Hodge Podge

I keep coming up with half-formed…

What I’m trying to say is…

What to blog about…

A little bit of this and a little bit o…

You get the picture?  I got nothing cohesive to throw out to the blogosphere.  So, here’s the hodge and the podge…

I did good body work today.  Interesting things happened and it was good.  Positive changes were made for chronic conditions.

The boys are healing up.  The bay faster than the sorrel. The filly picks on the bay boy and forces him to move more.  Moving keeps the swelling down, which seems to speed the healing process.  Before I fed tonight I moved the sorrel around the pasture a bit… he started to loosen up after a couple trips across the pasture at the trot.  He’s kind of a weenie, so I’m thinking I’ll need to repeat that process a couple times over the next few days.

I watched Kanak get worked.  He is going along like he should be.  He is actually doing very well for having maybe ten rides on him.  The boy (it’s what his dad calls him) loped Kanak around the arena.  He had been riding him outside the last few rides.  All good stuff.

The weather has been gorgeous here.  Our high was about 60 with a light to moderate breeze.  It feels like Spring.  Finally.

I realized over the last couple of months I have been eating an atrocious diet.  Basically a gluten-free version of the Standard American Diet.  Lots of sugar and grains.  I need to stop that.  A couple days ago I started to get a handle on it.  I’m aiming to eat more Primal/Paleo.  Tonight I had a steak cooked just right with some green beans that were tasty and salad greens with champagne dressing.  Sometime, I need to learn foodie cooking terms, because I have no idea how to tell anyone what I did to the green beans.  But they were perfect and tasty.  Now I just need to get a chocolate munchies under control.

And I am wiped out… like I’ve been going full speed all day.  Oh wait, I think I have been.  Maybe that’s why the thoughts aren’t coming together much.  Yes, it must be Spring.

Does 9:30pm count as early to bed?  Or just worn out?

New Year, sort of New Adventure

Happy 2012!

So, we are starting another year.  Good thing, right.  My planner pages got all used up, needed to order some new ones.  Got them a few weeks ago, they are in the binder and ready for action.

My big adventure from the last half of this year has been overhauling my diet.  I have determined that gluten and I just do not get along.  This has been a huge change for me.  Growing up I was the bread-queen or the carb-queen.  Within a few months of dropping gluten I dropped about 15 pounds.  That was definitely needed.  I could stand to continue that trend too.  On a couple occasions when I have slipped up while eating out and consumed something with gluten in it there have been major repercussions.  So much so that wheat products hold absolutely no appeal for me.

Overhauling is an overstatement regarding my diet.  Really at this point, I have just eliminated all gluten (wheat, barley and rye).  That means no more Coronas, no more Fat Tires, no more micro-brews when I visit Portland.  No more “real” bread.  I find substitutes and alternatives.  Some of them are acceptable, a few are actually good and a lot of them just suck.  I do still have my corn chips.  I do realize that is not necessarily a good thing.

I mentioned above my love for bread and carbs?  My favorite stress relieving activity has been baking up a batch of chocolate chip cookies.  Something about the process of mixing up the recipe my Mom always made, waiting for them to bake and then eating them until my stomach hurt was all so soothing.  In case you were wondering, I do not consider myself to be a “health-nut”.  Elana Amsterdam over at www.elanaspantry.com saved my sanity with her chocolate chip cookie recipe.  And her Paleo bread recipe.

There have been a couple of my own recipes (ok, not technically my own, but ones that I have used forever) that I have re-tooled to be gluten free.  They worked out pretty well too.

I have not fully committed to grain free life, but I notice a positive difference when I leave the grain out of my mouth.  Really this has been at least ten years in happening.  Slowly but surely the message was getting through my thick skull that what we put in our mouths makes a difference in how we feel.  More than that, what I put in my mouth now may leave me feeling ever so icky in a few hours, even days (other than weight gain).  Can you say carb crash?  I knew you could.

Anyhow, about this new year thing.  I agree it is arbitrary, but it’s got to happen sometime.  Why not now?  I don’t really have any New Years resolutions.  For me it will be a continuation of what I started in July – figuring out how to give myself options on the food front that support my feeling good long term.