Two weeks without sugar & wine (dairy, grains and legumes), and no more hot flashes

It's a good thing this elimination diet isn't about weight loss because I'm quite sure I'm not losing any. 

I NEED to see a scale.  But I promised I wouldn't.  For 30 days.  "Just notice if your clothes seems looser," they say.  Ha.  I wear yoga pants most of the time. They're handy when you don't want to know if you're packing on a few pounds.  Less handy for establishing loss.

I don't feel skinnier.

Perhaps that's because I'm really not depriving myself of anything.  My meals look like this:

Sunday night dinner of steak AND chicken.  Yum. 

Locally made beef & mustard sausages.  Less yum.  

But I'm not doing it for the weight loss.  Really.  And I need to remind myself of that in the lower moments.

The whole point of this 30 day program is to feel better, and to have a better relationship with food.    

One that doesn't involve me hugging a ginormous bowl of buttered popcorn and a glass - or 4 - of wine -just because it's what I do on Friday nights (and sometimes Tuesday, and Thursday... occasionally Wednesday), or I'm tired, lonely, bored, aggravated, overwhelmed, underwhelmed, happy, mad etc.  

It's about listening to my own body's cues - like I try to teach my yoga student's to do in class (wouldn't it be nice if it was easy to take all of your own advice?).  It is NOT about worrying about some numbers on a scale or tape measure.

And yet... while I did agree to not step on a scale for 30 days, I did not take off my Fitbit.  It not only measures my steps (which I've been slacking off on) but also my my heart rate and my sleep. 

Yes, I'm still relying on external data to tell me how I'm doing.  I'm a work in progress.  And sometimes that progress is slow. 

I always knew that my heart rate and blood pressure were affected by what I ate  - despite having my (former) doctor tell me that was nuts.

Perhaps not so nuts.  At least not about this.

I've always been a restless sleeper.  I snore, toss, turn, and - in the last year or so - whip covers off because I'm breaking out in a full-body prickly sweat despite the fact that the room is 10 °C.  It hasn't made sharing a bed easy.  Nor does the fact that if I get within 6 inches of my husband, my temperature spikes.  Not in a good way.  More like there's molten lava in my bed and  I can't get away fast enough.  

Before the diet this was a pretty typical night for me.  

 I couldn't figure out why I'd wake up tired even on days when I went to bed so early. 

This was last night. 

What the chart doesn't show is that I snugged my covers up to my ears and  wrapped my arms around my husband.  No more night sweats. Or  daytime hot flashes for that matter. At all. 

Perhaps these changes are coincidence rather than cause and effect. Maybe it's too soon to start bragging.  I'm not sure.  But I like it.