{who are you and what have you done with my wife}

Something really weird happened in our house the other night. I cooked. I made dinner. I know, I know. Tony was shocked, too! He didn't recognize my presence in the kitchen and I have to admit I felt a little out of place in front of the stove. Many nights I find myself at the sink cleaning while Tony cooks. Now, I didn't totally do the entire meal by myself. Tony jumped in to help with some chopping and stuff (if you have eaten Paleo you know that the chopping and stuff takes up half your evening), but I initiated the new recipe. A Paleo recipe I found online. He told me he would make dinner, but I told him, no. I need to start liking to cook (I really dislike cooking). I'm planning to start cooking a lot more and trying many new Paleo recipes. Starting today I am challenging myself to 30 days of a strict Paleo diet. I really want to make this my lifestyle. We eat this way about 80% of the time, but I want it to be more than that. I have to for my health. I sincerely feel my cancer was caused by environmental reasons. The crap in our foods, products we use in our households, plastics that we eat and drink from, products we use on our bodies, etc. I have no risk factors for cancer, genetic testing was negative and I even have factors playing in my favor. I just saw a naturopath on Thursday to find a natural alternative to tamoxifen and I had him totally dumbfounded. He said there is absolutely no reason I should have got cancer. So, I'm doing as much I can to avoid environmental factors to reduce my risk of reocurrence. It is hard to avoid all of these factors, I know this. But, I am going to do what I can.

One of these things is to really dial in my diet. For the most part we do pretty good with our diet. We mostly follow a Paleo (paleolithic) diet. A diet our bodies were designed to digest. It is suppose to resemble a diet that our paleolithic ancestors followed. The cavemen. Hunter gatherers. Long before cows were milked and agriculture reared it's ugly head. I am still reading my awesome book by Robb Wolfe, The Paleo Solution to learn all the specifics. How these food items affect our body? How these food items hurt our body and their specific relationship to chronic disease in our country. Heart disease, obesity, diabetes, CANCER. I just know how I feel when I eat like this and it just makes sense to me. I'm not going to preach to you and say everybody should eat this way, but you should! lol No, just kidding, well, kind of. :-) But, seriously, if you are interested in being the healthiest you can be. Do some research on it and give it a try. Quality foods? It can't hurt, that's for damn sure.

So, in my effort to dial in my diet I am challenging myself to 30 days of strict Paleo following the Whole 30 Program . I'm not a great fan of waiting until a Monday to start a diet or a fitness plan, but I spent the weekend finding recipes and putting together a menu for the week. I planned to do all my grocery shopping yesterday when my muscle (Tony) was available. I'm still not supposed to lift more than 5 pounds. Pay attention to this people. How many things do you have to lift during the day that weigh more than five pounds? Everything!! I can't go to Costco by myself because everything weighs more than five pounds and pushing the enormous cart is more than five pounds of pressure I'm sure. So grocery shopping is a task for me right now. Anyhoo, I didn't do my grocery shopping yesterday because I was hurting a bit, I didn't want to go out in the cold, and well, I was just flat out lazy. Hey, it was Sunday afterall! So I went today without my muscle. Which meant I could only shop for tonight's dinner and I had to ask the guy bagging to please try not to make any of the bags very heavy. It stinks. Tomorrow I will go back and get groceries for dinner tomorrow night. Not very time efficient, but it is how I have to grocery shop right now.

So, back to my dinner the other night. I guess it was little trial run to see if I was capable of making a new recipe and surviving in the kitchen. :) This little dinner we cooked up was so yummy and the leftovers were just as glorious. I love leftovers because they take no time to make. Reheat and enjoy!

Feast your eyes upon "Chicken and Vegetable 'Lo Mein'".

Ingredients:

1 1/2 lbs. chicken or beef

1/4 c. almonds, chopped

1/4 c. water chestnuts

1/4 c. green onion, chopped

1/2 c. shiitake mushrooms, stems removed and cut in half

1/4 c. celery, chopped

1 T. minced ginger

1 T. minced garlic

2 c. broccoli

2 c. shredded cabbage

Toasted sesame oil

Coconut aminos

Sesame seeds to garnish

Clean up the veggies and start chopping. Cut meat, broccoli and mushrooms into bite-size pieces. Thinly slice cabbage (about half a head). Chop almonds, green onions, celery; mince garlic and ginger.

For ease and organization I went a little "Food Network Cooking Show" and put the ingredients in separate bowls depending on when they are added. Bowl #1: Broccoli, water chestnuts, celery and mushrooms (Shiitake mushrooms give me the heebie-jeebies so I just used your standard white mushroom. Do they have a special name? I don't know). Bowl #2: almonds, cabbage, ginger, green onion and garlic.

Heat wok or large saute pan over high heat. Add sesame oil swirl to coat bottom of wok, then add meat. Cook meat for 3-4 minutes, until mostly cooked. Add Bowl #1 (broc, water chestnuts, celery and mushrooms). Cook two minutes. Add Bowl #2 (almonds, cabbage, ginger, green onion and garlic). Add a splash of coconut aminos, 2-4 T. (If you ask me 2-4 T. is not a splash. Holy cow! We added 3 T. Also, we used gluten-free tamari. The grocery store only had a monster-sized bottle of coconut aminos in stock and I wasn't quite prepared to sell a child to buy such a large bottle.) Cook 2-3 minutes until cabbage softens a little.

Remove from heat, plate your creation ("plate", I went "Food Network" again), garnish with sesame seeds and feel good about the good food you are about to put into your body!

This recipe was swiped from the primal people at The Food Lovers: Primal Palate.

I've meant to post my workouts everyday and I have been failing miserably on that. So here is my workout for the day and I use the word "workout" very loosely.

Monday WOD

5-4-3-2-1-1-1-1-1 (each leg)

Back lunge, press out with #1 weights, stand up.

Before WOD, hip mobility and therapy stretches

After, stretching as able

The gym has been bittersweet for me. It is so wonderful being back in the gym, but at the same time it is so frustrating not being able to do anything. When I get frustrated with being so limited I think about a text Tony sent me last week.

"I know you did not want to be there, but your job is to keep showing up. It's not how much you do, it's that you show up that impresses me and makes me proud of you!"

So I keep showing up. :-)