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I am probably going to be sorry tonight. We’ll see if the watermelon affects me like the butternut squash and carrots have done. Usually when I have carbohydrates in the evening it causes me to wake up with insomnia around 1:30 in the morning.

I just couldn’t help myself. My son bought a watermelon and it just looked so delicious. So ice cold, crunchy and juicy, I had a nice thick slice. It is legal on GAPS to have melon, but I want to avoid carbohydrates in the evening as they seem to affect my sleep during the night.

Also yesterday I made the GAPS-illegal cake for Independence Day.

My sinuses have been bothering me. Ever since last week after having kefir and then raw goat’s milk cream. It seems like every day my sinuses are clogged and it is hard to breathe.

I have been doing a very brief workout on my Total Gym each day. I don’t know how tomorrow will go as I have to get up early and go to work.

I took a late nap today, and already feel tired.

It is the fifth of July and I need to stop the cheating already. Here are my goals for the month of July:

• Limit fruit to a small portion on Sunday. For example, less than 10 cherries, grapes, one half banana, one half apple.
• Workout on my Total Gym Friday through Monday (shoot for a workout on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday but no stress if I don’t get to it, they are less than five minutes at this point, after all)
• Limit nuts to less than 1/2 cup week (I often use nuts as a quick snack for on the way home from work so I don’t get starving hungry)
• Concentrate on eating mostly meat, vegetables and broth
• Limit baked goods (almond flour [affiliate link]) to one weekend day
• Avoid vegetables high in starch
• Drink more broth
• Take my cod liver oil
• Eat raw liver shots

Last night I had planned to go see the fireworks but I took one look at my husband around 6pm and he looked exhausted. When I saw how tired he looked, I asked him if he was too tired to go and he said what was so hard about driving someplace and sitting for a while listening to me going “ooh” and “ahh” and then driving back home?

Well, the problem is that he goes to bed around 6:30 or 7pm each night (because he regularly gets up for work around 2:30am, sometimes leaving the house by 4am). Also, it is very warm in Arizona at this time of the year, and I was not looking forward to sitting in that heat watching the fireworks. My camera doesn’t have fireworks settings, so I can’t take awesome fireworks photos like I was able to do last year, so that was also holding me back.

I tried to take a nap in the middle of the day and usually can take a two hour nap easily, but only slept about an hour. The fireworks wouldn’t have started until 9pm so we would not have gotten back home until around 11pm. I will probably make a point to go next year though.

I am having hot flashes throughout the day and night. Not too bad, but enough that I am feeling very uncomfortable. During the night I spray my arms and legs with my water bottle and then get back into bed and the fan blows on me.

I realized over the weekend that I need to water every single day in the morning on Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, and every single afternoon on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. This means the garden goes without being watered for 36 hours on Monday/Tuesday.

I hate having to water the garden on the days I work. It is so ungodly hot and uncomfortable out there.

I didn’t get any extra work done this weekend. Well, actually I did clear out one book shelf where we have been storing canned goods, and replaced the canned goods with books. We don’t have a pantry so there has been no place to store canned, jarred or dried goods, so we resorted to using the living room book shelves. When my husband replaced our air conditioner, he got rid of the split system so now I have an area which I want him to convert into a pantry where I can store kitchen items, like food and the Kitchen Aid mixer, and anything else that is big and bulky and needs a home.

I also tidied up my older son’s room again, and vacuumed in there. I’ll ponder this week on what I can do next weekend. Maybe the bathrooms. Agh.

This has been a very disjointed update. What can I say? It was probably the watermelon. 😉

Don’t miss Life Before and After the GAPS Diet over at Heart of Cooking. This is the inspirational testimonial from a woman who has been on the GAPS diet for 9 months. Also in January she wrote: A Happiest New Year and My Life Prior to the GAPS Diet. I can relate to much of her post and so glad she shared!

Starlene

When you don’t have much energy, it’s hard to keep a clean house. For years, I thought it must be laziness on my part. I would try my hardest to get the house cleaned up, and then try to stay on top of it. Even when I was a stay at home mother I had a difficult time keeping my home clean. I depended on these monthly bursts of energy which would come right before my period. It was like having a nesting urge each month. But I would get my place cleaned up for the most part and then the energy surge would gradually fade away and things would pile up and it would get messier and messier. I have spent most of my adult life in fear that anyone would want to come over and visit. And those monthly nesting urges have sorely waned in the past few years as I have entered a perimenopausal phase.

