I’m not sure where to start, and I’m not sure who is still out there. It has been 2.5 years since my last post, so I guess a lot has changed in your lives as well.
Where have I been, why did I disappear completely?
It was a great source of stress to me that I couldn’t keep up the blog. From about the beginning of 2012 I really struggled – responding to comments, emails, writing posts. Not being able to act on all of the ideas I want to share with you. On the one hand I was too overwhelmed to write by mid year. On the other hand I didn’t want to post an announcement “I’m taking a break” because at first it felt too depressing to admit, then it would have felt like giving up, and then so much time went by all of these feelings were replaced by guilt and remorse for not having posted anything at all.
In my last post (August 2013) I had discussed some progress I had made toward relieving my migraines. This progress was short-lived, and my migraines continued to increase in intensity. By the end of 2013, I was having at least one full-blown migraine a week, sometimes two. This is when I stopped blogging; I was basically no longer able to carry on with much other than work and recovery from migraines. Something had to change and I had no clue what else I could try. I was still convinced stress reduction or posture improvement was the only solution available, but despite trying every stress reduction technique/practice under the sun, I just couldn’t crack it. I started tracking how many days I spent in extreme pain per month, and was shocked to find it was more than half.
At the same time, I was carpooling with a colleague who was very interested in diet. After reading loads of research and books that he sent my way, I convinced myself that going on an elimination diet to uncover food intolerances would be the best hope of helping my husband, who has an auto-immune condition. Looking back, I’m so surprised I didn’t even think once that it could help me.
So we went on an elimination diet (more details later if people are interested) in January 2014.
After a couple of weeks, I noticed I started to feel better, and by the end of the month, I hadn’t had a migraine and was noticing the absence of problems I had even taken for granted or stopped noticing because they were small compared to the migraines. My husband found he had more energy on the new diet, but unfortunately it did not help his auto-immune condition.
So you might wonder, if I discovered the key to my problem in January, why did it take so long for me to get my life back to normal? This is where it’s easy to say “we changed our diet” and very difficult for someone else to understand what that means in daily life.
My husband and I spent a significant amount of our spare time cooking, exploring new ingredients, and experimenting with introducing foods that had been eliminated to see what I could tolerate. I have found I cannot tolerate gluten, wheat or dairy. (You might wonder why I include both gluten and wheat separately. There are gluten free products with wheat starch; this also triggers migraines for me.) Eating out is difficult, and I made a lot of mistakes where I thought a little wouldn’t hurt, and then suffered with a migraine for a few days after that. This took most of our spare time in 2014 and half of 2015. I also spent a significant amount of time helping my husband get his business off the ground in 2015.
So here I am, back at it. Not in perfect health, but good enough to be hopeful. I still get perhaps one migraine every couple of months, usually linked to contamination when eating out. I’ve maintained most of my vision improvement, even though I only practiced intermittently. I will continue blogging again, and further developing my regular vision improvement practice. I’ve learned a few lessons:
- It’s important to accept limitations. I’ve accepted that I’m not able to respond to all comments or launch as much on this blog or the planned website as quickly as I would like.
- Focus on what is most important. I am going to continue to develop my own practice, and to share the tools I make for myself and my friends here on my blog, to make it easier for you to learn and practice vision improvement. Everything else is just details.
- If you want to make a step change in health (or anything…) expect to have to make an equally large change to your actions. It might be an unexpected change!
To all of you, thank you for your patience, and the nice emails during my absence from this blog.
Best wishes for a happy and healthy 2016!
Seeing Beauty 