Waking up feeling like another 2-3 hours is needed to feel fully recharged.
Eyes are puffy
Lethargic
The dull throb of a looming headache behind the eyes
Low tolerance to noise.
Inability to be spoken to or to speak before a cup of coffee.
An overall feeling of general shittiness and wishing the day was over before its even begun….
Sound familiar?
That was me Thursday morning…. And all I could think was “people wake up like this every morning?” No wonder there are so many cranky pants people out there.
During the week, I ate, what most people would say is a “normal” and even call it a “healthy” lunch and dinner.
Lunch was bread roll with cheese, avocado, lettuce, tomato and chicken breast. No butter, no mayo, no aioli but lashed out had had some chips.
For dinner – glass of sav blanc, roast pumpkin, char grilled zucchini, semi-dried tomatoes and some cheese, with a flat bread.
The chips said “hi” so many times during the afternoon I wanted to slap them in the face and to bugger off and annoy someone else. Sure, they tasted nice when eating them but afterwards…. not so nice.
Now many of you will be thinking “it’s ok to eat a burger and chips, and pizza (yes, that’s what I had for lunch and dinner - pizza was dinner, burger was lunch, not both for lunch and again for dinner, I do have my limits!) occasionally. And that's correct and I am not beating myself up because I made those meal choices.
This is not about the emotions and the psychology of the associated guilt that goes along with eating such choices. I’m over that emotional obstacle when it comes to food. I made the choice when looking at the menu and made an entirely conscious decision when ordering.
This is about how I felt the NEXT DAY, how my body felt compared to other mornings and during the day.
Some of you may know a bit about my history with regards to overexercising, undereating and developing a rip-snorter of an eating disorder, so when I say I have already lived a life of feeling like total and utter crap each and every single morning and I never, ever want to go back there because life is far too short to waste another day feeling like crap, I hope you might begin to understand why I make the choices that I do….. My choices
When you go to sleep, this is your body’s opportunity to do the repair work that it needs to do so you are ready to get on with life when you wake up. All sorts of funky, cool, mind-blowing things that we still don’t fully understand happens when we are asleep.
I like to think of it along the lines of “taking out the trash”, “filling in some pot holes”, “reinforcing to increase strength”, “refilling fuel tanks”, all those things that your body can’t do while you are awake because it is busy simply dealing with moving, thinking, and all those other things that we simply are unware that our bodies do.
So where am I going with this?
If we keep putting trash into our bodies (each bodies definition of trash is slightly different – for me any more than 2 cups of coffee and foods that are high in fodmaps (i.e. fructose, fructans, etc.) is trash) during the day then our bodies spend the entire time dealing with the high levels of trash and toxic waste dumped in our system and has no time for the restorative, replenishing, and regeneration processes and we wake up feeling tired and lethargic.
It is NOT normal to wake up feeling tired and sluggish all the time.
It is NOT normal to pick up every single cough, cold or bug that is going around.
YES, you can wake up feeling energised and ready to face the day more often!
The choice to change your normal is yours.
No one else’s but yours.
The only person you are accountable to for the choices you make about your food choices is you.
No one holds a gun to your head and makes you choose that food.
Just like it was my choice to order a burger with chips, and a glass of wine with pizza. Which I will do again, just not on a week night!!
And come to think of it, leave off the chips – the ongoing harassment from the chips for the rest of the day just wasn’t worth it!
Do you know what to eat before bed?
