Moving farther away from Multiple Sclerosis

A couple of weeks ago my legs were a little floppy. I reflected on a summer of deteriorating resolve. There was a lot of corn, booze, gluten exposure (though I wouldn’t actually eat it), dairy. Sooo much cheese. Gluten free pretzels. Like I can just eat cheese. I really can’t. I started thinking about the concept of reintroduction. I have had only partial success. With weak, floppy legs and a bit of a fat roll I put myself on a ’30 day strict phase.’ I am on day 10, feeling awesome, really thinking about how things can deteriorate.

You don’t start out going to the store and buying a bag of GF pretzels and a chocolate bar to take home and melt and then add macadamias and dried cherries together and make ‘bark.’ You start out having a piece of cheese off the buffet appetizer table. Or some potato chips at the grocery store sample area. Or a dark chocolate covered strawberry. It’s inevitable and necessary that you are going to relax and eat stuff. I definitely did. And we can probably handle that, eating it once in a while. But for me, it got too frequent. I was feeling so well. MS was behind me at times. I would go for weeks without feeling even one tiny MS related feeling in my body. So why not eat a ball of mozerella and dip it in olive oil, basil, garlic and balsamic? Totally doable, but not 3x a week which is where I went with it.

They way I test how addicted I am to something, I say in the morning ‘I am not going to do (insert addiction here) today’ and then depending on what time I end up succumbing to the addiction, how far from the promise of not doing it, that’s how addicted I am. So I would wake up and say I will not eat cheese today and then by lunch I had it either in the form of a cheddar pig or in a pesto sauce on top of some fish, a restaurant special I didn’t modify. So, cheese is on the 30 day clean it up list. So are nuts, corn, eggs, potatoes (those had snuck in after hearing their nutrient density lauded by Robb Wolf). BOOZE. I was letting that get out of hand as well. Drinking wine even though I don’t even really like it.

So here I am, 10 days in. I can’t lose too much body fat, the last time I did that, I stopped getting my period for 6 months. But my legs are already coming back. I did box jumps on the small box today. It was exhausting, my vertical lift is not quite there yet. But 2 weeks ago I couldn’t have done one at all.