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I woke up to cloudy skies this morning.
My morning routine is to fall out of bed and head out the door while I am still asleep and start walking. I avoid thinking about it because I can easily talk myself into staying home. By the time I wake up, I am enjoying a beautiful morning walk with my little Shih Tzu and my husband. I have varied my walks from very short to quite long. It depends on the morning, whether I grabbed an apple on the way out of the door and how hydrated I am.
Home from my walk, I sit down with my coffee and computer to plan the day. I plan my menu for the full day, including snacks, I plan what exercise I want to fit in and whatever is on my calendar for the day. I use a wonderful piece of nutritional software for my meal planning (a great tool for planning foods that include all of the micronutients) and for tracking my exercise and activity.
I also keep a mood log as I am on meds for depression. This morning, I logged a point lower than I have been. I contemplated why. Ah, the cloudy sky. So I decided to focus on my busy day and a project that needs finished up in the next week. I intend to keep a positive attitude and gain that point back before the day is out.
I also remembered how low I was just a couple months ago. The real benefits to eating healthy foods and staying active are a healthy mind and elevated mood. As important to all of us a healthy body is, it does not compare to having a healthy mind and enjoying the fullness of life.
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 Comments
I've enjoyed reading your journal! Sounds like you work from home. I do too. My husband is more of an early-morning guy so he walks our dog in the morning and I walk him in the afternoon... when lately it has been close to 100 degrees. You're right about the connection between healthy foods and activity and a healthy mind. I feel improvements all around even after just a few weeks.
22 Jul 10 by member: cocobutt
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Thank you. I am a domestic engineer. ; ) My "work" is volunteer projects. You are right, I do the work from home. My current project is a website for our local Moose Lodge. It has been a lot of work, but also way fun! I am using a lot of things that I haven't done before so it has been a challenging learning experience also. I am pretty much a morning person. It gets so hot here that I have learned to get up and get things done first thing. I love my morning walks, it is the best time of the day. I like to be done with everything that needs done outside by 10 am. Then I can finish up what needs done in the house in air conditioning. I use my morning walk as a warmup for my elliptical. I am using the elliptical twice a day, once sometime in the morning and once in the evening with the morning routine longer and more intense. LOVE your nick by the way!
22 Jul 10 by member: datadoll
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I agree with coco, I like your journals and your writing in general :) You and I seem to be very much on the same page. I believe the body and mind are not two separate entities but one and the same. It is quite clear to me that our moods and emotions are very much tied to our physical bodies. Though I have never been diagnosed with depression, I feel I was indeed mildly depressed before I made my change. It still amazes me that I never realized it wasn't normal to sleep over 12 hours at a time and spend entire days in bed hiding from the world. What amazes me more is that these episodes were almost immediately alleviated by regular exercise and healthful eating! I used to have days where I just couldn't stop crying. I don't have those anymore. Sometimes it is very good to look back at where you have been to fully appreciate where you are. I used to feel like "I" was trapped in the shell of my physical body. Now I feel like "I" am my physical body :) The brain is another organ, affected by what we eat and do just as much as our lungs and our hearts.
22 Jul 10 by member: k8yk
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Thanks K8! I consider that a great complement coming from someone I consider to be a great writer! You are so articulate and you always know how to get to the meat of things. What you just described sounds like a serious depression to me. Congratulations on being able to pull yourself up to the level you have reached. I certainly believe you are going to stay on top. I have seen amazing results as far as mood elevaton from my new eating plan and level of activity. On May 11 when I started working on this I was a 3 on a scale of 1-10, 1 being low. I stayed at a 3 for a full week and then my mood began to elevate rapidly and fluctuated between a 6 and a 7 for a couple of weeks. I hit an 8 within a month and I am holding steady there. Looking back the first elevation was one week after diet change and I leveled off at an 8 about a week after my activity became more of a constant and at a nice level of time and intensity. Thanks. I hadn't gone back to analyze it. I think I will encourage people who are starting to track their food comsumption along with their energy output to include mood tracking. I would love to see how many people find the same correlation. Actually, I have a very nice spreadsheet to do it in. Maybe I should publish the template.
22 Jul 10 by member: datadoll
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