked it in Canola Oil???  The funny thing was every other ingredient (spices and all) were very healthy and very good so why do they add canola oil instead of olive oil??? Where were you on that one Harmon’s!?  Oh the joys of sticking to a Candida Friendly (or not so friendly for the yeast I guess) diet.

Breakfast today was Cacao Pow (using steel cut oats as the base—our favorite kind of cacao pow).  Also had our green drink.  For lunch I had a huge salad topped with lentils and some quinoa.  Dinner was our great grocery store haul mentioned above we had before running in our fun run.  The best part of the run was when our 8 year old was upset for not winning any prices in the raffles.  We had 3 people and so could get 3 tickets at each stop so we ended up with like 21 tickets (probably more than most people there).  My son said: “We ran all that way for nothing!”  I guess we got him a little too excited about the raffle and not excited enough about the run.

We had a great run though, running down some busy streets and even jay-walked across one that freaked our son out to which we stressed: “you should NEVER do that when you are alone, only when you are with mom and dad!”  That makes it all OK right?  We also found a short-cut on a light rail track the state is putting in that won’t be up and running for a few months yet, but was smooth enough and finished enough to cut about ¼ mile from one area to another!  Thank goodness the only goal was to get the tickets and not to follow a specific route otherwise we would have been cheating and being AWESOME examples to our boys yet again!

Interesting article on the effects of soda--YIKES!  http://www.ksl.com/?sid=24552939&nid=1010&title=this-is-what-happens-when-you-drink-soda&fm=home_page&s_cid=featured-5