Jump-In January!

*This photo is 3 years old from when I first started swimming.

There are many small changes I've made to make my autoimmune arthritis feel better. Not all of them are always easy to do or the most enjoyable to participate in. Not all of them are things that make me feel like I'm living my life deliciously. 

As with the realization that my extreme love of sugary treats has been causing me more inflammation, so is my realization about how I feel when I'm not active. Though it may seem like a Catch 22, when I am in pain and feel like I don't want to move sometimes the best thing to do is get up and actually get my body moving. A body in motion stays in motion. So, over the years I've tried many types of movement and exercise. Many forms of movement can feel hard and rough on my joints and ligaments or feel like they are grinding my body apart. These have been the times that I did not feel like I was living deliciously. Other people with autoimmune arthritis might like Tai Chi, Qigong, golf, walking, low impact biking, swimming, dancing, or even yoga. I, for one, have found yoga to be the absolute worst thing for my arthritis and though I'm happy for anyone that it works for, I do not plan to continue trying to use yoga as my best form of movement.

I have found over the years through much trial and error that my four best forms of movement for my arthritis are:

1. Swimming: In my opinion, swimming is the best form of movement for someone with an autoimmune arthritis. Not only are you weightless and therefore not putting any weights on your joints, but you are also able to use all muscles, joints, ligaments, and bones in a continuous fluid movement as you swim. Swimming is one of the only activities that make me feel fully emerged in the moment. I find it meditative and rejuvenating. 
2. Aqua Aerobics: Though I'm often the youngest person in many of my aqua aerobics classes (by thirty or so years), I find them to be extremely enjoyable and really a great workout. I often make an effort to get to know the instructors so as to ask them how to get the most out of my class and to ask them if they might let me know how I can make any of the moves that they are leading, even more impactful. In addition to having tons of fun in the classes, I rarely feel self conscious as most of the other participants are so welcoming and kind. Unlike being at a gym where I sometimes feel judged by those around me, in aqua aerobics I often feel a communal sense of encouragement and play. I almost always leave feeling like my day is just a little bit better.
3. Swing Dance & Lindy Hop: I've been swing dancing on and off since 1997. When I began swing dancing as a preteen lead (often assumed to be the male role in dance), I fell instantly in love with everything about swing dance and swing culture. I read books about the swing era, watched any and all movies I could fine with great dance scenes, and tried really hard to get other friends excited about swing dance. Unfortunately it took me another twelve years before I met others who were as excited as I was about everything swing (during which time I learned how to be a follow). I'd only taken classes up to that point and had never participated in the dance scene. I had multiple year gaps in my training. No matter what though, I kept coming back to swing dance. Lindy Hop has always made me feel supremely happy. In 2009, I finally found other people my age who liked to swing dance and began dancing socially. At the same time though, I was going through a massive flare up that lead to my diagnosis of Psoriatic Arthritis in the summer of 2009. Despite my pain, I've found Lindy Hop and my swing dance community to be an anchor in enabling me to push through my pain to find joy in movement. Arthritis and dancing are not mutually exclusive. Knowing that I will dance again makes me feel motivated every day to reduce my inflammation.  
4. Long walks: As cheesy as it sounds, walking is known as "America's past time." It makes sense though, because walking is literally the easiest way to get up and move. I can always find a way to walk more in my daily life. Though some folks love hiking and walking in nature, my favorite walks are long walks through cities. I've been known to walk 13 miles through London in a day or 10 miles around San Francisco in an afternoon. The best thing about walking is that it costs practically nothing. Once you've found some good walking shoes, you're completely set.

In the spirit of my December challenge to go partially dessert-less, I've decided to use January as a motivator for me to get moving. I'm jumping in this January. I'll be spending the month jumping in to the pool, jumping back in to the dance scene, and jumping in to my walking shoes. In addition to continuing to experiment with how best to fight inflammation through the food I eat, I'll also be experimenting with how best to jump in this January. 

My goals for jumping in this January are:

1. Go to Aqua Aerobics a minimum of 3 times a week = Totaling a minimum of 12 classes.
2. Swim a minimum of 1 time a week = Totaling a minimum of 4 times.
3. Swing dance a minimum of 2 times during the month.
4. Go on at least 2 long walks during the month of January.

I'm beginning with these three very realistic goals with the hopes that they will help get me back in to old patterns. Since I'm luckily not currently in a big flare-up, I'm hoping that jumping in in the above ways will not overwhelm my body and will help me feel better and more agile. I plan to share updates with you here as well as tips around how to add more movement in to your life as well as how best to eat anti-inflammatorily while jumping in.

