How to Deal with Stress  3/20/18

   Not all stress is bad, actually some stress is necessary to help you be excited and active in the world.  The stress a performer feels before a show can help someone do their best in training and performing. You will always have some stress if you’re alive. However too much chronic stress that never goes away and interferes with daily quality living, needs to be investigated.  Sometimes what bothers us wouldn’t bother someone else, so it mainly comes from our internal reaction to something external.  Sometimes it’s our faulty or distorted thinking that causes it.  However until we are able to change our perspective and grow beyond old habits of thinking and reacting, there are things we can do to make life a little easier.

    I encourage you to keep a daily journal, writing is a more sophisticated and in depth thinking process.  It gets abstract thoughts and feelings out of your head and down to a more concrete level you can look at what happening and deal with it.  In your journaling, you will look at what’s bothering you and come up with a plan using the four “A’s” below.

Four “A’s” of Stress Management (Avoid, Alter, Adapt and Accept)

1.        AVOID

Learn to say “NO”.  Learn where your limits are.  Taking on too much is a surefire way to create stress that will backfire.

Avoid or limit people who stress you out.  Choose your friends and people you interact with wisely. 

Take control of your environment.  If the news and social media are too negative and stress you out, don’t go there.  If traffic bothers you, plan to go at an off time of day.  If your phone rings too much, get a voice recorder and only check it once in a while when it’s convenient for you.

Pare down your to-do list.  We always think we can get more things done than is realistic.

2.        ALTER

Express your feelings, don’t bottle them up.  Journaling is good for this as well as talking to someone (friend, clergy, therapist, etc).  If someone is causing the problem, address it immediately but respectfully.  Let your emotions cool before you talk, but don’t keep it in and let resentment build.

Be ready to compromise.  Give a little and try to meet someone in the middle. 

Create a daily BALANCED SCHEDULE with time for yourself in it.

3.       ADAPT

Learn to look at some stress in a more positive light.  Driving in heavy traffic can be time to listen to podcasts or new songs or a favorite radio station.  A heavier workload mean could mean you are very qualified at what you do and people come to you.

Look at the big picture.  Is this event or situation going to be remembered or even important in a month or a year?  Is it worth getting this upset?

Adjust your standards.  PERFECTIONISM is a major cause of stress.  Set reasonable standards and learn to be okay with good enough.  All humans make mistakes.  If you don’t make any mistakes you aren’t doing anything.

Practice daily gratitude.  Learn to appreciate your positive qualities, good people in your life, riches you have and your own gifts.

4.       ACCEPT

Don’t try to control events or people you cannot change.  However, you can control your reaction to it.

Look at the positive side of the issue.  You are learning life’s lessons here.  If you have made poor choices, learn from your mistakes and move on.

Learn to FORGIVE.  Forgiveness is not to justify what happened but more so that you can move on.  People are unaware and imperfect.  Don’t take it sooo personal.

Share your feelings, journal, talk to someone.  Most of all, come up with a plan to change the things you can.

OTHER STRESS MANAGEMENT TOOLS

Rhythmic Exercise -  Dance, running, walking, etc., the body releases feel good hormones.  MOTION helps EMOTION.

Carve out “ME” time every day.  Time for exercise, a walk in nature, time to do something you enjoy, wind down time.

Eat HEALTHY – A good diet helps you have more energy to deal with things.

Get enough quality SLEEP.  Try gentle stretching before going to bed.  Read something relaxing or meditate.

Cut down on the CAFFEINE, SUGAR and CARBS.  Also cigarettes and alcohol all of these interfere with good sleep and your body’s energy levels.

MEDITATE – Do a ten to fifteen minute easy relaxing meditation each day.  This allows the thoughts to come and go, like clouds across a sky.  It allows the brain to process and digest and is very calming to the body and blood pressure.  Over time meditation can increase awareness, how you think and react and is great for dealing with stress, anxiety and depression.

