Though my beginnings with the WildFit Challenge started with the Mindvalley Master class in March of 2017, I will add some back-story, which seems important to share.
I am a mother of five. The first two were twins. I breastfed all of my children for at least the first two years of their lives. This began my journey to find the truth about nutrition, in earnest. I had a typical teen to young adulthood in the USA up to that point. I had grown to love many of the convenience foods we have been inundated with for the past fifty years. My weight would fluctuate 10-20 pounds over the course of life’s adventures. I had suspicions that something was amiss, even then. I was not about to pass the poisons on to my children, however. I had no idea what to do when those sweet little girls were howling at my feet and I needed to figure out what to make for dinner. I was grateful for the breastfeeding community who shared cookbooks and recipes with me. I eventually compromised to convenience, at times. Especially when another baby came along, time and energy were deciding factors beyond my wildest imagination.
Fast-forward 18 years. I had been enjoying my ideal weight and body fat percentage for the previous 4 years. I was an avid rock climber and worked out regularly in the premier indoor rock gym near my home. I was traveling with four of our five children, to visit friends just a couple of hours north of us for a quick overnight visit during the Christmas/ Solstice season, before my husband returned from Iraq. We never got there. I woke 5 days later in a hospital, with my husband at my side. The worst news was the twin in the vehicle had been killed. (The other one had stayed home). Had she been with us, there would have been two fatalities because someone would have been sitting in the seat directly behind the front passenger. As it was, the daughter sitting the next row back was even more severely injured than I. We both spent weeks in the hospital, months in wheelchairs and many surgeries to repair the broken bones. All of that took my metabolism for a very wild ride, to say the least.
What I would give to go back and redo that process with even a fraction of what I have learned from Eric Edmeades about the human diet and how we can optimize our health and more specifically, our ability to recover from injuries and surgeries and whatever ails us. Alas, it has taken me more than 12 years to arrive to this wisdom and reap the benefits of optimizing my health.
I had not started the Challenge on time with the group. I do not even recall why I was delayed. I struggled with playing catch-up and not reading posts on the Facebook group that would give away the current week’s enhancements. I had kept true to the plan up to the fifth week. Then when the enhancements were things I had already eliminated, I ventured to wonder what the next week’s enhancements would be and whether I could at least move up a week closer to the group. Sure enough, it appeared I could skip a few days and begin making Alkagizer prime smoothies and the other enhancements involved. Up to that point, I was feeling like I had to eat “so much” to stick to the ‘no hunger’ rule. I held to the protocol and had moderate weight loss. I was not as focused on the weight as I was on the inches and percent body fat, which were my more prioritized goals. I know that fat stored around the waist is a primary marker for increased risk of heart disease and other diseases I have no interest to visit. I wanted to optimize my health with a diet overhaul and to restore my metabolism to the fat-burning state I had known the majority of my adult life. The enforced sedentary lifestyle from injuries and chronic pain had wrecked havoc with every aspect of my metabolism and endocrine system. I have tried several diets in the past ten years with very little success. The hardest part was living in a household with three other adults who insist that so much more junk comes into the household than I had allowed when I was the head cook and bottle washer. My former capacity to hold the reins in the kitchen has been a complicated conundrum. My own sense of self-care was easily overridden with their disregard for my intentions. This WildFit Challenge was the first program in which I have found the psychological empowerment to take my self-care more seriously, and make progress beyond a few weeks of diet change attempts.
I began to see a real jump in progress personally, when I took the first invitation to try a mini-fast. I had Alkagizers and water the first day and only water the following two. After the three days, I had broken the plateau of weight loss and jumped down five pounds. Even better, I had broken the hunger barrier and also saw significant shift in body fat percentage. I was a happy camper and would be fine with that outcome by the end of the Challenge. As it was, I was very appreciative of the extra week added to the program. I took the time to slowly add foods back after the fast. I had to really take it slow with going into spring from deep spring, after the fast. I was so upset that when I put a quarter cup of blueberries into my smoothie and it tasted terrible! I had been drinking smoothies for years (since losing the 40 pounds hanging on after baby #5). I had thought it would be so nice to have fruit again. Later, as I got bolder to test things ‘below the line’, I had much the same experience as many of my fellow WildFit adventurers, and easily kept them below the line. This also happened to coincide with trying the 6:1 spring to mini-fast ratio for size. I would gain maybe 3-4 pounds and amazingly, lose that plus another after the fast-day. I decided I could refine this plan even more and stick with a deep spring: mini-fast in that same ratio. The best part is that the body fat percentage just keeps tilting down to my formerly ideal range week by week. I have lost enough weight (18 pounds) to find my former size 10 clothes to be a bit loose fitting. I like my clothes that way, so all is well. That means actually a total of three clothing sizes down, however. What’s the best part of all? I can enjoy the company of my family members as they eat things I used to crave, without folding to join them. This was pretty tough in the early weeks of this Challenge. I had to work very hard to say “Not this time” quite often. I am also eating much less in a day without hunger issues. This is maybe even the best part, I can’t decide.
I can honestly state that I have reached a sense of confidence that this has become my new lifestyle. I am enjoying so much less pain, and so many other little signs of food sensitivities gone. I still have about 5-8 pounds to go, or whatever it takes to get to 18-20% body fat. I am more excited to add more exercise to my daily activities for the sake of restoring some flexibility and strength to my overall health plan. I expect to be ready to give that rock gym a visit in the near future. This has all given me such a sense of success and improved self-esteem. I am even more inspired to take the plunge and go back to school for that Masters Degree I have been reluctant to go for. At age 60, I am even more inspired to tackle the hurdles to that degree and get the credentials to be able to share this amazing information with others who are floundering in the medical quagmire of misinformation, while hoping to recover some facsimile of former life after traumas. The regulations in my state limit what credentials qualify who can give nutrition information, and to what degree. More than anything, I want to continue to model my lifestyle and health gains to my family and hope they eventually come around to giving this a try. Their health issues continue to stack against their sense of wellbeing. My husband is my best friend and I wish to have him around for a good long time yet.
