Trim Healthy Mama with a Side of Vitamin D

Trim Healthy Mama.  Vitamin D.  Thyroid issues.  Essential oils.  My journey to being healthy and feeling good.

I’ve mentioned here and on my fb and IG pages that I’m feeling better than I have in months – maybe years.  And I’ve had some questions about what I’m doing and I’ve promised I would share in more detail.  So here it is – my journey to a healthier life, more energy, and feeling great.

3 things have been huge factors in this journey – Essential Oils, Trim Healthy Mama, and Vitamin D.

If you have read here for long you know that I have taken depression meds since I was pregnant with my second child.  She is now 11 so it’s been 12 years since I started those.  Thankfully I’ve never had to up the dosage or switch to stronger brands.  I’ve done very well with this but would like to not be dependent on prescription meds now that the government has trashed our health care system.

You also know that I don’t like winter.  At all.  I dread the cold the most and the snow makes me cranky in a hurry.  It also makes it worse when other people try to ‘make it better’ with comments that don’t make it better but in fact make it worse, and laughing like it is something those of us who suffer from this can just ‘get over’.

Anyway – this past winter I started using Essential Oils and I fell in love with them.  That is an entire post of its own so I’m not going into detail here but it was the beginning of getting myself to a point of feeling better instead of continuing the downward spiral I couldn’t seem to get out of.

Mid-July I was introduced to Trim Healthy Mama and the complete transformation began.  ( A couple friends talked about it one night when several of us were out for dinner, and I followed up with one of them later on what exactly this THM was.  Had I known at the time how many people I knew were doing this I probably would have wanted nothing at all to do with it.  (yes I’m funny like that) and I’m so glad I didn’t know and that I ordered the book then and there.)

Trim Healthy Mama (THM) is not a diet plan but a lifestyle change.  For the first time in my life I began to believe that I could attain an ideal weight and keep my weight there.  This was not a diet like some I’d tried, where you do your best to stick to the rules till you reach your goal weight, and then the pounds just come back as you slowly end up going back to the way you ate before.

 Trim Healthy Mama is a way of life, a healthy, wholesome way to approach food and is based in Biblical roots.  I was hooked.

For the past 2 or 3 years I’ve tried different things to lose weight.  Weight Watchers, exercise, portion control, healthy foods – nothing worked.  I might lose a few pounds but they came right back and usually brought friends with them.  And not the kind of friends you want hanging around 😀  In the past year I hadn’t been able to lose any weight at all no matter what I tried.  I decided I needed to be resigned to being a size 18 and hoping I could at least not get bigger!  But  I wasn’t resigned and I wasn’t happy about it.  I really wasn’t feeling good either.

I never really pulled out of the winter slump last Spring.  I was functioning but not at full steam.  I wasn’t really enjoying much of what I was doing either.  I was existing, doing what had to be done.  If I could put it off or get out of it I did.  My husband took on more and more of the housework and errands as I just couldn’t seem to find the energy for all of it anymore.

But then my THM book arrived in the mail.  I couldn’t read it fast enough.  I’m sure my friend who introduced me to it got tired of me texting her with questions.  I’m sure she wanted to say ‘READ THE BOOK ALREADY!”  And I WAS reading the book but I couldn’t get it all in my head fast enough.  This plan sounded so sensible, so do-able, and it just made SO. MUCH. SENSE.  So I started in.

The plan in a nutshell is that you don’t eat your carbs and your fats in the same meals.  It’s so amazingly easy for me and there are so many good things you can eat – recipes people share – and you can eat butter and cheese and cream and cream cheese and so many yummy things.  You do cut sugar – no sugar allowed.  No honey or Maple syrup either.  Honey and Maple syrup send your blood sugar levels up faster than regular white sugar!  Makes me laugh now when people thing they are being so much healthier to sweeten with honey and maple syrup.  While they ARE healthier, especially honey, using the amounts you need to sweeten desserts is not doing your body any good.

I found that I wasn’t so much addicted to sugar as I was to refined flours.  I’m not a huge dessert fan but I love breads, granola bars and all kinds of things that on the surface can even seem healthy, but a bit of research shows they are not.  They are full of refined flours, added sugars and corn syrup.  Even foods that say they have no trans fats unfortunately do have trans fats.  They can say ‘no trans fats’ because the oils used don’t start out as trans fats.  But when the oils are heated it turns them into trans fats.  Coconut Oil is the only oil I have in my house now that we will use in baking – we use it for almost everything.  I also have olive oil to use for dressings or for anything cold.  Chilled, the coconut oil solidifies so it’s not ideal for things like salad dressings that you want cold but pour-able.