Now I don’t want to get my hopes up, and think that this time I’m really going to be organized and get the house cleaned up, and keep it that way. I have been down this path before, and it always dead ends. At No Energy Lane.

But this is the third weekend which I have felt pretty good.

One way I can tell that I’m feeling really low on energy is how long it takes for me to wash my clothes on the weekend. There have been some weekends where I don’t get my load of clothes into the washer until Sunday afternoon, and that’s pushing it because I have to go to work the next morning. I love having my clothes in my drawers, ready to wear, but I have also spent most of my adult life with my clothes in piles, having to dig through and find something to wear.

I got to bed a little later than normal last night, around 9pm. I woke around 4am and decided to get up, because after all I didn’t need to try to stay in bed and get more sleep since I didn’t have to get up and go to work. I figured I could always take a nap later in the morning if I got tired.

My mom texted me about 4:40 and said she was awake, and looking forward to the holiday and that I probably wasn’t awake yet. I had been sitting at the computer, but I texted her back and told her to call me if she wanted. I grabbed my ear piece and headed to the kitchen, thinking I may as well do something while I talked.

We were on the phone for a while, and then I got off because I needed to eat.

By 8am, here is what I had accomplished (by the way, on a normal no-energy morning I would have accomplished the bare minimum which I’ve italicized in green font):

• washed two loads of dishes, put both away
• folded a load of laundry from last night, sorted out the things I was going to donate and put the rest away
• washed and folded and put away another load
• one more load in the washer
• milked
• took the scrap bucket with me to dump to the chickens
• came in, processed the milk
• changed kefir grain’s milk
• washed the scrap bucket out
• dealt with five milk jars that had been in the fridge all week, cleaned them
• took the excess milk to the chickens
• wiped counters and stove
• watered garden
• harvested tomatoes and eggplants and peppers
• changed cat and dog’s water, washed container before replacing
• swept and mopped kitchen floor
• emptied kitchen garbage
• scooped the two cat litter boxes
• hand scrubbed a spot on my bedroom floor
• made the bed (hubby was last one in for once)
• did a “non-exerciser” workout on the Total Gym
• took a shower

Now, if the bathrooms were both clean, I would have added a quick once over on the list for them.

It seems like the more I get the house cleaned, the longer the list of chores becomes to stay on top of everything. And once that list grows too long, I can’t keep up with it, and I fall back to doing nothing and then the mess builds and becomes unmanageable and overwhelming.

On the days I work, Monday through Thursday, I would like to incorporate a few chores, but there are things I absolutely have to do, like milk and water the garden. I can’t water in the morning, I already am supposed to get up by 3am to milk, so I have no choice but to do it in the evening. I have tried automatic watering over the years, and it always fails. The little tubes clog up from our hard water, and my current method is irrigating a large bed with the sides built up to hold the water. I’ve lost count how many times the gophers have dug a hole in the garden bed and I wondered how come the water wasn’t rising in that bed like it should be, to finally discover that the water was rushing down the gopher’s hole which never seemed to fill up.

After I showered, I warmed up some vegetables to eat. Then I laid down on my bed to rest for a while. Oh, it was so heavenly to lay on my bed with the fan blowing on my bare clean feet.

I began having hot flashes last fall, then they went away (a couple of months before I even started GAPS). They seem to be back. I wonder if the extreme heat is a trigger, as it is very, very hot here. I think we have been over 115°F some days. The air conditioner works hard all day long just to keep the temperature at 79°F in the house.

OH. That’s why I was awake at 4am. It was hot and I was uncomfortable and could not sleep. When I got up, I saw that someone had put the air conditioning unit’s temperature to 80°F which is too hot for me to sleep. I have trouble sleeping if it’s 79°F but I do best at 78°F.

It was so comfy lying in my bed. So sooooo comfy. I decided to peruse my favorite seed catalog, the only one I ever order from – Pinetree Garden Seeds. After a while of looking and writing down the ones I wanted to order, I felt so relaxed and comfortable I decided to take a nap.

Hubby came in around 11:30 and asked me if I was awake, and I was just drowsing and felt like getting up again, so I did, and here I am.

—

I found a book recently that piqued my interest… I have tried so hard over the years to get organized, and I have tried some methods again and again. But my lack of energy has always gotten in the way. It is hard not to get angry at myself for not being able to keep up with things. They get so bad, and then it takes so very long to get them under control again. I can only do so much with a few hours of energy.

But I thought I would order this book and see if THIS method will work: One Year to an Organized Life: From Your Closets to Your Finances, the Week-by-Week Guide to Getting Completely Organized for Good.

