Hello puppies!!
It has become quite apparent that I have “lost weight” in the recent months. I say it like that (“lost weight”) because don’t weight myself very often (couple times/year?), so I don’t have much concept of how much weight I have lost, but my body has definitely changed.
Bodies change over the years. My body used to always fluxuate up and down 10lbs or so, on a pretty regular basis. It really depended on what my lifestyle was like and how much consumption I was doing at the time. It wasn’t until I started competing in yoga competitions that my body started to actually CHANGE…not just FLUXTUATE. Fluxtuattion was really about weight. My weight would go up and down but my body was pretty well the same body all the time. When I started with the competitions is when I started with Raw Food and Veganism as well. It all went hand in hand for me, and my path was set (in stone) for several years…and it was like this new body emerged from underneath the old body.
Jump to the past couple years…I am no longer competing, I had been travelling more than ever, and still struggling to maintain a Raw Food diet…or at very least VEGAN diet…I relaxed about the cooking part. But I began feeling not quite right. In my last post, I wrote how I have been studying MY body for several years on a very serious level through my yoga practice, my teaching of others in a yoga practice as well as being (extremely) mindful of every single bite of food and drink of anything that went into my body. I knew exactly how things were going to feel in my body and then, in turn, knew how everything would treat me in the yoga room.
Not gonna lie, it’s intense. It’s really really intense to think that deeply about every single thing that I ate or drank!! Whoa. For the years that I was competing, for the years that I was so committed to being vegan and raw, it was worth it to me. I was committed to the idea that this was the right thing for me at the time…and if someone is committed to it and believes it, then who are we to say it is wrong? It is through experience that we learn things…and what works at one time might not work forever (again, see last post…long live evolution!).
OK, so again jump to the past few years….I was struggling to stay within the confines of something that I thought I needed. I felt like I was inside of someone else’s body, not my body. Not this body that I had gotten to know so well. The things I was eating and doing and the beliefs I had about food were creating the opposite results that I anticipated. I was gaining weight, I was feeling crappy, tired, low energy…etc. Jump now to a year ago and I went to see a naturopath. Bestest had gone to see her when things were going haywire in her body and everything turned around for her, so for my birthday, she bought me a slew of tests and bloodwork. Happy birthday to me!
I was not unhappy when I was doing all that raw food high maintenance thinking about my consumption every second of the day. (Haha, I make it sound so glamorous!) I enjoyed the time I took with my food. I enjoyed knowing what was in my food, where it came from, preparing it, making it pretty…etc. It was what I did. Just like you play with your kids or go golfing or like to garden…I liked to play with my food. There were definitely times that I didn’t really fit in (being out at restaurants was challenging at times), but I did always try to share my raw creations with my friends and family…so, I just made it work.
Jump back to last year, I got my test results back. Turns out I spent the past several years creating this “perfect” working machine…my bloodwork for food allergies was….wait for it…..ZERO ZIP ZILCH. I have NO food allergies! Aye, here’s the rub…My adrenal glands were totally fucked up. Adrenal glands control your output of adreniline (flight or flight hormone) and cortisol (helps with blood sugar, immune system, metabolism and overall stress management). I was getting a hit of energy at about 6am and then again in the late afternoon. My body was out of whack, not sleeping, not able to handle the food I was bringing in and craving other things to try to balance it out. The stress on my body of my weird taxed adrenal glands was causing all the things I was experiencing…creating this body that was (seeming, at the time) out of my control…making me think that so many foods were bad for me and that I had such sensitivities. Ha! I spent several years thinking I couldn’t eat so many things and it turns out it’s completely the opposite!!
So, to make a long year of what I ate in my life story short, the catalysts were eating fish and garlic bread in Mexico in May, and then eating my way through Europe in September! Ever since then, I have been eating pretty well anything I like.
And my body has changed.
So…this am after class a couple women mentioned how I have lost weight and asked me what I had been doing. I said that I started taking a supplement at the beginning of last year because my adrenal glands were over worked and from there everything fell into place. The more I thought about it over the day I realised that it’s not fair to say it was just the supplement. It was the supplement that was the catalyst for my adrenal glands to start to function properly…which gave me more mental clarity, more energy, more oomph and more mental and physical gusto! From there I began making choices that fed my soul, not just what I thought my physical body needed.
Now I only eat what tastes delicious. I don’t eat something just because I think I need to.
That’s my not so secret, secret. Feed your soul with your life, yogis!! Food, yoga, family, friends, laughter, music, hiking, biking, walking, pets, kids….you get the idea. FILL YOUR BUCKET with every thing you do.
Love you, go eat something good!
~Ida xx
Ida Ripley 