Writing in Your Daily Journal

1.       Write down the incident or problem that’s stressing you out.  Read through the (4) A’s and write down some solutions that might help remedy or resolve the issue. 

a.       If this is something you can change, write down some solutions to avoid or alter the external stressor?

 

b.      If this is something you cannot change, write down some solutions for you to adapt or accept?

2.       Revisit the problem and solutions.  After journaling, maybe take a walk in nature and think about the situation and solutions, or talk to a friend or therapist, think over your solutions.  Maybe the incident will resolve itself, maybe you’ll decide you didn’t handle it well or it wasn’t that big a deal.  The key here is to calm down the emotions and look at the problem again from a different perspective.

3.       Implement your solutions and see what happens.  If it’s not effective you may need to think of other solutions. 

How Songs Grab and Keep a Listener’s Attention  3/17/18

What gets a listener’s initial attention and keeps it? 

1.       Catchy Song Titles

2.       First lines that are catchy, contemplative, asks a Question, makes a strong statement, something that stands out.

3.       Shows instead of tells (like describing a video)

4.       Great imagery

5.       Interesting story lines

6.       Uses a lot of stronger active verbs (notice the word grab above)

7.       Not too preachy

8.       Not too sad or depressing

9.       Not too long or wordy  (no epic Dylan songs)

10.   Universal meaning or general audience can relate (don’t make it too personal)

11.   Unique or unusual topic or lines (don’t get too abstract)

12.   Uses metaphor and similes sparingly to add interest

Next the question is how can you write this way?  Are some people just more talented and creative when they talk or write?  Can you learn to write more creatively?  The answers are yes and yes.   While some people just seem to be born more creative or are naturally funny, practice and training go a long way also.  You have to have the desire and persistence to get better at anything.   

1.        Keep a song title list and everyday search for interesting titles.  Song titles generally aren’t copyrighted, so you may find several songs using the same title. 

2.       Write a lot of songs and write bad songs, but always go back and rewrite lines to make them more interesting.  Think about how can I say this better.  How can I be more interesting with this line.  How can I show by adding more action and imagery, turn this into a metaphor or simile, etc.  You have to start thinking this way, not just going with the first thing that pops out of your head.  Some people think songs are special gifts from God and rain down on a privileged few talented people and that they come totally perfect and are not to be messed with.  Wrong, this way of thinking is a lot of pig headed ego. 

1.       Practice being creative every day in some way.  The days you don’t write a song still spend some time writing and doing something related.  Search for titles, topics, concepts, catchy phrases, interesting photos on the internet in books, movies, photos, interesting web-sites, etc.  Out in public look for interesting things people do and say.  Train you mind to always be looking for interesting ideas and write them down somewhere.  Spend some days just free writing about something on your titles or idea list. 

4.       Have a way to keep organized where you can find your stuff.  I like programs like One Note or Evernote and Microsoft Word and set up folders to find ideas I accumulate.

5.       Practice object, simile and metaphor writing frequently.  It will help you to be able to incorporate more imagery into your lines.

6.       Learn to write lines that make sense and are clear to the listener.  I heard a quote that says “Just because you write material that is vague, abstract and no one but you understands it, doesn’t make you an artist”.  If the listener has to ponder or try to figure out what you are saying, they will move on to something else.  Do not write something so personal it only relates to you or only you would know what you’re talking about.  Do not write something that is so flowery or abstract it could be poetry.  Do not write lines just to try to force a rhyme.  Do not use too many similes or metaphors in your song, a little goes a long way.  Do not write songs that are too dark, depressing or preachy.  Most people do not like being told what to do and they want some kind of a lift or understanding with their daily life and problems, not more negativity.  You can write these kinds of songs if you make it humorous or in some way you have an uplift to the story.  Finally, don’t let your song get too long or wordy.  Three to four minutes is enough.  Gone are the days of the long jam sessions or the Dylan epic story songs.  Get in, get out and leave ‘em wanting more.

