I know I’m joining late, but I decided to sign up anyway. Usually I would have seen that I was late and decided to wait and start eating healthily when the *next* challenge starts, so I feel that joining now instead of waiting until July was a huge accomplishment by itself. Onto the quest – hopefully I do this right. My main quest is to feel healthy more often than not. At the moment I’m dealing with regular migraines, joint pain, digestive issues, “women’s issues†(is that a good enough euphemism?), exhaustion and a range of things that seem neurological but that the neurologist can’t diagnose (pins and needles, dizziness, odd twitches, and double-vision among other things). I know changing my diet will help – I’ve done a Whole30 before and come out the other end with most of those problems gone – but haven’t managed to stick to the primal/Whole30 way of eating after the initial challenge is up. So, I’m hoping that having a six week challenge (or five now, I guess) will let the habits settle in a bit more and I’ll stick to it at the other end. Support Quests 1) Eat Wahl's Paleo+ - I didn't want to go cold turkey with the nutrition but I'm having so many health issues that I think I need to. Lots of people have had great results with the program so I figured I'd give it a try. It's really structured with how many vegetables and which types of protein to have in a week which I think I need otherwise I'd just end up eating steak and carrots every day and calling it healthy. Measurement - A= followed 100% B = followed 95% C = followed 90%, but I'm going to be a bit flexible with the types of protein because it's hard finding grassfed offal in my area. 2) Walk daily for at least 20 minutes (preferably with the dog, who is my personal trainer) A = 20mins for 35 days B = 20mins for 30 days C = 20 mins for 25 days 3) Go to bed with the potential of 8 hours sleep – I don’t want to say I’ll have 8 hours sleep every night since I have trouble getting to sleep and also staying asleep, but the biggest problem is just staying up watching Cold Case reruns until midnight knowing I have to wake up at 5am. Last night it wasn’t even a very good episode. So, the goal is to look at when I have to wake up (5am weekdays) and go to bed 8 hours before that (9pm). Then I’ll have trained my body to feel sleepy at that time (and it usually is anyway, I just push myself to stay up a little bit later…and a little bit more… and just to the end of this chapter/tv show/whatever) and hopefully I’ll be on my way to getting a decent amount of sleep every night. Life Side Quest - Meditate daily and finally finish my elective. I’m doing a course on how to teach meditation and my elective calls for meditating daily for six weeks and journaling about it and so far it hasn’t gone very far, so it would be good to get most of it done during these five weeks. Motivation – I want to quit my job and travel full-time with some blogging and freelance work supporting me, but at the moment I can’t afford to get started. And every time I sit down to get things started and organised I’m too tired to get very far. Plus, how am I going to go camping and the like with some of the health issues I have? So, I figure, getting healthy is the first step on the quest to completely makeover my life.
