30 Year Vow Renewals – A Love Story
Thirty-two years. That’s how long we’ve been married now. There’s something ridiculously liberating about spending 30 years with your person. He gets me utterly and there’s zero judgment. Even on my worst days, he still gropes me. I don’t think he even has a concept of “bad hair days” when it comes to how he sees me. Every ten years, we’ve renewed our wedding vows, but our 30th was different. We started this tradition by accident actually. Our original wedding ceremony wasn’t entirely my created dream wedding. We’d eloped on a Tuesday (just 3 weeks after we started dating) with plans to keep it a secret until much later (that’s…
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Intentional Living & Why it Matters
What is intentional living? LIVING IN A WAY THAT IS INTENTIONAL. I realize that may sound like I just repeated myself, but let that last line sink in for a minute… Living with intention means living in a way that is in line with your personal values, beliefs, and purposes. This can include religious, political, creative, or personal. In the end, it really comes down to understanding what matters to you and living a life intentionally in alignment with that. Intentional living means having defined goals for various areas of your life and then designing a life that helps you reach them. The problem is that most people live their lives…
My 10 Step Plan to Lose Weight and Feel Awesome
You know how I was eating really good before? How I’d finally gotten past my food addictions, and even wrote about them? How I’d gotten to a place where my ideal weight was actually on the near horizon? Yeah, well… Let me back up for a second. Here’s a picture of Grant and I on a plane headed to England. See how cute I look? So, a lot happened after that trip. Most of it pretty epic and awesome, except for the sabotage part… Oh man. I was at such a good place physically just before that flight. I’ll tell you how it started, but first a quick story for…
Never Good Enough – A Lesson in Loving Myself
Never good enough. Oh man, if that doesn’t smother any hope of awesomeness, I don’t know what does. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for self-improvement and the constant willingness to up your game. But when you never acknowledge the triumphs, embrace the accomplishments, or celebrate the victories, why bother? After all, life is a game, and the accomplishment of goals no matter how big or small are everything, but I’m getting ahead of myself… See this picture? I never shared it on my social media. Or these… You know why? Because I was super self-conscious…and I still thought I was fat. Even though I had lost over 70 pounds.…
10 Steps to Feel Awesome
It’s a little hard to be awesome when you don’t feel awesome. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but there’s no way that some of the potential awesomeness isn’t dampened. This is why I have a section of posts devoted to health and diet. Because being awesome is an “all over” thing. It’s how you feel. It’s how you think. It’s what you do. And it’s covered in several points of my 365 Ways to Be Awesome manifesto. But first, a story. Many years ago I met a sushi chef who was delightful and very good at what he did. His business was not doing great because of local…
How Eating Fat is Making Me Healthy
In my last post, I discussed how I finally broke free of food addiction. Well, two months later, and I’m happy to say it’s true. No more food addictions. No more insane cravings. No more guilt because I just couldn’t resist that (pastry, bread roll, waffle, pancake). Seriously. So, how did I do it? Well, I completely eliminated sugar, refined carbs and starchy carbs from my diet. Instead, I’m eating loads of fat, moderate protein and just a little bit of carbs. And the carbs I do eat, are the good ones (green leafy vegetables, berries, non-starchy vegetables). Believe it or not, almost 70% of my daily calories come from fat.…
Welcome to The End of Food Addiction Forever
Wait. Is that even possible in today’s culture? Actually, yes. So, here goes… In addition to regaining my health, I’ve been doing extensive research on how to extract myself from my food addictions and food cravings. And I keep coming back to the same point: I need to stop eating the very foods that trigger them. Simple. In fact, I’ve written two previous blog posts on my thoughts on food addiction, and how I was conquering them. However, I was missing a final piece of the puzzle, and I have finally figured it out. When I quit smoking over 8 years ago, it wasn’t grueling or awful, or unbearable. In…
Why Berries Made Me Sleepy
You know what sucks about having a body? The fact that sometimes it doesn’t feel so hot. For me, it has been a situation so severe that at one point, I could barely walk without assistance, and was unable to participate in the daily joys of life at all. My body was riddled with inflammation, everything hurt, and my memory had started accumulating blank spaces at an alarming rate. Over the past 3 years, I’ve been doing a lot of—some might say—aggressive methods of addressing it. All of these have helped in some way, and of course led me to a place where life is pretty awesome actually. Well, last…
Be Brave With Your Life
“I will be a mermaid when I grow up.” These were the words spoken by a young girl many years ago who goes by the name of Hannah Fraser. And weirdly, she is, in fact, a real-life mermaid today. Don’t believe me? Watch this video and be mesmerized, and amazed. Right???!! I stumbled across this today, and I am smitten. Her bravery. Her beauty. Her tails (she designs them herself!!). Aaaand she makes being a mermaid ridiculously cool and utterly believable as a practical career. If that’s not enough, she swims with sharks of all kinds, manta rays and dolphins. She’s an activist actually making a difference and changing laws…
Wear Whatever You Want to Wear, Pretty Please
My mom just turned 70. She was born in 1946. How awesome is that? My mother-in-law made a low-sugar gorgeous cake, I made a slideshow of my mom’s life from childhood through to the present, and four generations turned up to celebrate this momentous occasion including her grandkids, and great-grandchildren. My personal gift to her was an evening of painting on canvas, and dinner—just the two of us. While we were at dinner, a girl walked by in a cute outfit that looked a little vintage—a romper with a 40’s flavor. My mom admired it wistfully, and said, “That’s really cute. I guess I’m too old for that sort of…
Be awesome. Every. Single. Day.
