So, on Friday I talked about my journey into the Discipline of Discomfort and my desire to push through the uncomfortable barriers in my life that are keeping me stuck.

Now, if you’re like me, and a bit of a “Type A” personality combined with ADD you will have a list a mile long of things that need to change in your life, or things you want to push through. Tackling them all at once (as we tend to do in the first week of January…) is only going to get you frustrated.

I like to try to add one thing per week, but even that is overwhelming and I burn out too quickly. Right after the New Year I came across Chris Brogan’s blog post “My 3 Words for 2012” and he mentioned a personal trainer named Jackie from Fitarella.com who uses a concept called “12 in 12″. Every month you pick one thing that you’re going to do consistently for 30 days. At the end of the 30 days you decide if you’ll continue or not. Regardless of the decision on that first item, you add a second item to work on in the next 30 days. Check out the blog post to get more detail.

The main area that is frustrating the heck out of me is the weight that refuses to budge, regardless of the diet, exercise, or magic potions I might try. SO unbelievably discouraging. If you can’t lose weight walking 100+km a week, while eating a healthy diet, there really is little hope. Currently I have the cold/cough from hell that refuses to let go, so my options are somewhat limited here as well. However, last month I began a program of supplementation/cleansing that I’m hoping will boost my energy and help me sleep better. I’ve been pretty faithful with that. The first two weeks of January have been about healing this blasted cold/cough, but I’ve also been doing some research into programs that will help me get fit and lose the weight without stressing my daily schedule too much.

Several years ago I found Zna Trainer and found her stuff very interesting and backed by a huge amount of science. It’s pretty weird, though, and is based on some rather odd breathing practices. It’s only 5-10 minutes a day and the results seem pretty astounding. I spent about an hour chatting with her on Facebook and then spent more time exploring her site and some of the success stories, and then 15 minutes working on figuring out the O2 exercises which are unbelievably powerful. Just the O2 Breathing exercises alone gave me a full abdominal and facial workout! I will feel this tomorrow.

So, between now and the end of January I’m going to do her O2 exercises every morning for 5 minutes. In February, my intention is to start back with my walking, which is nearly impossible right now with the combination of this cough and the cold weather. Hopefully by the end of January, the cough will be history!!

Why not join me? Pick one thing you’re going to do between now and the end of January, every day, faithfully, regardless. Post below what that is, and we’ll motivate each other!

Make it a great day!

Darlene

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Yeah. Well, not quite the results I wanted, but we’re still fighting the “focus thing”. I can only focus on one thing at a time, and last week, that wasn’t weight loss either! Sigh. I’ll post because I need to be accountable, not because I’m delighted with the results! :S

Get your own graph at skinnyr

However, I did end up having a great call with a coach, the result of which completely changed the way I’m now handling my time. Currently I spend most of every day working on our HotSpot Promotion business, marketing and helping business owners with getting the word out about what they do. I enjoy that work and the delight I feel in helping others meet their goals.

But where I really get excited is in the area of healing – physical, emotional, mental – all of it. It really excites me to be able to offer people something that helps them get unstuck. The exploration I’m doing right now on the Emotional Release with Essential Oils program really has me buzzing, and I have 6 books to work through in order to really understand it. With my current schedule, I’ll be 80 before I get through all that, even with my current reading speed.

The truth, however, is that we have a great group of clients already with HotSpot Promotion and while we are certainly open to more clients, the ones we have are enabling us to both make ends meet, and move forward with some of our other goals. I don’t need to be marketing 4 hours a day to keep HotSpot Promotion running. So, I’ve decided to now work part time for HotSpot Promotion, and use the other days to further my studies. This has created a gentle weekly schedule for me that is still very productive, but it allows for much more flexibility with regards to reaching my goals in all areas that are important to me.

Kinda cool. This is the first day I’m trying it out, and so far, so good. I’ve kept up with my weight loss activities, and my HotSpot Promotion activities, and am still feeling relaxed.