Dessert-less December In Review

Dessert-less December has just about come to a close (two days left but I will NOT be consuming sugar on either of these days). If you will remember, I began my Dessert-less December as a way to consume less sugar so as to better fight inflammation. I allowed myself exactly seven days of sugar in the month of December. I am a bit of a sugar addict and so it was a challenge to really look in to how sugar (particularly fructose) might be affecting my Psoriatic Arthritis and my inflammation. Though I now know a lot more about what fructose is doing to my body, I don't plan to cut it out entirely. I plan to allow for five celebration days a month (not seven as I found that this was way too many) where sugar consumption can be done in moderation. Starting in 2016, I'll have five celebration days: one day a week, plus a floater celebration day in case anything comes up.

Reducing my sugar consumption this month has really made me more aware of how much sugar affects my body, my mood, and my general inflammation and soreness. It was a great experiment to come up with the seven days that I would allow for sugar consumption in my Dessert-less (-ish) December. During a season of party after party, I really had to prioritize which days would be celebrated with sugar consumption and which would have to be celebrated in other ways.

This is how the breakdown of my seven days went:

1. December 5th: My Annual Crafting and Cookie Decorating Party
2. December 13th: Family Friend's Annual Christmas Pancake Brunch
3. December 16th: Day one of All Staff Retreat For Work
4. December 19th: Annual Cookie (and Castle Cake) Decorating Day With Nieces
5. December 22nd: Annual Fancy Christmas Lunch 
6. December 24th: Christmas Eve Party
7. December 25th: Christmas Day

My main take aways were these:

1. I noticed, most drastically, the positive effects of limiting my sugar intake on December 13th because that was the longest period in a row where I did not consume sugar (the 6th through 13th). During the Pancake Brunch I found the syrup and spiced hot apple cider jarring though the pancakes were fabulous as always! (Persimmon pancakes, walnut date pancakes, and lemon pancakes! Yum!)
2. I really wish that I'd avoided consuming sugar for the entirety of my work All Staff Retreat. I'd allotted for both the 16th and 17th as possible sugar consumption days. I was able to minimize it to only consume sugar one one of the days. I feel that I could very easily have avoided sugar both days, though that is sometimes hard when food is being supplied by an outside source. In the future, I'll prioritize homemade sweets over extremely sweet donuts or other store bought pastries. I found that though it was fun to be able to consume these treats, they were overwhelming and unnecessary. 
3. Because of the craziness of the holidays, I felt like from December 13th - December 25th, I was eating sugar pretty much every three days or so. Due to consuming sugar so often during that time, I was aware that I felt much more inflamed and generally sorer during that period of the month. 
4. I will never regret decorating cookies with my nieces or celebrating Christmas day with my family. These two days, above all, are the main days that I could not see myself removing sugar from. Sugar is so integral to both of those celebrations. 
5. In addition to general inflammation and autoimmune arthritic soreness, on the days after I consumed sugar, I often felt almost as though I had a hangover (even though I no longer consume alcohol).

This is an exact list of all of the sweet things I consumed during those seven days:

Hot spiced apple cider, homemade sugar cookies with and without frosting, a single brownie, candied nuts, a couple chocolate covered graham crackers, maple syrup, a donut, a churro, a single Ferrero Rocher, one dark chocolate dipped pretzel stick, one slice of S'more Pie from Buckeye's, a slice of vegan gingerbread with coconut whipped cream, coconut chocolate pudding, two square of homemade fudge (one made by each of my aunt's who make homemade fudge), gingerbread cookie dough while I was making mini-gingerbread houses for everyone for Christmas dinner, and a slice of homemade chocolate coconut cake (also made by me!).

All in all I think that I did fairly well. It was very hard to cut down to 7 days of sugar consumption in the celebratory month of December. As it was, I felt pressure to add more sugar days here and there. I had to really priorities the days where sugar was integral to the celebrations. In some cases I had to opt out of eating desserts or conversely was guilted in to consuming sugar when I didn't feel I actually really needed it to celebrate. In the future I will find it important to prioritize homemade treats as these really are the best. Often store bought treats are overly sweet and their costs to my joints are not worth it to me.

I believe that anyone can do an (almost) Dessert-less  month and that the more reduce fructose in our diets, the better. In the coming months, I'll continue to share how my sugar reduction is going. In the mean time, best of luck to you as you reduce your sugar intake! 

Dessert-less December*

*Alright, you caught me. It is not an entirely dessert-less December. But, certainly a minimal dessert December.

If you're like me, December is the hardest month to avoid sugar. Sugar is everywhere in December: in Christmas cookies, hot cocoa, warm spiced apple cider, pies, cakes, fudge, divinity, and candy canes. December is a month of celebrations and feast days. So, how do you even begin to avoid sugar?

For the past few months, I haven't been able to cut sugar out of my life as much as I would have liked (And thus haven't been great about posting here). I slid down the slippery slope of one small cookie here, one cup of hot cocoa there. I wasn't able to follow my once a week sugar rule of last spring. So, as the months creeped closer and closer to the HOLIDAY SEASON, I felt worried that I'd never get back on track with my reduction of sugar (and thus inflammation). 