7.       Realize becoming the songwriter you want to be takes time, a lot of time, could be ten years or more.  Do you really like it enough to stick with it?  What are you going to do with all the songs your write?  You could reach out and maybe you’ll be lucky and find a musician or band that really likes what you write and wants to create original music.  Your songs could end up on an album and go somewhere, maybe?  You could be the Emily Dickinson type and leave catalogs of songs in your Estate and become famous post mortum.  You could make your own home recordings or have a SoundCloud, Bandcamp or YouTube channel where you can try to get a fan following.  If you’re young you could move to a big city and co-write and hope to make your break.  You could join a band and go out on the road touring and writing music for the group. Songwriting is a lot like anything else in life, maybe it’s just a hobby and it’ll go nowhere. But if you enjoy it, then that’s okay.  Better to be songwriting than bored or depressed.

How to Learn Anything Quickly and Easier  - 3/14/18

I came across a podcast by Josh Kaufmann on some of this material, the rest is from my lifetime of classes and learning new things.  It is so much harder to learn new things when you are older, so I was particularly interested in Mr. Kaufmann’s material which I believe is called You Can Learn Anything in About Twenty Hours.  He has about five steps in his talk and I’ll incorporate those in mine.  He talked about the book “10,000” Hours and that’s fine if you want to master something, like if you want to become a virtuoso on an instrument.  But for most of us, we just want to be able to do something halfway well, enough to enjoy what we’re doing.  So, if you want to learn something new and challenging, first ask yourself these questions.

1.   1.  Why do you want to learn this particular subject?  Are you willing and interested enough to do what’s necessary to learn it? 

2.      2. You  need to breakdown your learning into specific sub-sets of only what’s useful learning and start small.

3.     3.  You need to be willing to accept the initial frustration level.  Everyone sucks in the beginning of learning something new.  There will be a certain amount of time before you like anything you are doing.

4.      4. Make learning this one thing very convenient and workable into your schedule.

5.     5.  Practice only this one small thing for 20 hours, breaking it down daily into (2) twenty minutes sets early morning and later for 30 days.  The best practice time is within two hours of waking up or from a nap or quiet time.  Scientific research shows your brain easily builds new neurons within that time period.

6.     6.  Use simulation and all your different sensual methods of learning.  There have been scientific studies on different types of learners and retention rates and the best was using all methods visual, auditory and kinesthetic.  That means you need to read it, see it, hear it and then manually do it.  Simulation means you practice it in your head mentally and visually and later back it up with physically doing it.

So let’s take a couple of examples and work through the process.  Let’s say I want to learn a musical instrument.  First, I would ask myself why do I want to learn to play this instrument.

Do I want to play music with others, or play out at open mics or other events, do I just want to play for my own enjoyment?  Am I really willing to set down for twenty minutes two times a day to learn this?  Many of us hear someone else play and think it’s so cool, but when faced with the hard work of actually being able to do it half decent then that’s a different story.

So, let’s say you answer an enthusiastic “yes” to the first question.  Then let’s decide where to start.  If you are totally new to music you’re going to have to start with basics of notes, scales, rhythm, usually all the boring stuff.  Or, you could start with learning just an easy song and forget all the other basic stuff.  That would definitely be much more fun.  Or, if you already know music and another instrument you could just focus on one aspect of an instrument like finger picking on a guitar.  Only study what you need to do that one thing.

Accept that it’s going to be somewhat frustrating and maybe even boring when you start.  It happens to everyone.

Make it convenient to learn.  Keep your musical instrument close where you can grab it twice a day.  Carve out a time in your schedule where you won’t be interrupted and you can focus.  Maybe find an online teacher or a site that shows you how to play this song and you have your laptop at your fingertips.

Practice just that one thing for a month, two twenty minute sessions a day, first one early in the day upon awakening.  Maybe do a short meditation before the later practice session.

Make sure you use all your senses when learning, including simulation followed up by actual manual practice.