How cool is that?! I love it when simple changes make a huge, transformational difference. Don’t you?

Happy Walking!

Darlene

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Ok, I confess, I completely forgot to take my measurements today. No idea where I am, though I’m assuming it’s not good, LOL!

I have a project I’m working on (almost finished) that’s part of a much bigger project, and as I’ve already learned, I can really only intensely focus on one thing at a time. The project is almost finished – just some tweaking and updating required now – and so I can get back to this starting now.

In spite of everything I did manage to keep walking most days, and my eating wasn’t terrible – just not as disciplined as I would have liked. I did let everything else slide…

This morning I got up on time, did my water, my tonic, and my breakfast as prescribed (woohoo!) and I’m on track for finishing the day well. Got my walk scheduled for this afternoon, so I’m cookin’ with gas already.

I promise to check in properly next week.

How about you? How are you doing with your goals? Share below! Maybe we can encourage each other.

Happy Walking!

Darlene

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So, here we are at week 4! Lookin’ good. I’m so pleased with my results so far. My week was kind of up and down – a big birthday celebration for my daughter at “The Olive Garden where I simply enjoyed myself and my dinner consisting of Shrimp & Crab Tortelli Romana, their amazing endless tossed salad and breadsticks (only had one of those…) and a delicious dessert choosing the Tiramisu from their selection of tiny desserts called Dolcini. YUMMM! We had a GREAT waiter (Thanks, JB!) and lots of fun.

For the rest of the week I was pretty good, though I did enjoy the odd treat, which is how I like to diet!

My results? Take a look:

Get your own graph at skinnyr

No change in inches overall.

It’s been kind of an interesting week this week. I began working with an intentional goal dealing with increasing the set-point of my body’s very sluggish metabolism. I started experimenting with intentional goal setting a while back but (as usual) had trouble following through.

This time, instead of starting with an ideal weight set-point, I started with revving up my metabolism with the following intentional goal:

By the end of 4 weeks at the latest (Nov 6, 2011), I will have done whatever is necessary and appropriate to increase the set-point of my body’s metabolism by 10% – 15%. I will notice it because my body will be pleasantly and comfortably warm (including my hands and feet), excess fat will drop off, and I will feel healthy, lean, energetic, vibrant, clear-headed, strong, joyful, and alive.

I will have done all this joyfully and easily, according to the perfect will of God and for the highest good of me and of everyone else involved.

There is a specific, somewhat time-consuming method to wording this exactly right, and you can get more information on that here: Changing Your Unconscious Body-Weight Set-Point. Once you’ve got the goal exactly right you repeat it daily, 100x until you see the evidence that it’s working properly.

Now, the interesting thing is, while I’ve still been a little hit-and-miss with the goal setting thing, I’ve been plugging away at it, and the first thing that came to mind was a recipe I’d found and modified from Dr. Axe (whose site, while always great before, seems to be indicating some sort of malware, so I won’t share the link!). The recipe is as follows:

Detox Drink:

• 1/4 C. fresh lemon juice
• 1/4 C. organic apple cider vinegar
• 3/4 tsp cayenne pepper
• 1 tsp cassia cinnamon
• 10 drops therapeutic grade Grapefruit Essential Oil (if it’s less than therapeutic grade it can do you harm if you ingest it)
• 750 ml iced green Oolong tea

Mix together, and drink 250 ml before each meal. (note, you might need to put 1/3 into a large glass and dilute it with water or more green tea. It’s quite strong! Also note that Cassia Cinnamon turns to a kind of mucous if you leave it in the mixture for a while, so add 1/3 tsp to the bottom of the glass, then slowly add the mixture and mix as you go).

This recipe is a strong fat-burning mix but I’m not sure exactly if/how it stimulates metabolism. I drink it for its fat-loss qualities.