—

Yesterday I harvested one of my Malali watermelons, the plant of which came up volunteer.

Okay, I cheated. It’s not a cheat in that it is GAPS illegal, as melons are allowed on GAPS. It is a cheat from my own rules for myself, which is to avoid fruit altogether. Yet I am giving myself permission to have fruit a few times during the month. I ate one-quarter of this melon. It weighed 7.5 pounds. It was not super sweet, but it was very juicy and ice cold.

The hot summer weather is one thing that is hard about not having fruit. In the summer time, I crave cold things. I always have. For all of my adult life, during the summer it has been common for me to nap in the afternoon, wake up too warm and thirsty and have a thick slice of ice cold watermelon. Or a bowl of ice cream. Or some kind of fruit smoothie.

It’s just not the same to whir up some cooked, chilled zucchini, you know? I mean… maybe if I could sweeten it with honey [affiliate link], which I’m also keeping to a bare minimum… but still. It’s not the same.

Well, I should hit publish and get busy with something else.

Hugs,

Starlene

I forgot to mention yesterday that I had a breakfast smoothie, consisting of coconut milk [affiliate link] (not GAPS legal since it contained guar gum), 1/2 a banana, some very sweet pineapple I’d sliced and frozen a couple of months ago, about 5 pecan halves, one egg yolk and a handful of blueberries.

This morning I had one of the same.

It was somewhat celebratory in nature, but it has been so hot here that I wanted something cool for breakfast. Also I justified to myself, it’s four weeks away from the next time I step on the scale, so I can afford to cheat a little and pay attention to how the fruit affects me. I do still plan to limit my fruit heavily for the month of July.

I was astonished to learn on the list today that avocados are high in fiber. Fiber Menace says if your diet is higher than 15 grams of fiber daily, then you need to ease into a low fiber diet. I sometimes eat two avocados a day, they are a quick food for me when I need to eat and there is nothing else. An online search revealed that one cup of avocado contains 7 grams of fiber. Astonishing!

I did start my Total Gym exercising today. The exercise manual suggests that “non-exercisers” begin with two exercises for two weeks. I thought that would be good for me to start there.

I also, out of curiosity, timed the making of my bed. Just under five minutes. I needed to know on those days when I feel like I would rather not make my bed. I can use the reasoning to myself “It’s ONLY five minutes!” I will do that to convince myself to floss some nights.

I picked up the living room a bit today and vacuumed. The living room looks better. I haven’t decided what to tackle this weekend yet, or if I will do any big cleaning at all. We’ll see how I feel tomorrow.

‘Night.

I stopped stepping on the scale sometime around 1997 because it would mess with my head so much to know the number.

I could not bring myself to look at the number for years, and instead had my son and husband keep track of how much I weighed (just in case I ever needed emergency surgery or something).

But since being on GAPS I decided to start stepping on the scale on the first of each month.

This morning I was really grumpy. I had insomnia, was up at 1:30am. I have to get out of bed at 3am to milk and get ready to leave for work by 5am, so I just stayed up. My mood was pretty foul, not looking forward to the day ahead of me, but I was perked up a little bit after I stepped on the scale.

My experiment in June was to avoid fruit altogether and cut down on nut butters, nuts and vegetables high in carbohydrates.

If you’ve been reading my blog for the past month, you’ll know that I did have fruit several times during the month – five or six times, if I remember correctly. I also had one-quarter of the not legal GAPS cake on Father’s Day, and cashew nut ice cream. And I had some baked goods. But I did cut down quite a bit.

So this morning I weighed exactly 194 pounds. On June 1st, I weighed 200.6. I did not weigh myself until I’d been doing GAPS for a couple of weeks, and at that time I weighed 232. So my official weight loss in nearly seven months on GAPS: 38.

As I have said before, I did not start GAPS to lose weight. I hoped to regain health, energy and to stop feeling depressed and lackluster about life in general.

Losing weight was a bonus.

In July I plan to lay low on the fruit again, high carb veggies, nuts, almond flour [affiliate link] baked goods, but I am planning to start working out on my Total Gym.

Now I had promised myself I would work out on the Total Gym today, if only for five minutes. Can you believe that my husband undressed the bed tonight, and neatly laid the shams and decorative pillows on my Total Gym? Of course I’m just too tired out to even consider moving them at this late time of the day.

I also got some very sad news today. My ex-boss’ wife has just today been diagnosed with breast cancer. It makes my problems seem insignificant. I have promised the family I will ask for prayers so if you pray, please keep R & L in prayer.

‘Night all.