A little story about Hypoglycaemia, plus my 30 day challenge that I want you to join!

So, as the title suggests, recently on my rawtill4 journey I have come across a couple of other symptoms that are very interesting to me.

Before I continue with this I may have to make another confession, I had been slacking off a bit, and what I mean by this is that I wasn't eating enough.

During the day I was sipping on a couple of 400-500cal banana smoothies and then having a 1000cal dinner, not quite the recommended 2500cal minimum. This mentality was brought on by my old anxieties around eating and wanting to see results faster then my body was dishing them out. Old habits die hard it seems.

Anyway, what I found from doing this is that after I went to bed at night I would wake up for my routine nightly pee, except that I would be in a sweat, this sweat could range from a slight dampness to full blown ‘I've-just-been-for-a-run-sweat.’ Gross!

Now I had done some research into why I was sweating so much by this point and all resources pointed to hypoglycaemia;

'But how could this be??' I thought, 'I'm eating a high carbohydrate diet!'

I was feeling rather confused and slightly sceptical, until this one particular afternoon when I was just about to tuck into a big bowl of pasta, I was just waiting for it to cool down when I started to feel hot and sweaty, and to be quite honest it was putting me off my food, I thought to myself;

‘If I'm all hot and sweaty now, how much sweatier and hotter will I feel after a 1700cal bowl of hot pasta!’ 

Nevertheless, my love of pasta took over and I began to eat…and to my surprise the sweating stopped! I actually got colder after my meal, very interesting indeed...

I was then convinced me that what I was experiencing was hypoglycaemia due to being undercarbed! How crazy is that! 

Now I have to tell another story, the story of ordering 168 bananas from the supermarket!

Basically after scolding myself for not being motivated enough to nourish myself properly I found out that freshchoice was advertising bananas for $1.69NZD per kilo! (a.k.a VERY cheap!)

My eyes lit up immediately and when I arrived at the supermarket, I rather nervously went up to the checkout;

“Hi, can I please have 168 bananas?” hahah I don’t think I will ever feel normal at the supermarket again. 

Anyway the point is that for the next 30 days I am challenging myself to consume 20 bananas a day as well as a cooked dinner, and I challenge you to do the same!

I am already at Day 2 and I actually feel amazing, more amazing then I expected to feel!

What I want to try and get across to you guys is to please please PLEASE make sure you all eat enough on this diet! I believe it is paramount to your success!

There is definitely a reason why the recommendation is at least 2500 calories a day of low fat high carb vegan food, it really is what you need! I am definitely going to monitor how I feel over the next 30days, but so far so good!

I hope you all join me for this amazing experience and let me know how you all go and remember...

SMASH IT IN! 

Exercise, Exercise, Exercise!

We all gotta do it.. 

That's right, exercise is important! 

That doesn't mean it's easy though right? Hell no. Hands up if you would opt out of exercising if you could be healthy without it? yea, exactly. 

But the truth of the matter is, we can't live without it. Exercise is essential not just to burn calories, because lets face it, if you just cut your calories enough you can loose weight without the need for exercising, however this is not healthy! Many people can be thin, but be unhealthy internally at the same time. Their are so many benefits of exercise that go beyond the aesthetic values. 

1. Mood/Emotional well-being 

Exercise has been shown in numerous studies to be able to lift a depressed mood, and also help with depression, a study published in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research concluded that "both clinical and non-clinical subjects may benefit acutely from even a single bout of exercise." This study was referring to subjects who fit into the category of being older men and women living in southern California. 

The reason for this is that exercise releases  endorphins which act as your bodies 'feel good' hormones. This hormone has also been shown to help us cope with stress, and with the ever increasing amount of stress that we are told to cope with on a day to day basis, I think a little exercise is the perfect kind of medicine! 

2. Circulation 

Humans are not stationary creatures, we have evolved to function best when we are moving around our environment. There are a lot of biological benefits that arise from regular exercise.

Circulation is an important one of those benefits. Blood needs to be pumped around our whole body, even down to your little pinky toe, and all of the pressure which pushes the blood down to your little toe is generated from the heart muscle. Even though the heart is a very powerful muscle, it isn't able to defy gravity, what I mean by this is that, once the blood from your heart has reached your little toe, it needs to be able to be transported back up to your heart, and how does it do this? Well, there are a couple of techniques that help blood get back to your heart, one of them is little valves which are present inside your veins which basically stop the back flow of blood that is trying to get back to your heart. Secondly, the muscles that surround these veins constrict when you walk and help to push the blood up to your heart. 

This is why regular exercise is beneficial for circulation! I think that's pretty neat, don't you? 

3. Heart Health 

Just as with all the muscles that surround your body, the more you work out your heart muscle, the stronger and healthier it gets. For me, this fact is the one that motivates me to fill my life with regular exercise, I want my heart to be the healthiest it can be so that it can do its job more effectively! 

Although I have only touched very briefly on some of the benefits of exercise, I hope you can appreciate that our bodies are a machine that needs to be moved and worked out in order to perform at its best. The body is an amazing and complex creation that deserves to be treated with respect, love and care, and it's the only one you've got! So look after it! 

http://www.premierfitnesscamp.com