Then a couple of days later I was reminded of the chapter on Thermogenesis for weight loss as recorded in Tim Ferriss’ book “The 4-Hour Body“. Taking their suggestion, I started drinking ice-water every morning upon awakening. Over the next two weeks I’ll be adding in other things that also fire up the fat-burning metabolism of my body.

Finally, I remembered that at a recent health seminar I went to they listed the main symptoms of hypothyroidism as being:

• Tiredness/Low Energy
• Forgetfulness/Slower Thinking
• Weight Gain and
• Cold Intolerance

All of which I have in abundance! So I started researching that, as well, with some fascinating results that I’ll share with you on Wednesday! Stay tuned!

And I’m off for my walk! Catch ya’ll later!

Darlene

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Feeling great this week. Had one day of “spoiling” but was otherwise in good shape regarding my diet. Yesterday marked the start of actual training instead of just walking, and today’s walk was a really good “push”. Oh, it feels SO good to be back on track.

My results are pretty nice, too! Take a look:

Get your own graph at skinnyr

As far as inches are concerned, I gained a total of.25, but that was the overall result of gaining in legs and thighs and losing in more important places, so I’m happy there, too!

I’m still struggling with water. Not sure why that’s such a problem for me. I’m playing around with my schedule at the moment, and so my devotional time is a little messy, too, but that’s ok. It’s all about journeying in the right direction.

How about you? How are your goals coming? Share your results below so we can encourage you!

Happy Walking!

Darlene

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Ok, another week behind me! I’m going to think positive and say that the weight gain is due to new muscle through walking. Though I’m sure next week’s will be even scarier as this was BEFORE Thanksgiving dinner. Hopefully I’ll be able to drop some weight this week and have it look a little less frightening! Here are my results:

Get your own graph at skinnyr

I also gained .5 inches over all, but the gain was mostly in areas that would normally increase due to walking – like thighs and calves. I also lost inches so all in all, I’m happy with these results. Hopefully as my training intensity increases and my caloric intake decreases I’ll see better results.

I was rather encouraged this week. I’ve been trying to figure out how to add 1.5 hours of morning reading/devotionals to my day when I need to be at the computer by 6:00am to get my morning marketing done. If I get up 1.5 hours earlier, I won’t make it through my Gymboree day. So, I found all of my morning reading on audio, and created 2 weeks of listening lists (in 2 weeks I’ll no longer be working regularly for Gymboree). Now my alarm goes off at 4:30, I select the day’s list, and just doze to it, while trying to listen. Our main alarm goes off at 5:30 and I make tea and coffee, bring it back to bed for Tom and I, and I do my prayers then. So far, it’s working really well. By November I’ll be ready to get up at 4:30 as Gymboree will no longer be an issue. Woohoo!

I kept up with my evening reading except on one night, and I am waiting on my noon reading until I’m done Gymboree – again, I can’t take a break during the day to read, and I’m too tired when I get home to apply the necessary concentration.

I did really well with walking – 6 out of 6 days. Woohoo!

Water was terrible. I will need to really focus on that this week.

Eating was great until Thanksgiving weekend, and I allowed myself to thoroughly enjoyed that!

This week I add my dinner – protein and a big salad or large serving of mixed veggies.

How are you doing with your goals? What are your goals for the coming week? Share below so we can encourage each other!

Darlene

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If you’ve ever gone on a low/no carb diet and had to give up breads you know exactly what I mean when I talk about withdrawal! It’s possible to give up just about anything else without too much suffering but if you’re like most people it’s the grain-based stuff that drives you nuts – and it’s not just the sugary donuts or cookies (though they’re bad, too!) For me the toughest is giving up good, “healthy” bread.

Well, I just found out why. I’ve been reading a fascinating book called “The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability” and it talks about grains and the fact that grains have pharmacological substances in them called exorphins – which are like endorphins but they come from outside your body instead of from inside your body. These are actually from the opiate family and they affect our brains the same way that opiates do.

Wow.

