About 6 months ago I tried to do the intermittent fasting and failed. I just watched a program about Keto and intermittent fasting by Eric Berg “The New Body Type” and it is getting my attention. This program went straight into facts and didn’t spend an hour selling.

The reason I found it is because the benefits of lemon water showed up on my YouTube feed. I watched his program on drinking lemon water because it has been a daily habit for almost 10 years and I have taken it with me everywhere I have traveled.

Anyway, I was interested in the facts and it sounds like there are many benefits  for example, keeping the liver happy? I should watch it again and take notes.

Thinking about eating the salad for breakfast makes me think I was probably more energetic when I started my day with my plate of salad and boiled eggs. The reason I quit probably has much to do with Dad dying and the traveling to the West Coast twice this last two months. There is nothing like 8000 miles driving that will  mess up a person’s eating habits.

It might be a good thing to return  to eating salad for breakfast and see how it fills me with energy. I will check out this keto thing and see how I can fit it into my life.

If nothing else I do know that drinking my lemon water every day is a very Good thing and I will continue to use it every day, it is a good thing that I truly enjoy lemons!

God Bless you this very day. Amen!

Being truthful God reminded me today I started cutting back on my salad breakfast because it is so much easier to just fry eggs and have a piece of toast. Eating the more healthy way takes more work but I feel better and have more energy so the goal is to keep working at getting better each day.

God is so Very Good!

My whole life I have been skinny and didn’t understand as I gained weight. In my thirties my weight rose to 130 pounds and I told myself it was good because my body worked better!

My weight continued to rise another 10 pounds each of the next two decades. I wanted to do something, but what could I do? Exercising most days didn’t seem to do much. My real problem comes from weakness due to scoliosis, and the need to eat food for energy to function.

January 2011, God gave me 5 new vertebrae and started to grow nerves cut in 1976 during scoliosis surgery. 

I started to be able to run 5 days every week.

It took food to give me energy to be able to run. I added another 10 pounds, bringing me to my high weight of 160 on my 5’4″ and shrinking frame. Some of it was muscle but my face showed something different.

Over the next few years of running, I grew stronger and gained confidence! Two different years, I notice the shorts I was buying were two inches smaller from the previous year.  The last thing I heard before life took a turn was my daughter say, “You are very skinny!”

The next three years we drove 5,000 mile many times a year to visit family as Mom died and moved Dad out of the house. My real problem came when Bart, my husband of 36 years started to have difficulty walking and keeping his balance. This lead to neck surgery to save his spinal cord. Two years later he is still recovering and getting stronger. The first year after his surgery, he could do nothing! It took everything I had to keep life going, and I had nothing left to keep me strong. Then COVID hit!

So now after a year of stress and the covid fears I find myself struggling to fit into my clothes. I try running. It helps, but I can’t do it regularly yet. My weight goes down for a few days, but I can’t yet keep going and my weight goes back up.  Getting busy with cleaning and yard work is good, but my body isn’t as strong as it was, and it gives out.

Two days ago Bart read something in Readers Digest about intermittent fasting. There were a couple ideas: one was fast two days a week; I have fasted for 24 hours many times, I loose weight, but food gets thrown out. The other idea is to eat everything in six hours.

Hope has arrived. I have tried the eating everything in six hours for two days. I am pleased to find my weight lower than I have seen for months. It is hard to eat all I want in 6 hours. Bart believes he is seeing more energy in me and I have less pain today. I guess it will be a wait and see. I will keep you posted.

God Bless you all with The Peace only Jesus can give. Amen.

Suffering sciatic pain for over a year I searched for relief. My doctor said, “The sciatic nerve is wrapped in a muscle, when one is swollen it inflames the other becoming a vicious cycle.”

Finding a solution became my goal: the medicine from the doctor did nothing, and stretches only helped for the moment. I looked into everything to gain knowledge and understanding. I saw an ad for free Outback pain relief on Facebook. I decided to try it because it has tea tree, and eucalyptus oil, healing from nature.

Applying it just above my hip joint, the pain was gone in just over a week.

Since it worked so well, I tried it on muscles pain from scoliosis, surgery, and nerve damage. Lately I have found numbness in my knee, the doctor said, ” the numbness is from kneeling.”

I use Outback Pain relief daily, to keep the numbness away!

 

Learning to live my life better!

 

Some of my earliest memories of the sunrise are weekends at Grandma B’s farmhouse in the summer.  She would wake me each morning to stand at the edge of the field, and watch the sun come up and puts words of being a princess in my head. In a dress with a white sweater, she would hold me tight, keeping away the morning chill, standing together, filled with love, watching the sun rise.

