I NEVER thought I’d get to this point. It’s definitely not something that I planned for as my goal was to lose 75 pounds. But I guess my body has other plans!
Please join me in celebrating the release of 100 pounds on this current journey!! 🤩🎉🎊🥳
Starting around 2009, I began having these crazy eye issues. I already have allergies so I thought it was just a bad allergy attack. Nope- I started dealing with iritis and uveitis ugh!
Allow me to remind everyone that I am not giving medical advice, but just sharing my journey that has allowed me to move toward better health.
So what are these strange sounding eye conditions? Iritis is inflammation of the colored part of your eye, the iris. Uveitis is inflammation of the middle layer of tissue in the eye wall. (Source: Mayo Clinic) Both are painful and happen really really fast.
Symptoms include eye redness, pain, blurry vision, bright light flashes and eye floaters. What is an eye floater you ask? Have you ever been stressed with tired eyes and see a squiggly line in your vision? That’s a floater. Both conditions can cause scarring in the eye 😭 so not much fun at all.
Traditional methods of controlling a flare up are cortisone steroid eye drops and/or an eye drop that keeps the eye slightly dilated to relieve pressure and strain. And I was getting these flare ups back to back to back. I mean, it’s to the point that I typically see an ophthalmologist rather than an optometrist. I’ve had allllllllll of the testing associated with the conditions and all test have been negative.
So I started pinpointing triggers. High seasonal allergies are a huge trigger so I started changing my habits – keeping shoes at the door, not rolling my car window down all the time, and even starting allergy shots to build immunity. Lack of sleep is another trigger which typically happens when I’m super stressed, a third trigger. Instead I make sure to get a minimum of 7 hours of sleep to keep the eyes happy. I try to incorporate more foods with beta carotene. And when it’s really bad, I take lutein vitamins. Whew! It takes work but all of those combined actually work.
Have you dealt with an eye condition similar to uveitis or iritis? If so, please share what has helped you. To your good health…until next time!
Allow me to remind everyone that I am not giving medical advice, but just sharing my journey that has allowed me to move toward better health.
I have always heard vitamin D referred to as the happiness vitamin. And this is crucial as vitamin D can be a challenge to acquire naturally. But it does so much more!
Studies show that women with PCOS tend to be vitamin D deficient. I thought mine was low as it was just outside normal range but a friend with PCOS had a level in the single digits! 😲 And with PCOS, there tends to be higher levels of anxiety and depression. Could there be a correlation there?? I believe so, but then again, I’m always looking for a conspiracy when it comes to health and wellness 🤷🏽♀️
Since my vitamin D was low, my nutritionist had me take 10,000 IU per day to begin – yikes! But the megadoses worked. I cut down to 5000 IU per day which is now just 3 times per week. I typically add a day or so when it’s rainy as there’s no sun but my vitamin D level is pretty good now.
So how can you get vitamin D? Sun exposure, which I love love love! 🌞 Sources also include –
Pretty short list right? There are also fortified foods that have vitamin D but I don’t eat those, like breakfast cereal, so high quality supplements have helped tremendously. Besides boosting your mood, what else does vitamin D help with?
If you have not, please get your vitamin D level checked. For me, it was one of the first aspects of my health that turned around quickly. This quick turnaround encouraged me to give the other health modifications a try too. I liken it to climbing a ladder to better health. Until next time! 🎉
I will admit – I used to think meditating was all about chanting and making some weird noises over and over again. And that it was only for hippies, not this African American city chick. And I was so wrong!
Allow me to remind everyone that I am not giving medical advice, but just sharing my journey that has allowed me to move toward better health.
Growing up, I wasn’t into yoga or meditation. I stretched after working out because that’s what the exercise classes did and I stretched for running track. I started trying yoga-esque workouts in my early 30s when I moved to North Carolina the first time. I started because my walking seemed to be uneven and yoga like workouts seemed to really help; this was well before I knew the issue with osteoarthritis. But I still hadn’t really delved into meditation.
I didn’t really begin meditating until some time after the age of 40. I was still going up on sugar so I looked at meditation as a way to bring me back down. I tried a couple of apps on my phone for free trials and thought little of it. It wasn’t until I learned more benefits of meditation and the difference between the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems did I begin to make more of an effort.