Two books have really helped get me back on track: I Quit Sugar by Sarah Wilson and Year of No Sugar: A Memoir by Eve O. Schaub. In these two books, Wilson and Schaub share their process of detoxing from sugar and minimizing sugar intake. Additionally, I recommend watching this lecture by Dr. Lustig entitled Sugar: The Bitter Truth.

Through reading these books and watching Dr. Lustig's 90 minute lecture, I found a renewed sense of urgency in cutting out sugar but didn't know how to hold myself accountable through the holiday season. 

Because I have been overly excited for it to be Christmas this year, I started looking up holiday decoration inspirations early. One decoration that kept popping up was the Christmas Advent calendar. If you are not familiar with an Advent calendar, it is a 25 day calendar leading up to Christmas day. For each of those 25 days before christmas, the owner of the advent calendar is to open a window or package to receive a small treat (usually sugar). This gave me an idea. What if I made an opposite advent calendar? What if I gave myself a treat for every day that I didn't have sugar in the month of December? Instead of a small piece of candy each day, I'd get one small purple strip of paper for each day that I didn't eat sugar. At the end of the month, I'd get to count up how many purple strips were in the calendar and each strip would be valued at $1. At the end of the month I could buy myself a guilt free Holiday gift (but not a sweet one) with my advent money! 

I do not want to deprive myself of feast days and celebrations though, because that would not be sustainable. So, I am making an alteration to my spring time sugar reduction plan: instead of sugar being allowed once a week, I will allow a maximum of 7 (one week out of the month) days of sugar eating in December. (In future months if I follow this plan, this will be limited to 4-5 sugar days in a month. But, because it is the holiday season, I made an additional 2-3 day add on exception.) I have looked ahead at my month to see what days I know I'll be very tempted to consume sugar. For each of those days I have slipped one of  7 green celebration slips in to that day. A green slip does not mean I HAVE TO EAT SUGAR that day, but instead means that I'm prepared ahead of time to know that I have to avoid sugar on other days so as to be able to celebration that day if I want to. I am hoping that this calendar will hold me accountable because I put it in a very visible place in my studio apartment, where I can see it from my bed at night and where others would be able to see it if they were in my living room area during holiday festivities. I believe that this public and ongoing display will keep me honest with myself. 

In this whole process, it is very important for me that:

1. I call my sugar eating days "Celebration Days" rather than "Cheat Days." The point is not to feel like I am cheating myself, but rather to feel like I am being reflective and thoughtful about when to celebrate and allow sugar in to my life.
2. That I create 1-2 small exceptions. In Year of No Sugar: A Memoir, Schaub and her whole family follow a simple set of rules. One of those rules is that each member of their family is allowed 1 exception sweet that they can have regularly with the caveat that though it has sugar in it, the amount of sugar in that item is low. So, I am choosing chocolate that is 85% or more cocoa. I am also allowing a minimal amount of trace local honey because I add a small amount of it to my homemade almond butter.  Here are my exceptions: 

For the sake of avoiding community defensiveness, I'd like to state that I am trying to minimize my Sucrose and Fructose intake, not my Glucose or Dextrose intake. Glucose is pretty much our life force and extremely essential to everything we do. Dextrose is essentially Glucose so it is fine as well. Many people may think it sounds crazy to remove Fructose because we all think of fruit as Fructose and we think of fruit as being healthy. Fruit is fine. It is when Fructose is removed from it's fibrous encasings when it becomes more dangerous. Schaub explains:

"How Fructose Makes You Fat and Sick:

1. All sugar contains fructose.
2. Fructose does not satisfy hunger, so you eat more food than your body needs.
3. Fructose may not be used by any of the cells in your body, except the liver.
4. In processing fructose, the liver produces bad things: uric acid and fatty acids.
5. Too much uric acid causes:
1. Gout
2. Hypertension
6. Too many fatty acids cause:
1. Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD)
2. Cardiovascular Disease (CVD)
3. Insulin Resistance & Type 2 Diabetes
4. Obesity
7. The clustering of two or more of the four conditions above is called Metabolic Syndrome. Virtually unheard of only a few decades ago, one in five Americans suffers from it today.
8. Additionally, circulating fatty acids have been proven to speed the growth of cancer cells.
9. Consumption of fructose has risen 341% in the last century and continues to climb.
10. So what do you call something that your body has no need for and that, when we take it in, creates toxic by-products in our bodies resulting in debilitation, disease, and untimely death? Well, doctors call that a poison."

So, as you can see, I'm starting to realize that my sugar intake is a bit of a problem. Now I am doing something about it. My plan is to make this my New Years resolution (one month early). One. Month. At. A. Time. I'll be sharing my progress here with all of you and would love to hear about others who are creating their own Sugar-Free Advent calendars! Please send me photos of your Sugar-Free advent calendars and we can work to make sure that our Holiday is still filled with joy  and celebration... without much sugar!