Last winter was hard on me.  It was cold, very cold, with lots of snow.  The cold didn’t want to go away.  In fact we never really had much hot weather this summer.  We haven’t had a very hot summer for a few years now. (so much for global warming) That makes the approach of yet another winter even harder to take.  I kept dragging along all spring and into the summer, doing what had to be done, enjoying some of it, but wondering when I was going to crash and not be able to get back up.  The first 2 to 4 weeks of THM were a bit brutal with detox symptoms from quitting sugar.  ALL sugar.  Anything we bought had to have the label inspected for added sugar.  We had to switch up brands on some things.  I quit drinking milk completely – milk is liquid carbs.  I quit eating bread.  My sandwiches are lettuce leaves stuffed with yummy meats, mayo, cheese, dill pickles, mustard, and a few tomatoes.  Potatoes are too high on the carb chart for weight loss so until I reach my goal weight I will not be eating them either.  There are substitutes to take the place of those in my meals and I’ve not missed them at all.

I love the food I can eat and I was so overjoyed when the scales started to move I was almost in tears.  Seriously.  (I still get a bit teary feeling when I get on the scales and it’s a bit lower)  And slowly the scales has continued to move.  And for the first time I can ever remember I feel a freedom in sharing what I am doing because I know I WILL attain the weight I want to weigh.  In the past I was always afraid to talk about what I was doing because I was afraid I would fail – because I always did.  I always got tired of dieting and the weight came back.  This plan is not a diet.  It’s a way of life that is healthy and do-able.

And something else happened.  I not only was losing weight but I was feeling better than I had in years.

Those first few weeks on THM, I’d have days with detox symptoms and I would take a nap and drink a lot of water.  Then I thought I was through the worst of it.  Then it hit again – with a vengence!  Years of putting junk in my body took awhile to erradicate.  It was bad enough I made an appointment with my Dr. to get some blood work done – to rule out some things if nothing else.  Diabetes is very high in my family and I wanted to make sure I wasn’t dealing with a bigger issue than detox – detox is bad enough!  So I had some lab work done and found that I was vitamin D defficient, and my thyroid wasn’t quite working at full speed.

My Dr. recommended 5000 mg of vitamin d daily.  After 6 weeks I will be tested again to see where my numbers are.  And then I will start something for thyroid.  Most likely not meds – I have some other things I plan to try first.  (those six weeks are almost up so I need to get another Dr. appointment made.) (I’m trying to support my Dr. all by myself this fall 😀 )

The vitamin D has been huge in making me feel better, but I also realized that other than the detox from sugar I went through I hadn’t had a really down day since starting THM.  I had almost gotten used to having days where my shoulders felt weighted, I was so sleepy I couldn’t stay awake while helping my girls with school, and I didn’t really care if anything got done.

I HAVE NOT HAD A DAY LIKE THAT SINCE I STARTED THM.

I take my vitamin D early in the morning – usually when the alarm goes off and then it’s at least an hour before I eat.  My Dr. told me the best way to take it was on an empty stomach – 2 hours after and 1 hour before eating (at least)  My Dr. has been doing vitamin D testing for 11 years.  He recommends the NOW brand so that’s what I bought.  It has been helping.  I take 5,000mg per day because that is what my Dr. recommended.  Have your doctor order a blood test for vitamin D and see where your levels are.  Most people are low!

I take my vitamin D and most mornings I’m ready to get up a half hour to an hour later.  My eyes come open and I actually WANT to get out of bed.  I don’t remember the last time I wanted to get out of bed instead of getting up because it’s what had to be done.  Most days I keep going all day long without wanting a nap.  It’s amazing.  I feel like I have myself back.

As I’ve said, in the past I’ve been very hesitant to share anything I’m trying because I was afraid of failure – and I always failed too.

It’s been tempting to not share anything about this till I am to my goal weight and can share my complete success.  But then I started feeling so much better.  And I just can’t keep silent about it.  If there is a chance that I can help someone else begin their journey to feeling good and having optimal health I want to do it now not later.

So that’s what I’m doing.  Trim Healthy Mama.  With a side of vitamin D.  And a few (really quite a lot) of essential oils.  I’ll share about the oils sometime too.  I’m losing weight – I started THM 3 months ago and I’m down 16.5 pounds.  Even with my thyroid not functioning at 100% I’m losing weight.  I’m losing a bit slower than a lot of people do but I’m losing.  I’m good with that!

THM is amazing.  The book is a must for every home in my opinion.  Even if you don’t have weight issues and even if you don’t adopt the lifestyle it’s a must-read.  There is so much information about health – superfoods, good oils, what’s not good for you, etc.  There is a section on hormones – ladies we don’t have to feel yucky ‘just because we are getting older’!  There is a section on exercise clear in the back – it’s not the key to weight loss – it’s just added in because it’s healthy and very good for you. There are a ton of recipes.

The women who wrote the book are sisters, and they have been through quite a few health and weight issues of their own.  They have done a ton of research and tried almost every diet out there.  They spent 5 years writing the book and it is self-published.  It’s amazing.  It’s worth the money.  It can change your life.

That’s the beginning of my journey to health.  I’ll keep you updated now and then and please – feel free to ask any questions!

Jill