Rebecca July 17th Update

Low

I’m still fighting a cough and exhaustion from being sick two weeks ago. It’s frustrating. I feel good enough I can start doing more but then I tend to easily overdo it and end up tired and coughing more the next day.

I think I finally found some doTERRA oils that are actually helping with the cough now though since cough medicine, Mucinex and decongestant doesn’t help at all. At least it’s just a dry cough that doesn’t hurt and it doesn’t usually keep me from sleeping.

An Accomplishment

I finally caught up on making “babies” of all the plants I could until I completely ran out of room. I should have done it a long time ago because now I have a lot of plants that aren’t ready to sell but that would sell quite easily if they were ready. Oh well. It will be good to take it slow for anywhere from a month to six months, depending on the plant, and let them grow.

From now on, the idea is if a plant sells and I can chop any of the same type of plant then just hurry and do it right away so there is a more continuous flow of plants ready instead of right now I don’t have any ready and then in the future there will be too many ready.

What’s New?

I went to nutrition class this week and I just have to tell y’all some of what I learned because my mind is blown a bit by some of it. It was interesting because he went through a lot of popular diets and they mostly seem to have some truth to them but they each go too far in one direction and ignore up other biological facts about our bodies.

I know I have definitely been confused in the past by all the conflicting information but what he seemed to say made sense and is actually based on science and on a 95% success rate for almost 30 years for their office. Here are some of the highlights –

Your metabolism starts working when you wake up and kind of starts counting down from there. You have one hour from when you wake up to eat or your metabolism goes into starvation mode for the day and shuts off your metabolism.

Assuming you wake up at 8 am and eat within the first hour then these are the percentages of how much your metabolism will work –

8 am – 4 pm	100%
4 pm – 7 pm	50%
7 pm – 10 pm	25%
10 pm +	0%

So, the earlier in the day you eat the more time your body has to digest your food before bed. You should try to eat your large meals for breakfast and lunch and a small dinner and no food after 6 pm.

This is basically the complete opposite of the way I have been eating. I was doing intermittent fasting and skipping breakfast because I thought it was good for me but he said the original intermittent fasting program was to eat for 8 hours between 8 am and 4 pm and not to eat after that but it got changed and that’s why it wasn’t really working for me.

The best time to exercise is first thing in the morning on an empty stomach so your body will be forced to get its energy from your fat stores since there isn’t anything in your stomach. If you don’t have the energy to do that then have a very small starch before exercising.

Proteins – are negative calories so you burn more calories digesting them than you got from eating them so if the protein was 200 calories your body will burn about 300 calories digesting it.

Raw veggies / Fruit / Complex Carbs – neutral

Sugar/Starch/Simple Carbs – Positive

So the idea is if you are trying to lose weight then you want about 75% of your calories from protein and 25% from carbs. 50% protein / 50% carbs to maintain and 25% protein / 75% carbs to gain weight.

I’m just really glad they sell a clean protein drink that’s plant-based with no dairy and tastes fine and I can drink that for most of my protein. Then I’m trying to figure out if I can get away with having meat and/or eggs for breakfast maybe every other day and on the off days having a handful portion size of what he calls combo foods (half protein/half complete carbs) –

• Legumes – especially chickpeas and lentils (just not refried beans unless they are homemade)

He said I shouldn’t have these foods when dieting because they are counted as simple carbs – banana, potato, sweet potato, peas. That’s hard for me because a lot of my plant-based meals have sweet potato in them.

What are the Children Up To?

Megan was recently called to be the sacrament meeting chorister for our ward and has been taking conducting lessons for a lady in our ward to prepare. Today was her first day and she did a great job!