My aha moment

If you’ve been following my blog then you’ll know it has taken me a long time to recover from adrenal fatigue. I wasn’t crashing after work anymore or on the weekends but I was still finding it really hard to get motivated or have the energy to workout and I was procrastinating a lot!

My naturopath had suggested I switch to a low carb, high fat diet which I started at the beginning of July but only lasted 9 days before I gave in to emotional/stress eating! I started the diet again last week and so far haven’t had any uncontrollable cravings :) I don’t know if the change in diet is making me more alert and energetic but I have been noticing that I feel more and more like myself.

What else has changed? I finally started meditating again. You can read last week’s review here. I started meditating at night because that was when I could fit it in but I don’t think I was getting the full benefits. Plus I was falling asleep half the time! So I knew I should meditate in the morning but I was only just getting into a routine to wake and workout. I caught up with some girlfriends the other weekend and had a really good chat with them. They knew everything that I had on my plate and that I didn’t want to give anything up. But they could see I was struggling. They suggested I alternate my mornings between meditating and working out and see how that went.

So on Monday I woke up and did my meditation. On Tuesday I woke up and meditated and then worked out. And that was my routine for the rest of the week. I guess I just had to let go and let it all fall into place.  Letting go has been really hard for me to do. It’s not that I’m a control freak. It’s the organisational Virgo in me. I have to plan things and then I have to stick to the plan. But then it got to the point where I was avoiding my plan because I knew I couldn’t do everything on it or procrastinating when I did try to tackle my to do list.

Listen to your body and your mind

If you’ve been reading my Maxine’s Challenge 2015 review you’ll know that for the past few weeks I have been unwell. I have been struggling with fatigue, constant colds, brain fog, headaches, lethargy and a lack of motivation. At first I thought I had just burnt myself out because I spent one weekend in bed. I didn’t do anything at all and couldn’t handle the thought of any responsibilty. Friends kept telling me it was ok, that we all need a day or 2 in bed. By the time that week had passed, I felt like I was close to feeling normal again and then caught a cold and spent another weekend in bed, again with no energy to move, let alone think. Again the week passed and just when I felt like I was feeling a bit better I ended up with a throat infection! I finally went to see the doctor and got some blood tests done.

He tested the usual – blood sugar, full blood, Iron, Vitamin D and also tested for Ross River Virus and Barmah Forest Virus. At first I thought how random! The main sypmtoms are painful/swollen joints, sore muscles, aching tendons and skin rashes. I didn’t have any of them. Other symptons include fever, tiredness, headaches and swollen lymph nodes. I had experienced all of these so maybe it wasn’t so random after all. Especially when I remembered getting eaten my mosquitos after bootcamp a few weeks ago.