It's true: I'm exhausted...

Though I'm sure it wasn't this very cruisy 2km saunter through a new bit of bush that made me tired.

It's far more likely that it's my upcoming period + the detox I think my body must be going through with the huge influx of raw veggies I've been giving it most days for weeks now.

Some of you will have read that we've been transitioning towards a more wholefood, plant-based diet. There are many ways to do this and you can do it as slowly or quickly as you like. But everyone needs to find their own way.

Essentially I've been:

reducing my animal product intake (including all meat including fish and all dairy including eggs)
reducing my consumption of highly processed foods (basically anything that looks like, when I look at its ingredients list that, it was made in a food lab)
reducing my processed sugar intake (I didn't eat that much anyway, but they sneak it into fruit and nut trail mixes and all sorts of unnecessary places like that!)

AND

increasing my consumption of green, leafy veggies (by putting them into smoothies every day)
increasing my intake of omega 3 nuts and seeds (chia, flax/linseeds, hemp and walnuts)
increasing my water intake (okay, that's not really a food, but it's part of the plan to help me get healthier and heal my gut!)

The point of this change is first and foremost, my health; I want a really healthy immune system, which means I need a really healthy gut. (Plus side: what's good for me is good for my fellow animals on the planet and good for the planet as a whole, so everyone wins).

One of the doctors I'm learning from is a woman named Dr Brooke Goldner. She treats patients with auto immune issues to help them reverse conditions that western medicine says are things you're stuck with for life. She disagrees! Completing healing and recovering from Lupus herself makes her pretty confident in what she's doing. She's backed this up with huge amounts of research (to confirm that she wasn't just "lucky") and has helped innumerable people over the last decade to reverse or improve their (various) auto immune AND inflammatory health conditions.

To my knowledge, I do not have an auto immune disease but I have been exhausted an unreasonable amount for an unreasonably long period of time (more than a decade). So I'm pretty determined to get to the bottom of this nonsense and find out, once and for all, how to resolve the food intolerances (it's a long list!) and get the health and vitality of my childhood back.

I believe it's possible and I sure as hell am not resigning to living a life like this. Even though I do get many, many beautiful moments (and often minutes and even hours of wonderfulness <--- that's a word :P) I'm ready to have more. And I'm glad I've found people like Brooke who are genuinely breaking the mould of what we think is possible.

Some of the beautiful moments I had today are captured in these photos (by Brad, my darling) including a metal artwork of a gecko that was on someone's back fence (that surrounded the nature area we walked through)...

And one of the many real life lizards that were scurrying and jumping about. This one is a type of dragon lizard, which has far tougher, thicker skin than a gecko (though not as tough as that metal one above!).