See, for me, meditation touches on everything that blows up with PCOS – inflammation, irritability, irregular sleep habits, high cortisol, constant fight or flight nervous system, food cravings and anxiety. (I had to take a breath just writing that) These all correlate with the sympathetic nervous system – go, go, go, go. Think of the fight or flight response of a tiger chasing a hunter.
Meditation helps bring all of that down for me, especially being relaxed enough to actually sleep and stay asleep. In that way, I’m able to tap into the parasympathetic nervous system – rest and digest, relaxation and decreased heart rate. (Via Science Direct). And when I am more relaxed, the body can function as it ought to more easily.
I still use a meditation app on my phone, Headspace. I’m still not that person who can meditate for hours on end, or even 30 minutes for that matter! But I do appreciate the time that I take to let the day slip away, relax and prepare the body for sleep. If I feel anxious during the day, I may do a short meditation on breathing to bring the heart rate down. It’s all about balance – high stress response leads to high cortisol which leads to more inflammation which leads to a host of issues for me. So I use meditation as a preventative measure.
If you have tried meditation and seen great results, please share your experience below ⬇️. And if you haven’t tried it, I would recommend giving it a whirl. Until next week …
Welcome to the third week of Wellness Wednesdays! Today’s focus is magnesium. Allow me to remind everyone that I am not giving medical advice, but just sharing my journey that has allowed me to move toward better health.
What is magnesium? According to the Nutrition Source of the Harvard School of Public Health, magnesium is a mineral that “plays an important role in assisting more than 300 enzymes to carry out various chemical reactions in the body such as building proteins and strong bones, and regulating blood sugar, blood pressure, and muscle and nerve functions.” It basically helps with everything.
In PCOS, women tend to need more magnesium than the recommended daily dosage. It can be difficult for my muscles to relax and magnesium is responsible for that. Have you ever taken magnesium citrate? See how quickly your digestive system relaxes from that! And even though I don’t take the citrate form (I use buffered chelate magnesium), if you have too much, it can cause diarrhea. So I now take approximately 600 mg of magnesium daily and it has works wonders.
I can sleep better. My bowel movements are regular and easy, which has not always been the case. I’ve dealt with low motility and that is the worst ever. And of course, magnesium helps with the other 300 processes mentioned above that I didn’t even realize were connected until I started using it. I even use a topical magnesium spray for areas that tend to stay tight, like the cervical area or hips.
I’ve recommended the use of supplemental magnesium to family members. They both mentioned it to their respective doctors and their doctors agreed with my recommendations! One person, my mom, has seen improvements in her sleep as she is better able to relax, bm consistency and help with sciatic nerve pain that she was dealing with. I sent her the magnesium spray as well to help with areas that she needs to address.
I am not saying that supplemental magnesium is for everyone. Checking with your medical care team is a must. But it has definitely come through for me and been a game changer! Have you tried magnesium? If so, please comment below with your thoughts. I’ll see you next week! 🎊
Welcome to Wellness Wednesdays! Today’s focus is exercise. Allow me to remind everyone that I am not giving medical advice, but just sharing my journey that has allowed me to move toward better health.
For most of my life, I’ve tried to incorporate some type of exercise. As a teenager, I ran track for a couple of years. I tried out for field hockey and made the initial cut to do conditioning but that level of running left me exhausted. Looking back, this should have been a stop sign to find out why I was so exhausted. In college, I worked out fairly consistently my freshman year and lost about 25 pounds. But when my course load increased sophomore year, physical activity decreased. After graduating, I worked at an hmo and went to the gym there several times a week but it seemed that I toned more than lost weight. And the saga goes on and on. Frustrating, yes?
Around 2011, I started having issues with my hip and so I chose yoga and stretching to help ease the concerns. And it worked! Another clue but I still hadn’t taken the time to put all of it together. I walked a good deal and did other higher impact aerobics but was just maintaining weight. Then I started following doctors and nutritionists who focused on PCOS. That was a game changer.
Basically, I had been doing a lot of the wrong type of exercises for me. While exercise is wonderful, the body believes there is stress and increases cortisol- your fight or flight hormone. Well with pcos, that hormone is hard to get back down and that increases the storage of fat and inflammation, especially in the gut. So I’ve changed to longer, slower walks and always stretch at the end. I try to do a yoga or Pilates based workout twice a week. Weight training probably once per week. I limit hiit workouts to maybe twice per month. Sometimes I cycle or do the elliptical at the gym, when available. And that’s it! After years and years and years of thinking that the harder I went, the more I would lose 🤯 I don’t have to do that. How amazing to have that revelation! And I have still lost 97 pounds in the process! 🤩
So I encourage you to find the workout that is best for you. Comments, questions? Drop them below and share what works for you. See you next week!