I did some further research and found the following on a blog called “www.HealingMountainPublishing.com”

Imagine what would happen if a food were consumed that contains low-level heroin-like compounds (exorphins). Assuming that these compounds could be absorbed and reach the brain (which they have in fact been shown to do, at least in animal studies), they could induce a mild euphoria, dull pain sensation slightly, and have a low-grade tendency to cause addiction. This sounds eerily like people’s descriptions of foods they crave: “I feels relaxed and calm when I eat it.” “My emotional pain seems far away.” “I tried to give it up but I just couldn’t.” Imagine what would happen if the food exorphins were as strong as heroin, which some test tube studies suggest they can be.

Sugar can also be addictive, because it also releases opiods into our system that make us feel happy. I’m thinking the combination of the two is a powerful double whammy that we need to look at seriously.

How to get over it? Well, as with any drug addiction, cold-turkey is the quickest way, but it’s tough. People who follow the paleo diet plan suggest:

(Y)ou need to encourage yourself to dig in really aggressively to paleo diet for at least 30 days. Follow the strict NO grain-legume-dairy-sugar diet, get the perfect training for your body needs (never over train), have good well-rested sleep at night, get enough sunlight exposure for vitamin D level issues and get plenty of water for hydration. It would be really hard for the first few days and weeks to fight off the urges for sweets, but you need to control yourself in order to take the challenge.

The thought of giving up my favourite comfort food (“Big 16″ Bread with peanut butter and Nutella) is devastating. I have cut my carbs way back anyway and almost never eat pastas or rice, but bread? Really? Waaaaaaaah!

In this process I’m in, I’m just slowly pushing bread back. I don’t eat much of it anyway, but I will often have a mid-morning or mid-afternoon sandwhich. When I added my lunch menu to my habits, I stopped morning snacking. Once I add dinner (next week) I’ll have pushed it out of my day.

If, over the next couple of weeks, I appear grumpy and morose, just know that it’s the withdrawal and I’ll be my usual cheerful self in a day or two! LOL!

Darlene

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Who is Darlene Hull? Click here: www.darlenehull.com to find out!

So, here we are – two weeks in a row. Yep, there’s hope for me!

I thought I’d check in today with the results from last week’s labours. My goals and results were:

1. Read “The Scroll Marked II” 3x daily from “The Greatest Salesman in the World”
2. Read Chapter 2 “Desire: The Starting Point of All Achievement” in “Think and Grow Rich” daily at lunchtime
3. Read “Principle 1: Take 100% Responsibility For Your Life” from “The Success Principles(TM): How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be” daily at bedtime

   I didn’t do very well here. I forgot to factor in what happens in the “catch up” week after holidays! LOL! I gave myself grace. Feeling like I’m back into the reading thing again but I’m not as disciplined as I will be.

4. Exercise according to the schedule I laid out (walk 4 times along with 2 days of Gymboree).

   I did two walks and 2 days at Gymboree. I’m good with that. Probably do better next week. My walking partner had a cold, so between that and my catch-up stuff, we had trouble keeping up.

5. Begin each day with 1/2 litre of water sipped slowly over a couple of hours.

   Blew this completely, Hahaha!

6. Make a daily high nutrition protein shake for breakfast each morning.

   Success. I do allow myself one cheat day a week with regards to food, so 6 days I had the shake and one day I had poached eggs on toast.

For this next week I’m going to be doing mostly the same, but adding in lunch – a bowl of vegetable soup and a hard boiled egg. Again. Super easy, no stress, but nutritious. The only time I won’t eat this is on Gymboree days as I have neither time nor the equipment to prepare it, so on those days I’ll eat raw veggies or apples and a hard boiled egg.

Results of my efforts?

Weight loss: down .2 lbs

Get your own graph at skinnyr

Inches lost: 2.5 Woohoo!

And that’s me for this week! Gotta get dressed now and go meet my walking partner!

