Listening to my body.....

Insert foot in mouth. I see this starting to be a theme for me during this journey. There are multiple things that I am doing that Ive totally picked on someone for doing before. I like to tease, roll my eyes and goof around about stuff...especially "health nut" stuff.

see, we're goofy :)

One that stands out to me is when one of my friends had a headache or pain of some kind and when I asked "why don't you just take some Tylenol?" they said "I'm listening to my body."  I remember thinking "oh gosh here we go..... just take a pain killer and get it over with!" She explained that she didn't want to just kill the pain because she wanted to figure out what was causing the pain rather then just keep taking medicine to mask it. She's learned things about her body this way and was able to fix the source many times. It made sense but still seemed like the much harder way of doing things.

I guess I've been a bit impatient at times and not willing to take the time to "listen to my body". But, during this journey I have learned this is exactly what I need to do! Like with most things in life... the longer road and the one that needs patience and endurance is usually best and most rewarding.

Two examples of this...

1. Listing to my tummy. The fact that I've pulled back on almost all fast food has allowed me to actually feel when my body likes or doesn't like something. I can eat a certain food now and almost instantly know I'm sensitive to it and I might need to cut back on that a bit or a lot. I'm learning! I'm listening to my body and what makes it function best. Its kinda neat what you can notice when your gut isn't constantly lined with processed food!

2. Listening to my body. As I mentioned before I deal with restless leg syndrome(RLS).... it started getting very aggressive, strangely aggressive. Its not uncommon that it keeps me up for 2 hours or so when its bad but it recently was keeping me up 4-6 hours after I got in bed. That is quite frustrating and exhausting to deal with. I knew there had to be something agitating it which caused me to start adjusting my supplements. With a bit of patience and adjusting my supplement time frames I figured out that the Tyrosine was it! Once I took it in the morning and stopped taking the afternoon dose I found my RLS was much more mild! Hooray! I listened!

Learning patience is icing on this healthy journey's cake! Oh and I better be careful because Im already drinking dandelion root drink so all my "health nut" teasing might be coming to an end soon. Stink, it was kinda fun.

-Kristin