Another example would be learning another language, maybe Spanish.  Why do you want to do this?  You want to talk to the people at your favorite Mexican restaurant.  You want to be able to order in Spanish and carry on some conversation.

You don’t need to learn all the words, variations and grammar of the language.  You just need to learn conversational Spanish and more specifically what you would need to order at a restaurant and speak generally.  Hello, Goodbye, Thank you, How are you today, etc.

Are you willing to practice every day, maybe find a tutorial online.  Go to the restaurant more and engage with speaking there more.  Maybe befriend a Spanish speaking person to hang out with sometimes and speak only Spanish. 

The Storm Before The Calm   3/14/18

In my life it has always seemed that just when I make up my mind to master a personal change, as they say more “shit” hits the fan.  I chose a difficult career and occupation at least for about four months of each year.  The rest of my year, work is not too bad, but from February through May it’s a bear.  I am a tax accountant and it’s a job where a tsunami of work arrives with a deadline and lots of rules and regulations that change at the last minute or when you don’t know it or have the time to learn it.  A job that deals with people’s monies and potential penalties, a job where people of course want to pay the lowest amount of tax and agencies trying to squeeze every penny out of their constituents.  It’s a job with a lot of pressure, when you have to be focused, very accurate and you have to get a lot done in a little bit of time.  You get tired, things slip through the cracks and sometimes you make mistakes and screw up and there’s the stress of that, especially when people have to pay more money and there’s penalties.  At that time, I hate my job.  I beat myself up, how did I screw up.  It’s what I call “tax season hell”.

So last year I had six months or so of being successful with my healthy eating diet and losing a fair amount of weight.  I thought I had locked in my new habits of eating enough to withstand tax season stress and my usual go to relieve stress of alcohol and sweets.  Wrong, a lifetime of that kind of go to doesn’t change with six months of a good diet.  And so I’m not only beating myself up for things that go wrong during my work day, I’m beating myself up for failing on my eating plan and starting to gain some weight again.

I had realized a month ago that I had not dealt with my negative emotions when I had done my diet and I had started on a personal development plan to change and help me manage my stress levels better. But it’s kind of hard to change horses in mid-stream as they say.  In the middle of tax season, it seems hard to start a personal development change plan, but maybe that’s exactly when it should start.  I fail but I see what’s happening.  So right now it seems things have gotten worse and the only positive is the awareness I have developed of my internal dialogue and  over reacting to events that happen.  I guess that’s a positive and maybe when my stress calms down in a month or so I can work the rest of this year on my negative emotions and get back on the healthy eating plan.   And I will get tested again and again, maybe next year I will handle things better.

My husband says I’m way better than when I was younger and more unaware as my bad moods back then went on for weeks and months.  It’s hard for me to remember exactly how I used to be, but I vaguely do.  Now many times I catch myself being in a bad mood but not wanting to bring that to my family and I don’t.  I also see myself sometimes starting to worry about a disease and I’m able to stop it and I say to myself you know you usually over react. 

I was reading on the Personal Development site, neprov.com, that many times the struggle intensifies as the change starts happening.  I am seeing things more clearly than ever.  Sometimes now when I start being a hypochondriac, I maybe don’t even really care so much about a disease or death.  I think, oh well maybe it’s not so bad to be out of here I wouldn’t be dealing with this or that anymore.  I also see some negative things I used to want to do and now I don’t enjoy it anymore.  I think tonight I would like to watch the news and I turn it on and then everyone starts yelling and being negative and I turn it off.  Or, I go on Facebook and I see nobody’s really doing much of anything interesting or productive.  They just post silly comments or pictures of ordinary lives, nothing intellectual or spectacular or that interesting.  I used to like to see what the belly dance community was doing as that seems like a lot of fun.  I will see a video of a belly dancer in a restaurant and she’s dancing away and hardly anyone is watching.  The dance and her costume may be pretty but gets boring and monotonous very quickly.  Then I listen to music people have created or lyrics they have written, again a few good ones but mostly fairly amateur.  But maybe all this is just a reflection of my mind and now at a different space and level than your every day Jane.

