Tag: a to z blogging challenge

#AtoZChallenge | X is for Xylitol and other sugars that are off the table.

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I would make the long walk to the barn, located on the outskirts of campus, from my college dorm every day. I had no choice. I had to feed my chickens. There were four assigned to me that I embarrassingly had named after various school girl crushes. Probably not the best choice, as I also had to document their symptoms as they got progressively more ill. I had to determine which nutrient was missing in their diet. Welcome to my undergraduate world where, at the time, I was studying Human Nutrition.

I’ve always had an interest in food. While I enjoyed much of my undergraduate program, I realized after graduating and working in a hospital that the career paths aligned with my newly bestowed degree weren’t the right fit for me. I moved on career wise, but have always maintained a strong interest in food and diet.

Lately, I’ve been focused on getting to know how my body reacts to certain foods. My primary goal is to reduce overall inflammation. I feel great, but know that inflammation has long term negative effects on your body and that the symptoms can be subtle but pervasive. I’d like to understand better how it might be impacting me and how I can eliminate or reduce inflammation.

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#AtoZChallenge | W is for Warmth and why I can’t give up my chair.

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I recently took up meditation, which I wrote about in my previous A to Z Challenge Post: J is for Juggling thoughts and learning to stay in the moment. In addition to the meditation practice, there were mindfulness challenges each week.

For the first week, we worked on being more aware of habits by changing the chair we typically sit in each day. When I went into our weekly work meeting that Monday, I glanced around at the small oval table, where I typically sit facing the entrance door, and paused. I had arrived early, so my options were open. I mixed things up and grabbed a chair opposite where I usually sit, with my back to the door. My coworker noticed and even commented on the fact that I wasn’t in my usual spot. Habit busted.

That night with my husband traveling and girls away at school, I was alone for dinner. After I finished cooking, I started to head into the living room with my plate of food but stopped. Instead, I sat down on one of the bar stools that line our kitchen island. I slowly and deliberately ate my dinner there instead of in front of the television. Habit busted.

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AtoZChallenge | V is for Vacation and obsessively planning our Scottish adventure.

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When my alarm went off at 4:00 am, I was immediately awake and hit off rather than snooze. An unusual move for me. I grabbed my phone, turning on the flashlight feature so I could see my way downstairs without waking up my sleeping family members. When I reached our home office, I sat in front of our desktop computer hitting the escape key to wake it up. I navigated quickly to the website I needed and got into the virtual queue to buy tickets. Even though I’d logged in within five minutes of tickets going on sale, the covered grandstand was already sold out. I grabbed two for the uncovered section and felt a sense of relief once I finished entering my credit card information through paypal and saw the pop up message that everything had been processed successfully. On a whim, I also emailed them to ask if there was a wait list for the covered section and quickly got a reply that they would put me on it. We had our tickets to the Braemar Gathering for the Highland Games this coming September.

I have spent so much time planning our upcoming trip to Scotland that we will actually spend less time in the country than the time I’ve invested in mapping out our adventures. The Braemar games also weren’t the only time I got up during the night to buy tickets for a planned vacation. I’m sure it won’t be my last.

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#AtoZChallenge | U is for Uncluttering, organizing and moving my To Do List to the cloud.

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We have a deep kitchen sink, but as our family eats meals throughout the day, it starts to get piled up with dishes. Once we add a few of our taller Calphalon® pots into the mix it gets too crowded. The endless supply of dirty dishes starts to encroach onto the surrounding counter. The clean side is no different. Our drying rack is no match for the shear volume so we have to lay drying towels along the back of the counter to hold the overflow of clean dishes and the endless supply of empty seltzer cans that my youngest and I produce in a given day. Between the dirty and the clean, this area of the kitchen is often the messiest and most cluttered. I hate it.

I am physically uncomfortable in a cluttered space. I’m happiest when my house is clean. Fortunately, at least when it comes to the kitchen sink, my husband feels the same so we can usually keep ahead of the onslaught.

The same need for uncluttered spaces applies to my to do list. I like a nice, organized list.

If I searched my hard drive right now, I’d probably find old excel files dating back almost twenty years with titles like “house projects”, “gardening plan” and “renovation”. I use to have Doctor Who sticky notes with barely legible instructions scribbled across them hanging from my computer in multiples. My refrigerator mirrored the messiness of the sink with hand written lists and reminders organized on scrap paper and hung by magnetic clips at eye level helping to remind me of what I needed to do that day or that week.

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#AtoZChallenge | T is for Taking Risks and Saying Goodbye to My Comfort Zone.

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On my flight back from a recent business trip, I reached Boston and had to change planes for the final leg up to Portland. I hadn’t paid much attention when making my reservations, so was a little surprised when I saw that the plane we’d be taking for the final leg was a small five-seater and that the open cockpit meant we’d be able to watch the pilots in action. I was definitely guaranteed a window seat. The flight was thankfully uneventful, and what struck me most was that I couldn’t have even gotten on the plane ten years ago. I had too much anxiety about flying.

I had anxiety about a lot of things, but in the last ten years I’ve realized that the more I push myself beyond my comfort zone and challenge myself the more my fears ease.

Comfort zones act like our friend, but they’re really not. They’re the frenemy who holds you back. I’m not saying I’ve swung to the other extreme of becoming an adrenaline junkie and only doing things that make me uncomfortable. It’s about finding the balance. I still love hanging in my comfort zone as much as the next person but now I push myself out on occasion and take more risks. I’ve never been happier.

So how to challenge myself this year?

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