My first day of the challenge was a success! I filled up on tasty foods:
- plain yogurt with frozen berries
- skim milk
- apples and bananas
- copious amounts of white tea
- carrots
- oatmeal with sugar and cinnamon
- salmon poached in white wine, scallops, roasted yam fries, and steamed asparagus for dinner
Today I've got a gigantic salad of raw veggies mixed with some canned tuna for lunch. I find that the more I think about the meals that I'll be eating, the more delicious they sound to me. I really look forward to my lunches of fresh salads (does that make me strange?).
Yesterday was also very successful because I went through all of my clothes and sorted out what does and does not fit. Over the course of the past 6 years, I've accumulated a very large amount of pants, pretty much all of which I've kept. And I tried on every single pair yesterday. At the end of it, I counted all of my pants. Twenty pairs of jeans, cargo pants, and dress pants. That's a pretty disgustingly high number. However! It was very liberating, because SEVENTEEN of those pairs of pants are going to Salvation Army (in addition to three pairs of capris/shorts). Why is this? Because they are all way too big on me! Every single one of those seventeen pairs of pants can slide right off of me even when they're buttoned and zipped up (I told you
I have no hips ). Two more pairs are pretty loose but I'm holding on to them anyways just until I get some more.
It feels great to be able to say goodbye to all of those pants. Not only is my closet much emptier (time to fill it up again!), but my mind feels better to have less stuff cluttering up my room, and my body feels so much better in its healthier state.
Here's a photo of the clothes I'm giving away (indulge in my excitement for a moment):
This article over at the Winnipeg Free Press is some food for thought. It seems to me that drugs are being handed out left right and center these days, as the solution to all of life's problems. I don't think much of most kinds of drugs and try to avoid them as much as possible; I don't even like to take aspirin for headaches. I really think that there are some circumstances in which drugs are of immense help (recovering from getting my wisdom teeth out would have been that much more brutal if I didn't have a bottle of T3's for company!), but I also believe that all too often we reach for the pills when they aren't necessary. And as our bodies become used to these drugs, they become dependent on them. It weakens the immune system and means that gradually to get the same effect you need to take two pills instead of one, and so on.
The issue with antidepressants is very concerning. How could 30.2 million antidepressant prescriptions be filled within the space of one year?! And the correlation between weight gain and taking antidepressants is staggering. I'm sure it's resulted in tons of people becoming even more depressed and just winds up a vicious, unhappy, unhealthy cycle. As always, the problem is overprescribing and overusing these drugs. Moderation, moderation, moderation!
Please note that I'm not saying all pharmaceutical drugs are the devil, and I'm not saying it's necessary to abstain from them altogether. Sometimes, it really might be the only thing that'll work. But I unfortunately don't know enough about antidepressants to say whether they're of much help to most people. I've had a couple of times when I've become rather depressed, but I spent my time focusing on exercising and reading good books to help me get better; that combined with letting time pass was what did it for me (and possibly the approach of warmer weather:)). Taking antidepressants wasn't even something I considered as an option. It's just not for me.
Have any of you ever been on antidepressants and did they work? Or were there negative side effects that made it not worth it?
This article over at the Winnipeg Free Press is some food for thought. It seems to me that drugs are being handed out left right and center these days, as the solution to all of life's problems. I don't think much of most kinds of drugs and try to avoid them as much as possible; I don't even like to take aspirin for headaches. I really think that there are some circumstances in which drugs are of immense help (recovering from getting my wisdom teeth out would have been that much more brutal if I didn't have a bottle of T3's for company!), but I also believe that all too often we reach for the pills when they aren't necessary. And as our bodies become used to these drugs, they become dependent on them. It weakens the immune system and means that gradually to get the same effect you need to take two pills instead of one, and so on.
The issue with antidepressants is very concerning. How could 30.2 million antidepressant prescriptions be filled within the space of one year?! And the correlation between weight gain and taking antidepressants is staggering. I'm sure it's resulted in tons of people becoming even more depressed and just winds up a vicious, unhappy, unhealthy cycle. As always, the problem is overprescribing and overusing these drugs. Moderation, moderation, moderation!
Please note that I'm not saying all pharmaceutical drugs are the devil, and I'm not saying it's necessary to abstain from them altogether. Sometimes, it really might be the only thing that'll work. But I unfortunately don't know enough about antidepressants to say whether they're of much help to most people. I've had a couple of times when I've become rather depressed, but I spent my time focusing on exercising and reading good books to help me get better; that combined with letting time pass was what did it for me (and possibly the approach of warmer weather:)). Taking antidepressants wasn't even something I considered as an option. It's just not for me.
Have any of you ever been on antidepressants and did they work? Or were there negative side effects that made it not worth it?