A few years later we are living on Grandma W’s farm. This Grandma didn’t rise to watch the sun, but to work the farm. Each morning I would wake with the sunshine peaking in my window, and the sound of Grandma making breakfast was traveling up the stairs, to my ears.  Crawling out of bed, I tip toe down the stairs quietly, allowing my sister to continue sleeping. Grandma reacts with surprise and joy when she sees me enter the dining room and greets me with a hug! I see the sun pouring in the windows, casting a beautiful glow in the dining room that is only seen in the early morning summer sun. Grandpa is out milking the cows before I wake up; but he makes it back to the kitchen before breakfast carrying a pail of fresh milk for Grandma: to be strained, skimmed, and chilled. Each morning we poured the fresh cream on our cereal and berries, what a treat.

During the years my daughter is a toddler, I am pleased to find she is not a morning person. She joins my husband wanting to sleep in giving me the ability to get up and spend some quiet time with God before the day gets busy. This works well all the days of my life, until year 50!

To have the morning change so drastically, my evening also needed to change! All my life, bedtime has been around 10 in the evening.  I am very thankful for my friends during sleepovers; they moaned and complained, but didn’t prank me when I fell asleep, long before they did.

The days my daughter is young, I am often tempted to go to bed just after 8 pm! The very last year I go to bed before midnight, I have an online Hebrew class; it ends at 10 PM, pushing me to stay awake until it ends. The very next year I have a Hebrew class in the morning and I struggle to pull myself out of bed and be awake up for it.

Something switches around the time I turned 50: sleep starts coming in the early morning with the sun rising! It is such a strange thought to feel awake and alert and look at the clock to see it is midnight! It messes with my head! This change shows up when I wake up, wide awake after sleeping in bed for 2-3 hours. I start to be awake for hours in bed.  At first it bothers me and I stress about how little sleep I am going to get because 5 am is approaching. I pray and take medication to sleep, but stay awake. I turn on a cd or podcasts to keep my mind positive and learn, while I wait to fall back asleep.

Before the change, in my 40’s I am so weak (from scoliosis and accident damage) I nap 1-3 hours in the afternoon after the 8-10 hours of sleep at night. Turning 50, Menopause has something to do with my sleep changing, but also the healing and strength God is providing has a great deal to do with it.

WISDOM ARRIVED!  I lay down (not in bed) if I am tired, resting my back for scoliosis.  Going to bed before midnight, no longer works. I learned Peace and how to enjoy my time awake in bed. Stress and worry make everything worse; if I am not sleeping, I trust God to carry me through my day.

 

 

Yesterday, was a day I enjoyed; I acted almost like a normal person!

I played Frisbee with the dogs, AND started a fire in the fireplace which means hauling logs, AND vacuuming,  AND putting together a Christmas angel AND finishing the outdoor Christmas lights AND I noticed the stems from all the Hosta plants that needed to be cut,(it was very hard on my back all the bending over it probably took on hour to clip them),  AND I walked with Bart, AND I went to the grocery store, AND made dinner, AND I boned the turkey from thanksgiving, AND washed the week’s dishes that had built up; midnight I finally took time to pray and read my Bible.

NOTICE THE AND’S IN THE FIRST PARAGRAPH AND NEAR THE BOTTOM THE OR’S! This is the difference between before my healing and after my healing which is still continuing. Before my healing I could do ONE THING; after my healing I am able to string many projects together in one day!

One important thing happened yesterday which gave me great understanding; after I went to bed my back became very hot; for the first time in my life I followed the heat to where it quit being hot; it split hot and cold with a horizontal line crossing my tailbone.  What it told me was I still have a huge area without enough nerves to regulate my core body temperature.

How many people do you know that build up so much heat from sweeping and moping a floor they need to take clothes off; if I have company I put on shorts but if I am home alone off come the pants and I fold the shirt up to let the heat out from my midriff. When I sit, I get cold. I am noticing as I spend hours typing and reading and changing my story; my sweater goes on and off: IT IS WORK!

Today is a day of rest; the kind of rest that makes me sleep sound. I get frustrated because most days I am able to do so much but days like today my body says enough!  December 3, 2016, this was a day I slept until noon; when I woke up it was hard to put one foot in-front of the other to walk. I brought the dogs outside to play Frisbee and made breakfast. It wasn’t long after I ate breakfast that I had to lay down and take a nap; I slept until 5:30 PM. It is still much better that before my healing;  during a visit from our parents 10 years ago, I was so worn out from sitting at a table and playing cards for hours;  that I slept the whole next day waking only to eat 3 times during the day; I was able to sleep the whole next night also.

Today when I woke  from my nap, I was so weak I needed a quick snack to get my body moving, cottage cheese and a granola bar, energy! This gave my brain food for thinking, and my body energy to move to making dinner.  At the end of this day, God has blessed me with the ability to sit at the computer and type; sitting up at a computer and at a dinner table uses my muscles in a way that takes great strength. God is Very Good!