I read about Buddha yesterday, very interesting a person who had everything in this world.  Wealth, fame, the best food, clothing, he wanted for nothing and was in line to be the next Emperor.  At a certain age I believe he was in his twenties he saw the suffering in the world and realized even he wasn’t happy with everything he had.  The material things and even people you have or acquire in this world does not make you happy.  We see this so many times when musicians or Hollywood people become rich and famous and they slowly kill themselves with alcohol and drugs.  They have finally made it and they have everything, but they are miserable.  The external world does not make you happy.

So what makes you have a happy, peaceful, contented life?  The internal work has to be done, you have to deal with your deficiencies and negative emotions.  Unhappiness comes from our reactions within, not from what happens outside ourselves.  It’s not easy, it’s a lot of work but it has to be done or things remain the same.  We were not born to be the way we are and we are not locked in our personalities.  It’s not because we are a virgo that we act the way we do. 

I can see that changes are starting to happen from things that were seeped in negativity that I no longer enjoy doing (watching the evening news).  I can see things about my own internal negative reactions that must change.  It’s starting to happen, but right now it seems worse because I see it more clearly.

I’m in the storm before the calm.

Life is For Learning  3/11/18

Just when we think I think I have things under control, my life falls apart.  For once in my life I had been successful in losing a fair amount of weight and staying on a good healthy eating plan for over six months.  This was a huge improvement from my past where two weeks was about the longest I could stay on a so called diet.

Chinese Taoism philosophy says it takes 120 days to establish a new habit, so I was much encouraged that after six months I was firmly rooted in my new healthy eating habits, enough to maintain during my annual few months of intense work stress.   The testing is always surprising as to how much work still needs to be done.  So this year when the work stress had intensified I found myself falling off the wagon, eating sweets, cheese and drinking alcohol to cope and maintain.  All my go to triggers, which cause weight gain and inflammation in my body.  And they don’t really solve anything, it’s just a crazy kind of coping.  I was not the cool, calm and collected person I had wanted to be, but upset and stressed out.   Of course, I always want a friend to care but it doesn’t happen.  Fair weather friends, no one’s there when you’re down.  I have to be compassionate even to them as I know they are also struggling and maybe just don’t have the skills either to be helpful.

I had recently came across a blog on personal development as to how to be a happy person.  How to get rid of internal negative emotions such as anger, irritability, self depreciation, etc. I had started working with his plan to increase the peace in my life.  I had started meditating,  journaling, not watching the drama on the news or going on social media sites to hear uninformed people make stupid comments, all which seemed to help somewhat, but did not stop my work stress and freak out.  I slid back into my old habits of a lifetime.

So, in the middle of this strong current I’m trying to reassess and come up with ways to get control of my life, if there is such a thing.  Some of the positive steps I’ve maintained or newly initiated are

1.       I have continued to eat my good healthy foods soups, salads, plain yogurt, fish, etc.

2.       I have continued to walk and do some yoga.

3.       I have continued to journal and write songs almost daily.

4.       I took control of the phone and appointments, so scheduling is working better.

5.       I do have a little office help and am better about getting things out the door.

6.       Just read there shouldn’t be a wagon at all to fall off of as I need to be compassionate with myself and not set hard rules.

Life is learning and doing the best you can at the time without rules.  Priorities change as life changes, so hard rules don’t always work.  We need to be flexible and compassionate with ourselves, especially when we struggle.  Taoism always says a trees needs to be flexible in the wind.  Sometimes we find ourselves in pain and coping the best we know how until we figure out a better way.  We need to be thankful for our learning experience as this is how we grow and become the better person we want to be.  Our struggles make us think and figure things out.  I now feel I need to spend time each day getting more organized and coming up with a way to measure my productivity and keep things moving.  If I can see it visually on paper, then I’ll feel more in control and know it’s all going to work out. 

So life is a process of learning.  Don’t miss it!!  My new song for the day.