Where do I even begin with making sleep a priority? Looking back, for years I ran on little sleep which didn’t help me to better health. Then, for awhile, I would go to sleep really easily but wake up around 1 or 2 am and just be in the bed, wide awake until about 5, doze off and jump up to a 6 am alarm. I would maybe get 4 hours of sleep. Not enough hours and lack of quality caught up with me.
And I knew I needed to do better because I felt tired all the time. I would need a nap in the middle of the day, which worked out as I worked remotely at the time. But I felt awful and it affected everything else.
I follow a couple of functional doctors who kept emphasizing the need for quality sleep as well. Then I started with working my nutritionist (I actually work with two now who focus on different things). The first one really helped me to understand the importance of sleep and how it allows the body to repair itself and reduces inflammation, which is HUGE for me. And it’s made such a positive difference.
So if you are not getting at least 7 hours of quality sleep, rethink your routine. Wear blue blocker glasses after dark. Limit the amount of time you watch tv, especially at night. Don’t use overhead lights after dark. Stick to a consistent sleep schedule, even on the weekends. Meditate before bed to get your mind prepared to sleep. These are all changes that I made and continue to tweak as I still work on this area.
Any suggestions on how to improve sleep quality? Comment below and share what works for you.
I hope you are having a magnificent Monday! Just a reminder that Wellness Wednesdays begins this week – May 5. Join me on changes that have helped me be and feel better. For inspiration, I’m dropping a comparison pic below. The left side was me about 90 pounds and 4 years ago; the right side was yesterday! Do I still have challenges to overcome? Yes but I’m celebrating the wins to date. See you Wednesday!
I am so excited to update everyone on this new venture that I plan to work on this summer. I’m going to publish a blog post every Wednesday, beginning in May through the end of August. Each week, I will feature a topic that has helped me throughout this wellness journey. I do not intend this to be medical advice for anyone. I am not a medical professional. I’m just someone who hopes to shed light on options that have worked for me. I even have friends and family who have asked for assistance with health challenges. And guess what? The solutions work!
I’ll also update you on my health journey throughout as well, including challenges for transparency. If this is your first time reading this blog, thank you. And thank you to those who continue to follow. I reached over 100 followers! Wow! That’s amazing as I never thought anyone might be interested.
For those who don’t know, I was diagnosed with PCOS in my mid-30s after YEARS of trying to find solutions to all of the issues that I was having. There are several types of PCOS and you can have more than one. Some days, I feel like I deal with them all at once! My biggest concern is chronic low grade inflammation; this (only my belief) led to the osteoarthritis that I deal with as well. I started working with a nutritionist in 2018 as I was having so many health issues and through the work, I’ve had major improvements including losing 95 pounds to date! With the arthritis, however, I am looking at possible knee replacement and physical therapy for cervical arthritis. It can be a lot and overwhelming sometimes, so yoga, meditation and prayer are key for me.
So join me on this summer’s adventure. And feel free to comment with solutions that have worked for you. Let’s build a community. 🥂 to your good health.
I live about 20 minutes from a Gap factory outlet and let me say, this store has the BEST deals. Each week or so, there are a few highlighted items there. And the store includes all Gap brands including Old Navy, Banana Republic and Athleta.
A friend went yesterday and sent a text that some of the items were down to $1.99! So of course I went after work 😄 Because my sizing continues to drop, I try to find deals on clothing. And yes, I found some amazing deals.
But…the best discovery was when I picked up the size medium leggings and THEY FIT! 🤩 why is this such a big deal? I remember buying a pair of leggings a few years ago size XXL from the same designer, Old Navy. The bonus was that the leggings only cost $1.99!!
For those who need encouragement, let this be it for you: you can drop weight the healthy way. It may take time and it may not happen the way you expect, but as someone who had to buy “husky” clothing when I was in elementary school, this is a great win! (On another note, WHYYYYY was clothing labeled husky? That’s another post for another day)
Share with someone who needs encouragement or share your NSVs below. 🥂 to your good health!
Fantastically 40-ish 