At 14 years old doctors put a 18 inch Harrington rod connected to my spine to stop my spine from curving further; when the doctors first diagnosed me they saw that I had double curves, both 35 degrees; within 2 years the curves had grown to 65 degrees while wearing a Milwaukee brace (in the picture you can see the metal of the brace is around my neck).  Surgery was the only thing they could offer to stop my spine from continuing to curve. The surgery took the two 65 degree curves and straightened  them to two 35 degree curves; it left me with a 16 inches of  a scar and back muscles  that lost communication with my spine, the nerves were cut.  (this is a picture of me in my cast that went from my neck to my groin) I do see my lower jaw thrusting forward; I still do that today, it is a way my body compensates when I look down to keep my airway open to be able to breathe freely.

I remember the first winter after my surgery my family was visiting relatives who lived on a hilly part of the Minnesota country side; while walking those hills my thighs went numb, it was a bit scary: those nerves must have repaired themselves because the feeling only lasted a few years. Sometimes, strange things happen when nerves reconnect, they sometimes get crossed with another nerve: many days I have had an itch and had to hunt for the spot to scratch, because the place that itched wasn’t the spot that needed to be scratched.

My back ended up with large areas of deadness; you could stick me with a knife and I would not feel it. There were also areas that were so hyper sensitive that at one doctor visit while he was checking my nerves with electricity I almost gave the doctor a heart attack; he touched the area of sensitivity, I jumped with a  scream so loud the doctor RAN out of the room. After a few minutes, he came back into the room shaken and filled with fear, asking if he had damaged my spine.

What I didn’t know at age 14 and I have found out at age 50; if the nerves don’t reconnect to the muscles, the muscles atrophy!

Every year at my yearly doctor visit , my doctor would notice my lack of back muscles as she checked my breathing and heart; she would say, “You need to do core exercises.”

I would think to myself, “my stomach muscles are strong, they are what holds me up!”

At 49 years old, I asked my doctor, “Can atrophied muscles get stronger?”

She said, ” If they have nerves connected to them.”

I then asked God, “Could you give me nerves connected to my muscles so they can get stronger?”

God Did: One evening, during the winter of 2011-12 I remember getting up from the couch, walking into the kitchen and feeling parts of my back that I had not felt since 1976; it was the craziest feeling!

The year God started to work on my nerves and I started running, my doctor FOUND MUSCLES in my back! After a year or two of getting stronger I mentioned to my doctor that she used to tell me I needed to exercise my core muscles; she remembered and was shocked at my transformation! I told her it was ALL GOD! I hadn’t changed anything I did before, I was able gain strength and DO MORE! I do remember the first time in my life I had strength added: I lifted heavy snow for hours then I went to teach children at church I noticed an amazing feeling: I WAS STRONGER instead of weaker!!!

The way I started to run Looked like this: run the block, while tightening all my core muscles because every step hurt; I walked the street and again I would run holding tight every muscle until I got to the next street. By the 3rd – 4th street I was able to run without as much pain.  At the end of the street I huffed and puffed and huffed and puffed and huffed and puffed, when I was ready I ran home in the same manner! The miracle: when I had the desire to run the next day I was able to do it all over again!  I started to run 5 days a week. Realize my almost mile took a good 20-25 minutes to run! Bart found a 5K to run 9 months after I started running.

What I have learned, it takes back muscles to lift your legs and arms past a certain point. Sometime after I turned 40 I starting to limp on my Right leg; previously I had limped for 20 years on my Left leg because of my accident; I didn’t understand why it switched: it didn’t make sense to me.  I now understand, My Right back muscles were very weak and getting weaker; when I was tired my back muscle could no longer lift my leg, it gave me a big limp: I used walls, counter tops and my family as a cane. During days I was well rested I could dig in my garden, OR weed, OR clean house, OR walk 2 miles, maybe even run a block, OR clean some house, OR go to the store, OR do something that needed to get done: then I would rest for 3-5 days depending on how hard I had pushed myself!

When my body was very weak; what I was able to do was sit on the couch, lay my head against the back of the couch, and watch tv. There were days I couldn’t walk up the stairs to help my daughter or to check on her. When I took my daughter to the store to buy clothes I often sat on the cement floor and let her look, because I just couldn’t stand up any longer. If we went to the grocery store and I remembered something while waiting in line; I had to send my daughter because I couldn’t walk anymore.

God does His Work at the Perfect timing; when I received my miracle, I was so far bent over that it was hard to hold my body up; my butt muscles were working overtime! My body cannot bend at my waist, all forward leaning is from my hips. I was beginning to think I needed a cane; Bart thought I needed a walker; my mom thought I needed a wheel chair: BUT GOD HAD OTHER IDEAS!!!! I finished the race!