“Pain is real, but suffering is optional”, said the Buddha.  3/03/2018

 I’m just starting to understand that quote.

Jordon Peterson, a renowned psychologist from Canada, states that writing is a sophisticated form of deep thinking.  He has an in depth self authoring help project for people to write about their lives in great detail from the age of a toddler up to enable people, especially young people to sort out their lives and be able to move on to happier, successful careers.  As a child things just are and children sort of live in the present from day to day.  Sometimes bad things happen and we see bad things but we don’t know how to sort things out and we don’t dwell on them or process them.  They stay unprocessed and distort our reality from then on.  Mr. Peterson says the brain how to come to terms with things that happened, it has to digest them. If not all our future experiences get distorted by our perception of what happened in the past.  So, all the writing and serious contemplating you do with his program from a toddler and through adult allows you to digest and come to terms with old experiences and to see your current life through a clearer lens.  My son who is 25 wanted to do his program, so I agreed to do it also even though I’m way past a career at age 64.  But I still had plenty of emotional garbage to sort out.

Something happens when you get to a point that you have time to look back and process your life.  As an older woman whose children have grown and now has lost her sex appeal, it’s like losing your identity.  I was never model quality but I was fairly attractive, had a good body and always felt sexually attractive to men.  That gave me a certain identity and also options for my life (to meet the right man, to get promoted at a job, etc.).  Now all that’s gone away and there’s the disappointment, not of what I did or accomplished, but what I didn’t and maybe should have done.  Interests I also realized late in life that I’ll never get the opportunity to do fully experience.

As a young woman there were so many things to decide and choose.  Life was new and hopeful.  What career I would have?  Would I go to college?  Where would I live?  Also, finding the man and having the family.  So I spent my twenties moving around a lot, having various jobs, various relationships and I did finish college.  The thirties and forties were spent being married, raising a family, running a business and a household.  Those years weren’t easy, there was just so much to do and not a lot of time for me or my problems. I had to get up every day and get moving and do all the things I had to do.  I did find some time for talk therapy trying to cope with all those difficulties during those years.  It did offer me some support, venting and coping, but I can’t say it changed me a lot, if at all. 

Around age 45 I finally had a little more free time to start thinking about me and getting involved in the world again.  I fell in love with belly dance and have been dancing for about twenty years now.  At about age 55, I also got back into music (I’ld learned piano as a teenager), this time learning guitar and writing songs.  I took voice lessons and guitar lessons, joined a local songwriting group and immersed myself in the things I wanted to learn.  As much as I enjoyed my new interests, I also experienced a fair amount of frustrations, disappointment and offenses.

Being a high achiever, I expected the new things I wanted to learn to come easy and many times it didn’t. 

I did have the past experience of learning painting as an artist and I did remember how difficult that was in the beginning.  I didn’t like any of my paintings or drawings for about five years, so having that perspective helped me be patient with learning new creative things.  With my songwriting and music I now tell myself, it’s going to be about ten years and I am into year six right now.  Being older, It’s also much harder to remember things and technique, it’s like your hard drive is filled up from a life time of thinking and learning.  Not impossible but harder.

Many teachers are used to teaching young people, so an adult learner is more of a challenge.  We’ve developed bad habits, can’t remember as well, are more demanding, etc. so this presents it’s own problems to a teacher.  We also know bits and pieces of things, but not the whole picture, so some things will be boring and others challenging.  A teacher just can’t start you out playing Mary Had a Little Lamb, but maybe that’s where you need to be.  Usually, I had to try several teachers in dance, voice and guitar until I found one who was fairly flexible and very patient.  Unfortunately, this all took time and resulted in some unpleasant incidents that weren’t handled well. But bottom line it was my money and free time and I was not going to suffer indignities. 