How are you doing with your goals? Have you had any breakthroughs or achievements this week?

Wishing you a successful week!

Happy Walking!

Darlene

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First of all, the good news! All the sleepless starvation is paying off in inches and weight lost! Here’s the newest graph:

The bad news is that I find I can cope with highly organized, super stressed living for a certain period of time, and get very excited about how much is accomplished in that time, and then I crash and burn. I’ve learned to give myself permission to do so, because when I give myself permission, I allow myself to recover, and then I rediscover the lost energy and focus I need to push hard again. Each time I start again, I last longer until the crash and burn.

So, currently, it’s “crash and burn” time. Three months of seriously reduced eating and sleeping is taking its toll: I’ve not been able to get up for the past two nights for prayer, I’ve been overcome with hunger at about 3:00pm, and I’m bordering on “zombie”. The kids find it entertaining – I lose my train of thought regularly, and vastly increase my steps by retracing them trying to remember what it is I forgot!

Starting Monday my family is taking some holiday time, so I’ve decided to allow myself to take a “grace break” from all of this, starting today and lasting until the following Monday (28th) when we get back (an end date is always helpful!)

So, back to eating 3-5 healthy meals a day, sleeping 8 hours, and containing my focused spiritual disciplines to a chunk of time each morning. Should do me good! But, to be honest, I’m already looking forward to getting back from the holidays and jumping in again!

Wish me luck!

Darlene

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So, we’ve been at this slow carb thing for 4 weeks, with negligible results – or at least not the kinds of results that were typical in Tim Ferriss’ “The 4-Hour Body“ book from which I’ve taken it.

Now, to be fair to the book, let me comment that my original copies, and the ones from which I got my information, were the abridged audio book from Audible, and the unabridged Kindle version which I read on my iPod, before I got my wonderful Kindle. This is not the kind of information that is easily assimilated from an audio book, and reading a 500 page book on an iPod touch is also a bit of a challenge!

SO, I received a box of autographed hard-cover copies of the book (4 of which I’m giving away on my blog here – watch for it) and sat down with the book again, and poured over the finer details of this program.

Tim Ferriss not only presents the basic program in his book in the chapter “The Slow- Carb Diet I: How to Lose 20 Pounds in 30 Days Without Exercise” but he expands on that basic program in the chapter “The Slow-Carb Diet II: The Finer Points and Common Questions”. Taken together, I saw some key elements that were missing from what I was doing in my attempts at the slow carb diet.

There are also two more chapters that have to do with fat loss: “Damage Control: Preventing Fat Gain When You Binge” about coping well with the one day a week that you can eat whatever you want, and “The Four Horsemen of Fat-Loss” which deals with other “fun” ways to increase your fat loss, and I’ll deal with these chapters in later posts.

So, after reading/skimming/extracting information from these chapters, I created a bit of a “cheat sheet” that I’ve put in various places (iPod, Kindle, Fridge) that will help me stay on track a little better.

However, I’m also realizing that there can be too much of a good thing!

In addition to working through the Slow Carb Diet, I am also finishing up a 3-week partial fast as part of my prayer experiment (and as you may or may not know, fasting slows your metabolism if it’s conducted over a longer period of time) so my results may be hampered by that, as well. The prayer program also requires a 2.5 hour prayer session beginning at midnight every night, so I’m also suffering from pretty serious sleep deprivation, which I’m trying to work through. That being said, I’m putting aside the Slow Carb thing until I finish this fast (Saturday night) and then we’ll start again on Monday. I’m also still in the middle of my experiment with changing my unconscious body-weight set-point. That last one’s been a bit difficult with my iPod having broken this week, and so accessing the goal sheet has been awkward. I have a temporary iPod that I’m using while waiting for mine to be fixed, but it’s taken a couple of days to get it all set up.

So, busy days ahead! Lots of fun keeping me on track, LOL! but I love living an experimental life. Never a dull moment!

How’s life your way?

Darlene

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