So this blog ties back to my successful weight loss in the previous article “Healthy Makes You a Better Creator – Part I”.  Recently I was slammed at work, under a lot of stress, was constantly being upset, annoyed and angry.  I started back to my bad coping habits of eating sweets and drinking some alcohol to calm down.  I had to admit my coping mechanisms were just temporarily helping.  I would think I felt better just for a few minutes, but then at night, I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t relax.  I was also starting to pack on some weight again after all my hard work for the previous six months.  I had to put the brakes on.  I had to come up with a new strategy.  I had to deal with my negative emotions.  I couldn’t believe I was almost age 65 and I could not control my emotions. I was mentally suffering.

 

Somehow I came across a blog called nperov.com about self-development and it was a godsend.  I knew what I had to do.  I had to get control of my negative emotions.  I wanted to be happy.  I wanted peace in my life more than anything else.  The guy who wrote the blog is Russian and it’s his own experience as he worked through his mental and emotional issues.  Not an overnight quick fix, but a roadmap for a journey to do the internal mental work needed.  As with the diet not everything applied to me so I’ve done some modifications and started on this journey to keep the gains I’ve already made. 

HEALTHY MAKES YOU A BETTER CREATOR – Part 1  3/03/18

Menopause was a hard one for me, sort of an uncomfortable rite of passage consisting of hot flashes, insomnia, weight gain, mood swings, dryness, fatigue, etc.  As much as I had disliked my monthly periods, I almost wished for them back.  My only blessing was I didn’t go through menopause until late, age 56, but now at 63 here I was an older woman and I didn’t like it.  I was irritable, easily angered, stressed out, sluggish, and I didn’t feel well.  Almost every day I had to take an hour nap just to do my job.  Luckily I work at home and could do that.  Also, I had never had a weight problem all my life and here I was struggling with that.

I finally went to a medical doctor a couple years ago, fearing something must be wrong.  Thinking maybe my thyroid wasn’t functioning well?  He was sort of an alternative medical doctor whom I chose as I did not wish to go down the same road, get on drugs for this and that, most people encounter.  I hoped he would be open to me trying to adopt a healthier lifestyle, rather than blood pressure medicine with all the side effects.  He did a lot of medical tests and my blood pressure was border line, thyroid was a little low but not substantial.  So bottom line he didn’t really find anything after spending a couple thousand dollars. 

After that the next year, I found a good acupuncturist and oriental massage clinic that I went to pretty regularly and that helped some with the fatigue and to keep me going.

Then last year the summer of 2017 at age 64, I finally decided to address my creeping weight problem that made me look old and fat.  I found a great diet at Avocadu.com which focused on keeping your insulin low by eating low carb.  The diet doable with a few modifications (I really couldn’t do the all vegetable days)  and it has became my go to way to eat.  I did add some moderate fasting and lost about 27 pounds last year.  I still have a few extra about five pounds to lose.  The diet is a very healthy and delicious, so I don’t even feel like I’m dieting and can stay with this eating plan the rest of my life.  Of course, I will allow myself an occasional indulgence.  I will post my recap of the diet information on the blog. 

The Avocadu diet is a 21 day cycling diet which incorporates a couple days of 24 hour fasts.  I found if I ate a hearty meal with some meat the night before, I could do the 24 hour fasts fairly comfortably.  What I did more frequently and was easier to me was 12 to 18 hour fasts which includes your 8 hours of sleeping.  If your last meal the evening before is around 6:00 pm you can go until lunchtime the next day and you will have an 18 hour fast.  I read a lot about the benefits of fasting, especially Dr. Jason Jung’s research, and it is the best way to quickly deal with an insulin problem.  When your insulin gets and stays too high, your body will easily store fat and not burn it, therefore you get in a cycle of packing on weight and having no energy because your body is not burning the fat. The great thing is my energy returned after being on the diet and I am feeling so much better. I really think I was getting insulin resistance which is sort of like a pre-diabetic state, therefore the fatigue and packing on the weight.  I always do my blood work and even through my sugar was under the limit for healthy, this is my conclusion of what was going on for those years.

The great thing is when you feel better and have much more energy, you are much more creative.